Samuel Pepys is a dick, part III
Jan. 16th, 2011 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaWednesday 15 January 1667/68
So just because Pepys gets cockblocked, he does his pathetic best to ruin everyone else's evening. Oh, and deprive two kids of their horse. Luckily the horse had better sense.
And just what was Pepys "reading all the evening"? A few days earlier we find this:
Pepys doesn't get up the nerve to actually buy the book until later, of course. Meanwhile I guess he'll have to make do with La Puttana Errante, which had been raising cazzi on the Continent since 1531. I wonder if this predilection for foreign-language porn is why Pepys can never talk about adultery in plain English?
La Puttana Errante is often misattributed to Pietro Aretino, whose Sonetti Lussuriosi were the definitive poetic porn of the Renaissance; but the real author was one Lorenzo Veniero:
--A General Bibliographical Dictionary, from the German of Frederic Adolphus Ebert, Librarian to the King of Saxony, &c. &c. &c.
Google Books reference
Looking up links for this entry took me to the Wikipedia entry for whore dialogues: well worth reading.
[...] and so walked by moonlight to Deptford, where I have not been a great while, and my business I did there was only to walk up and down above la casa of Bagwell, but could not see her, it being my intent to have spent a little time con her, she being newly come from her husband; but I did lose my labour, and so walked back again, but with pleasure by the walk, and I had the sport to see two boys swear, and stamp, and fret, for not being able to get their horse over a stile and ditch, one of them swearing and cursing most bitterly; and I would fain, in revenge, have persuaded him to have drove his horse through the ditch, by which I believe he would have stuck there. But the horse would not be drove, and so they were forced to go back again, and so I walked away homeward, and there reading all the evening, and so to bed.
So just because Pepys gets cockblocked, he does his pathetic best to ruin everyone else's evening. Oh, and deprive two kids of their horse. Luckily the horse had better sense.
And just what was Pepys "reading all the evening"? A few days earlier we find this:
[...] Stopped at Martin’s, my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called “L’escholle des filles,” but when I come to look in it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw, rather worse than “Putana errante,” so that I was ashamed of reading in it, and so away home [...]
Pepys doesn't get up the nerve to actually buy the book until later, of course. Meanwhile I guess he'll have to make do with La Puttana Errante, which had been raising cazzi on the Continent since 1531. I wonder if this predilection for foreign-language porn is why Pepys can never talk about adultery in plain English?
La Puttana Errante is often misattributed to Pietro Aretino, whose Sonetti Lussuriosi were the definitive poetic porn of the Renaissance; but the real author was one Lorenzo Veniero:
[...who by means of it sought to revenge himself on a Venetian courtesan of the name of Angela, whom he here designates by the Venetian insulting word Zaffetta (daughter of a sbirro [policeman].) In the first poem he describes her life; in the second, the cruel and brutal revenge which he inflicted on her.
--A General Bibliographical Dictionary, from the German of Frederic Adolphus Ebert, Librarian to the King of Saxony, &c. &c. &c.
Google Books reference
Looking up links for this entry took me to the Wikipedia entry for whore dialogues: well worth reading.
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no subject
on 2011-01-16 05:12 pm (UTC)The random smattering of other languages really does make it come across as comically pretentious. I'm officially amused.
no subject
on 2011-01-16 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-01-16 09:41 pm (UTC)At this date, most erotic books were in French or Italian (apart from stuff that circulated privately in manuscript, like the poems of Rochester). Even the homegrown 'Wandering Whore' (serial publication, 1660-1661) stole its title from a contemporary Italian book (La Puttana Errante), and the characters in the dialogues have Italian names (except the brothel's bouncer, who has a Spanish one: Guzman, an allusion to the picaresque novel Guzman d'Alfarache).
The Wikipedia article overlooks Lucian of Samosata (2nd century AD), whose Dialogues of the Hetaerae* are the original 'whore dialogues' which inspired Aretino.
Here's a translation of Lucian's tamer 'whore dialogues'. And here is a translation of another one, which for a very long time was considered too spicy to translate into English.
*usually translated 'courtesans'
no subject
on 2011-01-20 10:35 pm (UTC)It's good to have an expert's view on where the Wikipedia entry comes short; I recall their rather unfair policy disqualifying actual experts on a given topic from editing entries on that topic.
no subject
on 2011-01-16 11:11 pm (UTC)I say!