BOCCACCIO, Giovanni. Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta.

Yiddish Pulp Fiction Disguised as Boccaccio?

BOCCACCIO, Giovanni. Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. New York: [Golden Hind Press for] the subscribers of the Biblion Society. 1927.

4to. Publisher’s black cloth, spine label printed in red; pp. 47, [1 (advertisements)], in the rare printed dust-jacket; title-page and first page of text printed in pale blue and pink; slight soiling and a few marks to dust-jacket, spine ends and extremities lightly worn; a near-fine copy in a good jacket.

First edition of these spurious translations of Boccaccio involving accidental mother–son incest and friendship between Catholics and Protestants (despite the fact that Boccaccio died a century before Luther’s birth), falsely claiming to be illustrated with ‘new sketches’ by Beardsley, this copy in the rare dust-jacket.

This edition was distributed by the Golden Hind Press for subscribers of the Biblion Society, both operated by notorious publisher Samuel Roth. He would later be the plaintiff in the landmark 1957 Supreme Court case Roth vs United States, which redefined what constituted obscene material unprotected by First Amendment rights. In 1930, he spent two months in prison for selling obscene material, including Joyce’s Ulysses, which he had published in serialised, bowdlerised form without Joyce’s permission two years earlier.The present edition claims to present several hitherto unpublished illustrations by Beardsley, each captioned ‘New Sketch’. All, in fact, had been previously published: they comprise ‘The Mirror of Love’, four illustrations from Le Morte D’Arthur, and ‘Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Woman’, from the 1896 edition of Lysistrata.

The phallic vignettes between paragraphs are the work of Hungarian illustrator Walter Pogany. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti attribute this pseudo-translation to Romanian-born writer of Yiddish pulp fiction David Moses Hermalin (1865–1921), who had produced Yiddish adaptations of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, and, at the start of the twentieth century, Boccaccio, publishing Paskarela through B. Rabinovits and Madam Babeta through the Hebrew Publishing Company in New York City. ‘Paskarela and Madam Babeta are longer versions of those same stories that Roth printed in English twenty-seven years later. Unless some proto-version of these two stories surfaces, the most likely explanation seems to be that the tales were composed by Hermalin as pseudotranslations of Boccaccio, and that Roth (or someone close to him) translated these stories and passed them off once more as authentic, lost stories by Boccaccio.
‘By birth a Galician Jew, Roth knew Yiddish, and used Yiddish sources to produce translations of Heinrich Heine, since he had no German. He was also an inveterate publisher of phony translations […] He had the means, the motivation, and the sheer brazenness necessary to take a pair of Yiddish fakes, translate them into English, and pass them off as genuine discoveries to an unsuspecting literary public’ (Lubin and Lazzarotti, online).

Library Hub finds three copies in the UK (BL, CUL, Goldsmiths).

Not in Samuels Lasner; Healey 4907, note (‘one assumes that both stories and drawings are pastiches and fakes’). See Lubin and Lazarotti, ‘Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce’, in The Public Domain Review (17 April 2024).

SKU: 2126079