Nancy L. Canepa has brought together a unique collection of texts ranging from the anonymous Liombruno (1470?) to writers still living, illustrating what a strong hold the uses of enchantment have always had on writers in Italy, “the Boot.” I know of no book comparable to this one. Her introduction is a masterful survey of the subject, and her wide range of readings includes authors both famous and relatively unknown. She makes the interesting suggestion that the major collections of Basile, Pitrè, and Calvino came into being at pivotal moments of national identity crisis, responding to a need to reaffirm shared traditions, and specifically that of storytelling (22). This is especially true for Calvino, who actually complained in a letter about having been assigned by his publisher the difficult task of “unification.” Perhaps less so for Basile and Pitrè, whose dialects would have prevented nationwide impact (cf. page 3: Basile “never achieved the status of national treasure”), although they would have strengthened regional identity. The texts presented here are mostly literary works rich in folk and fairy tale elements, supplied with ATU numbers where they apply. Writers include well known figures like Straparola, Basile, Collodi, Calvino; some who deserve to be better known to anglophone readers, like twentieth-century fabulist Gianni Rodari; 1926 Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda; and the still active Dacia Maraini. Each author is introduced with a short description of their career and the social, historical, and literary context of their writing. The tales show increasing freedom from traditional paradigms as they are transformed by exaggeration, parody, subversion, and allegorizing. This is the Italian version of the process that led to today's fractured fairy tales, feminist fairy tales, and the like.
Giovan Francesco Straparola, dubbed “Fairy Godfather” (R. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) offers the earliest European collection of magical tales in his The Pleasant Nights (1550-1553), which includes the first known version of “Puss in Boots.” His style is direct, not particularly elegant, and his narrative technique not always smooth; but his range is extraordinary, incorporating material in oral circulation, and his book lays the foundation for the Italian and European traditions.
Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) is a much better storyteller and stylist, whose classic Lo Cunto de li Cunti, written in Neapolitan, is inspired by Bocaccio’s Decameron. His tales include many types probably assimilated from oral tradition as well as from precedents in Straparola: “Cinderella,” “The Maiden in the Tower” (Rapunzel), “Puss in Boots,” “The Grateful Animals,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Hansel and Gretel,” etc. He is a challenge to translate since his vocabulary and baroque style combine high and low registers. Canepa—an expert on Basile who has published a translation and a book on him—meets this challenge with ingenuity and flair, mixing high and low diction to reproduce the same comic effect as the original. For example, “[Cinderella] arrived in a golden coach attended by so many servants that she looked like a whore arrested in the public promenade and surrounded by cops” (112). The monosyllable “cops” adds the perfect final touch. The only translation problem I noticed involves Basile’s play on the verb spelled variously consumare, consummare, or conzomare, which can mean both consume and consummate. On page 105 the awkward phrase “and consume our relationship [i.e., marriage] with greater pleasure” (pe conzomare con chiù gusto la parentela in the original) should read “consummate our relationship”—unless Canepa intends the mistake to be a comic malapropism. The same verb is translated “consummate” [marriage] twice on page 138, and simultaneously used for consuming food. A footnote on Basile’s punning would have been helpful. Basile’s world is far from a fairy-tale paradise; Canepa points out how much the contemporary world of Neapolitan violence and corruption infuses his work, and she emphasizes the psychological depth of his characters compared to those in traditional tales. In her introductions to “Cinderella Cat’’ and “The Old Woman Who was Skinned,” Canepa finds the concluding moralizing statements inappropriate, although to me they seem to fit.
The main representative of the eighteenth century, Gozzi’s “The Love of the Three Oranges,” is a prose description of theatrical action, meant for the actors to improvise dialogue suiting their stock commedia dell’arte characters. In the abridged version printed here, I found the lengthy plot growing tedious. Other readers may find more fun in it.
In section IV, The Golden Age of the Fairy Tale, we learn that while Pitrè was collecting traditional tales from living storytellers, some of his contemporaries were writing magical tales but altering the standard motifs imaginatively and even parodying them. Collodi’s Pinocchio exemplifies this trend, and so do the delightful tales of Capuana and Perodi. Section V contains eight tales from Calvino’s classic collection representing different regions of Italy, translated by George Martin. Although Calvino rewrote them in a smooth Italian prose that doesn’t reflect the oral style of the storytellers, they are always a pleasure to read. Section VI is devoted to modern writers who continue the tradition. In Malerba’s “Pinocchio in Boots,” Pinocchio is detached from Collodi’s text and attempts to enter classic fairy tales: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and others. He tries to protect Red from the wolf, but both tell him he cannot change the plot and should go back to his own story. A more subtle twist on tradition is Rodari’s “Nino and Nina,” in which the old lady who tempts the Hansel and Gretel figures is not a witch—just a regular old lady—and the helper who restores them is neither magical nor animal but an honest working man, a baker by trade, in accordance with Rodari’s utopian socialist vision. Deledda’s “Fairy Tale” rejects the tradition outright by keeping the Prince and Princess permanently apart, reversing the expected happy ending.
Rodari, a creative educator as well as a writer, took fairy tales into the classroom to stimulate children's imaginations by manipulating fairy-tale stock motifs in different ways, even using Proppian functions inscribed on playing cards. Canepa includes a fascinating excerpt from his “The Grammar of Fantasy.”
This volume concludes with a marvelous allegorical tale by Maraini, “A Family in a Shoe,” a powerful surrealistic depiction of the futility of violence and revenge and the consequences of breaking the bond between humans and nature. This sample should make the reader seek out more of this major author’s fairy tales.
Folklorists will be grateful for Canepa's appendix listing all the ATU types represented in this anthology.
This excellent book leaves almost nothing to complain about, but I have a few quibbles and corrections. The author says on page 23 that she has selected texts from the fourteenth century to the present, but her earliest text, Liombruno (for which she offers no date), is generally assigned to the fifteenth. The ten tales from Pitrè are this volume’s closest approximation to the voices of genuine tellers rather than writers. Pitrè is not the author but the transcriber. His informants “authored” these texts and I wish Canepa had included their names, which are given in her source text, Lazzaro’s Italian version of the original Sicilian. On page 45 Morlini is assigned to the second half of the fifteenth century, although his publication dates put him in the early to mid-sixteenth. On page 47, in the Latin title of Morlini’s tale, qui is missing after de matre. Canepa incorrectly identifies Chios as a son of Apollo on page 50, note 1. La capo e la coda on page 149 should be translated “The Head and the Tail,” not Tale. “No one, not even him, remembered his real name” (402) is terrible grammar. Why not, “not even he”?
A review of this extraordinary book must end with praise for the author’s vast knowledge of Italian literature and the fairy-tale tradition within it, and her excellent choice of representative texts. Every reader will discover some new fairy treasure here.
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[Review length: 1335 words • Review posted on April 8, 2023]