This edition features fifty of the more than 400 tales in nineteenth-century Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè’s multivolume collection. Forty-four of these were previously translated by Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo for their 2008 The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè; the remaining six are newly translated by Zipes.
The preface and introduction are brief and presented with a general audience in mind. Similarly, the tales are presented without notes or analysis, which makes this a pleasant volume to pick up for casual reading, and Adeetje Bouma’s ten black-and-white illustrations contribute to the pleasurable reading experience. For readers who pick up the book with a more academic purpose, scholarly apparatus is provided at the end of the volume in the form of a works cited list (pages 259-262) and notes for each tale (pages 262-280). The notes include ATU tale type numbers where applicable, original Italian titles, and brief analyses of plot focusing on noteworthy innovations or intertextual connections.
In the preface, Zipes notes that the forty-four tales that had been previously translated into English have been “revised and honed” for this publication in order to “come closer to Pitrè’s original stories” (xii), which show great care in preserving the identities of the tellers and their regional dialects (6-8). The art of translation is balancing the conflicting impulses to represent the original exactly and to craft a polished work of literature in the target language. In this edition, Zipes masterfully negotiates these conflicting impulses to present a collection of translated tales that give the reader a sense of multivocality through varying syntactic patterns, pacing, and vocabulary.
In the introduction, Zipes sketches a biography of “the extraordinary Giuseppe Pitrè” that emphasizes both his extraordinary skill at being a folklorist and his status as a neglected figure in the history of the field (1). Zipes contrasts Pitrè’s careful preservation of dialect, variants, and tellers’ identities with the editorial practices of more well-know nineteenth-century folklorists like the Grimms, and I hope this volume will inspire more scholarly attention to this folklorist and the corpus of tales he collected.
Sixty percent of those who contributed to Pitrè’s corpus were women and girls, and Zipes claims a “feminist” flavor for these stories because of Pitrè’s care to preserve the voices of the tale tellers (9). While many of these stories depict female protagonists who exhibit greater intellect, agency, and sometimes even interiority than their counterparts in similar tale types in other European collections, they remain bound by the patriarchal structure of the fairy tale genre and of the society in which they were told. There is compelling work to be done on the limits of the fairy tales of this corpus as a discursive space in which women grapple with patriarchy.
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[Review length: 467 words • Review posted on August 23, 2018]