Basile’s Tale of Tales, also called the Pentamerone, is a collection of fifty stories--chiefly complex tales of magic, popularly known as fairy tales--published in Naples in 1634-1636. It begins with a frame tale: a heavily-pregnant imposter bride needs to be entertained, so ten women tell one tale each on each of five days (a format reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Decamerone). When the true bride tells the final tale, it reveals her own identity. Many of Basile’s tales are the oldest, or oldest European, examples of their respective tale types, and many of them also have important connections to Indian or other Eastern literature. The Pentamerone has been part of comparative folktale scholarship since the beginning. The Grimms recognized its kinship to their own Kinder- und Hausmärchen (two-thirds of Basile’s tales have KHM analogs). Their own intended translation never materialized, but Jacob wrote an introduction to the German translation of Felix Liebrecht.
The Pentamerone has not yet found a niche in modern popular culture, at least in part because it confounds expectations. Stylistically these tales are the opposite of the plain, direct idiom of modern printed folktales. Basile’s prose is often extravagant, with piles of excessive details and often-humorous elaborations, some of which are quotations from or parodies of Italian literature. References to sexual activity can be frank--anyone who wants to share these tales with “little ones” may want to abridge. A mixture of high and low culture, the work is also a source of other folklore matter such as proverbial expressions and proverbs, games, customs, and food (in this edition, as in others, footnotes explain many such references).
Nineteenth-century English translations by John Edward Taylor (1847) and Richard Burton (1893; see pp. 8-10) were superseded by The Pentamerone translated and edited by N. M. Penzer (1932), which is now out of print. Penzer based his work not on the Neapolitan original, but on Benedetto Croce’s Italian translation, which cleaned up the coarsest expressions and unintentionally introduced various minor errors. This new version by Nancy Canepa goes back to the original, which makes it more accurate. It is also more literal. Basile’s convoluted style is difficult, and recreational readers may find some passages easier to understand in Penzer than Canepa. For example:
Canepa (57): “He then prepared the bed…and…took his old slippers far from that town.”
Penzer (1:30): “He then…made the bed…and…left the country as fast as his legs could carry him.”
Canepa (302): “Since it involved greasing their hands, the mice offered to travel across seas and over mountains….”
Penzer (2:8): “The two mice, hearing their palms would be greased, offered to cross mountains and seas….”
Canepa (183): “At the sight of this lovely service, tinder was added to the prince’s fire, and if before he had consumed himself by the dram, now he was destroying himself by the quintal….”
Penzer (1:176): “The Prince followed all her graceful actions with his eyes adding fuel to his flames, and if at first he had been wasting away by ounces, he now dissolved by pounds….”
For the purpose of comparative folktale scholarship, which analyzes events and generally does not concern itself with style, fine points of translation are less significant than the quality of annotation. Penzer’s comparative notes to The Pentamerone are a uniquely valuable source of information because the editor drew on his earlier work on Somadeva’s The Ocean of Story, an eleventh-century collection of tales from India. For example, the frame tale begins with a youthful character who laughs at the antics of an angry old woman, who then curses the rude youngster. Penzer notes an instance from The Ocean of Story, as well as modern examples. Of the ten tales told on the first day of the Pentamerone, episodes or other important motifs in nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10 have oriental analogs. Thus, Penzer’s notes open up a prehistory even for this early collection of tales. In addition, the second volume includes a table of Basile-Grimm analogs plus indexes of tale types (now somewhat outdated) and of motifs.
Canepa’s edition, with its newly-commissioned pen-and-ink illustrations, seems to be aimed at general readers. Its folklore apparatus consists of a paragraph-length footnote for each tale, providing the applicable tale type number (day 3 tale 6 should be ATU 883B) and comments on literary and popular analogs in Italy and elsewhere. These notes have been distilled from Rudolf Schenda’s notes in his German edition of Basile, Das Märchen der Märchen (2000), which devotes nearly a page to each tale and discusses other literary versions of the relevant tale type and its most important motifs, and provides references to modern folktale scholarship. Schenda, who published on Italian as well as German folklore, was a pioneer the area where social history, literature, and popular culture intersect.
Although Basile’s tales are typical (in that nearly all them belong to identifiable tale types), they are also remarkable. For example, Cinderella (this is the oldest European text) murders her own mother at the instigation of the woman who then becomes her stepmother. The woman covered in fur (analogous to Perrault’s Donkey Skin and the Grimms’ All Kinds of Fur) has a magical rather than a natural disguise. Many tales, such as The Myrtle and The Young Slave, are best understood in the context of Mediterranean (not just Italian) tradition. The Three Citrons combines episodes that are now found in two different, geographical subtypes. The tale of Petrosinella combines the motif of the maiden in the tower (Rapunzel) with that of a magic flight, a sequence that is popular in modern Mediterranean and Arab tradition. One tale, The Dragon, is more Arab than European.
Historic-geographic folktale studies, modeled on philology, take large numbers of modern, more-or-less oral, texts as their primary material, and augment this as much as possible with older literary versions. In contrast, American fairy tale studies take their approach from literary studies: they are author-centered, with a secondary emphasis on historical socio-cultural context. Canepa’s earlier work on literary fairy tales (1997), and on the life and times of Basile (1999), associates her with this group. However, the concept of the author is at odds with the notion of traditionality--that something is handed on rather than invented. Did Basile “invent” his tales (Zipes in the foreword, p. xiii), or did he retell them in his own inimitable style (Canepa on p. 15)? This is not merely a rhetorical question: evidence can be sought to determine an answer.
Fairy tale studies started with a focus on the Grimms and have worked their way back in time, through the French courtly authors to Basile and Straparola. Where can they go from there? There are other early fairy-tale authors, particularly from Italy, Spain, and Portugal--regions with connections to the Middle East or India. It would be wonderful to have their works available in English. Nevertheless, the evidence relevant to the history of fairy tales is not likely to be very extensive (for example, the sixteenth-century Portuguese author G. F. Trancoso is responsible for a collection of forty tales, but most of them are wisdom or moral tales rather than fairy tales). Back beyond about 1500, things fall apart: there is very little European material that conforms to whole fairy-tale tale types. Nevertheless, many of the episodes and motifs that are important in fairy tales have interesting analogs in literature from earlier times in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Basile’s Tale of Tales constitutes a crossroads in this landscape, and Canepa has provided a valuable service by making it available again in English.
Works Cited:
Basile, Giambattista. Das Märchen der Märchen, ed. Rudolf Schenda. München: Beck, 2000.
________. The Pentamerone, ed. N. M. Penzer. 2 vols. London: John Lane; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932.
Canepa, Nancy L., ed. Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
________. From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.
--------
[Review length: 1338 words • Review posted on November 14, 2007]