The Tale of Tales
Page 1
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE TALE OF TALES
GIAMBATTISTA BASILE (1575–1632) was born near Naples, Italy, and during his life was an accomplished poet, courtier, and feudal administrator. Today he is remembered not for his “official” literary output but for The Tale of Tales, the first integral collection of fairy tales published in Europe. Gathered by Basile probably during his travels through the Mediterranean region, the tales were written in the nonstandard Neapolitan dialect and published by Basile’s sister two years after his death. They include the first literary versions of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and many other classic tale types. Notwithstanding the subtitle “Entertainment for Little Ones,” they were written not for children but for entertainment and conversation in the sophisticated courts and academies that Basile frequented, and their often flawed heroes and heroines make their way through dark fairy-tale landscapes that mirror the troubled world in which he himself lived.
NANCY L. CANEPA is an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. She is the author of From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale and the editor of Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France.
JACK ZIPES is a preeminent fairy-tale scholar who has written, translated, or edited dozens of books, including The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. He is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.
CARMELO LETTERE is an Italian artist. Originally from Lecce, Italy, he now lives in New Hampshire.
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First published in the United States of America by Wayne State University Press 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-99178-7
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED
THE WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Basile, Giambattista, ca. 1575–1632.
[Pentamerone. English]
Giambattista Basile’s The tale of tales, or, Entertainment for little ones / translated by Nancy L. Canepa ; illustrated by Carmelo Lettere ; foreword by Jack Zipes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-14-312914-1
I. Canepa, Nancy L., 1957– II. Title. III. Title: Tale of tales.
IV. Title: Entertainment for little ones.
PQ4607.B5P413 2007
398.20945—dc22
2006032926
Cover art: Francesca Costa.
Version_1
Alle mie monacielle,
Camilla e Gaia
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Foreword by JACK ZIPES
Illustrator’s Note by CARMELO LETTERE
Acknowledgments
Introduction by NANCY L. CANEPA
THE TALE OF TALES
I. The First Day
Introduction to The Tale of Tales
1. The Tale of the Ogre
2. The Myrtle
3. Peruonto
4. Vardiello
5. The Flea
6. The Cinderella Cat
7. The Merchant
8. Goat-Face
9. The Enchanted Doe
10. The Old Woman Who Was Skinned
The Crucible: Eclogue
II. The Second Day
Introduction to the Second Day
1. Petrosinella
2. Green Meadow
3. Viola
4. Cagliuso
5. The Serpent
6. The She-Bear
7. The Dove
8. The Little Slave Girl
9. The Padlock
10. The Buddy
The Dye: Eclogue
III. The Third Day
Introduction to the Third Day
1. Cannetella
2. Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands
3. Face
4. Sapia Liccarda
5. The Cockroach, the Mouse, and the Cricket
6. The Garlic Patch
7. Corvetto
8. The Ignoramus
9. Rosella
10. The Three Fairies
The Stove: Eclogue
IV. The Fourth Day
Introduction to the Fourth Day
1. The Rooster’s Stone
2. The Two Brothers
3. The Three Animal Kings
4. The Seven Little Pork Rinds
5. The Dragon
6. The Three Crowns
7. The Two Little Pizzas
8. The Seven Little Doves
9. The Crow
10. Pride Punished
The Hook: Eclogue
V. The Fifth Day
Introduction to the Fifth Day
1. The Goose
2. The Months
3. Pretty as a Picture
4. The Golden Trunk
5. Sun, Moon, and Talia
6. Sapia
7. The Five Sons
8. Nennillo and Nennella
9. The Three Citrons
End of The Tale of Tales
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
The Tale of the Ogre
Peruonto
Vardiello
The Flea
The Cinderella Cat
Goat-Face
The Enchanted Doe
The Old Woman Who Was Skinned
Petrosinella
Viola
Cagliuso
The Serpent
The Dove
Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands
The Cockroach, the Mouse, and the Cricket
The Garlic Patch
Corvetto
The Rooster’s Stone
The Seven Little Pork Rinds
The Dragon
The Seven Little Doves
The Crow
The Goose
The Golden Trunk
Nennillo and Nennella
The Three Citrons
Foreword
The Rise of the Unknown Giambattista Basile
It is not an exaggeration to claim that, along with E. T. A. Hoffmann, Giambattista Basile is the most talented and innovative of all the fairy-tale writers in Europe up through the present day. Nobody wrote and invented tales with such gusto, style, and profound social criticism as did Basile. Only Hoffmann was able to match his brilliant irony and adroit use of fairy-tale motifs, often turning them upside down and inside out. But it was Basile who paved the way for Hoffmann and many other writers of literary fairy tales. However, Basile has remained fairly unknown because he wrote in Neapolitan dialect, and many of the j
okes, references, and barbs in his tales are difficult to decipher, even by those who know the dialect well and have a comprehensive knowledge of folklore and fairy tales.
Historically, Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti became gradually known in other European countries through translations and word of mouth. Aside from some of the important French fairy-tale writers of the 1690s such as Mme d’Aulnoy, Mme Murat, Mlle Lhéritier, and Charles Perrault, the omniscient Brothers Grimm were the first important folklorists and writers to praise and comment on Basile in 1811. Jacob Grimm even translated one of Basile’s tales into German in 1814 and thought of translating all the tales in Lo cunto de li cunti, but he eventually settled on writing the introduction to Felix Liebrecht’s translation in 1846. In England, there was an adulterated translation of selected tales for young readers, The Pentamerone, or, The Story of Stories: Fun for the Little Ones (1848), by John Edward Taylor with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The first complete translation of Lo cunto de li cunti, by this time better known as The Pentamerone, was by Richard Burton in 1893. Typically, Burton took great poetic license, and though his translation has its charm, it is chock-full of errors, embellishments, and distortions. The book did not attract many readers, and Basile remained virtually unknown in England and America until the twentieth century.
By 1925, the great Italian critic and philosopher Benedetto Croce translated Basile into Italian, and in 1932 the British scholar Norman Mosley Penzer translated Croce’s version of The Pentamerone in two volumes with voluminous notes. Although this translation is excellent, there are many errors because Penzer worked from the Italian translation, not from the Neapolitan editions of The Pentamerone. He was also hampered by the fact that very little scholarly work had been done on Basile’s original use of folklore, Baroque literature, poetry, and courtly customs. Once again, despite Penzer’s major contribution, Basile remained a ghostly figure even among folklorists and literary experts, perhaps in part due to fascism and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 that hindered cultural exchange in Europe and America during that time.
It was not until the 1970s, 1980s, and later that scholars in Europe and America began taking a new interest in Basile, and numerous essays and books appeared that reflected a deeper appreciation and knowledge of Basile’s extraordinary accomplishments. In Italy, Mario Petrini, Michele Rak, and Ruggero Guarini published new translations and/or editions of Il Pentamerone in 1976, 1986, and 1994. In France, Myriam Tanant and Françoise Decroisette produced their translations in 1986 and 1995. In Germany, the renowned folklorist Rudolf Schenda supervised a collective translation completed by leading German scholars and folklorists in 2000. In memory of Schenda’s unfortunate death that same year, Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli published a significant collection of essays on Basile with the title Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba (2004); the essays were based on talks delivered at a special 2002 conference in Zurich honoring Schenda. Among the leading Basile scholars who contributed an essay to this volume was Nancy Canepa, who had already published the most complete critical study of Basile, From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s “Lo cunto de li cunti” and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, in 1999. This comprehensive work has been responsible for finally drawing the attention to Basile in the English-speaking world that he deserves.
Now, thanks again to Canepa, we have the first full, accurate, and annotated English translation of Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti based on the original Neapolitan texts. This work is a prodigious accomplishment. Not only has Canepa masterfully captured the tone and style of Basile’s complex and pungent tales, but she has also provided important footnotes to understand the recondite meanings and references in Basile’s tales. In fact, her translation is steeped in knowledge of Italian history, literature, and customs. Basile lived and wrote during a period of great upheaval, and he traveled north as a soldier and then returned to Naples, where he worked as an administrator at various courts in the region and also wrote poetry. His wide experience imbued his tales with an unusual folk tone and high literary rhetoric. He was obviously at home on the streets and at courts, and one can sense his zest for life and his understanding of the intrigues of his times and his awareness of the survival strategies that people of all classes employed to taste a bit of happiness. Basile’s tales do not always end happily. Like Brueghel, he was too wise and wry to paint pictures of sweet idyllic country and court scenes. His plots reverse expectations; his language is an unusual stylized Baroque version of the Neapolitan dialect, at times mellifluous, at times coarse and provocative; his critical commentary on his era was so ahead of his time that it still has a bearing on contemporary society. Unlike the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Basile’s stories are more down-to-earth and more honest depictions of how people desperately sought the help of the fates and fortune to endure the trials and tribulations of life and to reap some benefits. His tales are not easy to translate into our vernacular and into the metaphors of our day and age. But Nancy Canepa has managed to do this, and Basile can now speak to us as he has never spoken before.
JACK ZIPES
Illustrator’s Note
In the varied course of its four hundred years, Basile’s The Tales of Tales has enjoyed unusual popularity as well as noteworthy marginality, above all with regard to the creation of national values. This condition of neglect has allowed for a better preservation of its qualities up to our own time, just as nature does with its own treasures, where the effort required to attain access to these treasures prepares one to possess them.
This particular collection of fairy tales cannot be recommended as light reading. The difficulty of access to a plebeian language, the learned virtue of design, and the classical sense of allegory all demand a patient approach. The forms of Basile’s text are a refined study in expression, not mere appearance. Those who fail to recognize this higher goal and wish for something more facile, moralized, or manipulated would do better to stay away.
Basile’s text lacks any anxiety about being easily popularized. Forms of laughter, for instance, are at the limits of the possible: from aristocratic humor to the roughest of comic constructions; from the luminous detachment of irony to the folly of a sneer; from triumphant royal laughter to the trivial convulsions of a practical joke to the devastating sound of a staged fart. In Basile’s text an uncontainable, unseemly, and impure world unfolds in elegant and anticlassical fashion; today, after centuries of disputes and oblivion, there is general agreement that The Tale of Tales is a Neapolitan classic—not of the Neapolitan dialect, but of the Neapolitan language.
THE VERNACULAR OF THE MODERNS
Basile parodied both Petrarch and Boccaccio, and thus drew critically on both models. His point of departure was the variety of processes that had led to Tuscan becoming the “learned” language of Dante. He intended to demonstrate that the “illustrious vernacular” was suitable not only for Dante’s Aristotelian “tragic” mode but also for the comic; Basile’s program was, in fact, to make Neapolitan itself an “illustrious vernacular,” using the comic-jocose tradition to create the new model of the literary fairy tale.
Basile was not the only one in the Naples of his time with this sort of program. But it should be remembered that outside Naples the names that have come to be associated with him are figures of absolute historical significance: Teofilo Folengo, François Rabelais, Francisco Quevedo, Miguel de Cevantes, William Shakespeare.
The Tuscan literati, as well as all of the various schools that preceded them and of which they were the culmination, disputed the preeminency of academic Latin as the sole learned language and argued for the eloquence of the vernacular. They were also disputing an archaic system—one that rested on the heritage of the imperial universality of Rome, for which the Roman Church had continued to answer as feudal relationships with other empires were forged and against which the new bourgeoisie of the Italy of the communes was reacting. The confrontation was now extended to the
question of the legitimacy of the common idiom.
For Dante and Petrarch and the Italy of their time the vernacular was an active and well-defined cultural and political project—expressed, for example, in Dante’s Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia. The Neapolitan literati of the 1600s followed in their footsteps (although their objectives were not identical, their “Italy” was still stably divided), and they, too, revisited the ideal of the polis, even if in an appropriately more unconventional fashion. Or, in other words, the Neapolitans shared an ideal with the earlier authors, an ideal that considered language to be intimately linked to the work of constructing the polis, as well as an inner fatherland.
If spoken language opens a space that is the domain of ethics, letters articulate this space. And the site where spoken language encounters linguistic signification, where voice and sign come together, was just as relevant in the establishment of civic morality as it was in the edification of personal thought. In the case of Basile and the Neapolitan language, the experience of refining a language contributed in intimate and latent form to the creation of the ideal of a redemptive ethos that, in effect, would never realize itself historically in the formation of a paradigmatic language and literature (as occurred with the Tuscans), but instead became historically inscribed—perhaps in more modern fashion—as an exploration of the poetic value of “different” languages. The Neapolitan of The Tale of Tales articulates itself as the language both of the marvelous and of experience, the language of oral folktales and of childhood, and thus becomes, in its own way, an ethical experiment as well as a peculiar cultural quest, even if the magnitude of the phenomenon and its effects on civic custom are not as easy to understand as in the case of Dante and Petrarch.
With Basile takes place, perhaps, the leap that is necessary in order for voice to flow toward an unconditional exercise of thought. As such, the successful example that The Tale of Tales provides must be understood in its historical context and should stand as an authoritative model of how spoken language may realize, in the sign, sound integrated with thought.