- The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

Other authorsJack Zipes (Foreword), Nancy L. Canepa (Editor), Carmelo Lettere (Illustrator)
Paperback, 2016

Status

Available

Call number

398.20945

Collection

Publication

Penguin Classics (2016), Edition: Tra, 544 pages

Description

The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales within a fiftieth frame story, contains the earliest versions of celebrated stories like Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. The tales are bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical, acute in psychological characterization and encyclopedic in description. They are also evocative of marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as of the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Yet because the original is written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian-and was last translated fully into English in 1932-this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars. Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile's original. Working directly from the original Neopolitan version, translator Nancy L. Canepa takes pains to maintain the idiosyncratic tone of The Tale of Tales as well as the work's unpredictable structure. This edition keeps the repetition, experimental syntax, and inventive metaphors of the original version intact, bringing Basile's words directly to twenty-first-century readers for the first time. This volume is also fully annotated, so as to elucidate any unfamiliar cultural references alongside the text. Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones is also lushly illustrated and includes a foreword, an introduction, an illustrator's note, and a complete bibliography. The publication of The Tale of Tales marked not only a culmination of the interest in the popular culture and folk traditions of the Renaissance period but also the beginning of the era of the artful and sophisticated ""authored"" fairy tale that inspired and influenced later writers like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones offers an excellent point of departure for reflection about what constitutes Italian culture, as well as for discussion of the relevance that forms of early modern culture like fairy tales still hold for us today. This volume is vital reading for fairy-tale scholars and anyone interested in cultural history.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Widsith
This obscure and wonderful collection of fairytales is not, perhaps, quite as filthy as you might expect from something called Lo cunto de li cunti, but it's still full of bizarre and scatological delights. Written in the early 1600s – before the Grimms, before Perrault – it contains the first
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known versions of famous tales like Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, or Sleeping Beauty, all of them dramatically different from how they're told today, and throws in for good measure a host of more recondite folk-stories that I had never heard before.

Their author, Giambattista Basile, was a kind of itinerant courtier and sometime soldier from outside Naples, who wrote in an elaborate, rococo form of Neapolitan as well as (elsewhere) in standard Italian. In The Tales of Tales, Basile gathers his stories together under a frame narrative, in a half-parodic imitation of Boccaccio: the tone is set early when a princess gets a curse put on her for laughing at an old woman's vagina, as a distant result of which it becomes necessary – don't ask why – for ten women to tell five stories each across the space of five days. Hence the alternative title of the Pentamerone.

Each story is no more than four or five pages long, which makes this an easy book to read, despite its length. And each begins with a helpful one-paragraph synopsis. I can give you an idea of the kind of thing we're dealing with by quoting one of these in its entirety – here's the précis of tale 5.1, ‘The Goose’:

Lilla and Lolla buy a coin-shitting goose at the market. A neighbor asks to borrow it, and when she sees that it's the opposite of what it should be, she kills it and throws it out the window. The goose attaches itself to a prince's ass while he's relieving himself, and no one but Lolla can remove it; for this reason the prince takes her for his wife.

Yep. The scene where the prince is trying to wipe his arse on the dead goose's neck is particularly to be recommended.

And this flair for the Rabelaisian is put to surprisingly effective use within the stories, generating some impressive insults and metaphors. ‘Why don't you shut that sewer hole, you bogeyman's grandmother, blood-sucking witch, baby drowner, rag shitter, fart gatherer?’ yells one character, while another is dismissed as ‘a flycatcher who wasn't worth his weight in dog sperm’. Someone else is described as being so terrified that ‘they wouldn't have been able to take an enema made of a single pig's bristle’.

Basile's obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world, is due in no small part to the lack of decent translations, which makes this new rendering from Nancy L Canepa – the first since the 1930s – extremely welcome. More than welcome; it feels staggeringly overdue. Most previous editions have been based on Benedetto Croce's ‘not always faithful’ 1925 translation into Italian, whereas Canepa is working straight from the original Neapolitan. To show what a difference it makes, let's return to that coin-shitting goose we met earlier. A line from the original tale runs:

Ma, scoppa dì e fa buono iuorno, la bona papara commenzaie a cacare scute riccie, de manera che a cacata a cacata se ne ’nchiero no cascione.

The previous complete English translation – from Penzer in 1932, working from Croce's Italian – translated this like so:

But dawn comes and it turns out to be a fine day: the worthy goose began to make golden ducats, so that, little by little, they filled a great chest with them…

But Canepa's translation restores the forceful vulgarity of the original:

And when morning breaks it's a nice day, for the good goose began to shit hard cash until, shitload upon shitload, they had filled up a whole chest.

You can see that it really feels like we're hearing Basile for the first time now. This gives a wonderful sense of discovery to Canepa's translation, even if for my own taste she sometimes seems to favour word-for-word accuracy over English readability (with the convenient, if believable, justification that Basile's own Neapolitan must have been quite a challenge even to contemporaries). Any quibbles are more than made up for by the wealth of notes and other apparatus, which give generous citations of the original and explain those flourishes of wordplay or references that Canepa has not attempted to modernise.

Taking this fabulous, irreverent tour of seventeenth-century life is an exhilarating experience, and even an uplifting one. Although he deals with violence, revenge and death, Basile is not especially interested in tragedy or cruelty; it's impossible to imagine him other than with a smile on his face. And indeed impossible to read him without one, either.
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LibraryThing member Ghost_Boy
Perhaps, the weirdest collection of fairy tales I've come across in my study of fairy tales. These were written in the seventeenth century, before bigger names like Grimm and Perrault. You can tell at times because most of these stories are early versions of best loved tales like Cinderella,
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Rapunzel Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty. Unlike Grimm and Perrault, this isn't an anthology of fairy tales. This is a novel set up similar to Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales. It's a story about telling fifty tales.

This book is not for children. Despite the fact it's fairy tales, this is for adults. Words like "bitch" and "shit" get tossed around more than once. I kind of find that interesting because this book is older than most collections, but than again, seeing this was written in the early seventeenth century I'm not surprised either. As I said before, these are like Canterbury Tales, but easier to read (well maybe that's the translator's doing).

There's a movie version I recommend watching before this book. Most times I'd say to read the book first, but the movie help me figure out what some of the tales were like beforehand. The movie isn't a frame story like the book, but it has some of the weirder tales. It's a good introduction what you'll except. The movie is R too, which I thought was a little off, but than I actually read the book...

I kind of wish this collection wasn't so underrated on Goodreads though. So many people like fairy tales, but so many people I see ignore or don't know this book exists. Even though I'm giving this a high ratting, this isn't the best book in the word, it's not even that well written, but it's great for people actually interested in studying fairy tales. Penguin's edition has a ton of notes and tales you which fairy tales are similar with each tale. This book would make a great book to study in college or a class about fairy tales too, I think.
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Language

Original language

Italian

Original publication date

1634-1636

Physical description

494 p.; 5.4 inches

ISBN

0143129147 / 9780143129141
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