Giambattista BasileReseñas

When a pregnant woman is caught stealing parsley from her ogress-neighbor's garden in this classic fairy-tale from Naples, the unfortunate lady is forced to promise her unborn child as payment, in order to avoid death. Taking the child into the forest, the ogress imprisons her in a tall tower, where she grows to womanhood. When a handsome prince (naturally) happens by and discovers Petrosinella, the two fall in love, eventually escaping. But can they outrun the ogress...?

Recorded some two hundred years before the more famous Rapunzel, from the Brothers Grimm - it was contained in Giambattista Basile's 1637 Pentamerone, often considered the first collection of European fairy-tales - this Neapolitan variant of the classic tale has always been a favorite of mine. I owned this edition as a girl, and must have read it a hundred times! The story here is engaging, exciting, and ultimately heart-satisfying. Rereading as an adult, I particularly liked the inclusion of the three magic acorns, which give Petrosinella more agency than her fairy-tale "sister" Rapunzel. The artwork from Diane Stanley is simply gorgeous - like Evelyn Andreas' Cinderella, I pored over this book as a child - perfectly capturing Petrosinella's beauty and the ogress' malice. Highly recommended to all fairy-tale lovers, and to anyone who appreciate lovely picture-book art.

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 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.

It is always interesting to compare and contrast the "traditional" with the same stories from another culture. Petrosinella and Rapunzel differ in quite a few minor ways, but there were a couple bigger points that I think deserve mention: first, Petrosinella involved a lot more magic, and she also did not get pregnant. It's a little milder of a story than the Rapunzel I am used to.
Medium: doesn't say, but it looks like colored pencil or maybe watercolor?

Petrosinella is a spin off the fairytale of Rapunzel. In this story a women sneaks into an ogress' garden to steal parsley. When the ogress catches her the woman is forced to promise her child to the ogress. When the woman's daughter turns seven the ogress takes the daughter and locks her up in a tower. There she stays until one day her prince comes to save her. However, Rapunzel can not escape until she over hears the ogress saying that she needs the three magic acorns in order to escape. Quickly rapunzel takes the three magic acorns and uses them to escape through the woods. Upon her return she finds her mother and is quickly married to the prince.

(Come inizia:) " I figli della ragione illuminista non hanno potuto, né forse hanno voluto, liberarsi del mito. Chi considera il 'disincanto del mondo' come caratteristica essenziale della società contemporanea, seguendo la descrizione delineata da M. Weber, difficilmente può trovare spiegazioni al fenomeno della persistenza del mito nella cultura dell'umanità occidentale..."

De Pentamerone is een 17de eeuwse raamvertelling waarin in vijf dagen vijftig verhalen worden verteld. In dit tweede deel worden de zesentwintig laatste verhalen weergegeven.

Net zoals in het eerste deel zijn het juist in deze raamvertelling de meest lelijke oude vrouwen die aan het woord komen in plaats van de schoonheden die gebruikelijkerwijs in een raamvertelling hun verhaal mogen doen. En daarmee is de toon al een beetje gezet van de sprookjes die ten gehore worden gebracht. Tot in het absurde wordt er met metaforen gesmeten, de ene nog hilarischer dan de andere. Het is onmogelijk om met een strak gezicht deze verhalen te lezen.

De sprookjes zelf bevatten voor mij bekende elementen zoals bijvoorbeeld de kinderen die het bos in worden gevoerd en het spoor naar huis niet meer terug kunnen vinden omdat dit spoor van zemelen was gemaakt en door een ezel is opgegegeten en toch is het niet het sprookje dat mij bekend is. Er is nog een legio aan voorbeelden te vinden in deze verhalen van bekende elementen in onbekende sprookjes. Daar krijg ik het gevoel bij dat er in de loop der eeuwen het een en ander aan de verhalen gewijzigd is en onze hedendaagse sprookjes daar het resultaat van zijn die wij nu kennen. Dan komt natuurlijk meteen de vraag naar boven hoe deze verhalen over enkele eeuwen in de toekomst zullen klinken.

Het einde van de raamvertelling is sterk voorspelbaar. Toch irriteert dat niet. Het is waar de vijf verteldagen naar toegewerkt hebben en daar hoort dit einde helemaal bij.

De Pentamerone is een 17de eeuwse raamvertelling waarin in vijf dagen vijftig verhalen worden verteld. In dit eerste deel komen de eerste vierentwintig aan bod.

Zoals in andere raamvertellingen het de mooiste meisjes zijn die de verhalen vertellen, zo zijn juist in de Pentamerone het de meest lelijke oude vrouwen die aan het woord komen. En daarmee is de toon al een beetje gezet van de sprookjes die ten gehore worden gebracht. Tot in het absurde wordt er met metaforen gesmeten, de ene nog hilarischer dan de andere.
Het is onmogelijk om met een strak gezicht deze verhalen te lezen.

De sprookjes zelf bevatten voor mij bekende elementen zoals bijvoorbeeld het haar van het gevangen meisjes dat zij laat zakken om een jongeling naar boven te laten klimmen en toch is het niet het sprookje dat mij bekend is.

Opmerkelijk ook is dat de sprookjes met een bepaald onderwerp kan beginnen en dan in de loop van het verhaal helemaal afwijkt naar iets anders en nooit meer op het eerste terugkomt. Slordige vertelling of iets dat bij die tijd hoorde? Ik weet het niet. Voor mij als 21ste eeuwse lezer in ieder geval verrassend. Het maakt het lezen nog eens extra spannend omdat het opeens afgelopen kan zijn of juist nog een paar bladzijden langer doorgaat dan ik zou verwachten.

Omdat de verhalen erg leuk zijn door manier van vertellen en inhoud én omdat ik nieuwsgierig ben hoe de vertelling waarin al deze verhalen zijn ingebed zal aflopen, heb ik deel twee ook aangeschaft.

A seminal collection of fairy tales, rendered difficult to read by Burton's awkward translation, still terrifickly homourous

Not suitable for children, it is interesting to read some folk tales from which many well-known children's stories must have derived.

Although I have read the translation by Sir Richard Burton, the glimpse we get of people's mindsets and fairy-tale habits are priceless - albeit possibly not accurate of the time... but who knows. The neapolitan dialect verson of the book is available online and so it's interesting to compare translations and word usage. Obviously much feeling and meaning gets lost in translation, however I found Sir Richard Burton's dated and quirky language magical and fascinating.

I liked the art work in this book more than the story itself. The artist did a great job fitting the characters to the time period they were from and the illustrations are beautiful and captivating

I find if fascinating how folk tales from all over the world have the same themes over and over again. I ended up reading a lot of folk tales for this class, and the same repetition of three, the trickster, the happily ever after, all of those things that we connect to folk stories exist in most of what I have read, regardless of where it came from.

A collection of 50 tales in the Neapolitan dialect.

Age: Upper primary
Genre: Fairy Tale
Critique: This is a fairy tale because it is a traditional, often-told tale. It also contains elements of music. The ogress is a static character because throughout the whole tale she is evil and mean, and ever changes.