The families of Annunzio and Cesare are cited with varying degrees of revulsion. The two boys lived with their large families in modest houses in the same medieval neighborhood. In the square near the church there was an iron fountain decorated with a fasces where people got their drinking water. In far-off 1963 the only public water source for the populous community of the village was the fountain, and with its crowded theater of everyday, plebeian reality it was not distant from the comic spirit of the more noble fountain of oil of the frame tale’s king of Hairy Valley. Cesare was “good-natured, docile,” and “delicate; pale.” He had “some will,” but too little, and he was “not very intelligent.” Yet “his scholastic results could be sufficient if he studied,” even though he was unable to “comprehend” and “memorize” and was “lacking in ideas.” In another note the teacher indicated that he was “in need of physical, emotional, and moral assistance,” and his family “poor, uninterested in the boy’s appearance, cleanliness, and scholastic progress.” For Annunzio the tone was cold and bureacratic. The impression was that he had never been considered a presence, a boy in flesh and blood, but only a formality. These last cases bring to mind Pacione of “The Five Sons” (tale 5.7), who has five good-for-nothing sons whom he can no longer support, and decides to get them off his back by sending them out into the world to learn something. “But take care,” says the affectionate parent, “not to agree to serve for more than a year, and when the time is over I will be at home waiting for you to show me your skills.”
It was more than a suspicion that many children had difficulties understanding their teachers and following, without huge efforts, the curriculum. This was due both to the use of Italian, presented as a virtuous ideal as well as an integral antagonist of the culture of dialects, and to inappropriate cultural models, often offered without any sort of context. The pressure and the pedagogically inopportune imposition of guilt on the children and their families were evident. Too many paid the price of exclusion only because they chose a natural faithfulness to the values of their families and to the codes of their culture of origin, reacting with passive resistance or indolence. The school was extraneous, other, and as it excluded the child it deprived the adult and the community of civic prerogatives and a sense of their own history. In doing so it inhibited, as we would say today, self-esteem, instead promoting conflict and division in the children, which in turn prepared them for the very real separation from their community that would inevitably occur in the future.
Whoever reads Basile’s tales can’t fail to see the direct ties they have with southern Italian folklore. And we should remember with pride the debt that the European imaginary owes to both our culture and Basile. But we should remember above all that The Tale of Tales is more, and to this it owes its present and perennial greatness.
Benedetto Croce’s 1925 Italian translation of the Neapolitan tales was a late attempt to recover the collection’s legitimacy, denied to it in the 1800s in one of the first post-Unification histories of literature, written by Francesco de Sanctis. This might have created the authority necessary to renew efforts to popularize the collection and to help it to become, in the 1960s (and not only in the extended area where the language in which it is written is spoken), a scholastic point of reference, alongside exclusive post-Unification models like Alessandro Manzoni and Edmondo de Amicis. An assimilation of the lessons of The Tale of Tales, those that are closest and most familiar to us, would extend education to include an open, more critical form of knowledge. The school should be the first insitution in which the state gives proof of its magnanimity and its strength.
The Tale of Tales is a model for the promotion of literacy in dialect. Initiatives leading to its pedagogical use are welcome; let us hope that every dialect in Italy one day has its own version, with or without eclogues and even without the interference of Basile himself. I hope that at least in high schools students demand, just as they do with the Italian and Latin classics, the Neapolitan version in which The Tale of Tales was written. Why? Because Basile’s unique merit lay in his ability to carve out, preserve, and restore, in universal form and with extreme lightness, a way of being Italian, and at the same time in his ability to give the gift of exhilarating pages to readers of every time and place.
PERENNIAL IMAGES: ILLUSTRATION AND THE LANGUAGE OF FAIRY TALES
Language and speech are a double reality. Pure and mute experience finds an untranslatable epiphany of being in the symbol. The word itself, in the fairy tale, can become allegory and thus correspond to the eloquence of the symbol. At the beginning word and myth were, perhaps, two forms of the same mystical necessity. Language that unfolds in allusions in order to express the universe describes the fixity of an image. Sound is united with word in a sudden illumination.
But it is clear that the fairy tale contemplated the internal processes and laws of nature. Mythological archetypes still inhabit the degraded myths of the cunti, even when they are reduced to the affairs of the small private worlds, historically more probable, of the novella, and when the authority of fairy-tale symbolism is personified in figures of everyday experience. Basile has no doubts; he takes the action of history, the declared cause of the wearing down of symbols, as a sign of the evolution of the genre. It matters little if it is history that becomes fairy tale or fairy tale that becomes history: the rewriting exalts the value of the open container.
This allegorical symbolism is a dissipated and tenacious virtue—a secret that travels with us, we who are oblivious and happily unaware of it—a presence as obstinate and fearful as a dragon in a cave or, worse, as being at the end of a chain held by some perverse god. It is an enemy to consciousness, often dominating and periodically killing it. But there is no death that is more universal and less absolute than this, since it is suffered at the culmination of an Edenic fullness, and the memory of this wholeness is dispersed but not lost in experience. Consciousness and history are the plane trod on by existence, but where we go to sleep at night and with whom, or where intimacy reposes in the contracted time of non-being, is a liminal mystery: the common and monstrous locus of the “solidarity of consciousness” of the civic being, and one of the nodes of modernity. The relationship between the imaginary constructions of fairy tales and dreams is a truly extraordinary and still open opportunity for excavation and research on the essence of things.
Lévi-Strauss sees in myth “a verbal entity which, within the sphere of language, occupies a position akin to that of the crystal in the world of physical matter. In relation to language [langue], on the one hand, and speech [parole], on the other, its position indeed resembles that of the crystal: an intermediary object between a statistical aggregate of molecules and the molecular structure itself.” He identifies myth with “the mode of discourse in which the formula traduttore, traditore has practically no meaning.”2
Infancy and myth are interpenetrated, in terms of their meaning and of their value as objects temporarily translated but at the same time coincident. With respect to langauge both are pertinent to nature and to history, but with opposite dynamics. Infancy, as Giorgio Agamben states in his essay “Infancy and History,” is “precisely the reverse engine, transforming pure pre-Babel language into human discourse, nature into history”; myth partipates in a mute eloquence, translating human discourse, momentarily, into the pure language of nature.3
The fairy tale cannot do without the mysterical-initiatory qualities of myth, which, for its very nature, takes upon itself secrecy and silence. Agamben:
The ancient world interprets this mysterical infancy as a knowledge that cannot be spoken of, as a silence to be kept. [. . .] the un-speakable of infancy [becomes] a secret doctrine weighed down by an oath of esoteric silence. This is why it is the fable, something which can only be narrated, and not the mystery, which must not be spoken of, which contains the truth of infancy as man’s source of origin. For in the fairy tale man is freed from the mystery’s obligation of silence
by transforming it into enchantment: it is not participation in a cult of knowledge which renders him speechless, but bewitchment. The silence of the mystery is undergone as a rupture, plunging man back into the pure, mute language of nature; but as a spell, silence must eventually be shattered and conquered. This is why, in the fairy tale, man is struck dumb, and animals emerge from the pure language of nature in order to speak. Through the temporary confusion of the two spheres, it is the world of the open mouth (from the Indo-European root *bha (from which the word fable is derived), which the fairy tale validates, against the world of the closed mouth, of the root *mu. [. . .] Indeed, it can be said that the fairy tale is the place where, through the inversion of the categories: closed mouth/open mouth, pure language/infancy, man and nature exchange roles before each finds their own place in history.4
That is why Antuono is confused when he meets the ogre (tale 1.1), and asks him, fortuitously: “How far is it from here to the place where I have to go?” And Basile’s ogre, out of a sense of investiture that finds no justification in his grotesque appearance, does not shirk his responsibility but, on the contrary, adopts Antuono into his fold.
CARMELO LETTERE
Acknowledgments
This translation has been an idea since I began to study Basile’s work in the 1980s. By the time my critical study of The Tale of Tales appeared in 1999 (From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale), interest in Basile was on the rise, and dedicating myself full time to translating Lo cunto became an imperative. As happens with most projects of this sort, it has been a longer journey than expected. But it has also been an exciting and tremendously satisfying one. In many ways, my reading of Basile has culminated during the last five or six years, for there is no activity like translation to compel one to consider more deeply the linguistic and cultural strata present in every single word of a text.
I am most grateful for the various forms of assistance that have helped bring the translation to its happy conclusion. These included a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship (1999) and a Dartmouth College Senior Faculty Fellowship (2003), both of which awarded me precious time to devote to the translation in its early and later stages, and the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund of the French and Italian Department at Dartmouth, which liberally subsidized some of the costs associated with preparing the manuscript for publication. I also benefited enormously from participation in a 2002 conference dedicated to Basile at the University of Zurich and organized by Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli; the many conversations about Basile with scholars from a wide range of disciplines were enriching and inspiring.
As always, Wayne State University Press has been marvelously amenable to work with, and I thank the various people there who have patiently supported me from beginning to end, in particular the past and present directors, Arthur Evans and Jane Hoehner, editors Kathy Wildfong and Annie Martin, and Don Haase, editor of the WSUP fairy-tale series. Thanks also to Jack Zipes for a friendship and steady faith in my work that go back to the early Basile days, as well as for his wise counsel and the stupendous example he sets for all fairy-tale scholars.
Carmelo, Gaia, and Camilla have co-inhabited this project day in and day out: Carmelo as generous interlocutor on critical, linguistic, and artistic matters; Gaia as acute but fresh reader and cultivator of both the fairy tale and the joys of language; and Camilla, born mid-project, as bearer in her own spirit of the frank truths enveloped in the fairy tale and its characters. Without the passion and force of our own daily narratives the impetus to bring Basile’s tales to a wider audience would not have been.
NANCY L. CANEPA
Introduction
Just how do we explain the appearance of the extraordinary creation that is Lo cunto de li cunti, overo Lo trattenemiento de ’peccerille (The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones)? Written in the early years of the seventeenth century and published in 1634–36 after the death of its author, Giambattista Basile (1575–1632), it is the first integral collection of authored, literary fairy tales in western Europe. This unique status extends in many other directions as well. The Tale of Tales is a masterpiece of Italian literature written not in standard Italian but in the dialect of Naples; thoroughly engaged with the aesthetics of the Italian Baroque, it nevertheless situates itself playfully at its linguistic margins. The marvelous dimensions depicted in its fairy tales stand in marked contrast to the realistic representation that was the heritage of Boccaccio and the novella tradition, still dominant at Basile’s time. And Basile’s tales are inhabited by supernatural creatures and propelled by forms of magic entirely dissociated from any religious system, at a time when the strict orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation influenced public and private expression. The Tale of Tales is a work that simultaneously evokes the humus of seventeenth-century Naples—its landmarks, customs and daily rituals, family and professional life—and conjures forth a fantastic world whose absolute originality still holds strong attraction today. Finally, this collection, written four hundred years ago in an obscure language, offers us intriguing hints of the links between certain forms of folkloric and early modern narrative and the experimentalism, in both structure and content, that marks more recent narrative traditions, from modernism on.
An engraving of Basile
Basile was a man of multiple literary personas. On the one hand he lived the typical life of a courtier in a turbulent period of Italian history, migrating from city to city and producing many works for many patrons. On the other, he authored a collection of fifty tales that today is recognized as a landmark in the history of the literary fairy tale—preceding Charles Perrault’s much shorter Histoires ou contes de temps passé (Stories, or Tales of Past Times) by more than half a century and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) by almost two centuries. The stories of The Tale of Tales are like no other fairy tales: imbued just as much with the formulas of elite literary culture as with those of folkloric traditions and orality; closer to Rabelais and Shakespeare (Basile has been called a Mediterranean Shakespeare) than to most other fabulists; bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical; acute in psychological characterization and at the same time encyclopedic in description; full, ultimately, of irregularities and loose ends that somewhat magically manage to merge into a splendid portrait of creatures engaged in the grave and laborious, gratifying and joyful business of learning to live in their world—and to tell about it. And reading Basile’s text is an experience like no other, a roller-coaster ride in which the reader glides along smoothly for only brief stretches of what is, overall, a decidedly vertiginous experience.
Basile’s work has been familiar since the nineteenth century to a small group of specialists of folklore and early modern Italian literature, but it was only in the 1980s that it attracted more sustained scholarly attention in the English-speaking scholarly world. As The Tale of Tales has begun to be awarded the attention it deserves, readers unfamiliar with Neapolitan or Italian still, however, have no access to a complete, modern, authoritative translation. The most recent English translation of The Tale of Tales dates from 1932; it has its charm but is sorely antiquated as well as lacking in the explosive verve of the original (besides having been out of print for decades). The present effort is, thus, long overdue and will, I hope, spread the riches of this remarkable collection.
BASILE’S LIFE*
Giambattista Basile was born to Cornelia Daniele and her husband (of whom we know only the surname) in or around 1575, outside Naples in the village of Posillipo. With its population of 200,000, Naples was at this time one of the largest and most animated cities of Europe and a major cultural center of the Italian Baroque. Basile was one of many—perhaps seven—brothers and sisters; the family was most likely of the Neapolitan middle class that had been expanding in size throughout the course of the sixteenth century.1 Giambattista spent his
professional life at courts in Italy and abroad, as did most of his siblings, three of whom were singers and one a composer.
Very little is known about Basile’s early years (up to about 1608), and in the absence of documentary evidence scholars have depended on autobiographical references in his works themselves. Around 1600, if not before, Basile probably left Naples to seek his fortune elsewhere, as he had been unsuccessful in finding a noble patron in his native city. He expressed his bitterness at this departure in Le avventurose disavventure (The adventurous misadventures [1611]) in a scene set in Naples where the autobiographical character Nifeo explains to another character,
You will hear, then, that I first opened my eyes to daylight on this very shore. It should cause no marvel that I am not recognized as a countryman here, for I have roamed afar for so long that my dress and manners appear different from those here. [. . .] When I had journeyed half of my life’s way, a new spirit inflamed in me the desire for higher study, and although I knew I was a swamp bird, I strived to equal the most noble swans. But when I thought most surely that my fatherland was going to confirm me in winning laurels, I then saw that those who should have loved me most ignored me. (Ah, the harsh conditions of our age, in which the most noble virtues of children are abhorred by their own mothers!) And so I arranged to flee the ungrateful shores and search for my fortune elsewhere.2
After a number of intermediate stops (we know neither where nor when) Basile ended up in Venice, where he enrolled as a soldier of fortune and was soon after sent to Candia, a Venetian outpost and strategic point of defense against the Turks. There he served and entered the graces of the Venetian nobleman Andrea Cornaro, who invited him to become a member of his Accademia degli Stravaganti. This was Basile’s debut in literary society, and it offered him experiences that would subsequently prove precious, such as “the association with a ‘frontier’ civilized society that was composite and plurilingual . . . and the source of much material . . . that would later be used in The Tale of Tales.”3
The Tale of Tales Page 3
