The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  In general Basile’s characters exhibit more down-to-earth behavior than many of their counterparts in later collections; they are flesh-and-blood creatures involved in fairy-tale adventures but also in the affairs of everyday life. They emote and are long-winded about it; they express affection and amorous passion, are cruel and vengeful, whine and complain, gossip, browbeat, and nag: in short, everything that we have always suspected is behind the black-or-white, good-or-bad exteriors of the more famous Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties—and perhaps, that we’re secretly relieved to find. They also have sex, and revel in it, another aspect of Basile’s collection that a modern public, brought up on a different fairy-tale diet, may not anticipate. And the sex scenes are among the most enchanting—and grotesque—of the book. In “The Myrtle” (1.2), for example, we hear of a prince’s nighttime encounter with a mysterious creature.

  [W]hen he felt that certain business drawing close and touched it, he realized what a smooth job it was; and where he imagined he would be squeezing hedgehog needles he found a little something that was more mellow and soft than Tunisian wool, more yielding and pliable than the tail of a marten, more delicate and tender than the feathers of a goldfinch. [. . .] [T]hinking that it might be a fairy (as in fact it was) he wrapped himself around it like an octopus, and as they played at “Mute sparrow,” they also tried out “Stone in your lap” [two children’s games, here used with sexual connotations].

  At the other extreme, in “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned” (1.10) we find a king’s similarly mysterious encounter with a paramour who turns out to be an ancient woman:

  When Night arrived [. . .] the old woman smoothed back all the wrinkles on her body and gathered them behind her shoulders in a knot, which she tied tightly with a piece of twine. [. . .] The king was more than ready to light the fuse on his artillery, and as soon as he heard her come and lie down he smeared himself all over with musk and civet and sprayed himself from head to toe with cologne water, and then raced to bed like a Corsican hound. And it was lucky for the old woman that the king was wearing so much perfume, on account of which he wasn’t able to smell the fumes coming from her mouth, the stink of her little tickly areas, and the stench of that ugly thing. But no sooner had he lay down than, feeling around, he became aware of that business on the back of her neck and discovered the dried tripe and deflated bladders that the wretched old woman kept in the back of her shop. Keeping his composure, he decided not to say anything right then, since he needed to have a clearer idea on the matter. And so, pretending not to notice, he cast anchor at Mandracchio when he had believed he would be on the coast of Posillipo, and sailed forth on a barge when he had thought he would be charting his course on a Florentine galley.

  Although noble-spirited and courageous heroes are certainly not absent from The Tale of Tales, a significant number of winning protagonists are simpletons who possess few redeeming qualities. The hero of the very first tale (1.1), Antuono, is described as “such a birdbrain and muttonhead that he couldn’t even throw a snowball.” After his exasperated mother kicks him out of the house, Antuono moves in with an ogre, where he grows big and fat and receives from the ogre a number of magic gifts that make his fortune—without, however, undergoing any significant change for the better in the course of the story. Likewise, his fellow numskull Peruonto (1.3), who is considered “the most dismal creature, the greatest yokel, and the most solemn idiot that Nature ever created,” is also banished by his mother, but in the course of his wanderings he makes a princess laugh with his absurd antics and eventually marries her.

  On the contrary, there are a striking number of female protagonists who, with the sole aid of their intelligence (which thus substitutes for the magic that lesser heroes need), succeed in turning events to their advantage, often in spite of having to deal with hostile family members and male contenders whose social class and power far exceed theirs. We find one of these unexpectedly modern heroines in “Viola” (2.3), where a working girl makes fun of a king who greets her every day, and then manages to playfully skirt every trap he sets for her, bringing the prince to this conclusion: “I give up and you win, and now that I truly realize that you know more than I do, I want you without further ado for my wife!” The authority of Sapia (5.6) is even more evident: she is hired as a tutor for a doltish prince who, under her guidance and fueled by a slap she gives him when her patience is exhausted, becomes one of the most learned men of his kingdom. Even after he determines to avenge himself for the insult by marrying her so that he can maltreat her freely, she one-ups him and he is forced, at the end, to admit the superiority of her wisdom.

  Kings and other representatives of power often have problems living up to the royal ideal of responsible management of subjects and reign, principally because they are either oblivious to their monarchic duties or driven to emotional excess by their thirst for power. The diminished authority and distracted nature of Basile’s kings are underlined, structurally, by the fact that they are absent at the start of about half of the tales, appearing only subsequently and in minor roles as accessories to the hero’s rise. The composite portrait that these kings form is of a dysfunctional system of power that, perhaps, figures the general sociopolitical crisis—of the Spanish monarchy and of the local nobility—that was playing itself out in the kingdom of Naples of Basile’s time. Examples of deficient kings include the king of High Mountain (1.5), who fattens up a flea by feeding it daily with his own blood until it grows to monstrous proportions and he has it skinned; when he organizes a contest for guessing the origin of the skin an ogre wins, and the king forces his daughter to marry him. The king of Strong Fortress (1.10) obsesses about the mysterious neighbors that live under him until he finally convinces one of them to go to bed with him, only to discover, in the grotesque scene already considered, that she is a decrepit hag. Courtiers, a professional category with which Basile was intimately acquainted, fare no better, tending to be indecisive or envious and vengeful. In “Corvetto” (3.7), for instance, a virtuous courtier with magical powers bypasses the traps that the other, inferior courtiers lay out for him, and ultimately marries the daughter of his king.

  Conventional antagonists are sometimes not so evil, either, as we can see from a survey of Basile’s preferred villain, the ogre. The ogre in “Viola” (2.3) is a vassal of the king who lives in a garden adjacent to Viola’s house, into which she is lowered by her envious sisters in the hope of eliminating her. The ogre, however, in an irresistibly comic scene in which he accounts for Viola’s sudden appearance with the theory that one of his farts has impregnated a tree and thus generated the girl, tends to her with the loving attention of a father. In “Green Meadow” (2.2) we encounter an ogre couple that, in a reversal of the usual order of aggression, is “cannibalized” by the heroine of the tale, who needs their fat to cure an ailing prince. These ogres are presented as enlightened commentators on the doings of civilized society; during an affectionate after-dinner conversation the ogre complains to his wife that “everything is topsy-turvy and all awry,” since “you hear of things that would make you jump out of your clothes: buffoons rewarded, scoundrels esteemed, lazybones honored, assassins protected, counterfeiters defended, and respectable men barely appreciated or esteemed.”

  Like the ogres, we, too, have the impression, when reading The Tale of Tales, that reigning hierarchies—literary, social, existential—have gone a bit topsy-turvy, and that this not only serves the purpose of reinforcing the alternative construct of a marvelous fairy-tale world, but also constitutes a vigorous engagement with the here and now. The degree to which real and fantastic, human and supernatural, nature and art, good and evil merge and are even mirrored one in the other, in an endless play of intersections, makes this a world of permeable boundaries and questionable closures, despite the token, rhetorical “happily-ever-after” with which most of the tales do end. The recognition that a clear-eyed affirmation of the most repellent, wondrous, confounding, essential aspec
ts of human existence does not tally with a neat packaging of moral lessons is, perhaps, not always easy. But it does hold a remarkable affinity with our own (post)modern sensibility that so often expresses itself in paradox, contradiction, parodic transgression, a taste for the hybrid, and a distrust of ready-made categories. It is for this reason that the journeys of initiation narrated in The Tale of Tales bear, at the end, a certain familiarity to our own conflicted dialogue with the world around us.

  THIS TRANSLATION

  The recent critical attention that Basile has received is certainly as exciting as it is merited, but as Basile’s star has risen there has been no corresponding attention to making his work itself more accessible. The lack of an up-to-date translation of The Tale of Tales is not only a serious impediment to further textual analysis on the part of scholars who lack familiarity with Neapolitan or Italian, but also deprives the more general public of tale enthusiasts—not to mention fabulists and storytellers—of a text of infinite resources and riches.

  The only complete English translation of The Tale of Tales of the twentieth century was published in 1932 by the British folklorist Norman Penzer; it is twice removed from the Neapolitan original since Penzer translated from Benedetto Croce’s 1925 Italian translation. Although quite readable and often elegant, the deficiencies in voice, vibrancy, and accuracy with respect to the original are significant in Penzer’s version. Let us look at a representative passage. In “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned” (1.10), a king’s attention is occupied by his mysterious downstairs neighbors, until, in the original,

  Era arredutto a termene che non poteva fare no pideto senza dare a lo naso de ste brutte gliannole, che d’ogne poco cosa ’mbrosoliavano a le pigliava lo totano: mo decenno ca no gesommino cascato da coppa l’aveva ’mbrognolato lo caruso, mo ca na lettera stracciata l’aveva ’ntontolato na spalla, mo ca no poco de porvere l’aveva ammatontato na coscia.

  Penzer translates,

  The King was brought to this point: that he was not even able to sneeze without upsetting these old hags, for they grumbled and complained about everything. First they said that a sprig of jessamine had fallen from the window and bruised their heads, then that a torn letter had hurt their shoulders, and then that some powder had crushed their hips.

  In the present translation the passage reads,

  The king was reduced to such a state that he couldn’t even fart without causing those old pains in the neck to wrinkle their noses, for they grumbled and threw themselves about like squid over the smallest thing. First they said that a jasmine flower fallen from above had given one of them a lump on her head, then that a torn-up letter had dislocated one of their shoulders, and then that a pinch of dust had bruised one of their thighs.

  For my translation I have used as primary text the 1634–36 editio princeps that belongs to the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense of Milan. The process of translation was painstaking due to the many degrees of difficulty of the text, but especially to the fact that the original is written in a seventeenth-century dialect often creatively manipulated by its author himself. My own familiarity with Neapolitan comes from some direct experience with related Italian dialects, but above all from long hours spent with Basile’s Neapolitan texts, texts contemporary to The Tale of Tales (in both Neapolitan and Italian), Neapolitan dictionaries and grammars, and the existing Italian and English translations.

  Once the essential semantic and syntactic hurdles had been confronted it was necessary to pose what is, perhaps, the translator’s most important question: to what degree should the text be “familiarized”? Translating Basile’s early modern version of a nonstandard language into standard American English is especially fraught with the risks of assimilating the status of Neapolitan to that of a dominant language. Specialists in Italian literature know that Basile’s text has virtually no precedents, or epigones, for that matter, in Italian literature, and this exceptionality derives in part from its hybrid linguistic status. Should the translator attempt to reproduce Basile’s every stylistic quirk, every note of his polyphonic opus, possibly to the detriment of fluidity, or, instead, to smooth the rough edges and coax the text into more orderly submission?

  The temptation to “domesticate” in the direction of rendering a more polished, easy to read, and accommodating translation is one that most of Basile’s early translators, and some of his later ones, succumbed to. Even Croce, certainly not naïve about the risks inherent in passing from one language to another—and a fellow Neapolitan to boot—tended to deal with difficult, or racy, passages by either simplification, elimination, or, above all, sanitation of the original. One example may suffice. At the beginning of “The Goose” (5.1), two penniless sisters spend their last resources to buy a goose, which as soon as they get it home awards them a big surprise. In the original we find,

  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. E fu tale lo cacatorio che commenzaro ad auzare capo e se le vedde lucere lo pilo. . . .

  Croce’s Italian translation reads,

  Ma spunta l’alba e fa buon giorno: la buona oca cominciò a fare scudi ricci, di modo che, a poco a poco, esse ne empirono un gran cassone; e fu tale quell’evacuazione che cominciarono ad alzar la testa e si vide loro rilucere il pelo.

  All derivatives of the verb cacare (to shit) present in the original are expunged in Croce, resulting in a reduced, flattened rendition, as we see repeated in Penzer’s translation (based on Croce).

  But dawn comes and it turns out a fine day: the worthy goose began to make golden ducats, so that, little by little, they filled a great chest with them; and, such was that excrement, that they began to carry their heads high with shining countenances.

  Finally, my translation from 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. There was so much shit, in fact, that the two sisters began to raise their heads and see their fur shine.

  On a more specific level, considerable challenges present themselves on every page of The Tale of Tales in the form of sophisticated punning and wordplay, citation of the most diverse registers and technical vocabularies, references to places, people, and usages of Basile’s time, and so forth.

  I have opted for a productively foreignizing translation, in which I attempt to preserve the distinctive tone, as well as the idiosyncrasies, of Basile’s literary language, a language that is “strange” even in Italy, where all Italians except erudite Neapolitans read him in translation. Nonetheless, a good deal of the cultural references in The Tale of Tales may be unfamiliar to the reader of today, and to embrace a defamiliarizing strategy to the point of further obscuring these seems irresponsible. Elucidation of what otherwise might appear to be esoteric references with little meaning has thus been a priority, but I have preferred, as have most previous editors, to do this outside of the text in the form of abundant notes, for the simple reason that the material peripheral to the bare plot of the tales forms an entire subtext unto itself that warrants an attentive, “parallel” reading. I have made ample use of the excellent (and exhaustive) notes by Benedetto Croce, Norman Penzer, Michele Rak, Roberto De Simone, and Ruggero Guarini and Alessandra Burani, adding my own when necessary.

  In his criticism of “domesticating translation,” Lawrence Venuti discusses a term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “minor literature.” The authors of such literature “are foreigners in their own tongue,” and produce

  stylistically innovative texts that make the most striking intervention into a linguistic conjecture by exposing the contradictory conditions of the standard dialect, the literary canon, the dominant culture, the major language. . . . Certain literary texts increase this radical heterogeneity by submitting the major language to constant variation, forcing it to become minor, delegitimi
zing, deterritorializing, alienating it.14

  This is precisely Basile’s operation as he fashions his Neapolitan not in a space radically separate from the “major” language (Italian) and its traditions, which would make of him a mannered naïf, but in constant dialogue with these. A deceptively fluent translation that purported to re-create a transparency and accessibility that were absent in the original text would thus be the most unfaithful to the spirit and letter of The Tale of Tales.