Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Frontispiece
Copyright
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Introduction
Dauntless Little John
The Man Wreathed in Seaweed
The Ship with Three Decks
The Man Who Came Out Only at Night
And Seven!
Body-without-Soul
Money Can Do Everything
The Little Shepherd
Silver Nose
The Count’s Beard
The Little Girl Sold with the Pears
The Snake
The Three Castles
The Prince Who Married a Frog
The Parrot
The Twelve Oxen
Crack and Crook
The Canary Prince
King Crin
Those Stubborn Souls, the Biellese
The Pot of Marjoram
The Billiards Player
Animal Speech
The Three Cottages
The Peasant Astrologer
The Wolf and the Three Girls
The Land Where One Never Dies
The Devotee of St. Joseph
The Three Crones
The Crab Prince
Silent for Seven Years
The Dead Man’s Palace
Pome and Peel
The Cloven Youth
Invisible Grandfather
The King of Denmark’s Son
Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch
Quack, Quack! Stick to My Back!
The Happy Man’s Shirt
One Night in Paradise
Jesus and St. Peter in Friuli
The Magic Ring
The Dead Man’s Arm
The Science of Laziness
Fair Brow
The Stolen Crown
The King’s Daughter Who Could Never Get Enough Figs
The Three Dogs
Uncle Wolf
Giricoccola
Tabagnino the Hunchback
The King of the Animals
The Devil’s Breeches
Dear as Salt
The Queen of the Three Mountains of Gold
Lose Your Temper, and You Lose Your Bet
The Feathered Ogre
The Dragon with Seven Heads
Bellinda and the Monster
The Shepherd at Court
The Sleeping Queen
The Son of the Merchant from Milan
Monkey Palace
Rosina in the Oven
The Salamanna Grapes
The Enchanted Palace
Buffalo Head
The King of Portugal’s Son
Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful
The Old Woman’s Hide
Olive
Catherine, Sly Country Lass
The Traveler from Turin
The Daughter of the Sun
The Dragon and the Enchanted Filly
The Florentine
Ill-Fated Royalty
The Golden Ball
Fioravante and Beautiful Isolina
Fearless Simpleton
The Milkmaid Queen
The Story of Campriano
The North Wind’s Gift
The Sorceress’s Head
Apple Girl
Prezzemolina
The Fine Greenbird
The King in the Basket
The One-Handed Murderer
The Two Hunchbacks
Pete and the Ox
The King of the Peacocks
The Palace of the Doomed Queen
The Little Geese
Water in the Basket
Fourteen
Jack Strong, Slayer of Five Hundred
Crystal Rooster
A Boat for Land and Water
The Neapolitan Soldier
Belmiele and Belsole
The Haughty Prince
Wooden Maria
Louse Hide
Cicco Petrillo
Nero and Bertha
The Love of the Three Pomegranates
Joseph Ciufolo, Tiller-Flutist
Bella Venezia
The Mangy One
The Wildwood King
Mandorlinfiore
The Three Blind Queens
Hunchback Wryneck Hobbler
One-Eye
The False Grandmother
Frankie-Boy’s Trade
Shining Fish
Miss North Wind and Mr. Zephyr
The Palace Mouse and the Garden Mouse
The Moor’s Bones
The Chicken Laundress
Crack, Crook, and Hook
First Sword and Last Broom
Mrs. Fox and Mr. Wolf
The Five Scapegraces
Ari-Ari, Donkey, Donkey, Money, Money!
The School of Salamanca
The Tale of the Cats
Chick
The Slave Mother
The Siren Wife
The Princesses Wed to the First Passers-By
Liombruno
Cannelora
Filo d’Oro and Filomena
The Thirteen Bandits
The Three Orphans
Sleeping Beauty and Her Children
The Handmade King
The Turkey Hen
The Three Chicory Gatherers
Beauty-with-the-Seven-Dresses
Serpent King
The Widow and the Brigand
The Crab with the Golden Eggs
Nick Fish
Gràttula-Beddàttula
Misfortune
Pippina the Serpent
Catherine the Wise
The Ismailian Merchant
The Thieving Dove
Dealer in Peas and Beans
The Sultan with the Itch
The Wife Who Lived on Wind
Wormwood
The King of Spain and the English Milord
The Bejeweled Boot
The Left-Hand Squire
Rosemary
Lame Devil
Three Tales by Three Sons of Three Merchants
The Dove Girl
Jesus and St. Peter in Sicily
The Barber’s Timepiece
The Count’s Sister
Master Francesco Sit-Down-and-Eat
The Marriage of a Queen and a Bandit
The Seven Lamb Heads
The Two Sea Merchants
Out in the World
A Boat Loaded with . . .
The King’s Son in the Henhouse
The Mincing Princess
The Great Narbone
Animal Talk and the Nosy Wife
The Calf with the Golden Horns
The Captain and the General
The Peacock Feather
The Garden Witch
The Mouse with the Long Tail
The Two Cousins
The Two Muleteers
Giovannuzza the Fox
The Child that Fed the Crucifix
Steward Truth
The Foppish King
The Princess with the Horns
Giufà
Fra Ignazio
Solomon’s Advice
The Man Who Robbed the Robbers
The Lions’ Grass
The Convent of Nuns and the Monastery of Monks
The Male Fern
St. Anthony’s Gift
March and the Shepherd
John Balento
Jump into My Sack
Notes
Bibliography
Books by Italo Calvino
About the Author
Copyright © 1956 Giulio Einaudi editore, s.p.a., Torino
English translation copyright © 1980 by Harcourt, Inc.
All right
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The woodcut illustrations are reproduced from Proverbi milanesi, Proverbi siciliani, and Proverbi del Veneto by kind permission of Aldo Martello-Giunti Editore, S.p.A., Milan.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Calvino, Italo, 1923–1985
Italian folktales.
Translation of Fiabe italiane.
“A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”
I. Tales, Italian. I. Title.
GR176.C3413 398.2'1'0945 80-11879
ISBN 0-15-145770-0
ISBN 0-15-645489-0 (pbk.)
eISBN 978-0-544-28322-0
v2.0614
Translator’s Acknowledgments
My thanks, first of all, to Willard R. Trask and Ines Delgado de Torres, for certain thoughtful and judicious remarks to me that are actually responsible for my getting launched in the translation of these folktales. Next, I am deeply grateful to Italo Calvino and to Helen Wolff for their encouragement at every turn. I feel especially fortunate to have had so painstaking—and patient—an editor as Sheila Cudahy, from whose expertise in literature, in translation, and in Italian I have profited immeasurably. My father, G. W. Martin, also deserves special thanks for his useful comments on portions of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the Translation Center at Columbia University for an award made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
GEORGE MARTIN
Introduction
A Journey Through Folklore
The writing of this book was originally undertaken because of a publishing need: a collection of Italian folktales to take its rightful place alongside the great anthologies of foreign folklore. The problem was which text to choose. Was there an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm?
It is generally accepted that Italian tales from the oral tradition were recorded in literary works long before those from any other country. In Venice, as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, tales of wizardry and enchantment (some of them in dialect) as well as realistic novellas written in a Boccaccio-like style were collected by Straparola in his Piacevoli Notti. These tales imparted to his book a flavor of magic—part gothic, part oriental—suggestive of Carpaccio. In Naples, in the seventeenth century, Giambattista Basile wrote fairy tales in Neapolitan dialect and in baroque style and gave us the Pentameron or Entertainment for the Little Ones (which in our century was translated into Italian by no less a personage than the philosopher Benedetto Croce). Basile’s work resembles the dream of an odd Mediterranean Shakespeare, obsessed with the horrible, for whom there never were enough ogres or witches, in whose far-fetched and grotesque metaphors the sublime was intermingled with the coarse and the sordid. And in the eighteenth century, again in Venice, to countervail Goldoni’s middle-class comedies, Carlo Gozzi, a surly conservative, deeming that the public deserved no better, brought to the stage folktales in which he mingled fairies and wizards with the Harlequins and Pantaloons of the Commedia dell’Arte.
But it was no longer a novelty: ever since the seventeenth century in France, fairy tales had flourished in Versailles at the court of the Sun King, where Charles Perrault created a genre and set down in writing a refined version of simple popular tales which, up to then, had been transmitted by word of mouth. The genre became fashionable and lost its artlessness: noble ladies and précieuses took to transcribing and inventing fairy stories. Thus dressed up and embellished, in the forty-one volumes of the Cabinet des fées, the folktale waxed and waned in French literature along with a taste for elegant fantasy counterbalanced by formal Cartesian rationalism.
Thanks to the Brothers Grimm it flourished again, somber and earthy, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German Romantic literature, this time as the anonymous creation of the Volksgeist, which had its roots in a timeless medieval period. A patriotic cult for the poetry of the common people spread among the littérateurs of Europe: Tommaseo and other scholars sought out Italian popular poetry but the tales waited in vain for an Italian Romantic to discover them.
Through the diligent efforts of the folklorists of the positivistic generation, people began to write down tales told by old women. These folklorists looked upon India, as did Max Muller, as the source of all stories and myths, if not of mankind itself. The solar religions impressed them as being so complex that they had to invent Cinderella to account for the dawn, and Snow White for the spring. But meantime, after the example first set by the Germans (Widter and Wolf in Venice, Hermann Knust in Leghorn, the Austrian Schneller in Trentino, and Laura Gonzenbach in Sicily), people began collecting “novelline”—Angelo De Gubernatis in Siena, Vittorio Imbriani in Florence, in Campania, and in Lombardy; Domenico Compareretti in Pisa; Giuseppe Pitrè in Sicily. Some made do with a rough summary, but others, more painstaking, succeeded in preserving and transmitting the pristine freshness of the original stories. This passion communicated itself to a host of local researchers, collectors of dialectal oddities and minutiae, who became the contributors to the journals of folkloristic archives.
In this manner huge numbers of popular tales were transmitted by word of mouth in various dialects, especially during the last third of the nineteenth century. The unremitting efforts of these “demo-psychologists,” as Pitrè labeled them, were never properly acknowledged and the patrimony they had brought to light was destined to remain locked up in specialized libraries; the material never circulated among the public. An “Italian Grimm” did not emerge, although as early as 1875 Comparetti had attempted to put together a general anthology from a number of regions, publishing in the series “Poems and Tales of the Italian People,” which he and D’Ancona edited, one volume of Popular Italian Tales, with the promise of two additional volumes which, however, never materialized.
The folktale as a genre, confined to scholarly interests in learned monographs, never had the romantic vogue among Italian writers and poets that it had enjoyed in the rest of Europe, from Tieck to Pushkin; it was taken over, instead, by writers of children’s books, the master of them all being Carlo Collodi, who, some years before writing Pinocchio, had translated from the French a number of seventeenth-century fairy tales. From time to time, some famous writer such as Luigi Capuana, the major novelist of the Sicilian naturalist school, would do as a book for children a collection of tales having its roots both in fantasy and popular sentiment.
But there was no readable master collection of Italian folktales which would be popular in every sense of the word. Could such a book be assembled now? It was decided that I should do it.
For me, as I knew only too well, it was a leap in the dark, a plunge into an unknown sea into which others before me, over the course of 150 years, had flung themselves, not out of any desire for the unusual, but because of a deep-rooted conviction that some essential, mysterious element lying in the ocean depths must be salvaged to ensure the survival of the race; there was, of course, the risk of disappearing into the deep, as did Cola Fish in the Sicilian and Neapolitan legend. For the Brothers Grimm, the salvaging meant bringing to light the fragments of an ancient religion that had been preserved by the common people and had lain dormant until the glorious day of Napoleon’s defeat had finally awakened the German national consciousness. In the eyes of the “Indianists,” the essential element consisted of the allegories of the first Aryans who, in trying to explain the mystery of the sun and the moon, laid the foundations for religious and civil evolution. To the anthropologists it signified the somber and bloody initiation rites of tribal y
I, however, plunged into that submarine world totally unequipped, without even a tankful of intellectual enthusiasm for anything spontaneous and primitive. I was subjected to all the discomforts of immersion in an almost formless element which, like the sluggish and passive oral tradition, could never be brought under conscious control. (“You’re not even a Southerner!” an uncompromising ethnologist friend said to me.) I could not forget, for even an instant, with what mystifying material I was dealing. Fascinated and perplexed, I considered every hypothesis which opposing schools of thought proposed in this area, being careful not to allow mere theorizing to cloud the esthetic pleasure that I might derive from these texts, and at the same time taking care not to be prematurely charmed by such complex, stratified, and elusive material. One might well ask why I undertook the project, were it not for the one bond I had with folktales—which I shall clarify in due course.
Meanwhile, as I started to work, to take stock of the material available, to classify the stories into a catalog which kept expanding, I was gradually possessed by a kind of mania, an insatiable hunger for more and more versions and variants. Collating, categorizing, comparing became a fever. I could feel myself succumbing to a passion akin to that of entomologists, which I thought characteristic of the scholars of the Folklore Fellows Communications of Helsinki, a passion which rapidly degenerated into a mania, as a result of which I would have given all of Proust in exchange for a new variant of the “gold-dung donkey.” I’d quiver with disappointment if I came upon the episode of the bridegroom who loses his memory as he kisses his mother, instead of finding the one with the ugly Saracen woman, and my eye became so discerning—as is the wont with maniacs—that I could distinguish at a glance in the most difficult Apulian or Friulian text a “Prezzemolina” type from a “Bellinda” type.