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4.0étoiles sur 5
Folk tales (and then some), Mars 3 2007
Italo Calvino is mostly known for being a brilliant magical realist. But he also collected two hundred Italian folk and fairy tales in "Italian Folktales," apparently because a publisher wanted a sort of Italian Grimm. The resulting collection is actually better than your average fairy tales -- full of the cute, bizarre and funny.
Basically, we have the usual collections of folk-tale oddities -- princesses and princes, talking animals, murderers, dragons, colourful peasants, ghosts, magical rings, bookworms, ogres, merchants, lots of money, wise professors, hunchbacks, people magically turned into dogs, and even an Italian version of Beauty and the Beast.
But there are also plenty of folktales in here that are outright weird: a kid with a goose that causes hands to stick to the holder, a young groom whose night in paradise has tragic consequences, a maid imprisoned in the sea, a girl transformed into a statue, the Queen of Luminous Souls, and a talking buffalo head. Even Jesus Christ and Saint Peter get to star in a longish story.
Fairy tales are always meant for kids, but folktales can be aimed at adults. And there's pretty much half-and-half in "Italian Folktales" -- Calvino includes some stories which are cute and have morals ("Don't be greedy, or a wolf will eat you"), but there are plenty that are weird, bizarre and grotesque (three dead men bowling with skulls).
Calvino can't include too much description, since most of these stories are straight-out fables. But he retells these stories with enchanting flair, funny dialogue and his knack for mixing the magical with the real. And the translator George Martin should get props for preserving the sparkling, spicy flavour of the original stories ("Cro! Cro! We come from brine/On gold and pearls we dine/Belsole's fair, as fair as day...")
These stories aren't the Brothers Grimm -- they're better. Calvino collected stories that were magical, horrifying and extremely funny, and "Italian Folktales" is a delightful, extremely fat book of folk stories.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
Italian Folktales, Mai 10 2004
Par Un client
I love this book.Some of the stories are exactly the same yet told in very different ways. Everything is here, humour, sadness, religion, fear, the animal world, the spiritual world, brutality, witchcraft, the will to survive and the list goes on. I bought my two weeks ago, but it looks like I've had it for two years.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
Italo Calvino's Labor of Love, Fév 10 2004
I haven't been a particular fan of folk tales in the years that have passed since more or less my tenth birthday, but it's hard not to adore this charming, magical, and fantastic collection of traditional Italian stories as recounted by master storyteller and author Italo Calvino.In the book's introduction, Mr. Calvino seems to regard his production of this almost 800-page volume as a sort of obligation. But in reading its pages, it's clear that it was really a labor of love, a massive project undertaken by an already established writer who had no need to produce something so unusual and challenging in order to help his own reputation. But we are clearly better off because of he did produce it. Inside are exactly 200 precious stories, parables, fables, and good old fashioned yarns -- all of them plucked from the Italian folk tradition, dusted off, and improved by Mr. Calvino. I admit that "improved" is not a word I'd usually want to read in regard to a modern production of classic literature, but from the bits and pieces I know from experience, improvement was needed: many of the tales were originally published based on cobbled together version of traditional oral stories with partially-developed sub-plots and characters whose names or motives change partway through the story. I have seen the original Italian versions of at least three of the stories between this book's covers -- Fra Ignazio, Rosemary, and the Peacock Feather -- and was thoroughly confounded by the original, only to be charmed later by Mr. Calvino's cleaner and more thoughtful retellings. It is important to remember that the Italian literary tradition dates further back in a direct line than any other in Western Europe: many of these tales were originally written in Italian long before the language evolved beyond being anything more than a vulgar street slang and when only Latin and Greek was spoken in the drawing rooms of literate Italians. And yet it wasn't until 1956 and Mr. Calvino's self-described obligation that more than a couple dozen or so of these wonderful stories was gathered in a single volume. Hats off also to George Martin, Mr. Calvino's translator, surprisingly enough, for only this book. Mr. Martin does a terrific job of preserving Mr. Calvino's cadence and subtle linguistic flare, and he does it while staying away from the temptation of translating too literally, a flaw that has a hold on many less talented translators.
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