Italian fables
I’ve started reading “Fiabe Italiane” edited by Italo Calvino a few days ago and I am loving it. He divided and organized fables and tales by their region of provenance and it’s been a pleasure to read the Ligurian (the region i come from) ones to start. Calvino grew up in San Remo, he was a Ligurian too. Anyway these are wonderful fables filled with your usual witches, kings and princesses but also very regional Italian characters and backdrops. Calvino is really the Italian counterpart to the brothers Grimm. Here’s just a few titles to give you a an idea of the feel of these wonderful fables: the crab prince , the soulless body, Giovannin the fearless, the dead man’s palace, the three floors ship. It really makes me want to illustrate each one if them. Wouldn’t that be a great project? I think the book is available in english too, here’s the first American edition from 1959, illustrated by Micheal train! Interesting, this might be worth some looking into.
January 6th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Thank you for the recommendation. I love fables and fairy tales. Too bad it is out of print, but it seems abundant in the used book arena.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Calvino is a master storyteller in his own right–I recommend reading everything originally by him first! But I’m curious about these fables.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Ellen- right … and I’d be very curious to see the illustrations on this old american edition …
Neil- Well certainly, in fact I wrote about other books by Calvino last year …
http://enricocasarosa.com/wordpress.1/2007/08/14/books/
I love the Cosmicomics and pretty much all his other novels and short stories.
Though it took me a while to get to that, in Italy we had to read Calvino in school, so as you can imagine he wasn’t immediately appreciated.
But these fables are really fun and in many ways they share a certain sensibility with Calvino’s novels and short stories.
Also his editing job hasn’t been a superficial one on these fables: in the captivating preface Calvino explains his method and how he had to rewrite some of these tales almost completely, while some others he had to translate from tight regional dialect to a more “intellegible italian slang” …
so a long explanation to just say that you get quite a bit of his hand in this collection of italian fables.
e
January 9th, 2008 at 3:44 am
There is a more recent edition (1980) published by Pantheon as part of their Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, with several small woodcuts: translation by George Martin.
When I read them as a kid I too was struck by the similarities in story structure some of the tales shared with other folktale anthologies, which Calvino dwells upon, (I didn’t read introductions or prefaces in my youth) but what these stories really have got going for them is their imagery. Reading the introduction is a must, and Calvino’s notes in the back soberly describe what he cut out or changed. While one may find this remarkable, strengthening the internal consistency of these fables makes this anthology readable, entertaining, and in equal parts serious and amusing.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:01 am
How have I never heard of this book? I’m such a huge Calvino fan.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Hey Enrico. I was really surprised to see you’re reading this. I’m reading the english version right now! I totally know what you mean about wanting to illustrate each one. I’m thinking about adapting “The Dead Man’s Arm” Into a script, I loved it so much. Any illustrator or animator should read this collection. It’s so perfectly magical.