The Robber with a Witch's Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach Francesca Maria Corrao (bio) The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach. Edited and translated by Jack Zipes . New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Laura Gonzenbach's is a wonderful collection of Sicilian oral tales as she heard them from the voices of traditional storytellers. Gonzenbach, a Swiss national who lived in Sicily at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wanted to explore and promote a "Sicilian" cultural and literary notion. In his two-volume edition, Jack Zipes makes available to English-language readers what is, in his opinion as well as in mine, the most startling literary discovery concerning folk- and fairy tales of recent years. The first volume, Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach, was published in 2003; this review will focus on the second volume only. The book is something more than a simple collection of folklore transcriptions. In fact, as Zipes underlines in his introduction, Gonzenbach gathers her tales mostly from women storytellers. At that time women used to narrate privately, only rarely telling their stories in public. Fluent in the Sicilian dialect, Gonzenbach was interested in listening to women's tales in order to get their point of view. She had a special interest in this approach; even though she was not a feminist, she built a bridge between the old and modern society. Zipes reorganizes the collection according to his own choice, and in so doing he conducts another interesting cultural operation, mostly responding to a literary taste rather than to a demotic criterion. This choice widens the gap between Gonzenbach's work and Giuseppe Pitrè's collections (Fiabe e leggende popolari siciliane, edited by A. Rigoli, Palermo: Il Vespro, 1978; and Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani, edited by A. Rigoli, Palermo: Il Vespro, 1978), with Pitrè being the other and more famous collector of nineteenth-century Sicilian tales. Gonzenbach's and Pitrè's works are to be considered the most important references for the Sicilian treasury of folk- and fairy tales. Their value is evident in the study by Sebastiano Lo Nigro, who used them in applying the Aantti Aarne index to Sicilian folklore. The differences between Pitrè's and Gonzenbach's [End Page 306] work are that the former has a more scientific approach; it is in the Sicilian language; it has not been edited for style; and anecdotes, proverbs, and jokes are interspersed with stories. Gonzenbach is more attentive to style, and in her collection we find a beautiful selection that makes it comparable to that of the Brothers Grimm. In Gonzenbach's collection we find stories that are not available elsewhere, because Pitrè refers mainly to tales gathered in the western part of the island. In Gonzenbach's stories we also recognize motifs from other important literary productions. This is the case with the tale "The Beautiful Maiden with the Seven Veils." Like the famous Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile (sixteenth century), this tale recounts the common motif of the heroine betrayed by a black slave; furthermore, the heroine in both narratives uses the telling of stories to reveal the trick to which she has been subjected. In the two stories the prince has been fooled by a black woman who has taken the place of the princess destined to be his wife. The betrayed woman is able to restore her rights by telling tales that reveal the truth to the prince. This story and closely related motifs are found in works belonging to the Italian "elite" literary culture. From the fifteenth century onward, Italian writers started writing famous stories of folklore in an elevated language and style. Boccaccio and Basile are the most famous, but we can also recall Masuccio Salernitano and Giulo Cesare Croce, the author of Bertoldo and Bertoldino. A similar project was carried out by Laura Gonzenbach and more recently by Italo Calvino in his Italian Folktales. In the present collection we have some tales, such as...