Carlo Collodi Research Articles

Pinocchio's road to adulthood from Carlo Collodi to Christos Boulotis

This study aims to present Pinocchio's road to adulthood based on the concept of the Bildungsroman, beginning with the original version by Carlo Collodi and continuing through the subsequent versions created by the Greek author, Christos Boulotis.

LesMu - Lessico della letteratura musicale italiana 1490-1950 (review)

LesMu - Lessico della letteratura musicale italiana 1490-1950. Edited by Fiamma Nicolodi and Paolo Trovato. Information retrieval programme DBT (Textual Database) produced by Eugenio Picchi. User Manual and Bibliography (English translation by Aloma Bardi and Carolyn Demcy), pp. 167 + CD-ROM. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 2007. [Requires Windows 98, ME Millennium Edition, XP (Home Edition and Professional), 500 MB hard disk free space minimum, 128 MB RAM. ISBN 978-88-7667-342-9. Pricing: euro900.00.] If we allow musicology any axiom, it would be that it is a metalanguage, as it uses verbal language to investigate and illustrate a nonverbal language. How has the discipline been conceptualized over time? The Italian linguist Fabio Rossi demonstrated in his article Tra musica e nonmusica: le metafore nel lessico musicale italiano (Between music and non-music: metaphors in the Italian vocabulary) (Musica e storia 10, no. 1 [2002]) that most of the essential vocabulary of musicology and music criticism has metaphorical origins. Metaphors loquaciously blossom in the attempt to describe without words the techniques and effects of a completely different system of signs-that of notes, tones, and tempos. How did this language become specialized? The answer involves centuries and many words, or musical talks. In his article, Rossi made extensive use of working material from the electronic music lexicon Lessico della Letteratura Musicale Italiana 1490-1950 (The Lexicon of Italian Musical Literature, 1490-1950), henceforth referred to as LesMu, for which the linguist Rossi acted as an editorial assistant. LesMu represents a remarkable corpus of sources in literature, stretching from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, from the invention of printing to the development of electronic music, before the mass spread of popular music, and before the enormous proliferation of musicological publications (User Manual, p. 69). LesMu's title is due in large part to the fact that beginning in the sixteenth century, Italian-in addition to its text having been frequently set to music-was a leading language of western art music. This does not mean, however, that LesMu is a resource solely intended for lexicographers, linguists, or musicologists engaged in Italian studies. Content LesMu is comprised of the lexicon on CD-ROM and a bilingual, printed user guide in Italian and English; the latter contains a lengthy bibliography which is also available in electronic format on the CDROM. Published in 2008, LesMu is the final outcome of a synergy of multiple disciplines. Over sixty accredited musicologists, philologists, linguists, computer scientists, and typists have worked on this project since 1989. The database contains approximately 22,500 lexicographical records, a total of over 8,000 entries (mostly locutions), 3,600,000 words, and 2,000 illustrations. The bibliography-which consists of 800 works chosen with knowledge and sensibility-includes treatises, periodicals, librettos, reviews by notable Italian authors such as Bruno Barilli, Fedele D'Amico, the Nobel author Eugenio Montale, and Alberto Savinio, correspondence, memoirs, and narrative (even novels by Carlo Collodi, author of Pinocchio). Entries are not exclusively about music but all are of some interest from a lexical point of view. LesMu was made possible by funds from the Italian Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita e della Ricerca (Ministry of Education, University and Research), and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council), the largest public research institute in Italy. Compared to updatable and augmentable online encyclopedias with cheap subscription costs, or compared to Google books or digital libraries that offer free access to some of the sources referenced in LesMu, the price of this CD-ROM is unreasonably high. I would also like to mention another resource, Saggi Musicali Italiani (SMI ), which shares the same field of interest with LesMu. …

L’indisciplina e il suo contenuto sociale da Collodi alle riletture di Carmelo Bene e Luigi Malerba

This paper shows how in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881) and in its subsequent rewritings by Carmelo Bene and Luigi Malerba, futurity is coded into indiscipline. In Collodi’s version, Pinocchio appears as an insatiable machine guided by the pleasure principle defying the ideals of hard work ethic and obedience of the Post-Risorgimento period. Here Pinocchio reflects the open contradiction between the rhetorical fullness of the national project, with its ethic of sacrifice and deferral of satisfaction, and the economic lack of the masses--what Marcuse called Lebensnot--that, through the affirmation of an immediate exigency for fulfillment, project the vision of a different society. The social character of this imagery shifts in the twentieth century as the industrialization of the country establishes the basis for a modern affluent society. Carlo Bene’s play Pinocchio (1961) and Luigi Malerba’s Pinocchio con gli stivali (1977) bear testimony to a different kind of unruliness in which negation replaces affirmation. In both works, Pinocchio’s indiscipline articulates a radical denial that defies the freezing of the social dimension into the fix coordinates of over-consumption and mechanization of individuals that characterized Italian modernization.

Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: theory and praxis of literary translation

This book represents an investigation into one of the basic issues in the study of translation: how do we reconcile theory and practice? main focus, in the form of close readings and think-aloud protocols in chapters 2 and 3, is on translations of two classic texts: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio. first and last chapters respectively seek to show what translation theory is and what translation practice is. Indeed, chapter 1, 'Theory and Hubris', provides a synthesis of the development of the interdiscipline of Translation Studies, with some consideration also given to the hermeneutical questions that inevitably arise when dealing with the interpretation of language.

De cuando Pinocho aprende valores. Una lectura de la novela de Collodi a la luz de las teorías de Shalom H. Schwartz y Leonardo Boff

Recibido 21 de agosto de 2008 • Aprobado 23 de marzo de 2009 • Corregido 23 de marzo de 2009
 
 Carlo Collodi publicó los capítulos de la novela Pinocho entre 1880 y 1883. Desde entonces, se ha convertido en una obra fundamental de la literatura universal. En este artículo se contempla la posibilidad de que Pinocho ayude al lector a construir valores, con base en las perspectivas del psicólogo social Shalom H. Schwartaz y el teólogo Leonardo Boff.
 
 

L’Adaptation de textes littéraire dans le cadre de la littérature de jeunesse: Le cas pinocchio

Youth literature has an important place in today’s publishing world, especially since it became a part of the school curriculum in France in 1982. This literary domain, once considered a subgenre, is now regarded as a means for helping the younger reader to achieve a higher reading level, both in length and in complexity, as in the case for books listed as literary ‘classics’ that may appear to be of more difficult access. Adaptations put these novels within reach of the young reader. Yet a number of questions pose themselves when it comes to the issue of literary adaptations: in what exactly does an adaptation consist? How is the original transformed? Authorship after the adaptation? Is not the adaptation then a kind of translation? In considering a concrete example like the Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi I will attempt to address these questions, or at least initiate the thought process regarding our subject.

Reality by Enchantment

Reality by Enchantment Ellen Handler Spitz “They also serve who only stand and wait.” —John Milton, “On His Blindness” What makes us real? Or, better perhaps, what makes us feel real? These questions (are they the same?) surfaced incongruously as I watched the performance of a pure fantasy. It was a gossamer dramatic production by the Enchantment Theatre of Philadelphia.1 Replete with allusions to Commedia dell’arte, Bunraku puppetry, ancient Greek masks of tragedy and comedy, Isadora Duncan-type modern dance, and mime, this production was based on a 1922 children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams. The story, with its uncanny admixture of the tender and the bizarre, had dismayed me in the past, and I recalled having avoided it when selecting books to read aloud to my children at bedtime, a memory that each of them has subsequently confirmed. Pondering this in the darkened theater on Rutgers University’s Camden campus, I became slowly conscious of a marvel that was occurring: namely, that exposure to a new work of art founded on a former work was awakening in me an unanticipated fascination with the previous work and enticing me to reconsider what I had hitherto laid aside and shunned. As the performance swirled me away from the here-and-now into resplendent realms adorned with cascading rainbow-colored fabrics and inhabited by masked dancers, larger than life-sized puppets, and miming characters who neither spoke nor sang but were accompanied by a narrative musical tape, a cluster of questions about what it means to be “real” exploded in my head like kernels of popping corn. Pinocchio, carved affectionately as a marionette from a talking pine log given with great relief to a craftsman named [End Page 585] Geppetto by his friend Antonio in an imaginary Tuscan village, longs to be a real boy. After misadventures galore, both in Carlo (Lorenzini) Collodi’s original tale of 1883, Le Avventure de Pinocchio, and in Walt Disney’s animated film version of 1940—far better known to Americans—the long-nosed puppet finally succeeds and attains his goal. Similarly, the Velveteen Rabbit, title character of Margery Williams’s book, wants to be real. Williams, born in London but later a resident of the United States, published her The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real to instant acclaim, and, like Pinocchio, the story has become a classic of children’s literature and a widely translated perennial favorite. In Williams’s story, a stuffed toy rabbit eventually ends up scampering with others of his species in the wild. But the protagonists of these two tales become real for very different reasons, reasons that may shed light on how we think we matter in the world, how we feel we become significant, and what we believe is at stake in the processes of growing up. Both stories feature nonhuman title characters that are treated as stand-ins for children. Both stories were written as and have assumed the status of modern fables. In The Velveteen Rabbit, when a Boy receives a plush Rabbit for Christmas, this Rabbit is placed in the nursery with his other toys, some of which are mechanical and therefore enjoy making believe that—because they can move—they are real. These fancier, more expensive toys mock the soft stationary Rabbit, and in dismay he turns to the wise old Skin Horse, who tells him that how he is made is of no consequence whatsoever. To become real he must be loved. Then, purely by chance, the Boy’s favorite china dog disappears and cannot be found; as a substitute, the Boy takes the Rabbit to bed with him. In time, this bedtime ritual continues, and the Boy grows fond of the Rabbit. He carries it (I have changed pronouns intentionally) with him everywhere. Its plush coat wears thin and discolors, its whiskers rub off, its spots fade away from all the loving to which it is subjected—the dragging, mauling, and cuddling. But the Boy falls ill and succumbs to scarlet fever. Sending him away to recover at the seashore, the family doctor orders the nursery to be disinfected and all germ-infested objects burned. A...

The Continuum encyclopedia of children's literature

One of the special features of The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature is the topical article. These include: Adventure Stories, African American Literature, African Literature, American Library Association, Asian and Asian American Literature, Awards, The Bible in Children's Literature, Book Clubs for Children and Teachers, Book Design, Canadian Literature, Caribbean Literature, Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Critical Theorists, Crossovers, The Disabled in Children's Literature, Disney, Fairy Tales, The Holocaust, How-to Books, Humor, Illustration, Informational Books, Indian (East) Literature, Internet Resources, The Kerlan Collection, Latina/o Literature, Librarians and Publishing, Miniature Books, Mother Goose, Movable Books (Pop-up Books), Native American Literature, Picture Books, Publishers, Reading Rainbow and Children's Literature on Television, Research on Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Series Books, Translation, Young Adult Literature, and more. Entries on individuals include: Verna Aardema, Louisa May Alcott, Aliki, Hans Christian Andersen, Anno Mitsumasa, L. Frank Baum, Judy Blume, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marcia Brown, Joseph Bruchac, Randolph Caldecott, Carlo Collodi, Roald Dahl, Tomie dePaola, Dr. Seuss, Lois Ehlert, Paula Fox, Gail Gibbons, James Cross Giblin, Nikki Giovanni, Leah Goldberg, Virginia Hamilton, Robert A. Heinlein, Ezra Jack Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Madeleine L'Engle, Julius. Lester, C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Ann McGovern, John Newbery, Beatrix Potter, Raffi, Margret and H. A. Rey, Faith Ringgold, J. K. Rowling, Richard Scarry, Jon Scieszka, Maurice Sendak, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Steig, The Stratemeyer Syndicate, Sir John Tenniel, J. R. R. Tolkien, Uchida Yoshiko, Cynthia Voigt, E. B. White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Paul O. Zindel, and many others.

"Bad Boys" in Translation

Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann's Der Struwwelpeter (1845), Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz (1865), and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (1881), three internationally known literary classics about ill-behaved children, have been the most popular children's books in their respective countries of origin for well over one hundred years. There is hardly a language into which the works have not been translated. In many languages more than one translation appeared. In Germany the verses by Hoffmann and Busch exist in various dialect incarnations, and the perhaps best-known English Struwwelpeter was translated by none other than Mark Twain. Pinocchio, available in the former Soviet Union in 24 versions and in more than 220 translations worldwide, remains the most translated Italian book and, after the Bible, the most widely read. Clearly, the impact of these steady sellers has been extraordinary, extending far beyond their geographic boundaries and the confines of the printed page. Sonia Marx's richly illustrated study, essentially a collection of seven previously published essays with slight revisions, examines how the three works burst out of the cultural contexts within which they appeared, and how effectively, and with what modifications, the memorable literary figures inhabiting these narratives have managed to survive in translations from Italian to German or German to Italian.

Psychoanalytic responses to children's literature

With the growing emphasis on theory in literary studies, psychoanalytic criticism has taken its place alongside other forms as an important contribution to literary interpretation. Despite its tendency to make readers uncomfortable, it offers insights into human nature, and hence is appropriate in examining a genre such as children's literature. Sixteen chapters in this work explore the psychological subtexts of a number of important children's books, including Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. While most of the analyses deal primarily with the psychological development of characters, some focus on the lives of authors and illustrators, such as Beatrix Potter and Jessie Willcox Smith. Other chapters analyze the various responses that readers have to children's books. The work draws on the ideas of such psychoanalytic theorists as Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller, D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan.

Enquiring Mind, Rebellious Spirit: Alice and Pinocchio as Nonmodel Children.

Ann Lawson Lucas lectures in the Italian Department of the University of Hull, U.K. Her research field is nineteenth-century children's literature, especially the work of Carlo Collodi and Emilio Salgari, the leading writer of travel and adventure novels for children. She translated and edited The Adventures of Pinocchio for Oxford University Press's World Classics series. She recently served as a Board member of the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

Towards a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio

Towards a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio Jack Zipes (bio) “Animation should be an art, that is how I conceived it . . . but as I see what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade . . . not an art, but a trade . . . bad luck.” (Winsor McKay, addressing young animators in 1927) Just as we know, almost intuitively, that a particular narrative is a fairy tale when we read it, it seems we know immediately that a particular film is a fairy tale when we see it. We recognize its generic qualities without necessarily interpreting it as part of a genre. It is almost as though it were natural that there be fairy-tale films since fairy tales are so much part of our cultural heritage as oral and literary tales. This “natural” process of recognition and consumption, however, makes it all the more important that we historicize the reception of the fairy-tale film to understand what has gone into its making. When did it come about? Why? What are the consequences? Of course, these questions cannot all be answered within a short essay, but by using Walt Disney’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s fairy-tale novel, Pinocchio, I want to suggest possible approaches toward developing a theory of the fairy-tale film as genre. Before I do this, however, I should like to present five brief theses about the development of the fairy tale as film. 1 ) As we know, storytelling is thousands of years old, and there are many types of tales. In the oral tradition, the “magic tale” generally centered on a miraculous transformation or occurrence that enabled the protagonist to triumph over evil forces or overcome obstacles to win a bride/groom, obtain wealth, or gain recognition within a tribe or community. [End Page 1] The oral tales were told and still are told, in many different settings—in all sorts of tribes and communities, in homes, at taverns, in the fields, at sea, in weaving circles, and so forth. No matter what the situation may have been, the teller was present among a group of people and told tales to share experience, to amuse, and to enlighten the listeners. Most importantly, the close personal setting of storytelling created a bond between teller and listeners and often reflected upon customs, norms, and values within the group. Since one had to be artful in the telling of tales, and since most people were not particularly “artful” or articulate in days of old, as Rudolph Schenda has maintained, 1 the taleteller was highly regarded within a community. Telling tales, using words and symbols, endowed the speaker with authority and power. A magic folk tale did not only concern the miraculous turn of events in the story, but also the magic play of words by the teller as performer. And each performance by the same teller was different, even of the same tale. The taleteller would also change in the telling of the story, and could shift his or her identity like the remarkable trickster of the folk-tale tradition. Telling a magic folk tale was and is not unlike performing a magic trick, and depending on the art of the storyteller, listeners could be placed under a spell, as if in awe. To be in awe is to be in a special place linked with the teller and other members of the group, transcending reality for a brief moment, to be transported to extraordinary regions of experience. 2 ) There is evidence of magic folk tales in all the sacred literature of the world. That is, the motifs of magic folk tales were incorporated into all the early texts such as the Bible, The Iliad, and The Odyssey that concern the origins of gods and/or initiation rituals. Another early classical example in the West is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, in which we find the complete magical tale of Cupid and Psyche. However, despite the existence of such magic folktales, one cannot speak about the literary fairy tale as genre until the invention of the printing press, the growth of literacy and vernacular languages, and the establishment of genres as institutions...

Folktales and Traditional Morality

Folktales and Traditional Morality Christa Kamenetsky (bio) Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and, the Culture of Childhood, by Maria Tatar. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Maria Tatar has searched out parallel didactic trends in early children's literature and European folktales. With great ease she crosses centuries and national boundaries in tracing recurring patterns of virtues and vices in educational tracts, folktales, fantasies, classical mythology, and the Bible, as well as in the works of Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Working on the premise that the history of children's literature has suffered from an unusually cruel streak, one that especially affects women and children, she singles out "moral correctives" in selected works of James Janeway, John Bunyan, Jane and Anne Taylor, Mrs. Sherwood, Carlo Collodi, Heinrich Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll and then looks for corresponding trends in contemporaneous folktales. Didactic patterns in folktales have become more prominent in recent centuries, Tatar claims, because the oral tradition has been supplanted by printed texts intended for children. Individual folktale collectors supposedly also rewrote folktales in accordance with prevailing social and educational concepts, as well as their personal likes or dislikes, thereby not only eliminating coarse, bawdy, erotic, and incestuous scenes to protect children, according to Tatar, but also emphasizing acts of cruelty, violence, brutal intimidation, bigotry, and coercion, mainly to utilize the tales as "lessons" (64–65). An increasing concern with productive socialization led collectors to intensify an already existing gender bias. Male protagonists usually reaped rewards for such virtues as humility, compassion, and faithfulness, yet they often escaped punishment for crimes committed in the course of adventurous actions. Female protagonists, in contrast, were not rewarded for the same virtues, though these were often taken for granted as preconditions for marriage, which was usually their only chance to move to a higher class. Self-willed or adventure-some actions by women were condemned. If women failed in obedience, [End Page 200] humility, diligence, or endurance, they were chastised, often having to sacrifice their self-esteem by assuming a servile attitude, like Catskin or Allerleirauh. In contemplating the "seven sins" of female protagonists and their gruesome consequences, Tatar traces this gender bias in such works as a tale of Boccaccio, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, and an eighteenth-century manual on how to subdue unruly wives. In European folktale variants she examines similar patterns of punishment associated with female disobedience, pride, selfishness, greed, gluttony, and unfaithfulness. After establishing some common sociocultural attitudes toward stubborn and self-willed women through the ages, she concludes that women were treated cruelly and coercively because men considered them to be "children" and inferiors (105–7, 135). In a chapter entitled "Beauties and Beasts," Tatar pays special attention to the themes of female obedience and self-denial. She uses the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius's version and a number of folktale variants on this theme as a testing ground, observing that de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," the Grimms' "Singing, Spring Lark," and the Norwegian "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" show a shift in emphasis toward didacticism. Whereas the myth dwells on the theme of female jealousy, the folktale variants emphasize the sin of female curiosity and state more explicitly a demand for modesty, obedience, endurance, compassion, and complete subordination. Here Tatar employs feminist and sociocultural interpretations of the theme by Carol Gilligan, Torberg Lundell, Jack Zipes, and others (260). According to Tatar, adulterous women are punished with special cruelty in folktales. To illustrate her point, she refers to two passages describing the death penalty for adulterous females, one from "The Three Snake Leaves" in the collection of the Brothers Grimm and one from "The Lion's Grass" in Italo Calvino's anthology of Italian folktales. In the first tale, the unfaithful woman is "sent out to sea with her accomplice in a boat filled with holes," and in the second the woman is condemned in the following terms: "Hang her first, then burn her, and then throw her ashes to the wind" (118). Even the most skeptical reader might lean toward accepting Tatar's thesis that folktales are biased against women...

Carlo Collodi As Translator: From Fairy Tale to Folk Tale

Carlo Collodi As Translator:From Fairy Tale to Folk Tale Ester Zago (bio) There is a general consensus among critics of Collodi in acknowledging the indebtedness, on the part of the author of Pinocchio, toward the French fairy tales. Few have explored the topic much further,1 and yet it seems to me that this important influence on Collodi's work deserves closer scrutiny. Collodi's translation method appears to have been by his own training as a journalist and by the interest in folklore studies that accompanied the rise in patriotic sentiment in Italy during the nineteenth century. My focus will be on Collodi's treatment of Peau d'Ane (Donkey-Skin), and shall also look at his handling of Perrault's prose tales. Finally I shall discuss Collodi's techniques in translating the six stories by Mme d'Aulnoy and Mme Leprince de Beaumont. First, however, it may be useful to trace a brief account of the circumstances, both personal and cultural, which led to Collodi's translation of the French fairy tales. I. In 1875 Sandro Paggi suggested to Carlo Lorenzini, better known under the pen name of Collodi,2 that he translate a collection of French fairy tales which included Perrault's Contes, four tales by Mme d' Aulnoy and two by Mme Leprince de Beaumont.3 According to several critics,4 Collodi was not familiar with Perrault's fairy tales or the Cabinet des Fées before receiving this commission. Sandro Paggi, together with his brother Felice, owned a bookstore in Via del Proconsolo in Florence, as well as a publishing house. The Paggi brothers had known Collodi for a long time when they entrusted him with the translation of the French fairy tales. They became the loyal publishers of all of Collodi's work. Collodi began his literary career in 1848. After participating as a volunteer in the first war for the independence of Italy, he came back to his native Florence, and for ten years he worked as a journalist for several Florentine magazines and newspapers. This experience was probably instrumental in developing the clarity of his style, the sharpness of his wit, and his shrewd understanding of what attracts and retains the reader's attention. But Collodi was also aware of the limitations inherent in the journalist's trade. He wrote that "one is born a poet, but there is no need to be born a journalist. In fact, once you become a journalist, you die a [End Page 61] journalist. . . . Journalism is like Nexus' shirt, once you have put it on, you cannot take it off."5 Like many Italian writers of his time, Collodi had an excellent knowledge of the French language; moreover, he demonstrated an early interest in problems of translation. In 1854 he stated in an article entitled "I traduttori e le traduzioni" that a good translator must have . . . a thorough and perfect knowledge of the two languages he is dealing with, and not only of words and phrases, but more importantly, of the nature, the physiognomy, the temperament of each language. . . . To translate does not mean to transpose a word from one language into another. . . . This is the task of the very modest compilers of pocket dictionaries. . . . (Bertacchini 177, my translation) In the same article he went on to say that it is not sufficient to know the language: the translation of a literary text poses different problems from the translation of a history text. It would seem that the translation of a fairy tale poses its own unique set of problems, as Collodi was to discover some 20 years later. When the Paggi brothers decided to publish the Italian version of the French fairy tales, they were demonstrating an astute recognition of the market's demand for a literary genre which could not only please but also instruct a public composed of children and adults. Concern for the imperatives of public education had considerably increased in Italy during the Risorgimento. Under the Cavour ministry, a law was passed which required two years of compulsory education for all citizens of Piedmont and Lombardy. The law was extended to Tuscany when the region was annexed to the dominions...

Metaphoric Mirrors on the Wall

Abstract Bary Moser, ALICE's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), University of Calif. Press, 1982, 148 pgs., $24.95. Richard Floethe, Pinnochio (Carlo Collodi), Philomel Books: New York, 1982, 239 pgs., $3.95, (paper). Gerald McDermott, Carlo Collodi's Pinnochio, (translated and adapted by Marianne Mayer), Four Winds Press: N. Y., 1981, 122 pgs., $14.95. Michael Hague, The Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum), Holt, Rinehart & Winston: New York, 1982, 219 pgs., $18.95. Allen Atkinson, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories by Beatrix Potter, Knopf: New York, 1982, 141 pgs., $16.95. Mercer Mayer, Favorite Tales from Grimm (retelling by Nancy Gardner), Four Winds: New York, 1982, 224 pgs., $15.95.

Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio

Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio Thomas J. Morrissey (bio) and Richard Wunderlich (bio) What epic hero worth the title does not undergo some form of death and resurrection? This primal motif manifests itself in a. number of ways in mythology and literature. Gods can die and be reborn, or rise from the dead. Such mythological events probably imitate the annual cycle of vegetative birth, death, and renascence, and they often serve as paradigms for the frequent symbolic deaths and rebirths encountered in literature. Two such symbolic renderings are most prominent: re-emergence from a journey to hell and rebirth through metamorphosis. Journeys to the underworld are a common feature of Western literary epics: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante all benefit from the knowledge and power they put on after such descents. Rebirth through metamorphosis, on the other hand, is a motif generally consigned to fantasy or speculative literature. Philomela, the Frog-Prince (in his many incarnations), the Beast of Beauty and the Beast, and Frost of Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry" are a few individuals who undergo such changes. These two figurative manifestations of the death-rebirth trope are rarely combined; however, Carlo Collodi's great fantasy-epic, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a work in which a hero experiences symbolic death and rebirth through both infernal descent and metamorphosis. Pinocchio is truly a fantasy hero of epic proportions. At first glance, American readers are likely to scoff at the greatness and symbolic importance of Pinocchio, for Collodi's masterpiece has suffered considerable deformation at the hands of adaptors and publishers.1 To most of us Pinocchio is a light-hearted, light-headed tale of youthful mischief. Walt Disney's film capitalized on what was already, in 1939, a well-established tradition of simplification and misinterpretation. A few American critics, such as Glauco Cambon and James Heisig, have resisted the trend, and so have many American families; faithful translations of Pinocchio are readily available, even after ninety years of desecration. Our bibliographic research shows that, counting abridgements and [End Page 64] adaptations, an average of two or more new Pinocchios have appeared annually since the first U.S. printing in 1892. In Italy, moreover, Pinocchio has long been held a national treasure. Its author (born Carlo Lorenzini in 1826) was an often satirical journalist and a veteran of the military and political campaign for Italian reunification. He was both a man of letters and a man of the world whose social criticism did not always escape the censors. The period from 1981 to 1983 marks the Pinocchio centennial, and the Fondazione nazionale Carlo Collodi, a serious literary society, has tried to make sure that the world remembers the real Pinocchio. Pinocchio is a fast-moving novel with engaging characters and crisp dialog. Much of the humor is ironic, usually at the expense of the heedless puppet. Furthermore, as a hero of what is, in the classic sense, a comedy, Pinocchio is protected from ultimate catastrophe, although he suffers quite a few moderate calamities. Collodi never lets the reader forget that disaster is always a possibility; in fact, that is just what Pinocchio's mentors—Gepetto, the Talking Cricket, and the Fairy—repeatedly tell him. Although they are part of a comedy, Pinocchio's adventures are not always funny. Indeed, they are sometimes sinister. The book's fictive world does not exclude injury, pain, or even death—they are stylized but not absent. How could Collodi write a true picaresque novel without accommodating the harsher facts of mortal existence? Accommodate them he does, by using the archetypal birth-death-rebirth motif as a means of structuring his hero's growth to responsible boyhood. Of course, the success of the puppet's growth is rendered in terms of his metamorphic rebirth as a flesh-and-blood human. On the road to rebirth, Pinocchio suffers setbacks that are themselves symbolic deaths and resurrections. Furthermore, along the way he joins the ranks of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hamlet by obtaining information and advice from the world beyond. Beneath the book's comic-fantasy texture—but not far beneath—lies a symbolic journey to the underworld, from which Pinocchio emerges whole. Pinocchio is one...

<i>Pinocchio in Emojitaliano</i>. Przekład eksperymentalny w kulturze zwrotu wizualnego i performatywnego

Pinocchio in Emojitaliano. The Experimental Translation in the Culture of Visual and Performative TurnThe article discusses the experimental translation of the classic of children’s literature — Pinocchio (La storia di un burattino) by Carlo Collodi — from Italian into an artificially created language of the emoji signs. The translation was dicussed in the context of other translations of literature into emoji sings and experimental translation in general. This originally new-media translation illustrates the cultural transformations of modernity and can be understood as an expression of the iconic (visual) and performative turn in the humanities.KEY WORDS: Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, experimental translation, intersemiotic translation, iconic turn, performative turn