Italian Folktales (2 page)

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 youths, rites that have been identical from time immemorial, from paleolithic hunters to today's primitive peoples. The followers of the Finnish school, in setting up a method for tracing migrations among Buddhist countries, Ireland, and the Sahara, applied a system similar to that used for the classification of coleoptera, which, in their cataloging process, reduced findings to algebraic sigla of the Type-Index and Motif-Index. What the Freudians salvaged was a repertory of ambiguous dreams common to all men, plucked from the oblivion of awakenings and set down in canonical form to represent the most basic anxieties. And for students of local traditions everywhere, it was a humble faith in an unknown god, rustic and familiar, who found a mouthpiece in the peasantry.

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.

I was unexpectedly caught in the spiderlike web of my study, not so much by its formal, outward aspect as by its innermost particularities: infinite variety and infinite repetition. At the same time, the side of me that remained lucid, uncorrupted, and merely excited about the progression of the mania, was discovering that this fund of Italian folklore, in its richness, limpidity, variety, and blend of the real and the unreal, is unsurpassed by even the most famous folktales of Germanic, Nordic, and Slavic countries. This is true not only where the story is recorded from the words of an outstanding narrator—more often than not a woman—or when the story is laid in a region noted for brilliant storytelling, but the very essence of the Italian folktale is unparalleled grace, wit, and unity of design. Its composition and genius for synthesizing the essence of a type is unique. Thus, the longer I remained steeped in the material, the fewer became my reservations; I was truly exalted by the expedition, and meanwhile the cataloging passion—maniacal and solitary—was replaced by a desire to describe for others the unsuspected sights I had come upon.

Now my journey through folklore is over, the book is done. As I write this preface I feel aloof, detached. Will it be possible to come down to earth again? For two years I have lived in woodlands and enchanted castles, torn between contemplation and action: on the one hand hoping to catch a glimpse of the face of the beautiful creature of mystery who, each night, lies down beside her knight; on the other, having to choose between the cloak of invisibility or the magical foot, feather, or claw that could metamorphose me into an animal. And during these two years the world about me gradually took on the attributes of fairyland, where everything that happened was a spell or a metamorphosis, where individuals, plucked from the chiaroscuro of a state of mind, were carried away by predestined loves, or were bewitched; where sudden disappearances, monstrous transformations occurred, where right had to be discerned from wrong, where paths bristling with obstacles led to a happiness held captive by dragons. Also in the lives of peoples and nations, which until now had seemed to be at a standstill, anything seemed possible: snake pits opened up and were transformed into rivers of milk; kings who had been thought kindly turned out to be brutal parents; silent, bewitched kingdoms suddenly came back to life. I had the impression that the lost rules which govern the world of folklore were tumbling out of the magic box I had opened.

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.

Taken all together, they offer, in their oft-repeated and constantly varying examinations of human vicissitudes, a general explanation of life preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciences; these folk stories are the catalog of the potential destinies of men and women, especially for that stage in life when destiny is formed, i.e., youth, beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the future; then the departure from home, and, finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one's humanity. This sketch, although summary, encompasses everything: the arbitrary division of humans, albeit in essence equal, into kings and poor people; the persecution of the innocent and their subsequent vindication, which are the terms inherent in every life; love unrecognized when first encountered and then no sooner experienced than lost; the common fate of subjection to spells, or having one's existence predetermined by complex and unknown forces. This complexity pervades one's entire existence and forces one to struggle to free oneself, to determine one's own fate; at the same time we can liberate ourselves only if we liberate other people, for this is a sine qua non of one's own liberation. There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all, there must be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things.

 

Criteria for My Work

 

The method of transcribing folktales “from the mouths of the people” was started by the Brothers Grimm and was gradually developed during the second half of the century into “scientific” canons scrupulously faithful to the dialect of the narrator. The Grimms' approach was not “scientific” in the modern sense of the word, or only halfway so. A study of their manuscripts confirms what is abundantly plain to an experienced eye perusing
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
, namely that the Grimms (Wilhelm in particular) had added their own personal touch to the tales told by little old women, not only translating a major part from German dialects, but integrating the variants, recasting the story whenever the original was too crude, touching up expressions and images, giving stylistic unity to the discordant voices.

The foregoing serves as an introduction and justification (if I may take refuge behind names so famous and remote) for the hybrid nature of my work, which likewise is only halfway “scientific,” or three-quarters so; as for the final quarter, it is the product of my own judgment. The scientific portion is actually the work of others, of those folklorists who, in the span of one century, patiently set down the texts that served as my raw material. What I did with it is comparable to the second part of the Grimms' project: I selected from mountains of narratives (always basically the same ones and amounting altogether to some fifty types) the most unusual, beautiful, and original texts. I translated them from the dialects in which they were recorded or when, unfortunately, the only version extant was an Italian translation lacking the freshness of authenticity, I assumed the thorny task of recasting it and restoring its lost originality. I enriched the text selected from other versions and whenever possible did so without altering its character or unity, and at the same time filled it out and made it more plastic. I touched up as delicately as possible those portions that were either missing or too sketchy. I preserved, linguistically, a language never too colloquial, yet colorful and as derivative as possible of a dialect, without having recourse to “cultivated” expressions—an Italian sufficiently elastic to incorporate from the dialect images and turns of speech that were the most expressive and unusual.

As the notes at the end of the book testify, I worked on material already collected and published in books and specialized journals, or else available in unpublished manuscripts in museums and libraries. I did not personally hear the stories told by little old women, not because they were not available, but because, with all the folklore collections of the nineteenth century I already had abundant material to work on. Nor am I sure that attempts on my part to gather any of it from scratch would have appreciably improved my book.

My work had two objectives: the presentation of every type of folktale, the existence of which is documented in Italian dialects; and the representation of all regions of Italy.

As for the real and genuine fairy tale (
fiaba
), that is, the wonderful, magical story that tells of kings of imprecise realms, all its “types” of any significance are represented by one or more versions that struck me as being the most characteristic, the least stereotyped, and the most steeped in local color (a concept I shall clarify presently). The book is also interspersed with religious and local legends, short stories, animal fables, jokes, and anecdotes—in short, popular narrative components of various kinds which I came across in my search and which held me by their beauty or else served to represent regions for which I lacked other material.