Italo - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Italo Calvino and the Making of Fiabe Italiane

Italian Language and Culture

June 3rd 2014Slide2

Italo Calvino (1923-1985)Slide3

Il

Sentiero

dei

nidi

di ragno (1947)

The Path to the Nest of SpidersSlide4

The Nostri

antenati

(Our Ancestors) trilogy:

Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscont: 1952);

Il

barone

rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1957); Il Cavaliere nonesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1962) Slide5

Cosmocimiche

(

Cosmicomics

: 1965)

Se

una

notte

d’inverno

un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller: 1979)Slide6

Fiabe

Italiane

(Italian Folktales), Einaudi,1956Slide7

200 tales - arranged in the order of NW to NE and then to south ending with Sardinia and CorsicaSlide8

Giuseppe Cocchiara

(1904-1965)Slide9

Giuseppe Petré

(1841-1916)Slide10

2. A national collection paralleled to the establishment of national identity in the postwar period.

1. Expansion of

f

olklore studies and a necessity of national collectionSlide11

What kind of audience?

Collection of tales from all Italian

regions and writing for all ItaliansSlide12

Why was the task entrusted to Calvino?

Calvino’s taste for fairytales and adventure stories

Taste for allegorical form of folktale Slide13

Rapiditá (Quickness)

‘[attracted] to the genre of folktales not as a result of loyalty to an ethnic tradition … nor as a result of nostalgia for things read as a child…’ but rather because of an ‘interest

i

n style and structure, in the economy, rhythm, and hard logic in which they are told.’

Lezioni

americani

(

Six Memos for the Next Millennium 1985)Slide14

Problems faced by CalvinoProblem 1: Uneven regional availability of tales

Importance of Sicily

More stories thanks to

Cocchiara

and

Pitré

2. Less foreign influence: demonstration of Italian spirit

Agatuzza

Messia Slide15

Pitrè’s Description of Storyteller Agatuzza Messia (1804-?)‘Anything but beautiful, she has facile speech, efficacious phrases, an attractive manner of telling, whence you divine her extraordinary memory and the sallies of her natural wit.

Messia

already reckons her seventy years, and is a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. As a child, she was told by her grandmother an infinity of tales which she had learned from her mother, and

she

in turn from her grandfather; she had a good memory and never forgot them. […] She cannot read, but she knows so many things that no one else knows, and repeats them with a propriety of tongue that is a pleasure to hear. This is a characteristic to which I call my readers' attention. If the tale turns upon a vessel which has to make a voyage, she utters, without remarking it, or without seeming to do so, sailors' phrases, and words which only seamen and those who have to do with seamen are acquainted with. If the heroine arrives, poor and desolate, at a baker's and takes a place there,

Messia's

language is so completely that of the trade that you would believe that the baking of bread had been her business, whereas at Palermo this occupation, an ordinary one in the families of the large and small communes of the island, is that of professional bakers alone… The reader will only find the cold and naked words; but Messia's narration consists, more than in words, in the restless movement of the eyes, in the waving of the arms, in the gestures of the whole person, which rises, walks around the room, bends, and is again uplifted, making her voice now soft, now excited, now fearful, now sweet, now hoarse, as it portrays the voices of the various personages, and the action which these are performing.’Slide16

Problem 2: The question of dialect and the difficulty in giving a stylistic and methodological unity to such a collection of varied stories.Expressivity and vitality of local dialects

Efforts to preserve local taste and

colour

while maintaining a stylistic unity.Slide17

Problem 3: Calvino as writer and philologist/translator “Calvino does not forget he is a sophisticated writer and scholar acting on the heterogeneous image of the Italian folktale as it was offered by anthologies written in dialect and already removed from the oral folk context. His collection reflects, quite consciously, neither the perspective of a specialized observer nor that of the subordinate observed world, but that of an amateur diver-writer who is open to risking the unexpected in a submerged, both familiar and mysterious, world.

”

Cristina

BacchilegaSlide18

What Calvino did.

Changes and retelling

Preservation and modernization

Make tales more interesting for modern taste and accessibleSlide19

Translation: 166 The Berber’s Timepiece (Inland near Palermo) Slide20

Calvino’s eight narrative interventions‘Acceleration’ of the tempi in storytelling including the shortening of episodes and descriptions, the elimination of narrative redundanciesSlide21

Acceleration: 159 Bejeweled Boot (Palermo) Slide22

2. ‘Contamination’ of tales:by integrating two or more versions;by borrowing a detail from another version or from another source;

o

r by grafting one folk tale onto another

3. ‘Emphasis’ of a detail, suspense, description and element. Slide23

Emphasis of a detail: 85 Apple Girl (Firenze)Slide24

4. ‘Addition’ of details, phrases, remarks, specifications and narrative links5. ‘Omission’ of a finale 6. ‘Invention’ of details, verses, names, tones or conclusion.

7. ‘Substitution’ of a detail, the final remark, and replacement for another.

8. ‘Variation’ of nonsense rhymes or versesSlide25

ConclusionCalvino as a creative storyteller

By freely changing and altering folklore texts, he revived them for his readers – non-folklore specialist Italians.

Defining time for Italian national identity in the post WWII period? Slide26

116 ‘The False Grandmother’ read by John Turturro

Fiabe

Italiane

from

AbruzzoSlide27

Questions:What are the main, recurring motifs of the stories? Did you notice how universal some of the stories are?

If we assume that consciously or unconsciously Calvino was defining Italian identity what was it? Slide28

23: Animal Speech (Mantua)

A man who understands animal speech will be Pope – a European superstition.

The episode about the horse informing to

Bobo

his father order of murdering him – Calvino’s inventionSlide29

27: ‘The Land Where No One Dies’

Various lengths of men’s beard were added by Calvino

‘

Urashima

Taro’ (Japan) ‘

Lankeshan

Ji’ (Rotten Ax Handle: China), ‘The Dragon Woman of Lake Dong Ting’ (China)Slide30

148: Gráttula-Beddáttula (Palermo) told by Agatuzza

Messia

Sicilian Cinderella Story – No slipper motif

No moralizing like those in Charles Perrault’s ‘La petite

pantoufle

de

verre’ (1697) and Brothers Grimm fairytales.‘Hachikazuki

’ from Japanese

OtogizôshiSlide31

150: ‘Pippina the Serpent’ (Palermo) told by Agatuzza

Messia

‘

Dojoji

Engi

’ (Japan)160: ‘The Dove Girl’ (Palermo) Calvino intervened with the tale heavily changing and adding narrative and descriptions.

‘

Hagoromo

’ (Japan) – a celestial maiden is compelled to be the wife of the man who hides her feather robe.Slide32

165: Jesus and St. Peter in Sicily (Palermo)

St. Peter as a trickster

V of the tales comes from

Agatuzza

Messia

Similarity to Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s ‘

Kumo

no Ito’ (Spider’s Thread) which is based on a story from

Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of the Times Now PastSlide33

182: The Mouse with the Long Tail (Caltanisetta

)

Heterogamy

‘The Frog King’ by Brothers Grimm

Storybook of Mouse

Slide34

Common motifs*Personification of animal, insect, tree, flower*Transformation of humans into monsters / animals vice-versa

*Supernatural world and superhuman power

*Reward and retribution

*Happy ending for the good or smart and death or suffering for the bad or wicked

*Why many kings, queens, princes

and princesses?