Calvino's Italian Folktales

 

Calvino, Italian Folktales, 1971 edition

Big collections of fairy tales can be dull – and I speak as a great defender of fairy tales. But I always turn to Italo Calvino with pleasure and anticipation. Why is this?

Back in 1956, Calvino was invited by publisher Giulio Einaudi to compile a representative volume of Italian folktales (Fiabe Italiane). The resulting book has been for me a source of entertainment and pleasure ever since I first encountered it in the 1970s. Calvino was an ideal choice to compile a representative collection of Italian folktales, to be placed alongside Grimm: his trilogy of fairy-tale inspired fiction, collected as I Nostri Antenati (our ancestors), was written between 1952 and 1959, that is, contemporaneous with the two years he spent compiling the folktale collection.  

Calvino makes it quite clear he has adjusted and rewritten the tales as he sees fit (“I enriched the text selected from other version 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” (Introduction, p xix). Does his rewriting make the stories more appealing, or is it perhaps that Italian folktales are more enjoyable to read than, say, Russian tales?

Calvino reveals some of his motivation behind the compilation in his introduction. First, a clarification. The book is entitled in English “Italian Folktales” contains not simply fairy tales, but a mixed bag including witches, fairies, kings and princesses, but also tales of cunning, popular religious tales and curiosities. Indeed, some of the stories contain no magical events at all (for example, no 56, “Lose your temper, and you lose your bet). The Italian title Fiabe Italiane could mean “Italian fairy tales” or “Italian folk tales” and Calvino states quite in his introduction (p. xx) that fairy tales comprise only a part of his collection. He also included “popular narrative components of various kinds … which held me by their beauty”. Hence he includes, as the Grimms do not, examples of the still continuing folk religion, the inspiration behind The Golden Legend, and some of those lovely tales about St Peter at the gates of Heaven.

Calvino’s compilation was not limited simply to selecting the stories. His goals were to select representative stories from all the regions of Italy. However, Calvino explains in his introduction that the geographical designation he provides for each story doesn’t mean the story originated there, merely that Calvino selected his version of choice from that region. Calvino makes it quite clear that some regions of Italy are richer in folktales than others, notably Tuscany and Sicily. His attempts to try to create a collection with tales from each region strikes me as a curious survival of the 19th-century Italian determination to forge a nation out of very disparate regional elements. In any case, Calvino redefines his region as the Italian linguistic area (so including Nice) rather than the present-day boundaries of Italy (he excludes South Tyrol as largely German-speaking). Hence I am worried by the single word at the end of each story: “Bologna”, or “Montale Pistoiese”, which suggests to the casual reader that the tale is from just one location. He makes it clear in the notes that he blends and merges versions from all over Italy.  

He rewrites them, or sections of them! He is unapologetic about this: he follows the proverb “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it”. Critics such as Jack Zipes have great pleasure in identifying how the Grimms changed their sources to fit the profile of a growing middle-class bourgeois class, but it seems less well-known today that Calvino was doing exactly the same thing to the folktales he selected. Despite our contemporary ideas of establishing the best text, fairy tales remain a genre where changing the story is perfectly OK.

Finally, Calvino tries to recreate a mythical pure, unadorned, form of the tales, as if to preserve their essential character. The notes to the tales are fascinating evidence of this practice – for example, no 80, “Fearless Simpleton”: “Pitre’s text closes with the hero’s head cut off … but since that brings an element of fantasy into an otherwise realistic narrative, I thought it best to exclude it”. In other words, Calvino has tried to create folk tales closer to his idea of what a tale should be than any of the actual examples in front of him. So much for textual fidelity. But if the resulting text is so enjoyable, should we be worried?

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