Background
Giambattista Basile was born in Naples in middle-class family. According to Benedetto Croce he was born in 1575, while other sources have February 1566.
( The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales wi...)
The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales within a fiftieth frame story, contains the earliest versions of celebrated stories like Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. The tales are bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical, acute in psychological characterization and encyclopedic in description. They are also evocative of marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as of the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Yet because the original is written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian-and was last translated fully into English in 1932-this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars. Giambattista Basile's "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile's original. Working directly from the original Neopolitan version, translator Nancy L. Canepa takes pains to maintain the idiosyncratic tone of The Tale of Tales as well as the work's unpredictable structure. This edition keeps the repetition, experimental syntax, and inventive metaphors of the original version intact, bringing Basile's words directly to twenty-first-century readers for the first time. This volume is also fully annotated, so as to elucidate any unfamiliar cultural references alongside the text. Giambattista Basile's "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" is also lushly illustrated and includes a foreword, an introduction, an illustrator's note, and a complete bibliography. The publication of The Tale of Tales marked not only a culmination of the interest in the popular culture and folk traditions of the Renaissance period but also the beginning of the era of the artful and sophisticated "authored" fairy tale that inspired and influenced later writers like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Giambattista Basile's "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" offers an excellent point of departure for reflection about what constitutes Italian culture, as well as for discussion of the relevance that forms of early modern culture like fairy tales still hold for us today. This volume is vital reading for fairy-tale scholars and anyone interested in cultural history.
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courtier and fairy tale collector poet
Giambattista Basile was born in Naples in middle-class family. According to Benedetto Croce he was born in 1575, while other sources have February 1566.
is life was spent largely in minor military and governmental positions. The most interesting example of his literary production, which consists mainly of poetry in the artificial style of his age, is Lo Cunto de li cunti ("The Tale of Tales"), written in the Neapolitan dialect and published posthumously in parts between 1634 and 1636. This collection, which is more commonly known by its alternative title, Il Pentamerone, has frequently been called the richest collection of European fairy stories in existence. Il Pentamerone consists of 49 tales, which are told within the framework of a story. It has long been of great interest to folklorists and linguists, but it has had comparatively little literary influence. Basile died at Gingliano, February 23, 1632.
His Lo cunto de li cunti was one of the earliest such collections based on folktales and served as an important source both for the later fairy-tale writers Charles Perrault in France in the 17th century and the brothers Grimm in Germany in the 19th century, and for the Italian commedia dell’arte dramatist Carlo Gozzi in the 18th century.
( The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales wi...)
