Author Basile Giambattista

ded and adapted the tales, believed to have been orally transmitted around Crete and Venice, several of which were also later adapted by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the latter making extensive, acknowledged use of Basile's collection. Examples of this are versions of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. While other collections of stories have included tales that would be termed fairy tales, his work is the first collection in which all the stories fit in that category.[1] Although he did not transcribe them from the oral tradition as a modern collector would, he wrote them in the dialect, and in many respects was the first writer to preserve oral intonations.[2] Lo cunto is known as the Pentamerone, a title first used in the 1674 edition, because it is constructed roughly upon the model of the Decamerone of Boccaccio. The style of the stories is heavily Baroque, with many metaphorical usages,[3] such as referring to the dawn as This has been interpreted as a satire on Baroque style, but as Basile praised the style, and used it in his other works, it appears to have no ironic intention. [4] Although the work fell into some obscurity, as a work in dialect, the Brothers Grimm, in their third edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales praised it highly as the first national collection of fairy tales, fitting their romantic nationalist views on fairy tales, and as capturing Neapolitan voice. This drew a great deal of attention to the work. [5] This collection (Basile's Pentamerone) was for a long time the best and richest that had been found by any nation. Not only were the traditions at that time more complete in themselves, but the author had a special talent for collecting them, and besides that an intimate knowledge of the dialect. The stories are told with hardly any break, and the tone, at least in the Neapolitan tales, is perfectly caught . . . . We may therefore look on this collection of fifty tales as the basis of many others; for although it was not so in actual fact, and was indeed not known beyond the country in which it appeared, and was never translated into French, it still has all the importance of a basis, owing to the coherence of its traditions. Two-thirds of them are, so far as their principal incidents are concerned, to be found in Germany, and are current there at this very day. Basile has not allowed himself to make any alteration, scarecely even any addition of importance, and that gives his work a special value - Wilhelm Grimm The Pentamerone is structured around a fantastic frame story in which fifty stories are related over the course of five days rather than the ten of the Tuscan compendium. The frame-story is that of a cursed, melancholy princess named Zoza ("mud" or "slime" in Neapolitan, but also used as a term of endearment). She can not laugh, whatever her father does to amuse her, so he sets up a fountain of oil by the door, thinking people slipping in the oil would make her laugh. An old woman tried to gather oil, a page boy broke her jug, and the old woman grew so angry that she danced about, and Zoza laughed at her. The old woman cursed her to marry only the Prince of Round-Field, whom she could only wake by filling a pitcher with tears in three days. With some aid from fairies, who also give her gifts, Zoza found the prince and the pitcher, and nearly filled the pitcher when she fell asleep. A Moorish slave steals it, finishes filling it, and claims the prince. This frame story in itself is a fairy tale, combining motifs that will appear in other stories: the princess who can not laugh in The Magic Swan, Golden Goose, and The Princess Who Never Smiled; the curse to marry only one person, and that one hard to find, in Snow-White-Fire-Red and Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa; the heroine falling asleep because of saving the hero and so losing him to trickery in The Sleeping Prince and Nourie Hadig. The now-pregnant slave-queen demands (at the impetus of Zoza's fairy gifts) that her husband tell her stories, or else she would crush the unborn child. The husband hires ten female storytellers to keep her amused; disguised among them is Zoza. Each tells five stories — most of which are more suitable to courtly than juvenile audiences. The Moorish woman's treachery is revealed in the final story (related, suitably, by Zoza), and she is buried, pregnant, up to her neck in the ground and left to die. Zoza and the Prince live happily ever after. Many of these fairy tales are the oldest known variants in existence.[6] The fairy tales are: The First Day The Second Day The Third Day The Fourth Day The Fifth Day The text was translated into German by Felix Liebrecht (1846), into English by John Edward Taylor (1848) and again by Sir Richard Francis Burton (1893) and into Italian by Benedetto Croce in 1925. A further English translation was made from Croce's version by Norman N Penzer in 1934. A new, modern translation by Nancy L. Canepa was published in 2007 from Wayne State University Press.