The Tale of Talesis a fairy-tale treasure that prefiguresGame of Thronesand other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature.
Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) was born to a middle-class family just outside of Naples, Italy. A poet, academic, and court administrator, he is most remembered for collecting the first set of European fairy tales, published by his sister two years after his death. Jack Zipes (foreword) is a preeminent fairy tale scholar. He has written or edited dozens of books, including a complete translation of the first two editions of the Grimm fairy tales, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published to great success in 2014. A retired professor of German at the University of Minnesota, he lives in Minnesota. Nancy L. Canepa (translator) is an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. Carmelo Lettere (illustrator) is an Italian artist.
“Exhilarating . . . Invaluable . . . Vivid and fascinating . . .
The body count is so high that it’s lucky our dimwitted heroes and
goodhearted fairies always seem to have convenient potions on hand
to paste everyone’s heads back on. . . . The writing has the manic,
crowd-pleasing energy of a work meant to be read aloud.”
—NPR.org
“Though [Basile] wrote for a literary elite, the dirt of an oral
tradition clings to his telling, rich in legend and slang.”
—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“The first authored collection of literary fairy tales in Western
Europe . . . [In Basile] we have the exuberance, outlandishness,
and hilarity of an Italian Rabelais, or ‘a deformed Neapolitan
Shakespeare,’ as Calvino called him. . . . The text teems with a
good-tempered, baroque liveliness and endless allusions to
Neapolitan customs of every kind. It is a unique reading
experience. . . . [The translator] deliver[s] a highly readable
prose that mixes modern vulgarity with a vaguely proverbial aplomb
(‘every piece of shit has its own smell’), often refashioning old
Neapolitan sayings into something credibly contemporary (‘they were
given pizza for pasty’), and never failing to use footnotes to
offer the curious reader a sense of the rich life beneath the
surface of the story. . . . She gives us an entire world, and gives
it in the liveliest possible way.” —Tim Parks, The New York Review
of Books
“What makes The Tale of Tales memorable is twofold: the
lunatic imagery used in many of these stories, and the occasionally
tart tone taken by its narration. . . . The bizarre details of
several of these stories offer much to recommend.” —Literary Hub
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