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The Tale of Tales; or, Entertainment for Little Ones.

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The Tale of Tales; or, Entertainment for Little Ones. By Giambattista Basile. Edited and translated by Nancy L. Canepa. Illustrated by Carmelo Lettere. Foreword by Jack Zipes. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. xxx + 463 pp.

Viewed in retrospect, Nancy Canepa's long engagement with Giambattista Basile has evolved by logical stages toward the courageous project at hand: that of translating his best-known and by far most problematic work, Lo cunto de li cunti, overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (1634-36). Containing a frame tale plus forty-nine others, ten per day across a five-day span, it was given a secondary title, Il Pentamerone (1674), echoing that of Boccaccio's Decameron (ten days with ten tales each). But the similarity stops there: translating Boccaccio is indeed trattenemiento de peccerille, "child's play," compared to translating the "bizarrely facetious Baroque ironist" ("l'ironico barocchista ... che si compiaceva nella celia bizzarra," as Basile was characterized by Benedetto Croce [1932], his authoritative Italian translator). The original text was and remains a significant obstacle to Italians themselves, who, given regional dialect cleavage, find seventeenth-century Neapolitan a hard code to crack, hence the multiple Italian translations over the centuries leading up to Croce's standard (1925). In this review we will be referring to the edition of Basile's Neapolitan text produced by Mario Petrini in 1976 (Laterza). There have been numerous other European translations--for example, into English (John Edward Taylor [1848ff], then Sir Richard Burton [1893], while Norman Penzer [1932] merely...