Pinocchio

CARLO COLLODI (1826–1890) was the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini. He was born in Florence, where his father served as the cook for a rich aristocratic family; his mother, though qualified as a schoolteacher, worked as a chambermaid for the same family. Lorenzini took the name Collodi from his mother's hometown, where he was sent to attend school. A volunteer in the Tuscan army during the 1848 and 1860 Italian wars of independence, Collodi founded a satirical weekly,
Il Lampione
—which was suppressed for a time by the Grand Duke of Tuscany—and became known as the author of novels, plays, and political sketches. His translation from the French of Charles Perrault's fairy tales came out in 1876, and in 1881 his
Storia di un burratino
(Story of a Puppet) was published in installments in the
Giornale per i bambini
, appearing two years later in book form as
The Adventures of Pinocchio
. Collodi, whose writings include several readers for schoolchildren, died in 1890, unaware of the vast international success that his creation Pinocchio would eventually enjoy.

GEOFFREY BROCK is the prizewinning translator of works by Cesare Pavese, Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, and others. He teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas. His Web site is www.geoffreybrock.com.

UMBERTO ECO is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of numerous novels and collections of essays, including
The Name of the Rose
,
Foucault's Pendulum
, and most recently,
Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism.

REBECCA WEST is a professor of Italian and of cinema and media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of
Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge
and
Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling
, and is co-editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture
.

The Adventures of

PINOCCHIO

CARLO COLLODI

Translated from the Italian by

GEOFFREY BROCK

Introduction by

UMBERTO ECO

Afterword by

REBECCA WEST

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

I
REMEMBER
the discomfort we Italian kids felt on first seeing Walt Disney's
Pinocchio
on the big screen. I should say at once that, watching it again now, I find it to be a delightful film. But at the time, we were struck by the stark difference between the American Pinocchio and the Pinocchio we had come to know both through Collodi's original text and through the book's early illustrators. (The best known and most popular, though not the first, were Attilio Mussino's 1911 illustrations—every Italian of my generation remembers
Pinocchio
through Mussino's images.)

The original Pinocchio was woodier than Disney's version—he was an actual marionette. Also, he didn't have that odd and off-putting Tyrolean hat but rather a pointed or “sugarloaf” hat, and his nose, even when it wasn't growing, was long and sharp. There were other differences, too: the Fairy was not a Blue Fairy but a Fairy with blue hair (or rather “sky-blue,” as Geoffrey Brock rightly has it)—you can see what a difference that could make to a boy's imagination, and even to an adult's.

And though I admit that Disney's Jiminy Cricket is an extraordinary invention, he has nothing to do with Collodi's Talking Cricket, who was an actual insect: no top hat, no tailcoat (or was it a frock coat?), no umbrella. And I haven't even mentioned all the changes to Collodi's plot. All this is just to say that the true
Pinocchio
may be discovered (or rediscovered) through Collodi's story, which first appeared serially between 1881 and 1883 and has since become famous in nearly every language in the world.

It must be said first of all that, though written in the nineteenth century, the original
Pinocchio
remains as readable as if it had been written in the twenty-first, so limpid and simple is its prose—and so musical in its simplicity. This simplicity poses a challenge to translators, as it is sometimes easier to translate difficult texts well than simple ones (though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's easier to translate
Finnegans Wake
into Italian than
Pinocchio
into English). In any case, I believe Brock has remained faithful to Collodi's style, for which I hope Anglophone readers will be grateful.

Pinocchio
is an untrustworthy book: it opens with “Once upon a time” and immediately addresses itself to some children, thus presenting itself as a children's book. But then it makes an unacceptable move: it contradicts its little readers (“No, children, you're wrong”) and, what's more, thwarts the expectations of adults, who expect even more strongly than children that once upon a time in a fairy tale there will have been a king. This children's book, then, starts out with a wink (or a low blow) to adults, which explains why so many sophisticated adult critics have spent so many pages on it, attempting to interpret it from various angles: psychoanalytic, anthropological, mythological, philosophical, and so on. All this to say that, though it's written in very simple language,
Pinocchio
is not a simple book. I'm tempted to say that it's not even a fairy tale, since it lacks the fairy tale's indifference to everyday reality and doesn't limit itself to one simple, basic moral, but rather deals with many. Indeed it has the air—and I don't hesitate to use such a literarily binding term—of a bildungsroman.