Their new translation of The Adventures of Pinocchio, published in 2021, includes copious notes and an introduction exploring the story’s complexities. “The beauty of the language, the literary inventiveness of Collodi-he does things I’ve never seen any author do,” says Hooper. She made the case to John Hooper, a British journalist and the author of a 2015 book called The Italians, that it was time for a new English translation. “I couldn’t believe how rich the text is,” says Kraczyna, who was born in Italy to American expatriate artist parents. The business went in a dramatic new direction when he started crafting Pinocchio toys in 1981.Īnna Kraczyna, a university lecturer in Florence, was astonished by the narrative about 15 years ago when she was reading the book to her young son. Shop owner Francesco Bartolucci was born into a family of woodcarvers. “These students will say, ‘I don’t really read a lot, and I don’t typically enjoy books, but I really enjoyed Pinocchio.’”Ī revelatory new annotated edition of the most translated Italian book in the world Buy The first reaction is “such surprise at how different it is from the Disney version-and how much they prefer the original version.” The second reaction is from students who find the book more complex than they’d expected. “Every time I teach Pinocchio to American undergraduates, I get at least two reactions,” says Maria Truglio, a professor of Italian and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State, and the author of Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity. His antics lead to poor Geppetto’s arrest. The moment Geppetto carves him out of the miraculous block of wood, Pinocchio runs away and refuses to go home. He’s a scamp, a brat, a kid who, as we might say today, makes a lot of poor choices. Yes, Pinocchio tells lies, but that’s just part of his general misbehavior he’s selfish and unreliable. But the original Italian story is not primarily about lying. For most Americans, Pinocchio is synonymous with the 1940 animated Disney movie about a wooden puppet whose pointy nose grows every time he tells a lie. Disney and Netflix are both in the process of producing new versions. The Adventures of Pinocchio has been adapted for film 18 times, including two live-action movies starring Roberto Benigni. That piece of wood, of course, became Pinocchio, and the story became the first internationally known work of Italian children’s literature. The native of Florence is the daughter of American artists who relocated Once upon a time there was.a piece of wood.”Īnna Kraczyna is co-translator of the new English edition of Pinocchio. “A king!” my little readers will no doubt say in a flash. Its opening paragraph was meant to undermine the traditional idea of a fairy tale-and also to send a political message: The Story of a Puppet first appeared in serial form, starting in 1881, in Giornale per i bambini, the Children’s Newspaper. He wrote political essays and satire for adults, and then, in his 50s, turned his attention to children. In the first half of the 19th century, a young boy named Carlo Lorenzini, originally from Florence, spent stretches of his childhood living here with relatives, and later, when he became a writer, he took Carlo Collodi as his pen name. It is probably fair to say they were tired. It’s hard to know what these laborers were thinking as they trudged back up the hill after a long day of working at the villa. It is where the working-class people lived, the ones who tended the nobility’s villa and gardens. The town is older than the villa and was probably originally built on the hilltop for purposes of strategic defense. Ascending its precipitously steep cobblestone main street, you come to a small piazza with communal sinks for laundry. Walk through the tunnel under the villa and follow the path up the hill, and the stone houses of Collodi speak to a very different reality. The garden, built as a kind of fantasy pleasure park for the Garzoni family and their noble guests, offers terraces, flower beds, grand staircases, splashing fountains and antique marble statues surrounding the Baroque villa. The town of Collodi, Italy, about 45 miles west of Florence, is set on a slope behind a fabulous 17th-century villa.
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