Opening

Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, is an autonomous region of Italy. The island has a very rich history. Over 5 million people live there today. Its region capital is Palermo.

Outlooks

Below are gleanings and a few quotations from the introduction to Italian Popular Tales by Professor Thomas F. Crane.

Stories that helped many and got much prestige

Sicilian popular tales have been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. The stories were regarded with contempt by the learned until famous scholars collected the orally transmitted literature of the people.

The impulse given by the brothers Grimms in Germany extended over all Europe. Thus, in the 1800s scholars set to work to write down popular stories from the lips of the people. Such orally transmitted stories may not have reached the collectors of stories in their original forms, but some are nonetheless found - in books meant for people who could read. Thus oral and written literature intertwine, as Hans-Jörg Uther show. (2004).

Forerunners in Italy

The earliest literary collection of stories with a popular origin was made in the 1500s by an Italian, Giovan Francesco Straparola, of Caravaggio. In 1550 he published at Venice a collection of stories in the style of the Decameron. Through that work Straparola introduced the Fairy Tale into modern European literature.

Nearly a century later, the first edition of the celebrated Pentamerone appeared at Naples in 1637. Its author, Giambattista Basile, spent his youth in Crete and became known to the Venetians. He went to Mantua, enjoyed the duke's favour there, roamed much over Italy, and finally returned to Naples, near where he died in 1632. His Pentamerone, as its title implies, is a collection of fifty stories. They are in the Neapolitan dialect.

Basile's work was translated into Italian and became widely popular. His Pentamerone tales must have been in a great measure drawn directly from popular tradition. The book influenced French fairy literature too through French authoresses. They drew considerably on Italian prototypes.

Straparola and Basile's works became popular in Italy and abroad, but nearly two centuries elapsed before another collection of Italian tales appeared. The impetus came from the work and key ideas of the German brothers Grimm.

A huge amount of folk literature was in time published and translated

"A people must first have a consciousness of its own nationality before it can take sufficient interest in its popular literature to inspire even its scholars to collect its traditions for the sake of science, to say nothing of collections for entertainment," maintains Professor Crane. From 1860, tales in Italy were collected and published, first without any other aim than to entertain, and later assisted by studies of relationship, such as between myth and popular tales.

Numerous collections from the various provinces of Italy soon followed. Germans translated many of them, for example sixty-nine tales from Italian Tyrol before Franco. Then, in 1870, came two fine volumes of Sicilian tales, collected and translated into German by Laura Gonzenbach.

Dr Giuseppe Pitrè's work and characteristics

In 1875 Dr. Guiseppe Pitrè, of Palermo, well known for his collection of popular Sicilian songs, gave to the world his outstanding work Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti, forming vols. IV.-VII. of the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni populari Siciliane per cura di Giuseppe Pitrè.

Pitrè's work contains more than all the previous Italian publications together, embracing over three hundred tales, etc., besides those previously published by him in periodicals and elsewhere.

Pitrè's collection excelled. It stands out as a monument of patient, thorough research and profound study. Its arrangement is almost faultless and the explanatory notes full, writes Crane, and "He has, it seems to us, very properly confined his notes and comparisons entirely to Italy, with references of course to Gonzenbach and Köhler's notes . . . [in his] contribution to Italian folk-lore."

Typical features of Sicilian folktales

The forms of the tales have standard openings like "There was", "There was one time", "It is related that there was one time", "It is related and related again", "This very fine story . . . " Another usual formula is, "Once (up)on a time there was."

The narrative is usually given in the present tense, and in most of the collections it is animated and dramatic.

Among the standard endings there are: "They remained happy and contented, and we are without anything" or "And here we are picking our teeth."

What Sicilian stories tell of, their various contents, differs little from those of the rest of Europe, and, further, the same story is found, with small variations, all over Italy, says Crane.

And there is but little local colouring in the Sicilian fairy tales. "Local colour" is a literary term for "characteristic features or atmosphere of a place or time".

Some English Translations of Sicilian Tales

First, nine of the tales in the table of contents in Thomas Frederic Crane's (1844-1927) Italian Popular Tales (1885), are from Gonzenbach's work. There are many mentions of other tales of hers in Crane's book too, and brief summaries to some of them.

Five of the tales here are from the folklorist Andrew Lang's series of translations in the Grey, Pink and Crimson Fairy Books. They are parts of a series of twelve collections of fairy tales he published between 1889 and 1910. These five tales were translated from the Sicilianische Mährchen (Sicilian Folk Tales) that were published in 1870 by Laura Gonzenbach.

In 2003 and 2004, Dr Jack Zipes and others published her work in two volumes in English translation. The original German edition is arranged according to tale types, whereas Zipes' translation of Gonzenbach's German translation of tales is not. Despite some minor blemishes the Gonzenbach work is a welcome addition to the limited sources in English for Italian folk narrative, writes David E. Gay (2008) of Indiana University.

Further, forty Sicilian tales in the table of contents of Thomas F. Crane's collection are from the books of his Sicilian friend Guiseppe Pitrè. Many other Pitrè tales are referred to or condensed in Crane's text as well. And Jack Zipes has since (in 2008) co-translated and edited 300 tales and 100 tales variants from them in a two-volumed English selection.

Pitrè's monumental collection of tales was first published in Palermo, Sicily in 1875. Through the translations of many of his tales they have in time become widely acclaimed.

Two Collectors

Laura Gonzenbach

Laura Gonzenbach (1842-78) was a folklorist born in a Swiss-German community in Messina, Sicily. Her father, from St. Gallen in Switzerland, was a commercial agent and also served as the Swiss consul in Messina. Her mother was from Eberfeld in Germany. Laura became well educated at home and in a small private school. She mastered Sicilian, Italian, German and French fluently. At the prompting of Otto Hartwig (1830-1903) for material to append to his history of Sicily, in 1868 she collected and sent to Hartwig ninety-two stories told by Sicilian peasant women mainly, and translated by her from Sicilian into literary German. They were tales that were told and retold among Sicilian women among the peasants and other classes, whereas most other collectors got their tales from men. Her material contains much original content.

Most of her informants were women from eastern Sicily, including Messina and its surrounding region, the countryside to the southeast of Mount Etna, and Catania. Little is known about the narrators, though, the situations that Gonzenbach collected her stories in, and what relationships, if any, she had with her informants. And we know little about her methods of collection, or of the storytelling context too. Any original manuscripts or notes Gonzenbach might have taken, or earlier versions of her work, were destroyed in Messina's 1908 earthquake. No transcripts exist today, but in a letter from her to Hartwig, published in the collection's introduction, she assured him that her transcriptions of the oral tales were faithful.

Hartwig edited and published her collection in 1870. Comparative notes by folklorist Reinhold Köhler went into it. Thus, Laura Gonzenbach's collection of tales were published as Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian folk-tales). The tales are similar to other Sicilian tales from the oral tradition, and this is taken to suggests her translation runs close to the stories as she heard them.

The work is one of the few major collections of the 1800s that was compiled by a woman. When the book was published, Gonzenbach had married an Italian colonel, later general according to Crane.

Sicilianische Märchen contains mostly fairy tales and novella. They represent attitudes and struggles among lower class Sicilian women against various forms of oppression, and further. Some of them - such as The Green Bird, The Humiliated Princess, Sorfarina, The Magic Cane, the Golden Donkey - had not been published earlier. The tales are unadulterated and carefully recorded to reflect the voice of the original tellers. They were women for most part. Gonzenbach did not soften the tales. They often reflect cruelty, violence and unfairness, so they are naturally not suitable in the nursery, but rather among those interested in folklore, feminist folklore and Sicily.

[WP, "Laura Gonzenbach"; Lee, in Haase 2008:417; Gay 2008]

Giuseppe Pitrè

The Italian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), born in Palermo, was also a medical doctor, professor at the University of Palermo and senator in Sicily. He gathered a very large amount of fairy tales as he travelled and treated the poor throughout Palermo. He also received tales from friends and scholars throughout the island, and championed the common people of Sicily as well.