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

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Pinocchio

  1. How it happened that Master Cherry, a carpenter, found a piece of wood that cried and laughed like a little boy.

  2. Master Cherry gives the piece of wood to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make it into an amazing puppet that can dance and fence and do flips.

  3. Back home, Geppetto immediately begins work on his puppet, which he names Pinocchio. The puppet’s first pranks.

  4. The story of Pinocchio and the Talking Cricket, which shows that naughty children can’t stand to be corrected by those who know best.

  5. Pinocchio gets hungry and finds an egg to make an omelet with, but at the last second the omelet flies away, out the window.

  6. Pinocchio falls asleep with his feet propped on the brazier, and the next morning he finds that his feet have burnt off.

  7. Poor Geppetto comes home and gives the puppet the breakfast he had brought for himself.

  8. Geppetto makes Pinocchio a new pair of feet and sells his own coat to buy him a spelling book.

  9. Pinocchio sells his spelling book in order to go see the Great Puppet Show.

  10. The puppets recognize Pinocchio as their brother and welcome him raucously; but when the puppet master shows up, Pinocchio is in danger of meeting a tragic end.

  11. Fire-Eater sneezes and forgives Pinocchio, who then saves his friend Harlequin from death.

  12. Fire-Eater gives Pinocchio five gold pieces to take to his father, Geppetto. But Pinocchio is duped by the Fox and the Cat and goes off with them instead.

  13. The Red Crayfish Inn.

  14. Because he ignored the Talking Cricket’s good advice, Pinocchio runs into murderers.

  15. The murderers chase Pinocchio, and when they catch him they hang him from a branch of the Big Oak.

  16. The Beautiful Girl with Sky-Blue Hair has the puppet taken down. She puts him to bed, and calls in three doctors to learn if he’s alive or dead.

  17. Pinocchio eats the sugar, but won’t take the purgative until he sees the gravediggers coming to carry him away. Then he tells a lie and, as punishment, his nose grows longer.

  18. Pinocchio again encounters the Fox and the Cat and goes with them to plant his four coins in the Field of Miracles.

  19. Pinocchio is robbed of his gold coins and, as punishment, gets four months in jail.

  20. Freed from jail, he tries to return to the Fairy’s house, but along the way he encounters a terrible Serpent, and after that he gets caught in a snare.

  21. Pinocchio is seized by a farmer and made to serve as a watchdog outside a henhouse.

  22. Pinocchio thwarts the thieves and as a reward for being faithful is granted his liberty.

  23. Pinocchio mourns the death of the Beautiful Girl with Sky-Blue Hair. Then he meets a Pigeon who carries him to the sea, where he dives into the water to try to rescue Geppetto.

  24. Pinocchio reaches Busy-Bee Island and finds the Fairy with Sky-Blue Hair again.

  25. Pinocchio promises the Fairy that he’ll be good and to study, because he’s tired of being a puppet and wants to become a good boy.

  26. Pinocchio goes to the seashore with his schoolmates to see the terrible Shark.

  27. A great fight between Pinocchio and his schoolmates; one gets wounded, and the police arrest Pinocchio.

  28. Pinocchio is in danger of being fried up in a skillet, like a fish.

  29. Pinocchio returns to the house of the Fairy, who promises him that the next day he will cease to be a puppet and become a boy. A big breakfast is planned to celebrate this great event.

  30. Instead of becoming a boy, Pinocchio sneaks off with his friend Lampwick to Toyland.

  31. After five months of nonstop fun, Pinocchio wakes up one morning to a rather nasty surprise.

  32. Pinocchio is amazed to discover a fine pair of donkey ears sprouting from his head. He turns into a donkey, tail and all, and begins to bray.

  33. Now a real donkey, Pinocchio is taken to market and sold to the Ringmaster of a circus, who wants to teach him to dance and jump through hoops. But one evening he becomes lame and so is sold to another man who wants to make a drum out of his hide.

  34. Thrown into the sea, Pinocchio is eaten by fish and becomes a puppet again. But as he is swimming to safety, he is swallowed up by the terrible Shark.

  35. Inside the Shark’s belly, Pinocchio is reunited with—with whom? Read this chapter to find out.

  36. At last Pinocchio ceases to be a puppet and becomes a boy.

  Afterword

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  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 a
dmit 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.

  And besides, how else can we explain its universal appeal? In a 2008 Milan exhibition devoted to various editions of Pinocchio, I found 242 Italian editions (I don’t know if that was all of them, but in any case it was fascinating to see how the story had inspired so many great illustrators). Even more interesting was the display of translations into other languages. I’d guess that before the emergence of international copyright conventions there must have been countless pirated versions that have fallen through the cracks, yet the Milan exhibit had 135 translations on display, representing not just the major European languages but also Korean, Swahili, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Amharic, and Latin (yes: Pinocolus, rendered by mild-mannered ecclesiasts, to educate the young). There were sixty or so from English alone, demonstrating how this simplest of texts continually provides new challenges to translators and illustrators.

  When a book creates a myth (though it must be admitted that Disney contributed to the myth’s creation), that myth will inevitably be manifested in various naïve and degenerate devotional forms. The Milan exhibition contained countless versions of and variations on Pinocchio: comic books, 325 sequels in Italian alone (including Son of Pinocchio, Pinocchio’s Grandmother, Pinocchio Drives a Car, and Pinocchio the Diver), four hundred postcards, ten board games, hundreds upon hundreds of figurines, fourteen calendars, ten musical compositions, forty posters, forty records, and several hundred miscellaneous objects (wooden toys, dolls, tins, glassware, celluloid rattles, little Pinocchios made of cloth or plastic or rubber or resin, jigsaw puzzles, ceramic figures, cutouts, decks of cards…). In the history of pop religions, I think only Mickey Mouse has surpassed this level of success.

  But beyond the myth, there remains the book, with its delightful simplicity. I’m grateful to Geoffrey Brock for bringing it once more (upon a time) to our attention.

  —UMBERTO ECO

  PINOCCHIO

  1

  ONCE UPON a time there was …

  “A king!” my little readers will say at once.

  No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

  It wasn’t a fancy piece of wood, just a regular woodpile log, the kind you might put in your stove or fireplace to stoke a fire and heat your room.

  I don’t know how it happened, but the fact is that one fine day this piece of wood turned up in the workshop of an old carpenter, Master Antonio by name, though everyone called him Master Cherry, on account of the tip of his nose, which was always shiny and purple, like a ripe cherry.

  Master Cherry was delighted to see that piece of wood. He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction and mumbled in a soft voice, “This log has turned up at a good moment. I think I’ll use it to make me a table leg.”

  Wasting no time, he picked up his sharp hatchet to start removing the log’s bark and trimming it down, but just as he was about to strike the first blow, his arm froze in midair, because he heard a little high-pitched voice pleading, “Don’t hit me too hard!”

  Just imagine dear old Master Cherry’s reaction!

  His bewildered eyes roamed the room to see where on earth that little voice had come from, but he didn’t see anyone! He looked under his workbench—nobody there. He looked inside a cabinet he always kept shut—nobody there. He looked in his basket of wood shavings and sawdust—nobody there. He even opened his workshop door to take a look in the street—nobody there. So what was going on?

  “I see,” he said then, laughing and scratching his wig. “Clearly I must have imagined that little voice myself. Now let’s get back to work.”

  And picking the hatchet back up, he dealt the piece of wood a heavy blow.

  “Ouch! You hurt me!” cried the same little voice, bitterly.

  This time Master Cherry was struck dumb: his eyes bugged out of his head in fright, his mouth gaped, his tongue dangled down to his chin, like those grotesque faces carved on fountains. When he regained the use of speech, he said, trembling and stammering with fear, “That little voice that said ouch, where could it have come from? Because there’s not a living soul in this place. Could this piece of wood have somehow learned to cry and complain like a little boy? I can’t believe that. Look at this log—it’s a piece of firewood, like any other. If I threw it on the fire I could bring a pot of beans to a boil. So what’s going on? Could someone be hidden inside it? If anyone’s hiding in there, tough luck for him. I’ll show him what’s what!”

  And as he spoke he grabbed that poor piece of wood with both hands and began whacking it mercilessly against the walls of the room.

  Then he listened, to see if he could hear a little voice complaining. He waited two minutes, and no voice; five minutes, and no voice; ten minutes, and no voice!

  “I see,” he said then, forcing a laugh and ruffling his wig. “Clearly I must have imagined it myself, that little voice that said ouch. Now let’s get back to work.”

  And because by this point he was really quite afraid, he began humming to himself to screw up his courage.

  Meanwhile, leaving the hatchet aside, he picked up his plane, intending to scrape that piece of wood and make it smooth, but as he was planing back and forth, he heard the same little voice, which laughed and said, “Stop it! You’re tickling my tummy!”

  This time poor Master Cherry fell down as if struck by lightning. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself sitting on the floor.

  His face seemed misshapen, and even the tip of his nose, which was nearly always purple, had turned bright blue with fright.

  2

  JUST THEN there was a knock on his door.

  “Come on in,” said the carpenter, still too weak to stand.

  In walked a spry old man. His name was Geppetto, but the neighborhood kids, when they wanted to make him boil with rage, called him by the nickname Corn Head, since his yellow wig looked like a mound of cornmeal mush.

  Geppetto had a terrible temper. Heaven help wh
oever called him Corn Head! He turned instantly into a wild animal and there was no controlling him.

  “Good day, Master Antonio,” Geppetto said. “What are you doing down there on the floor?”

  “I’m teaching the ants to count.”

  “Well, good for you!”

  “What brings you to my shop, my dear Geppetto?”

  “My legs. Actually, Master Antonio, I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  “Here I am, at your service,” the carpenter replied, rising to his knees.

  “This morning an idea popped into my head.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I thought I’d make myself a nice wooden puppet, I mean a really amazing one, one that can dance and fence, and do flips. Then I’d travel the world with it, earning my crust of bread and cup of wine as I went. What do you think?”

  “Good idea, Corn Head!” shouted that same little voice, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Hearing himself called Corn Head, dear Geppetto turned as red as a hot pepper, and approaching the carpenter he said furiously, “Why are you insulting me?”

  “Who’s insulting you?”

  “You called me Corn Head!”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Oh, I suppose you’re saying it was me? I say it was you.”