Prentiss Riddle
aprendizdetodo.com
riddle@io.com
 
home art austin books
causes chuckles garden
kids language movies
music time toys travel
 

Search this site

Archive by date
Archive by title
RSS/XML

Calvino's fables and compartment friends

Enigmatic Mermaid brings up Italo Calvino's Italian Fables and that reminds me of a story.

I once spent a month in Italy learning a bit of Italian at the Università Italiana per Stranieri. I'd heard of Calvino's book in its Gringolandian translation, so I bought a copy of Fiabe Italiane upon arrival and tried over the course of the month to read it. At my level, even simple folktales were a challenge. On day trips around central Italy by train, a classmate and I would whip out the Calvino and a pocket dictionary and stumble through it aloud, translating as we went; that inevitably broke the ice with our fellow passengers and before long the entire compartment would be deep into explicating "L'uomo che usciva solo di notte" or "Il naso d'argento". I highly recommend the method, both for language learning and for travel. It would probably work for picking up friendly locals, too, if you have some additional skills I didn't have.

I'm not sure what the equivalent in the US would be. Reading a Star Wars novelization on a Greyhound, maybe?

Hi Prentiss,

I cannot imagine a most charming ice-breaker than yours. No, not asking about the weather like an Englishman, but jumping straight to the core of Italian storytelling. I'm reading Italian Folktales right now and loving it at every page I turn. You ask what would be the equivalent in American terms. If I may venture a suggestion, it would be reading I thought my father was God on a Greyhound (yes, definitely a Greyhound). While these are not folktales in the strictest sense, they preserve the multidinous voices, the twists and turns and miraculous delivrances of the best folktales. Just read this description of the contents:

hilarious blunders, wrenching coincidences, brushes with death, miraculous encounters, improbable ironies -- come from people of all ages and walks of life. This one-of-a-kind collection is a testament to the power of storytelling that offers a glimpse into the American soul.

There are no princesses and dragons, the single requisite for this collection was that the stories be real. This fact could also be seen as a confirmation of Italo Calvino's quote. Folktales are real, no matter how unreal their settings or improbable their outcomes. These are bona fine American folktales caught in the moment of their creation, before they are transmitted across the ages by generations of storytellers. And they are much more enriching than a Star Trek novelization!