It's been a really interesting venture exploring Basile's Tale of Tales for my new podcast with Jess McDonald, Fairy Tale Menagerie. I've been listening and reading the Penguin Classics edition Translated by Nancy L Canepa and it's been quite the ride so far!
The tales are amazing and beautifully written even if there's much more bathroom humour than my personal tastes would usually allow, I'm still enjoying them immensely! I listened to most of the second day while I drove around Ventura county (my day job requires a lot of driving). I found myself meditating and musing while listening to stories of cunning and foolishness, love and loss and miraculous regeneration. As soon as I got home I had to put my pen to paper to write my musings down (along with a list of stories, whose prime literary form appear in this collection). Here's what came out:
These tales are giving me so much hope. It's like hearing all the stories that have become worn out records in my mind completely anew, in some cases they are the same story.
It's a wonderful paradox, this labyrinth of tales. It gives me hope and fills me with wonder at how wrong we can be about fairy tales. They aren't for blinding or deluding children, children already accept and believe. These are for jaded, cynical, broken adults.
They touch on all of the hopes and frustrations that children haven't learned yet, or at least they don't experience in the same way.
I'm sure there's more to be expanded and refined, but there you have the unfiltered first thoughts as they were by the end of a taxing work day. It's always been a pet-peeve of mine when someone scoffs at fairy tales as children stories or when they sneer "Life's not a fairy tale, you know", as if only good things happen in fairy tales. To further hear how these stories were told amongst adults with all the knowing - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - and horrible descriptions of desperate situations really brings back the core of fairy tales that I love: perseverance and hope. Sometimes the only way to persevere - to survive, is to keep telling yourself the most outlandish, wild and mad tale.
List of fairy tales whose prime story appear in Tale of Tales (as seen by this one so far):
Cinderella Cat - Cinderella
Petrosinella - Rapunzel
Cagliuoso - Puss in Boots
The She-Bear - Donkey Skin/ Princess Furball
Please check out Fairy Tale Menagerie on SoundCloud and on iTunes!
https://soundcloud.com/fairytalemenagerie
The tales are amazing and beautifully written even if there's much more bathroom humour than my personal tastes would usually allow, I'm still enjoying them immensely! I listened to most of the second day while I drove around Ventura county (my day job requires a lot of driving). I found myself meditating and musing while listening to stories of cunning and foolishness, love and loss and miraculous regeneration. As soon as I got home I had to put my pen to paper to write my musings down (along with a list of stories, whose prime literary form appear in this collection). Here's what came out:
These tales are giving me so much hope. It's like hearing all the stories that have become worn out records in my mind completely anew, in some cases they are the same story.
It's a wonderful paradox, this labyrinth of tales. It gives me hope and fills me with wonder at how wrong we can be about fairy tales. They aren't for blinding or deluding children, children already accept and believe. These are for jaded, cynical, broken adults.
They touch on all of the hopes and frustrations that children haven't learned yet, or at least they don't experience in the same way.
I'm sure there's more to be expanded and refined, but there you have the unfiltered first thoughts as they were by the end of a taxing work day. It's always been a pet-peeve of mine when someone scoffs at fairy tales as children stories or when they sneer "Life's not a fairy tale, you know", as if only good things happen in fairy tales. To further hear how these stories were told amongst adults with all the knowing - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - and horrible descriptions of desperate situations really brings back the core of fairy tales that I love: perseverance and hope. Sometimes the only way to persevere - to survive, is to keep telling yourself the most outlandish, wild and mad tale.
List of fairy tales whose prime story appear in Tale of Tales (as seen by this one so far):
Cinderella Cat - Cinderella
Petrosinella - Rapunzel
Cagliuoso - Puss in Boots
The She-Bear - Donkey Skin/ Princess Furball
Please check out Fairy Tale Menagerie on SoundCloud and on iTunes!
https://soundcloud.com/fairytalemenagerie
No comments:
Post a Comment