Storyteller
Laura J. Bobrow
102 Chesterfield Place SW
Leesburg VA 20175-2700
703.771.7571
The sixteenth century Neapolitan fairy tales of Giambattista Basile’s “Il Pentamerone,” although familiar in their original and derivative prose forms, have not, to my knowledge, been told in English in narrative verse. I have undertaken such a project.
Translations of Basile tend to replicate the baroque flourishes and colloquial dialect with which the author embellished his work, with the result that flamboyance and hyperbole often overshadow the stories themselves. My purpose in putting the stories into verse is to
retrieve the oral tales from which Basile’s work derived.
Speaking of the use of poetic form Frederick Turner in his epic novel Genesis says, “These rigidities compel the action again and again to come to a point, a focus, to collapse the wave function of possibility, to choose one path of plot.” You will find many archetypical elements in the stories, Keep in mind that these versions of the stories pre-date those of Perrault and the Grimm Brothers.
Basile’s collection was originally published in five separate volumes, one volume for each day
of stories told, consisting of forty-nine tales in all. That, too, is my intention. The poems
adhere strictly to the story motifs, but end of story homilies have been eliminated.
I have necessarily worked from translation, principally those of Nancy L. Canepa in “Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones” Wayne State University Press, Detroit 2007, and those by John Edward Taylor, 1848.
Click on the buttons below to read and listen to the tales. Laura J. Bobrow STORIES IN VERSE - IL PENTAMERONE
