From the baroque to the postmodern: notes on a translation from Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales. (Texts & Translations).

Introduction

I am currently working on an unabridged English translation of Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, or The Tale of Tales (1634-36). The Tale of Tales was the first framed collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe, and although it has only begun to receive the scholarly attention that it deserves, it was of huge importance to all subsequent fairy-tale authors, from Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and their colleagues at the time of Louis XIV, to the Grimms, to fabulists of our own time like Italo Calvino. In this essay I'd like, first of all, to offer one of Basile's most suggestive, scintillating, and disturbing tales--"The Old Woman Who Was Skinned"--in full translation. Second, I'd like to view this tale as a sounding ground for a number of the questions that are at the heart of The Tale of Tales, which involve how Basile revisits fairy-tale form and content and how his highly original rhetorical strategies become an integral part of this process. Finally, I will inve stigate some of the affinities between Basile's aesthetic sensibility and those of our own--postmodern--time, and reflect briefly on the trials and temptations involved in translating such a text. These critical reflections are contained in numbered footnotes. The "second order" notes, indicated with lower-case letters, offer information on obscure or unfamiliar textual passages, and when taken together make it quite evident that beneath the explicit story of "The Old Woman" there is a whole other narrative, one that recreates the everyday world of seventeenth-century Naples: its songs, games, popular art forms, beliefs and customs, culinary culture, neighborhoods, social and political life.

The Old Woman Who Was Skinned (1)

Tenth Entertainment of the First Day

The King of Strong Fortress falls in love with the voice of an old woman, and when he is tricked by a sucked-on finger, he gets her to sleep with him. But, discovering her wrinkles, he orders her to be thrown out the window, and when she remains hanging on a tree, she is enchanted by seven fairies, after which she becomes a splendid young woman and the king takes her as wife. But the other sister is envious of her good fortune, and to make herself beautiful she has herself skinned and dies.

[...] When the order was given to Iacova to seal this letter of entertainment with her coat of arms, she began to speak in this manner: "The accursed vice embedded in us women of wanting to look beautiful reduces us to the point where to gild the frame of our forehead we spoil the painting of our face, to whiten our old and wizened skin we ruin the bones of our teeth, and to put our limbs in a good light we darken our eyesight, so that before it is time to pay our tribute to time, we procure ourselves rheumy eyes, wrinkled faces, and rotten molars. But if a young girl who in her vanity gives in to such emptyheadedness deserves reproach, even more worthy of punishment is an old woman who out of her desire to compete with young lasses makes of herself a laughingstock and ruins her own body, as I am about to tell you, if you will lend me a bit of your ears. (2)

Two old women had retired into a garden overlooked by the King of Strong Fortress's quarters. They were the summary of all misfortunes, the register of all deformities, the ledger of all ugliness. Their tufts of hair were disheveled and spiked, their foreheads lined and lumpy, their eyelashes shaggy and bristly their eyelids swollen and heavy their eyes wizened and seedy-looking, their faces yellowed and lined, their mouths twisted and deformed and, in short, they had beards like a billy goat's, hairy chests, round-bellied shoulders, distorted arms, lame and crippled legs, and hooked feet. (3) And to prevent even the Sun from catching a glimpse of their hideous appearance, they stayed holed up in a basement apartment under the windows of that lord.

The king was reduced to such a state that he couldn't even fart without causing these old pains in the neck to wrinkle their noses, for they grumbled and threw themselves about like squid over the smallest thing. First they said that a jasmine flower fallen from above had given one of them a lump on her head, then that a torn-up letter had dislocated one of their shoulders, and then that a pinch of powder had bruised one of their thighs.

So that the king, upon hearing of this wonder of delicacy, concluded that underneath him lived the quintessence of softness, the prime cut of the most tender of meats, and the flower of all refinement. For this reason, from his little bones and from inside his bone marrow there arose a desire and a craving to see this marvel and to understand the matter more clearly And so he began to send down sighs from above, to cough without phlegm and, finally, he spoke more freely and with greater boldness, saying: 'Where, O where are you hidden, jewel, splendor, beautiful product of the world?

Come out, come out, Sun, warm up the emperor! (a) Uncover these lovely graces, show these lamps of the shop of Love, let's see this dainty head, O counting house heaped with beauty's money! Don't be so stingy about showing yourself! Open your doors to the poor falcon! Give me an offering if you want to give me one! Let me see the instrument from which issues this sweet voice! Let me see the bell from which comes forth this tinkling! Let me catch a glimpse of this bird! Don't make me graze on absinthe, like a sheep from Ponto, (b) by refusing to let me look at and contemplate this beauty of all beauties!' (4)

The king said this and other words, but he may as well have sung the Gloria, for the old women had stopped up their ears. This, however, only added wood to the king's fire: he felt himself heated up like an iron in the furnace of desire, squeezed by the tongs of thought, and pounded by the hammer of amorous torment, all to forge a key that could open the little chest of jewels that was making him die of desire. Yet still he did not pull back, instead continuing to send forth entreaties and to strengthen his assaults, never taking a rest.

The old women, who had begun to put on airs and grow bold as a result of the king's offers and promises, resolved that they would not waste the opportunity to nab this bird, who was about to fly into the snare all by himself. And so, when the king was ranting and raving above their window one day, they told him through the keyhole in a tiny little voice that the greatest favor they could do would be to show him, in eight days time, just one finger of their hand. (5)

The king, who as a practiced soldier knew that fortresses are conquered little by little, did not refuse this solution, hoping to conquer finger by finger this stronghold that he was keeping under siege, since, besides, he knew very well that an ancient proverb said 'first take and then ask.' (6) And so once he had accepted this final deadline of the eighth day by which to see the eighth wonder of the world, the old women's sole activity became sucking their fingers like a pharmacist who has spilled syrup, with the plan that when they reached the established day, whoever had the smoothest finger would show it to the king.

Meanwhile, the king was on tenterhooks, waiting for the established hour to blunt his desire: he counted the days, he numbered the nights, he weighed the hours, he measured the moments, he made note of the seconds, and he probed the instants that had been meted out to him in anticipation of the desired good. And now he begged the Sun to take a shortcut through the celestial fields, so that by gaining ground he could unhitch his fiery carriage and water his horses, tired after such a long trip, before the usual time; and then he implored the Night to sink the shadows so that he could see that light which yet unseen was keeping him in the little furnace of Love's flames; now he grew incensed with Time, who to spite him had donned crutches and leaden shoes, so as to delay the hour for liquidating the debt to the thing he loved and for respecting the contract stipulated between them.

But as the Sun in Leo (c) would have it, the time came, and he went in person to the garden and knocked on the door, saying come out, come out, wherever you are. (d) Then one of the two old women--the one heaviest with years--stuck her finger through the keyhole and showed it to the king, seeing as the touchstone had shown her finger to be of greater carats than her sister's. It was no mere finger, however, but a sharpened stick that pierced the king's heart; it was no sharpened stick, but a cudgel that stunned him on the head. But what am I saying, sharpened stick and cudgel? It was a match struck on the tinder of his desires, a fuse lit from the powder magazine of his longings. But what am I saying, sharpened stick, cudgel, match, fuse? It was a thorn under the tail of his thoughts--indeed, a cure of laxative figs which made him eliminate the gas of amorous affection in a mess of sighs.

And as he held that hand and kissed that finger, which from a shoemaker's rasp had become a goldsmith's burnisher, he began to say: 'Oh archive of sweetness, oh rubric of joys, oh register of Love's privileges, for reason of which I have become a store of troubles, a warehouse of anguish and a custom-house of torment! Is it possible that you wish to appear so obstinate and hard that my laments cannot move you? I beg you, my fair heart, if you have shown me your tail through this hole, then now show me your snout, and let us make a gelatin of happiness! (e) If you have shown me your shell, oh sea of beauty, now show me your sweet flesh; uncover those eyes of a peregrine falcon and let them feed on this heart! Who is it that keeps the treasure of this beautiful face sequestered in a shithouse? Who is it that quarantines this fair merchandise in such a hovel? Who is it that imprisons the force of Love in this pigsty? Come out from this ditch, flee this stable, abandon this hole. Jump, little snail, and …