The Storica blog has a post about Pinocchio that has some Hattic material:
Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children’s magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.
Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him. […]
The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.
When Italy was politically unified in 1861, the linguist Tullio De Mauro’s classic estimate is that only about 2.5% of the population spoke standard Italian — roughly 630,000 people out of twenty-five million. The rest spoke a mosaic of regional dialects mutually unintelligible enough that a Neapolitan recruit could not understand a Piedmontese officer. The new state needed a single shared language, and fast. They chose Tuscan, the literary tongue of Dante and Petrarch — but most Italians had never heard Tuscan spoken in daily life.
What got Tuscan into ordinary Italian homes was schoolbooks. Pinocchio became one of them. Collodi wrote in clean middle-register Florentine Tuscan: short sentences, common verbs, concrete nouns — pane, naso, bugia, legno, fata, volpe (bread, nose, lie, wood, fairy, fox). The book ended up on every elementary school syllabus and stayed there. Generations of Italian children learned to read in the language Collodi had already simplified for them. By 1951, when De Mauro re-counted, the proportion of Italians who could speak standard Italian had climbed from 2.5% to roughly 87%. Television finished that job. Mass schooling, with Pinocchio in it, started it. […]
What’s strange about reading the original today — not the Disney version, not even a translation, the original — is that it doesn’t feel old. The Italian is plain enough that an early learner with a textbook behind them can finish a chapter in a sitting. The plot moves at television speed: thirty-six chapters of trouble before the redemption finally lands. The pictures are vivid, weird, and entirely Collodi’s: a piece of wood that talks back, a fox pretending to be blind, a donkey at the bottom of the sea. You do not need a literary education to follow it. He wasn’t writing for one.
Most translations soften the book. Most adaptations cut the donkey-skin drum. Most adults who think they know Pinocchio are remembering Disney. The book itself is still the book Collodi reluctantly extended past chapter fifteen because Italian children would not let it end.
Interesting, I did not realize that the Blue Fairy of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (in the books a childhood story that is never fully described but alluded to throughout) was a reference to Pinocchio.
I have to say that Pinocchio is intractable enough to survive Disneyfication better than most things fed into the maw of that machine. Genuine nightmare fuel made it through in some places. With the result that it’s easily the best of the Disney cartoons.
the Blue Fairy
Not to be confused with la fée verte.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe
La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine …
La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine …
He was such a drama queen of the page. Thank goodness we now have horror films that take pressure off the prose.
In Chile in the 1970s and 1980s texts hostile to the dictatorship used Pin8 (= Pin ocho = Pinocho, the Spanish spelling of Pinocchio) to refer to Augusto Pinochet.
https://m.facebook.com/tiendapin8/photos/d41d8cd9/612827109369165/
Fearless compañeros, pretending to be a shop for kids.
Pinocho, the Spanish spelling of Pinocchio
I wonder why they didn’t go with “Pinoquio”.
Pinojo would be root-preserving, thought I in an etymological mood. Then discovered that’s indeed the title of a Spanish translation of the transspecies-affirming Pignocchio.
When I was about 8 I saw Disney’s Pinocchio and then read Collodi’s original (that is, in English …). Whoa! It was my introduction to what Disney did to things.
There have always been plenty of people who appoint themselves to control what other people experience. Parents, priests and educated fleas do it. Disney was not egregious in this respect.
Oh, I’d say he was.
I’ve never seen the Disney versions of either Pinocchio, the Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Парижката Света Богородица or any of the other adaptations. I’ve also not seen the musical adaptation of Les Misérables — we did study the book in school. I’ve read all of the originals (in Bulgarian). I saw Lion King, though.
The whole book? It’s about 1500 pages in the 1951 Pléiade edition (just the text of the novel, not counting the annotations and so on).
Well I did read Crime and Punishment in about 24 hours while sick then, but we read only excerpts of Les Misérables in school. I think 10th grade. It was mostly about Jean Valjean, Javert, Cosette, Gavroche and Fantine.
EDIT: I didn’t mean to imply I read the whole book, I was referring to the previous ones. I have definitely not read the whole of Les Misérables.
I did read all of Dhalghen, though it took me a few years 🙂
The most unforgiveable Disney perversion of all is the one of Winnie-the-Pooh. One does try not to be anti-American, but it’s hard sometimes.
@V
I was going to say: I am not capable of this level of heroism, although our host is
https://languagehat.com/proust-the-summing-up/
Stu: even educates bees do it? It’s one of favourite songs ever, how dare you 🙂 I’m on a loop now.
Stu, this is my vengeance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOFHOADTm7o — I really like this version and wanted to share it with you? 🙂 I really love Joan Jett.
I am not capable of this level of heroism, although our host is
*grins self-effacingly, bows, swaggers out the swinging doors*
My own proven-successful method of finishing Proust is to live for years in Bawku, in the far northeast of Ghana. (Not a lot to do in the evenings …)
One also begins to appreciate Victorian triple-decker novels in such circumstances.
I really like it that Tig Notaro named her Star Trek character after Joan Jett. It’s Jett Reno.
David : I was not aware there was an US Pooh film?
Google is your friend.
My own proven-successful method of finishing Proust is to live for years in Bawku, in the far northeast of Ghana. (Not a lot to do in the evenings …)
The least one could expect of a hatter in such circumstances is completing a comparative study of the Gur languages 🙂
@Stu Clayton: I too thought of “Pinojo”, but I didn’t think to look it up.
Sadly, the name of the card game pinochle seems to be entirely unrelated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochle
The “Hoyle” (Morehead, Frey, and Mott-Smith) I have suggests that bézique turned into bésicles ‘eyeglasses’, which turned into binocles (also eyeglasses).
Like V, I’ve never seen Disney’s Pinocchio. I wasn’t brought up on Disney (and, like David, I loathe their vulgarisation of Shepard’s immortal images of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends). The (unattributed) translation of Pinocchio that I had as a child certainly does include the donkey-skin drum and other incidents alleged to be often subject to bowdlerisation. I don’t remember finding them particularly troubling.
Kids are not troubled by nearly as much as adults expect them to be.
(Wait, is that grammatical? Should it be “as much as adults expect them to be troubled by”?)
I didn’t notice anything…
Whether the content is accurate varies widely and not very predictably, both among children and among adults. (To some extent you can even blame violent video games.)
@V: thanks for the Jett link. I missed out on punk rock among many other things back then. What I did hold to be heavy has turned to dust. Nowadays I get to deal with radiohead for the first time, Silversun Pickups and so on.
I saw Lion King, though.
Another inferior adaptation. In this case of the Japanese Manga l/TV show ジャングル大帝 (although in fairness Disney disputes this).
Vanya: No, I mean the original one. EDIT: I did not understand you meant the original one. Still not sure.
languagehat: kids are not troubled about a lot of things. Just yesterday my nephew was not troubled with him and another child playing with large sticks. Me, his mother and his father were watching over though.
Vanya : oh yeah, the White Lion Kimba, right? I’d forgot about that.
languagehat:
“Kids are not troubled by nearly as much as adults expect them to be”
“Should it be “as much as adults expect them to be troubled by”?
Sounds fine to me? I’m not exatly sure what troubles you.
Yeah, coppied ジャングル大帝 and made into Lion King, IIRC. I mean It’s not exactly the same, extremely similar..
I’m not exatly sure what troubles you.
I’m not either. It’s probably fine, it’s just complicated enough to set off my “is this OK?” alarm.
on disney (the juggernaut more than the man): i haven’t read it yet, but from the interviews she’s been doing (and generally trusting her work) i feel like i can and should recommend vicky osterweil’s hot-off-the-presses The Extended Universe.
@birds&bees&V: the film is pretty amazing! with some brilliant (and rather pointed) casting*: ann magnuson’s turn as The Madam, in which she performs Let’s Do It, is a highlight.
.
* it’s a great 1990s example of what i think of as V-effekt casting, where the relationship between the performer’s previous work (or/and life) and the role is a central part of the effect of the film: as with malcolm mcdowell, ice-t, iggy pop, and magnuson here. (more recently, White Lotus has been especially actively using this approach)
Compare “Kids are not run over by nearly as many cars as adults expect them to be.” Apart from the content, there is a slight abruptness, which is shared by your sentence, but I do not think that adding “run over by” to the end would help.
You’re right, it’s just one of those weird corners of linguistic usage.
I am reminded of T-Bone Burnett’s rather dark 1983 composition “Hefner and Disney,” which is not even the most cynical-about-then-current-American-culture number on the album containing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIUHawf97Ao
I used to have one of his albums, but I’m damned if I can remember which: Truth Decay? T-Bone Burnett? From the ’80s, anyway.
Carl Hiaasen’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Rodent
has pretty much exactly the take on its subject that the title would lead you to expect.
(This is the only one of Hiaasen’s works that I have read in English, as opposed to the original French.)
BTW, the kids were not fighting, they were trying to build something, but we’re not sure what –they were putting the pieces of wood in in different positions around this tree. And the other kid’s mom sat at outside of the restaurant a few meters away. I think they might have been trying to build something like a treehouse. They were trying to build up, in any case.
The sentence “kids are not troubled by nearly as much as adults expect them to be” implies that adults expect kids to be troubled by a lot of stuff, and then makes a counterpoint. Whereas the actual sensible intention is “some undefined amount”, not “a lot”.
Y: What sentence is that?
The one you yourself responded to above: “I’m not exatly sure what troubles you.”
I read a few of Carl Hiaasen’s* novels when they first came out in Norwegian back in the nineties — marketed (if I remember correctly) as part of a new wave of angry American noir along with Andrew Vachss, Sara Paretsky, and James Lee Burke. Hiaasen got some extra press for his obvious Norwegian heritage*, but James Lee Burke is the one that has stayed with me.
* His surname – you saw this coming, didn’t you? It’s not a stereotypical -sen name of patronymic origin, but a toponymic surname from a farmname. The name is a compound of two elements. The final element is straightforwardly åsen “the hill/ridge”. The initial element is more puzzling. It looks like hi “(animals’) den”, which I didn’t think could be correct, but O. Rygh says so too, and he usually knows. Checking the map, the farmstead is located in the forest away from the main settlement of Sigdal parish. This makes me think that the site was known as a place to hunt for hibernating bears before eventually being settled as a farm. Small forest farms like Hiåsen may have been economically viable in this region because of the huge demand for firewood for the budding industry – the Kongsberg silver mines, the cobalt mine in Modum, and ironworks and (briefly) glassworks in Eiker.
I love these norsk details you provide!
Languegahat : Oh, sorry. Never mind that. What I wanted to mention is that Joan Jett is proto-punk; It depends on how one classifies musical genres, of course.
I read a German translation of Collodi (which didn’t keep Pinocchio’s name but called him Purzel “Tumble” for whatever reason) before I knew the Disney version.
I never watched the film; I know a lot of Disney movies, including this, only from a series of “books based on the movie”, with stills from the cartoons as illustrations, that I had when I was a child.
But both versions have been superseded in my head by the Russian adaptations where he is called Buratino (book and cartoon movie), which I must have read and watched dozens of times with my daughter and then with my nephews and nieces in Kazakhstan.
“The new state needed a single shared language, and fast. They chose Tuscan, the literary tongue of Dante and Petrarch” — well, this is oversimplified to the point of being wrong.
The ‘choice’ of 14th-century Tuscan as the basis for literary Italian goes back at the very least to (Venetian [!] cardinal) Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua in 1525 (whose canon however was mainly based on Petrarch and Boccaccio; Dante’s language was considered too impure to be a good model). Of course there were several puristic and anti-puristic movements in the following centuries, but the fact that any conceivable kind of Standard Italian should have a Tuscan basis was never really called into question. By the 19th century, the main point of debate was whether the model should be archaic literary Florentine or contemporary spoken Florentine; Manzoni notably favoured the latter option. A few years after unification, however, G. I. Ascoli (one of the great historical linguists) argued that a common national language could not be based on the imposition of any model from above, but on raising the general level of education.
This is of course a long and complex story, and I’ve oversimplified it too. Wikipedia has a good English-language article on the Questione della lingua.
It is also a bit of a myth that until unification (or WW1, or mass media, or what have you) literally nobody except a tiny minority of literati spoke Italian rather than a regional language. De Mauro’s estimate is well-known and authoritative, but probably too pessimistic. Enrico Testa, for instance, has shown that in the early modern period even un- or half-cultivated people aimed at a kind of common Italian, even for purely practical purposes. It remains the case that most people were illiterate, and only or mainly spoke the local language, until quite recently. But I’ve long felt that the exaggerated narrative of a completely artificial Italian language foisted by the post-unitary State on an unwilling population is often exploited by localistic movements (both in the North and in the South) with unsavoury political views.
> Kids are not troubled by nearly as much as adults expect them to be.
Doesn’t “Kids are not troubled by nearly as much as adults expect” work too (with the same meaning)?
Hmm. I think you’re right, but somehow the longer form feels more natural to me.
Under normal circumstances, you would want to repeat everything up to the preposition (i.e. the point of departure of the comparison) to make it clear what you’re comparing. But I think the word “as” marks that for you, so it’s never ambiguous what part of the previous statement is being compared:
“I was troubled by the syllabus as much as you were.”
“I was troubled by as much of the syllabus as you were.”