Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
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Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#2Sad I can't read Italian. I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#3Are you Claude?
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#4The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#5I re-read Pinocchio with my (bilingual) kids a couple years ago, and I think this article is spot on for some things: it is a bit more weird then I remembered, the Italian reads almost contemporary (except for a few turn of phrases and odd terms), and it has a strong pacing.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#6The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
> the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English
Which Penguin edition is this?
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#7It's so creepy that my kids didn't want to hear it (being read to them) with all the burning and stuff. However they also didn't want to listen to the classic fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen which are super creepy as well. Just think of burning witches or some Anderson fairy tale I remember where one guy is put into a bag and thrown into the river. It's not that I deliberately wanted to read the most creepy stories to them but there's a creepy undertone to even the most famous and "harmless" ones, think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and so on.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#8Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#9Sad I can't read Italian. I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like.
An easy method these days is to get any frontier AI model to translate it for you.
I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.
Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
#10The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”