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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

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Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#51

Post by hadlock »

shermantanktop wrote: post #10

The 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.”

Children were entering the workforce between 7 and 9 years old; in 2000 kids were entering the workforce between 14 and 18 (a lot of my friends bagged grocceries after work) in 2026 I think the average person enters the work force after 18 now, working in high school is much less common than it was 25 years ago.

TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#52

Post by uncircle »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #39
jiggawatts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software? And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?

Dude, you should know on here the answer the every question, including the meaning of life, these days is AI.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#53

Post by culebron21 »

anthk wrote: post #49
culebron21 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories. At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex,…

>. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; every…

> The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.

Well, maybe. I meant the genre like Jules Verne, Robert Stivenson.

Actually, I checked facts and found out that Daniel Defoe (I thought he lived in the same epoch), in fact lived in XVII-XVIII, much earlier.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#54

Post by [deleted] »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #39
jiggawatts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software? And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?

[deleted]

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#55

Post by simiones »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #39
jiggawatts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software? And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?

To be fair to GP, while I agree that literary translations are still much better left to professional translators, the specific examples actually given have recently been moving in the opposite direction in my experience - at least for translations from English. In my own language, I've seen articles published in translation under license, on major local news sites, including mis-translations as ridiculous as "1000 lb bombs" translated as "1000 £ bombs" ("bombe de 1000 de lire").

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#56

Post by anthk »

culebron21 wrote: post #53
anthk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; every…

> The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around. Well, maybe. I meant the genre like Jules Verne, Robert Stivenson. Actually, I checked facts and found out that Daniel Defoe (I thought he lived in the same epoch), in fact lived in XVII-XVIII, much earlier.

Well, Verne was half adventure and half science fiction. You might call them "expedition books" with a purpose, because adventure papyres predate Rome.

The Oddysey, Gilgamesh and basically every tribe in the Earth ever. has its own lore about some hero doing an incredible quest

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#57

Post by anthk »

notorandit wrote: post #13

It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children. Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries. In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families. In 20th century, instead, they hav…

Spain until the late 60's (because the dictatorship put Spain cultural and economically behind the rest of Europe. My rural parents began to help parents in their village even at age 4 doing small tasks. No wonder the age on consent in Spain until a decade and a half ago was as low as 14... because it was a unchanged byproduct from the 70's/ society, where by age 14 the 99% of the population couldn't affort anything but basic education (which lasted into that age) and for sure by 14 you woud already be working in a trade as an apprentice as every other adult. And, OFC, you would have aches in your back because of farming with your parents (and women helped at home too).

So a 14 year old in the 1960 could one-hit KO a current 18yo kid from today in the spot because they had drastic hormonal and physical changes due to the hard work. OFC when they hit 30 they almost looked like 50 yo's from today.

I always laugh at some old soccer trading cards from the 80's where tons of players being at 19 look like men in their 40's. Yes, tons of them smoked like chimeneys and drank like pirates.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#58

Post by byteface »

junto wrote: post #31

I’ve never seen the Disney film. As a child I hated that story. My own children have no love for it either. If I was to guess, I’d say that there isn’t much of a character in that story to get behind and to empathize with as a child. Pinocchio is a selfish little shit. I can’t like him. As an adult I feel for his father’s desperation but even then I could never understand the story’s popularity appeal.

He's is selfish. Also cruel but funny, very gullible, often impulslive... alive.

He was ported to Russian too but they called him Burattino (Italian for 'puppet').

The image of burratino goes back hundreds of years before the story was ever written. He was one of the Zanni characters alongside other lower-class mischevious, comedic 'naughty' (anti-authority) characters like Harlequin.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#59

Post by anthk »

paulluuk wrote: post #17
notorandit wrote: post #13

It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children. Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries. In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families. In 20th century, instead, they hav…

The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature. But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no e…

Don't be so naive. My parents in Spain are now 70's and lived through rough times in villages in the postwar/dictatorship Spain. Even under the National-Catholic regime these stories were published with the raw violence untouched for kids. You know, better if they were scared than misbehaving around and being shooted down from a farmer, eated alive from feral beasts in the mountains or something worse.

And I've read gorier stories from damn Catholic journals for late aged kids in the 50's -from my parents, as they had tons of distinct books- will full depiction of beheadings from God's will in Africal trives and whatnot that would set a straight +18 sign in the cover today.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#60

Post by kdheiwns »

jimbob45 wrote: post #47
arjie wrote: post #15

When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translatio…

There’s just no reason to traumatize kids that early. It’s perfectly fine to be a happy Disney kid until 10 and then find the trauma gradually. It’s not like Bridge to Terabithia didn’t exist for the previous generation either.

As a kid, I liked the "traumatic" stuff. The world isn't all sunshine and roses and a lot of the scary elements are there to instill kids with an awareness of danger so they don't become a victim of something horrible. Most of us today live in a world where we don't get eaten by wolves and kidnapped and sold into slavery anymore, but our society is fragile. All it takes is a few bad economic disasters, war, or a famine and things get rough pretty quickly. And right now there are kids enduring those realities.
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