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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

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Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#81

Post by OJFord »

pmontra wrote: post #30
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…

I was born in the second half of the 20th century, I read Pinocchio as a child and the Grimm brothers and more. Those were the books for children. Did they damage us compared to kids of 50 years later? I can't tell. Probably nobody can tell until at least next century.

I don't know which version you read of course, but worth noting they've been increasingly diluted over the years, in much the same way as OP says Disney did to Pinocchio.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#82

Post by ourmandave »

golemotron wrote: post #71
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…

Those old stories may have been full of crazy stuff, but look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy. I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.

Always wondered how they had campfires and lit torches underwater.

My wtf cartoon through adult eyes is Ren and Stimpy. Serious moments of not even trying to be for kids.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#83

Post by theturtlemoves »

michaelscott wrote: post #67
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…

I had a partner who was a teacher in very rough areas; the school principal was routinely called by the local gang leader to let school out early because rival gangs planned to have a shootout in the afternoon. Kids there were abused in more ways than I want to remember or recount, babies were sometimes found in dumpsters, and the whole thing had this constantly oppressive and hopeless atmosphere. My partner did her…

> The stories the kids always loved most were the Grimms, the violent ones. I think they allowed them to process and in some weird way make sense of what was happening in the real world around them, if such a thing is possible in that environment.

I once read somewhere that after an earthquake, the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety than the children who drew happy happy sunshine butterfly rainbows after the event. Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#86

Post by 47282847 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #80
kombookcha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to remember that these stories are orignally an oral tradition that only fairly recently began to be written down. They would have had a myriad of differing versions depending on the preferences of the storyteller, their community and the intended effect on specific audiences. In a way, retelling these stories in a way that's meaningful to the listeners is the way it always has been. We just have to re…

Isn't that the other way around? People back then had more contact with the darker reality we live in - hence it was more relatable. Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironicall…

Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#87

Post by nottorp »

simiones wrote: post #55
bugufu8f83 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

News sites are extremely cash strapped, I bet it's all automatic translation, maybe with the exception of a few important articles, and it has been even before LLMs.

On my local news sites I still see crap like english word order but Romanian words on filler articles, which means it wasn't even a LLM.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#89

Post by throw0101c »

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…

> The book was never written for children […]

If this is the case you may wish to click on "edit" and correct Wikipedia:

> "The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a Puppet"), commonly shortened to Pinocchio, is an 1883 children's fantasy novel by Italian author Carlo Collodi. It is about the mischievous adventures of an animated marionette named Pinocchio. He faces many perils and temptations, meets characters who teach him about life, and learns goodness before he achieves his heart's desire to become a real boy.

> The story was originally published in serial form as The Story of a Puppet (Italian: La storia di un burattino) in the Giornale per i bambini between 7 July 1881 and 25 January 1883, and was subsequently issued in book form in February 1883, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti. Since then, Pinocchio has been one of the most popular children's books and has been critically acclaimed.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio

> Giornale per i bambini (Italian for 'Newspaper for children') was an Italian weekly periodical published in the 1880s by Tipografia dei Fratelli Bencini and later Tipografia Bodoniana.[1] It first appeared as an insert in Fanfulla della domenica in 1881,[2] and established as an independent publication later that year by Ferdinando Martini, who was also the periodical's first editor. The target audience was children between the ages of 6 and 12.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giornale_per_i_bambini

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#90

Post by ffsm8 »

47282847 wrote: post #86
ffsm8 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the other way around? People back then had more contact with the darker reality we live in - hence it was more relatable. Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironicall…

Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.

I guess I was too unclear with my comment... Because I can see were you're coming from.

Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about. But the target demographic is adults.

The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids (They also weren't really fantasy in nature, even if we consider them to be fantasy nowadays. And that's a big part of why a series like stranger things feels inapplicable here - unless I miss remember it's setting. Wasn't it fundamentally just entertainment? More about spectacle then actually relating to the viewer?

The young adults/teenagers are both 10+ years older then the target demographic of the old tales, and won't relate the story to themselves because it's too disconnected from reality? At least that's my impression.

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