| The Robber with a Witch's Head:
More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales New York and London, Routledge, 2004. Review by Francesca Orestano, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. A companion and enrichment to a former volume entitled Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales (2004), this book provides the common reader and the scholar with an additional group of forty-two Sicilian fairy tales. Easy to read, elegantly illustrated by Jellin Rock, they prove critically fascinating, insofar as -- although belonging to a well-known discursive area, in which the dateless voices of orality are fixed in the historical frame of the written text -- these fairy tales seem to have made a longer and more complex journey: emerging from the fertile cultural palimpsest of the area at the centre of the Mediterranean, a crossroads of Roman, Norman, Arab, Greek, Phoeinician, Spanish, French voices, they got extracted from the Sicilian dialect and recorded in German by a young woman, member of a small Swiss community in Messina. The adventurous events which are behind this collection of stories are told by Jack Zipes in a vivid introductory essay, where he describes the discovery of this ‘buried treasure' and its importance. We learn that these fairy tales were directly taken from the mouth of peasant women living on the Eastern coast of Sicily by a young Swiss woman endowed with many extraordinary talents, named Laura Gonzenbach. Laura Gonzenbach lived in Messina, where she was a young member of the prosperous and cosmopolitan Swiss mercantile community. Born in 1842, she died young, in 1878. It was Laura who listened to and wrote down the tales in the nineteenth century, one of the several intellectuals whose interest in folklore was fostered by the Brothers Grimm collection. Despite the fact that all the family papers were lost in the disastrous 1908 Messina earthquake, the stories which constitute the treasure of the present book (with a few letters) had been previously salvaged and published in Germany by a historian and friend of the Gonzenbachs. Their value had already been established during Laura's life: a young woman who could master German, French, Italian and Sicilian dialect at once, Gonzenbach had attended the school of the German-Swiss Protestant community in Messina, and was well known for her ability as a story teller. Dr. Otto Hartwig, who became minister in Messina in the 1860s, was gathering material for a historico-cultural survey, Aus Sizilien: Kultur und Gesichtsbilder (1867-1869). On his return to Germany, Dr.Hartwig asked Laura to send him a few tales for an “Appendix” to his work. Laura, “a formidable teller of fairy tales”1, and probably endowed with an excellent ear and ability to capture the lines of the oral thread spun by Sicilian story–tellers, at first sent him ten stories. Subsequently however, in 1868, Laura sent to Dr.Hartwig eighty-two tales so that instead of providing the “Appendix” to Hartwig's History , her contribution would be published as an independent two-volume work, Sizilianische Märchen , printed in Leipzig in 1870. The seminal importance of Gonzenbach's work, her remarkable contribution among those early passionate nineteenth-century collectors of Italian folklore, was also pointed out by Italo Calvino. In “Le fiabe italiane” (1956) he reminded us of the early work of those German enthusiasts -- among them Widter and Wolf in Venice, Herman Knust in Leghorn, and notably Laura Gonzenbach in Sicily-- whose passion proved infectious to a young generation of Italian scholars who followed in their footsteps as collectors of “novelline” or self-styled, according to Pitré, as “demopsychologists”: De Gubernatis in the Siena region, Vittorio Imbriani in Florence, Comparetti in Pisa and Giuseppe Pitré in Sicily.2 After having sketched the events which relate to the publication of Gonzenbach's stories, Zipes tackles the central problem connected with the literary fairy-tale, that is to say, the passages intervening between orality and literacy, between the voices of the women met by Laura, and the actual written version of a story, made by a young literate woman who was familiar with the German literary tales and the stories collected and edited by the Brothers Grimm. Knowing, as we do, that she could speak and understand Sicilian dialect, but that the stories were immediately translated into German by Gonzenbach herself, and that some ulterior stylistic changes were made at the prompting of Hartwig and his friend Reinhold Köhler3, how close to the Sicilian oral tradition are these stories? Zipes infers that “one cannot say that her tales are ‘authentic' folk tales”, yet he makes a point of maintaining that “Gonzenbach remained faithful to the ideological perspective of women from the lower class, whose struggle… is a major theme in the tales.”4 Not casually indeed one can mention the names of those women, still worth recalling: they were Lucia, Cicca Crialesi, Nunzia Giuffridi, Bastiana, Antonia Centorrino, Elisabetta and Concetta Martinotti, Francesca Rusullo, Peppina Guglielmo, Caterina Certo. Only one male story-teller is remembered, Alessandro Grasso. Not only these women's viewpoint is kept by Gonzenbach in her rendering of the fairy-tales: we are told by Calvino that on the title page of her collection, there were the portraits of two story-tellers, Caterina Certo, from San Pietro Monforte (Messina) and Francesca (Cicca) Crialese from the Borgo in Catania. Both had been portrayed wearing the costume of their village.5 It becomes evident that in her role as a story-teller Gonzenbach did intentionally preserve, despite the literay bent of her Hochdeutsch , a marked gendered viewpoint. This is the viewpoint of the protagonists of the majority of the stories. They are “the youngest daughter”, “the youngest sister”, “the clever maiden”, “the sister”, whether they be called Maruzzedda, Innocenta, Angiola, Sabedda, Maria, Sorfarina or Zafarana. All these young women, with a few exceptions, are made to act in difficult situations, in which their honesty and cleverness, their ability to handle adverse conditions with quick, skillful strategies which defy their opponants, eventually find the recompense of marriage, wealth, status. Despite the fact that these stories, as remarked by Salvatore Salomone- Marino, relate “…of ancient times, tales of sorcerers and Queens”,6 formulaic refrains at the end of each story (“and we are left without a cent”) bring the attention back to the stark reality of the story-teller, a Sicilian peasant whose bread is scant, food and water very scarce, rents due to the local baron too high, and whose life is generally hard, hardest indeed when facing old age. These storytellers do not allow the fairy-tale to trespass from its magic domain into their own history: and perhaps for this reason the protagonist is often a lower-class peasant who can cheat the lord, a clever farmer whose witty answers please the king; a scoundrel of picaresque vocation who can make the best of very modest means. Religion often appears in conjunction with wizardry; a rooster wants to become Pope, but there is also “A Pious Young Man Who Went to Rome” and discovered that the devil was the cook in the monastery; harbours and castles and forests are there, but also merchants with their ships and their money; cisterns where somebody gets thrown in; ugly daughters cut into pieces, salted in barrels as tuna fish. Words are exchanged, kept, broken; they are made into spells, prayers, curses. Women, and perhaps this is the most unique trait of these tales, are often the protagonists of stories in which they have to leave their home, and brutal parents, in order not to be treated like slaves: their stories, according to Zipes, are “emancipatory tales”7, especially when their behaviour is compared with the passivity which often characterizes Grimm's heroines. In this aspect, one may detect the respect Laura Gonzenbach shows for her narrator, her ideological perspective, the gendered viewpoint; and maybe also detect the enchantment that voices from the land “wo die Zitronen blumen” had for a young Swiss woman and for the German scholarly tradition around her. References 1 Jack Zipes, “Laura Gonzenbach's Buried Treasure”, in The Robber with a Witch's Head. More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenback. Translated and Edited by Jack Zipes, New York and London, Routledge, 2004, pp.xi-xxxii. 2 Italo Calvino, “Le fiabe italiane” [1956], in Sulla fiaba . Milano, Mondadori, 2004, pp. 31-78. 3 A well-known scholar on internation folklore (1830-1892), he contributed notes to the original edition of Gonzenbach's Sicilianische Märchen.Aus dem Volksmund gesammelt (1870). 4 J. Zipes, “Laura Gonzenbach's Buried Treasure”, cit., pp.xv-xvi. 5 I. Calvino, “Le fiabe italiane”, cit., p.49. 6 S. Salomone-Marino, a contemporary of Pitré, was the author of Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants . In J. Zipes, “Laura Gonzenbach's Buried Treasure”, cit., p.xvii 7 Ibidem , p.xxiv. Francesca Orestano |