The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet

Sociopath on a String

The Adventures of Pinocchio , which Carlo Collodi first published, in serialized form, in 1881, has spawned hundreds of translations — many of them in appropriately wooden prose — and countless versions for the theater and the screen. In America, at least, most of these have long since been eclipsed by Walt Disney's song-and-dance extravaganza. And indeed, with its hummable score and ominous underpinnings, that 1940 production does stand head and shoulders above much of the Disney canon, in comparison with which it resembles Crime and Punishment. Still, what about the original? Steerforth has now published an excellent new translation of Collodi's text by Nancy Canepa, and readers who know only the Disney version will find that although the moral of the story is the same, the atmosphere is darker and more dangerous. This is no sermon but a bad, sad, tantalizing dream, albeit one with a happy ending.

Some of the differences are merely cosmetic. In the Disney film, for example, Geppetto's cottage is so crammed with toys, clocks, and figurines that it looks like an outpost of FAO Schwarz. Here the old wood-carver lives in a rural hovel, with "a battered chair, a dilapidated bed, and a broken-down little table." More to the point, the puppet himself is something of a sociopath. Encountering the Talking Cricket for the first time, he responds rudely to his little companion's philosophizing: "Shut up, you nasty, bad-luck Cricket!" Then he seizes a wooden hammer from his father's workbench and squashes his interlocutor like, well, a bug. Nor does the mayhem end there. As the translator points out in her introduction, the original serialization concluded with Pinocchio's being hanged from an oak tree. Only a storm of protest from Collodi's readers, most of them still in short pants, prompted the author to write the second, more uplifting half of his tale.

All of this may suggest a collision of Mother Goose with Quentin Tarantino. But the text boasts a good many other, nonviolent charms. Like the very best fabulists, Collodi is slightly skeptical about human goodness even as he's promoting it, which explains his satirical take on the marionette theater: "The very attentive audience was nearly dying of laughter as it listened to the squabbling between the two puppets, who were gesticulating and insulting each other in every way possible and so realistically that they might have been two rational creatures, two people of this world." And from time to time his high-stepping narrative is marked by moments of real poetry. (When the seemingly dead puppet bursts into tears, the melancholic Owl can only declare, "In my opinion, when the dead cry, it is a sign that they are sorry to be dying.") Luckily there's no need to choose between Disney's version of the tale and Collodi's: we can have both. But if such a choice were necessary, I suppose I'd opt for the original — by, as it were, a nose.

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