Pinocchio
By Carlo Collodi
Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
Introduction by Umberto Eco



Though one of the best-known books in the world, Pinocchio at the same time remains unknown—certainly in America, where it is linked in many minds to the Walt Disney movie that bears little relation to Carlo Collodi's splendid original. That story—improvised on a weekly basis over the course of two years for publication in a newspaper—is about, of course, a puppet who succeeds after many trials and tribulations in becoming a "real" boy, and is hardly the sentimental and morally improving tale it has been taken for. To the contrary, Pinocchio is one of the great subversives of the written page (you might compare him to his close contemporary Huck Finn), a madcap genius, hurtled along at the pleasure and mercy of his desires. It is his unabashedness, his unwillingness to give up on anything he wants, that drives him on and delights us. And Pinocchio the book, like Pinocchio the character, is one of the great inventions of world literature, a sublime anomaly, merging the traditions of the picaresque, of the commedia dell'arte, and of the fairy tale into a singular book that is at once adventure, comedy, and irreducible conundrum, one that anticipates the surrealism and magical realism that when it was written still lay far in the future. Thronged with memorable characters—the Blue Fairy, the Fox and the Dog, and Fire Eater—and composed with the fluid but inevitable logic of a dream, Pinocchio is a masterpiece of satire, fantasy, and sheer wonder that is endlessly absorbing, amusing, and surprising: essential equipment for life.

In this new translation by Geoffrey Brock, the prizewinning translator of Cesare Pavese and Umberto Eco, Pinocchio finally has an English rendering worthy of the inspired original.

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I am fighting with the original for something like 2 moths I don't know italian well enough (yet ) to finish it and feel the real pleasure of reading... I guess it's available for free at Gutenberg.org

I am surprised that it is so unknown in certain parts of the world. I am so used to the tale, both reading it as a young girl to reading it for myown daughter and that of younger children at school that I forget not everyone has had the pleasure of the fable yet.

As we all know but find it oh so hard to do at times, practice makes perfect Durga. Keep on trying, it will one day dawn upon you that you are half way through a book before you realize it's in Italian and previously you have struggled It will come to you in it's own good time.

The Disney movie is very cute, but the real story is even better. I think it's a "must read" for kids, or for Mom or Dad to read aloud.