Classics corner: Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Classics corner: Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Geoffrey Brocks's new translation of Pinocchio is a delight and should rescue the puppet from its saccharine Disney rendition, writes Joy Lo Dico

Geoffrey Brocks's new translation of Pinocchio is a delight and should rescue the puppet from its saccharine Disney rendition. With crystal prose, tickling details and grotesque touches, this is much more than the story of a nose which grows when its owner tells a lie - something that only happens twice.

First appearing in an Italian children's magazine in 1881, Pinocchio was not just a puppet creation, but a symbol of a newly unified Italian nation. Carved out of a pine log, he became the vehicle for a morality tale about how a child made of base material can be transformed into a real boy, a hard-working and respectful son of family and country.

Carlo Collodi was a satirist with a reputation for indolence, womanising and gambling - hardly a model of morality - and he tired of Pinocchio after 15 chapters and left him hanging dead from a tree. But the nation had fallen for the errant marionette and so Collodi sent Pinocchio back into the land of Tuscan folklore, to encounter serpents, fairies, talking beavers and the belly of a shark, and rattled out another 21 chapters.

Conscience, in the form of the talking cricket, often tries to intercede, and the fairy with the sky-blue hair forgives him over and again, but within little wooden Pinocchio is a very human urge to stray towards hedonism.

Eventually, he does submit, learns to read and write and takes up a trade. He is redeemed and his reward is being turned from wood to flesh. However, after such a gambol through the receding folk lands of Tuscany, the new reality does seem a little drab.

Joy Lo Dico

The GuardianTramp

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