Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman

Foreword by Roger D. Abrahams

Foreword Italian Folktales in America: a modest title for a truly unusual work. The reader will not find here just another collection of Europeanstyle wonder tales which happened to be collected in the United States. Rather, this is a record of the repertoire of a remarkably animated and artful storyteller, Clementina Todesco, as recorded by her daughter, Bruna, on the encouragement of her folklore teacher, Emelyn Gardner, and put in an archive some forty-four years ago. Once it was rediscovered, two resourceful folkloristethnographers , Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, were able not only to find the original storyteller and re-interview her but to return to the community in which this gifted tale-teller grew up, and to cobble together an extraordinarily full and interesting set of memories (as well as additional stories) by old-timers there, about the setting and occasions on which these stories were told. Though we must give appropriate credit to Emelyn Gardner for having recognized the quality of the stories brought to her, and the industry and exhaustiveness with which Bruna Todesco carried out her recordings by hand, this work as we presently have it is guided by the vision of Mathias and Raspa, for it is they who gathered all the materials and put them into place. From an ethnographic and folkloristic perspective this is a textbook on how to carry out memory-culture collecting: how to gather lore from those who no longer perform and use such fabrications by having the informants discuss the world that lay behind the lore and to gloss the stories themselves, to talk about the meaning of specific characters and incidents, and to recall what point was being made in telling these tales at this time and F O R E W O R D in this specific setting. The collector-editors are able not only to reconstruct how life was lived in a specific peasant village at a specific time and place but also to explain how the lore of that village might be used as the baseline for an understanding of culture changes as they impact on the lives of specific villagers. And most remarkable, for the reader, the work of the memory is rendered in such a human fashion that both the tales of wonder and the reminiscences of hardships and horrible experiences reinforce each other, making up a mood document that will surprise greatly those who come to this work expecting simply to encounter examples of the northern Italian folktale repertoire. Not just made up of the recorded texts, the book is also built on the reminiscences of that storyteller and of some of her old neighbors in her birthplace, and is a record by two resourceful fieldworkers of what it takes to study memory culture. The result is a work that greatly enriches our understanding of who told (and tells) marchen to whom, why and how they are told, and, perhaps most important, under what conditions. It would be neither fitting nor useful for me to go on at any great length about the implications of this material for the future study of folktales. The texts and the enveloping materials are voiced eloquently by the informants and artfully focused and arranged by the editors. But one dimension of the information and its analysis , where the editors fill us in on the life conditions and, specifically , the village economy in which these stories lived, seems so rich in implications and so suggestive for future study of marchen that I cannot resist making a few remarks adumbrating theirs. I mean "economy" in the larger sense of the process of household management, for this book enables us to see so clearly that tales, in conjunction with other value-laden symbolic activities, may be usefully regarded as part of the expressive budgeting that goes on within traditional scarce-resource communities. That is, they enter both directly and indirectly into the way in which work and responsibilities are assigned and land, labor, and other resources are allocated. The activity of storytelling itself is carried on in the stable, seemingly a mean place, one which hardly seems an appropriate setting for these wonder tales. But in Faller, the town in which these stories were told, the stable was in fact the center of social Foreword activity: as the editors put it, "the stable was like a comfortable family room . . . a free zone [which] functioned to mediate the...