From the Baroque to the Postmodern: Notes on a Translation from Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales

This contribution offers one of Giambattista Basile's most suggestive, scintillating, and disturbing tales--"The Old Woman Who Was Skinned"--in full translation. The translation is accompnaied by a commentary in two sets of footnotes. One set of notes explores how Basile revisits fairy-tale form and content, and how his highly original rhetorical strategies become an integral part of this process. These notes also investigate affinities between Basile's aesthetic sensibility and those of our own--postmodern--time, and reflect briefly on the challenges in translating such a text. A second set of notes offers information on social, historical, cultural, and politicals aspects of everyday life in seventeenth-century Naples.