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ACKNOWLEDGMEN TS This translation has been an idea since I began to study Basile’s work in the 1980s. By the time my critical study of The Tale of Tales appeared in 1999 (From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s “Lo cunto de li cunti” and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale), interest in Basile was on the rise, and dedicating myself full time to translating Lo cunto became an imperative . As happens with most projects of this sort, it has been a longer journey than expected. But it has also been an exciting and tremendously satisfying one. In many ways, my reading of Basile has culminated during the last five or six years, for there is no activity like translation to compel one to consider more deeply the linguistic and cultural strata present in every single word of a text. I am most grateful for the various forms of assistance that have helped bring the translation to its happy conclusion. These included a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship (1999) and a Dartmouth College Senior Faculty Fellowship (2003), both of which awarded me precious time to devote to the translation in its early and later stages, and the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund of the French and Italian Department at Dartmouth, which liberally subsidized some of the costs associated with preparing the manuscript for publication. I also benefited enormously from participation in a 2002 conference dedicated to Basile at the University of Zurich and organized by Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli; the many conversations about Basile with scholars from a wide range of disciplines were enriching and inspiring. As always, Wayne State University Press has been marvelously amenable to work with, and I thank the various people there who have patiently supported me from beginning to end, in particular the past and present directors , Arthur Evans and Jane Hoehner, editors Kathy Wildfong and Annie Martin, and Don Haase, editor of the WSUP fairy-tale series. Thanks also to Jack Zipes for a friendship and steady faith in my work that go back to the early Basile days, as well as for his wise counsel and the stupendous example he sets for all fairy-tale scholars. Carmelo, Gaia, and Camilla have co-inhabited this project day in and day out: Carmelo as generous interlocutor on critical, linguistic, and artistic matters; Gaia as acute but fresh reader and cultivator of both the fairy tale xxix and the joys of language; and Camilla, born mid-project, as bearer in her own spirit of the frank truths enveloped in the fairy tale and its characters. Without the passion and force of our own daily narratives the impetus to bring Basile’s tales to a wider audience would not have been. Acknowledgments xxx ...

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