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Transformation in the Verbal Art of Clementina Todesco carole brown knuth 1986 The volume upon which the present discussion is focused comes to us as part of the Wayne State University Folklore Archive Study Series. Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, authors of Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman,1 have centered their study on folk artist Clementina Todesco and have effectively redeemed from oblivion the tales and talent of this heretofore unknown emigrant from the village of Faller in the Veneto. Who was Clementina Todesco, and how did this unusual book come to be written about her? The volume had an interesting genesis. In 1941, a young coed studying folklore at Wayne University in Detroit embarked on an ambitious project. Encouraged by her professor, Emelyn Gardner, and armed with memories of how her childhood had been enriched by the tales told to her by her mother, Bruna Todesco set out to collect material from the vast repertoire of her mother, Clementina: When she returned in the evening from classes at Wayne University, she sat by Clementina in the kitchen as she prepared dinner or washed dishes and wrote down word for word what Clementina recounted to her in the native dialect of Faller. Then Bruna would translate the tales into English, frequently checking with her mother for accuracy. In the final stage of her project, Bruna refined the oral transcriptions, making stylistic changes and additions which transformed the natural cadences and tones of the folk artist into something more closely resembling a literary text.2 When complete, the entire collection was deposited in the Wayne Folklore Archive. Bruna nurtured the dream of someday seeing in print, as a tribute to her mother’s folk art, the material which had been so meticulously garnered . With the untimely death of Bruna Todesco Baroni in 1961 at the 159 160 Carole Brown Knuth age of thirty-nine, the project, which had already lain so many years in the university archive, was all but forgotten. In 1974, when the Todesco papers were rediscovered, their unique value was at last defined: The documents formed the first ethnographic study of a storyteller from northern Italy. It was at this stage in the history of the Todesco collection that Italian Folktales in America began to evolve toward its present form. Folklorist-ethnographers Mathias and Raspa decided to build their book around a core of twenty-two märchen, legends, and religious tales which constituted Clementina Todesco’s narrative repertoire; these texts are presented intact, exactly as they were recorded by Bruna. As the authors’ research progressed, the scope of their project expanded to include scrutiny of both texts and contexts, tales and teller. Mathias and Raspa sought to place the folktales in their cultural matrix and to follow the transformations which the immigrant experience effected in Clementina’s narrative art. To accomplish their task, the authors spent ten years gathering information from a host of sources. They interviewed the residents of Faller; they consulted collections of tale variants in Italy; they tracked down analogues in published and archival materials in Detroit and Rome; and they conducted extensive interviews with Clementina Todesco herself. The results of this thorough research have been fashioned into an enlightening book that acquaints us with one taleteller and her repertoire, tracks her personal odyssey from a rural Italian village to three urban centers in America, and focuses for us the changing patterns of her art over the course of a lifetime. Clementina Todesco was born in 1903 in Faller, a remote Alpine village characterized by an extremely rich oral narrative tradition. Within the Fallerese way of life, the stable provided the setting for many of the work and social activities of both family and community. Villagers would gather in the evenings in the stables, where men might repair tools and women could do their spinning or embroidery. In such an atmosphere of shared labor, storytelling was a natural source of entertainment. As Mathias and Raspa point out, villagers ‘‘referred to the gatherings in the stables as the filo, from filare (to spin wool or hemp)’’ and the stables ‘‘also provided the framework for artistic expression’’—the tales spun by local raconteurs.3 Such was the tradition of the filo into which Clementina Todesco was born. Clementina recalled two very different Fallerese storytellers, one from her childhood and one she knew as a young adult, who greatly influenced her tale-telling style and provided the building...

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