Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio

I was prompted by Storica’s Pinocchio is weirder than you remember to read Collodi’s Pinocchio (in translation of course).

The book is indeed weirder than I remembered, being familiar with the story only from the Disney film. The Storica article does a decent job briefly showcasing the story’s strangeness (Pinocchio casually burns his feet off, squashes the talking cricket we come to know via Disney as Jiminy Crick with a mallet, and narrowly avoids being turned into a donkey-skin drum).

Why is it so strange?

He wrote Pinocchio with the deadpan irony of a man who thought most children’s literature was sentimental rubbish. The donkey-skin drum is meant to land as a joke at the expense of every previous moralising children’s book in Italy. The cricket is a cartoon of every adult who ever lectured a working-class boy on respect. The Land of Toys is a satire of the truancy panic Italian schoolmasters used to drum up. None of the cruelty is gratuitous, exactly. It is dramatised exhaustion with the genre.

Some misc thoughts:

  • Pinocchio at various points reminds me of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, not least in its depiction of “casual cruelty” and one could hardly accuse those of being “sentimental rubbish.” It is not always so obvious to me what is irony in this book.
  • The book is rife with moralizing, and given that the arc ultimately does result in Pinocchio abandoning his naughty ways to become a real boy, I’m not sure we can attribute to Collodi an “exhaustion with the genre” of morality tales for children. On the other hand, since Collodi apparently ended the original series with Pinocchio hanging dead from a tree having learned nothing (which is just about 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through the final full version), perhaps the character development/redemption arc was only added as a compromise between Collodi’s original artistic vision and a desire to capitalize financially on the success of the story.
  • A dreamlike logic and atmosphere pervades the story. When he encounters the marionette show he finds that it is peopled by other talking dolls like himself. They somehow know his name already, which he does not question, though later when he encounters the unscrupulous fox and cat who know his name, he is suspicious.
  • Life in Pinocchio is largely cruel and unpredictable, even meaningless. There is an episode in which a large snake blocks Pinocchio’s passage along a street. The snake laughs when Pinocchio falls into a muddle puddle, laughs so hard that he dies on the spot of a heart attack. This is the last we hear of the snake.
  • Gepetto is arrested and imprisoned early in the book basically just because townspeople say he’s going to punish Pinocchio. Pinocchio himself is later arrested based on no or scant evidence when a schoolmate is knocked unconscious by Pinocchio’s book (thrown by other, even naughtier classmates). One gets the impression that Collodi does not have a high opinion of the Italian police.
  • For most of the book Pinocchio vaccilates unpredicatbly between being stubbornly foolishness and contumacious, and self pity/ recognition that he deserves the consequences and suffering he earns by ignoring the wisdom others offer him. But he also occasionally displays great bravery and nobility of spirit, e.g. offering himself to be burned in place of one of the other marionettes he has just met, and also later when he tricks the polecats and refuses their temptation, even though this is to the benefit of the farmer who has leashed him up as a replacement guard dog.
  • I am reminded of the distinction I read (somewhere) between American and English children’s literature, which argued that the Americans empasized morals and “lessons learnt” while the Brits emphasized imagination, transformed/fantastical/broadened experience, etc. I can’t entirely recall the source for this, it may have been this 2025 Atlantic article by Colleen Gillard, Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories. In a nuthshell, Gillard’s argument is that British children’s lit is connected to its pagan roots while American kid lit is more realistic and morality driven, essentially stemming from America’s Protestant work ethic and its belief that children are born in sin (in contrast to the pagan belief that children are born naturally good–this part is a bit tendentious). I’m not sure how to situate Pinocchio along that line, it clearly has strong elements of the morality tale but also operates on a completely unrealistic and imaginative plane.

On the edition

The version I have is Puffin Classics, first published in translation in 1944, and translated by E. Harden, with some great illustrations by Gioia Fiammenghi. The Storica article mentions that “Most translations soften the book. Most adaptations cut the donkey-skin drum. Most adults who think they know Pinocchio are remembering Disney.” This edition does NOT exclude the donkey-skin drum, nor does this version online, The Adventures of Pinnochio, trans M A Murray.

Not being able to read or speak any Italian myself, I am in no position to legitimately comment on the quality of either translation, but I won’t let that stop me from doing so illegitimately.

Let us compare, for example, the speech of circus director/manager when Pinocchio has been turned into a donkey.

It begins thus in my edition (trans Harden):

Honourable audience! I am not here to tell you untrue stories about the great difficulties I had to conquer in order to capture and subjugate this mammal, as he was feeding, wild and free, in the mountains and plains of the torrid zone. Observe, I beseech you, the ferocious gleams in his eyes. After every tender means of taming him failed, I was forced to use the last resort, the whip.

Compare this with Murray:

My respectable auditors! I am not here to tell you falsehoods of the great difficulties that I have overcome in understanding and subjugating this mammifer, whilst he was grazing at liberty amongst the mountains in the plains of the torrid zone. I beg you will observe the wild rolling of his eyes. Every means having been tried in vain to tame him, and to accustom him to the life of domestic quadrupeds, I was often forced to have recourse to the convincing argument of the whip.

  • Surely “audience” is a better translation than “auditors”. Was “auditors” more suitable in 1892 (the year Murray’s translation was published) to describe those in attendance at a circus or other performance/spectacle?
  • At first I thought “mammifer” was a joke or an absurd typo but apparently it is an archaic term meaning “mammal”. But “mammal” was coined by Linnaeus in 1758, why would Murray not have chosen this seemingly much more standard term? The word in Italian is “mammifero”.
  • Harden skips the bit about “quadrupedi civili” entirely which Murray dutifully translates as “domestic quadrupeds”. Perhaps we are to take the Collodi as mocking the director’s highfalutin language, which would then perhaps justify the use of “mammifer” as a way to further highlight his pompous speech.