Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen before, take an earlier superb work of scholarship or translation and basically save it from obscurity by adding it to the Classics lineup. In our case today, the name of that obscurity would be Wayne State University Press, which in 2007 originally published Nancy Canepa’s translation of Giambattista Basile’s 1634 posthumous masterpiece, Lo cunto de li cunti, The Tale of Tales. That annotated translation now becomes one of the newest Penguin Classics, where it stands a greater chance of reaching the broad audience it deserves.

Basile spent all of his adult life as a Neapolitan freelancer, writing whatever the great or the powerful in the early years of the 17^th century wanted to see from his pen, and the whole while he was collecting folk tales and legends, these “entertainments for little ones,” and writing them up in his tangy Naples dialect. Canepa does far more than any previous English-language translation to capture the lilt and raucous earthiness of that dialect – and she quickly dispels the notion that these stories were ever really intended for children:

That The Tale of Tales begs a sophisticated audience is quite apparent from the language in which it is written. Hyperbolic description, long-winded accolades, flamboyant metaphor, bloated word lists, endless strings of insults, and deformative citations of the most diverse authors and traditions can at times overshadow the bare storyline to the point of rendering it almost an afterthought. The way the tales are narrated is just as spectacular as what is narrated therein; episodes are memorable as much for how they are drawn as for the events they evoke.

In these pages, readers get early and vivid versions of such folk tale fixtures as Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, as well as dozens of far less familiar – and more disturbing – stories, all told with gruesome, faux-pious relish and a real sense of the horrifying in narrative form. And all of Basile’s many digressions into obscurity are chased down and patiently annotated, like:

Anything immersed in the waters of the Sarno River, it was said, would turn to stone; can weeds were thought to have dangerous properties; sparrow feces was believed to cause blindness (as happened to Tobit in the Book of Tobit 2.17)

Or:

The “ash cloth” (cennerale) was used to cover laundry basins in order to contain the ash therein (which was used as a detergent); lye is also a common detergent.

I confess, I’d only read about but never read The Tale of Tales before I received this satisfyingly plump Penguin volume, and although I’ve never been a big fan of folk tales just in general, this collection kept me entertained from start to finish – mainly, I suspect, because our hard-working author was often just making stuff up and calling it ethnography (and as far as ethnography goes, it’s oddly comforting to see how little things have changed).