Pinocchio in the World: Visual Translations

Carlo Collodi’s Le avventure di Pinocchio is the most translated Italian book in the world and is probably also the most translated literary work in the world. You can find a description of the history of this book’s success all over the world here: https://www.newitalianbooks.it/it/pinocchio-in-altre-lingue/

The exhibition below, inevitably, provides a very partial view of this history. It does, however, in addition to highlighting how there have been virtually no periods of interruption in the translations of this book since its first translation (into English by Mary Alice Murray, 1892), offer a colourful panorama of the enormous variety of approaches that have been taken to this kaleidoscopic work. Indeed, Pinocchio has been absorbed into all the different countries and languages sometimes as a story for children, sometimes a puppet play, an educational journey, a picaresque tale, a social novel… It is basically impossible to know exactly how many unabridged translations of Pinocchio there are in every language (with many translations coming from intermediary languages rather than Italian), but the number is growing all the time. The commercial success of the many transpositions of this story, which is, at the same time, both archetypical and extremely original – making Pinocchio, in the 140 years since his birth, an intimate figure in the popular imagination of every country – has often resulted in academic reinterpretations, with scholarly introductions and critical analyses, but also linguistic and meta-literary divertissements, such as the versions in classical Latin or Esperanto, and the large number of versions in dialect (and not just Italian dialects), of which we provide a couple of examples – the result of the personal need of translators to engage in and share with readers a confidential channel of appropriation of the text. And while most of these versions have been produced by commercial publishing houses, there are more than a few cases in which the idea came instead from institutional bodies that promote the dissemination of the book because of its emblematic educational value. Nevertheless, the challenge of creating a new version of Pinocchio has not just involved endless numbers of translators of every language in the world, it has also involved hundreds and hundreds of foreign illustrators, who have joined the long line of Italian illustrators, in their desire to create their own personal vision of Collodi’s masterpiece, to be added to new or already publish translations. Indeed, sometimes the success of a translation and an illustration has meant that either the translation or the illustration has been used separately in new editions, in different parts of the world and different periods. From this point of view, the greatest success has, of course, been enjoyed by the great Italian illustrators, both classic early illustrators – Enrico Mazzanti, Carlo Chiostri and Attilio Mussino – and new masters like Roberto Innocenti. All these artists rooted their illustrations in Italy, while also managing to highlight the universality that lies at the very heart of the book. There are also many well-known artists among the foreign illustrators for whom depicting scenes from Le avventure di Pinocchio has been a test and acknowledgement of their artistic skill.

The book covers in this exhibition have been arranged in chronological order (as regards the first edition of a specific translation, even when the cover shown refers to a slightly later edition), and go from country to country and language to language, to try and give an idea – at least for the few periods shown here – of the speed and inexorable nature of Pinocchio’s journey around the world.

Mario Casari, “La Sapienza” University, Rome