When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translations that I read as a child - also easily available at the time) along with the stories by the Brothers Grimm.
As one does these days, I asked an LLM to help me detect if I had a bowdlerized version, and while I'm sure the stories were already softened in translation, they're still far more 'rowdy' than stories you can easily find today. In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
I wonder if the changing narrative structure of modern stories is a result of our improved civilization. In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death and destruction probably feels out of place. Nonetheless, I sometimes am saddened when I read people talk about stories in media and how they 'glorify' bad behaviour or 'send the wrong message'. A thing I really treasure from childhood is the breadth of storytelling: not all stories were an Aesop's fable.
But perhaps that's not true. I suspect the truth is that with lowered barriers to publishing there are just more stories told. The ones from the past that we know are twice selected: once for cultural value, and once because the writer himself was selected. Today, anyone can write, so it's the same problem as we encounter when we look at personal websites today. Sampled randomly in 2004 you would get interesting ones easily. Today, that is not so easy.
This is most easily visible with foreign media. The Chinese stories I've read are alien and strange and interesting; and the Japanese ones take unexpected turns. But they're going through that selection process as well. So it's probably just a boring selection effect.
Still, I've got the old Grimms. I'm keeping that one as an heirloom.
I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories.
At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex, nor kisses -- not because of "romantic" self-denial, as we would think -- but just because they were praying. They were busy saving their souls before the judgement day. In the Enlightment age, people stopped understanding this, and replaced it with purely romantic motivation.
The other stories, that villagers told their kids, were probably to scare them, about the dangerous world around. The characters were motivated purely by the need to survive, and minding their own business, no high moral goal. In XIX century, with steam locomotives and boats, people could travel to unthinkable places, and many moved to cities, so you couldn't scare kids with a witch or a werewolf living in that forest beyond that lastmost house. So, storytellers invented the adventure genre. So, instead of trying to survive, characters go far away on purpose, where they need to fight to survive. Or there are some unknown human villains, who the good character has to fight.
In late XX century, this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable, so stories start breaking this pattern, often demonstratively: here's a monster, ugly and huge, the little boy is scared of him, but suddenly the monster turns out nice, and loves dancing walzer or makes sweet pancakes, and they become friends. Soviet cartoons in the 80s were 100% postmodernist, whilst what I saw of the American ones, were still like 80% modernist -- the bad guys, danger, the righteous main character.
> In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death
Two hot-take theories to add onto the pile:
1. In a traveling oral tradition, the teller doesn't want to memorize lots of different versions known in different towns or regions, and they also don't want people to get angry that your version doesn't have some key things from how they remember it. This leads to compromises that don't quite fit together.
2. If you can only store one version, you've got to decide between "fun" versus "faithfully honors the memory of our elders and how they told it", and maybe the latter wins. However with the printing press etc., now there's room to do a bit of both, and the fun version sells better.
The place I come from in eastern Europe has tons of similar dark folk tales for kids. Every single one had something properly dark. Brothers killing each other (or kids their parents, or reverse), canibalism, envy and greed getting the absolutely worst out of people. Since its historically very poor region the hero often prevails, but bad unfair shit happens left and right in between. Grimms were definitely not darker in comparison, in contrary, but their stories had more depth.
When encountering cca modern western kids tales (so not grimm for example), it was shocking how over-sweetened and dumbed down they were, emshittification in Disney style, but everywhere. Shallow naive predictable stories.
It didnt make us bunch of psychos, in contrary ot felt very enriching compared to shalow monotone sanitized storytelling western kids had access to.
Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
It's not entirely correct that the government "chose Tuscan" as the language to push. The literary tradition was already rooted into a vulgata that happened to be mostly similar to the languages spoken in the areas between Roma and Firenze - unsurprisingly so, considering they had traditionally been the wealthiest parts of the country for centuries. In this context of broad intellectual agreement on the fundamentals, Alessandro Manzoni then published a few works that explicitly tried to formalize the language, sprinkling northern inflections on top of the traditional core. These works were later used as the model by authorities, who forced them on the national curriculum.
Looks like probably not Claude based on their privacy/terms:
>AI-powered feedback
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Lies of P is a fantastic video game (soulslike) that felt to me like a dark take on the Pinocchio story at first, but now maybe seems more in line with the original material. A lot of the references carry through.
I re-read Pinocchio with my (bilingual) kids a couple years ago, and I think this article is spot on for some things: it is a bit more weird then I remembered, the Italian reads almost contemporary (except for a few turn of phrases and odd terms), and it has a strong pacing.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.
It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children.
Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries.
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities.
They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
I dont think you are correct. In many parts of Europe, dark folk tales told kids from early age were the norm till very recently. I read and heard such, and they were brutal.
Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.
I was born in the second half of the 20th century, I read Pinocchio as a child and the Grimm brothers and more. Those were the books for children. Did they damage us compared to kids of 50 years later? I can't tell. Probably nobody can tell until at least next century.
I’ve never seen the Disney film. As a child I hated that story. My own children have no love for it either. If I was to guess, I’d say that there isn’t much of a character in that story to get behind and to empathize with as a child. Pinocchio is a selfish little shit. I can’t like him. As an adult I feel for his father’s desperation but even then I could never understand the story’s popularity appeal.
Interesting read, wouldn't have thought this of Pinocchio. Sadly, when I was learning Italian, I was reading more sophisticated things like Il Fu Mattia Pascal, with quite superficial understanding.
The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
An easy method these days is to get any frontier AI model to translate it for you.
I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.
The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
"(the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering)"
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
There are cultural differences here though. Brüder Grimm aren’t quite as toned down in Germany as we see in US stories being Disney-fied.
The U.S. was born out of Puritanism. That prudishness and absolutism continues to echo through into its modern culture. Most people don’t even realize it does.
After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.
It's funny, because I think that to certain other cultures, for example the Japanese, Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) are Lovecraftian horror. Shinto isn't really a religion in the sense you or I know it, it's more of an animistic set of practices related to daily life. The kami are very much real to the Shintoist mind; the big ones, like Amaterasu, don't have much of a direct interest in your life, and the little ones are more like neighbors. You have to pay them their due respect, and they could grant you boons if you made them the right offerings. OK, now tell this person that there is only one all-powerful god who lives in the sky, that he is keeping meticulous track of everything you do, and that he will doom you to eternal torment if you do not meet his threshold for good behavior, or even fail to properly believe in him. (Japanese have a concept of hell, borrowed from Buddhism, but it's much more a place of repaying karmic debt than of eternal suffering. Japanese hell is time-boxed.)
To me there is a reason why when Japanese media invokes Judeo-Christian themes, it's with a sense of grandiosity and terror. Think all of Evangelion. Or how in a JRPG, any time there's a "pope" character, he's the bad guy (or at least the penultimate boss just before God himself).
The whole website appears to be AI generated, including the core value proposition: books rewritten at the user's reading level (for language learning).
It's so creepy that my kids didn't want to hear it (being read to them) with all the burning and stuff. However they also didn't want to listen to the classic fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen which are super creepy as well. Just think of burning witches or some Anderson fairy tale I remember where one guy is put into a bag and thrown into the river. It's not that I deliberately wanted to read the most creepy stories to them but there's a creepy undertone to even the most famous and "harmless" ones, think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and so on.
> Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair
He may have run out of ideas and tried to fill in a story with a dark mood in mind (speculation). The thing is that this is not that uncommon in many fantasy novels. Anyone remembers "The Color of Her Panties" by Piers Anthony? I read it, it is very cheesy (also silly, in particular when you as target audience are, say, 10 years old or something like that) but not necessarily mega-creepy either. But then you also begin to wonder ... is it just "good fun" to pick such a title? But then it is not the only instance and you begin to find more oddities. Naturally this depends on the author; some authors never run into such issues, others run into such issues.
I only saw the Pinocchio cartoon, that anime-style animation, on TV. That version was harmless from what I remember. Never read the books, but I am not so surprised about books being darker. Anyone knows the Grimm brothers? They lived from 1785–1863 and 1786–1859 respectively. I clearly remember that some of those drawings were really dark. It's a bit like dark horror stories if you look at it today - here is a summary:
It starts with "There are some fairy tales that are just not meant for kids.".
Some of the pictures by Grimm or illustrators are quite scary, such as the
bleeding or weeping out of eyes ... is gross. Possibly these were more for adults, or adults who did not care, such as Pinocchio - perhaps. A puppet that has a growing body part ... that in itself is already super-weird. Are we certain the nose was meant? Is Pinocchio ... a prison item???
When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translations that I read as a child - also easily available at the time) along with the stories by the Brothers Grimm.
As one does these days, I asked an LLM to help me detect if I had a bowdlerized version, and while I'm sure the stories were already softened in translation, they're still far more 'rowdy' than stories you can easily find today. In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
I wonder if the changing narrative structure of modern stories is a result of our improved civilization. In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death and destruction probably feels out of place. Nonetheless, I sometimes am saddened when I read people talk about stories in media and how they 'glorify' bad behaviour or 'send the wrong message'. A thing I really treasure from childhood is the breadth of storytelling: not all stories were an Aesop's fable.
But perhaps that's not true. I suspect the truth is that with lowered barriers to publishing there are just more stories told. The ones from the past that we know are twice selected: once for cultural value, and once because the writer himself was selected. Today, anyone can write, so it's the same problem as we encounter when we look at personal websites today. Sampled randomly in 2004 you would get interesting ones easily. Today, that is not so easy.
This is most easily visible with foreign media. The Chinese stories I've read are alien and strange and interesting; and the Japanese ones take unexpected turns. But they're going through that selection process as well. So it's probably just a boring selection effect.
Still, I've got the old Grimms. I'm keeping that one as an heirloom.
I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories.
At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex, nor kisses -- not because of "romantic" self-denial, as we would think -- but just because they were praying. They were busy saving their souls before the judgement day. In the Enlightment age, people stopped understanding this, and replaced it with purely romantic motivation.
The other stories, that villagers told their kids, were probably to scare them, about the dangerous world around. The characters were motivated purely by the need to survive, and minding their own business, no high moral goal. In XIX century, with steam locomotives and boats, people could travel to unthinkable places, and many moved to cities, so you couldn't scare kids with a witch or a werewolf living in that forest beyond that lastmost house. So, storytellers invented the adventure genre. So, instead of trying to survive, characters go far away on purpose, where they need to fight to survive. Or there are some unknown human villains, who the good character has to fight.
In late XX century, this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable, so stories start breaking this pattern, often demonstratively: here's a monster, ugly and huge, the little boy is scared of him, but suddenly the monster turns out nice, and loves dancing walzer or makes sweet pancakes, and they become friends. Soviet cartoons in the 80s were 100% postmodernist, whilst what I saw of the American ones, were still like 80% modernist -- the bad guys, danger, the righteous main character.
> In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death
Two hot-take theories to add onto the pile:
1. In a traveling oral tradition, the teller doesn't want to memorize lots of different versions known in different towns or regions, and they also don't want people to get angry that your version doesn't have some key things from how they remember it. This leads to compromises that don't quite fit together.
2. If you can only store one version, you've got to decide between "fun" versus "faithfully honors the memory of our elders and how they told it", and maybe the latter wins. However with the printing press etc., now there's room to do a bit of both, and the fun version sells better.
The place I come from in eastern Europe has tons of similar dark folk tales for kids. Every single one had something properly dark. Brothers killing each other (or kids their parents, or reverse), canibalism, envy and greed getting the absolutely worst out of people. Since its historically very poor region the hero often prevails, but bad unfair shit happens left and right in between. Grimms were definitely not darker in comparison, in contrary, but their stories had more depth.
When encountering cca modern western kids tales (so not grimm for example), it was shocking how over-sweetened and dumbed down they were, emshittification in Disney style, but everywhere. Shallow naive predictable stories.
It didnt make us bunch of psychos, in contrary ot felt very enriching compared to shalow monotone sanitized storytelling western kids had access to.
Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
It's not entirely correct that the government "chose Tuscan" as the language to push. The literary tradition was already rooted into a vulgata that happened to be mostly similar to the languages spoken in the areas between Roma and Firenze - unsurprisingly so, considering they had traditionally been the wealthiest parts of the country for centuries. In this context of broad intellectual agreement on the fundamentals, Alessandro Manzoni then published a few works that explicitly tried to formalize the language, sprinkling northern inflections on top of the traditional core. These works were later used as the model by authorities, who forced them on the national curriculum.
Yes, but Claude (cleverly disguised as "storica.club") does not agree with the facts, and would rather show you a story with virality potential.
This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".
What are the Claude "indications"?
Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.
Looks like probably not Claude based on their privacy/terms:
>AI-powered feedback
>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.
It does look LLM-generated though.
Lies of P is a fantastic video game (soulslike) that felt to me like a dark take on the Pinocchio story at first, but now maybe seems more in line with the original material. A lot of the references carry through.
I re-read Pinocchio with my (bilingual) kids a couple years ago, and I think this article is spot on for some things: it is a bit more weird then I remembered, the Italian reads almost contemporary (except for a few turn of phrases and odd terms), and it has a strong pacing.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.
It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children. Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries.
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.
Pinocchio was published in 1–2-page instalments in “Giornale per i bambini”, a magazine for children.
I dont think you are correct. In many parts of Europe, dark folk tales told kids from early age were the norm till very recently. I read and heard such, and they were brutal.
Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.
I certainly read those stories too to my kids.
I was born in the second half of the 20th century, I read Pinocchio as a child and the Grimm brothers and more. Those were the books for children. Did they damage us compared to kids of 50 years later? I can't tell. Probably nobody can tell until at least next century.
I’ve never seen the Disney film. As a child I hated that story. My own children have no love for it either. If I was to guess, I’d say that there isn’t much of a character in that story to get behind and to empathize with as a child. Pinocchio is a selfish little shit. I can’t like him. As an adult I feel for his father’s desperation but even then I could never understand the story’s popularity appeal.
Interesting read, wouldn't have thought this of Pinocchio. Sadly, when I was learning Italian, I was reading more sophisticated things like Il Fu Mattia Pascal, with quite superficial understanding.
The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
> the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English
Which Penguin edition is this?
Probably [1], from 2025.
[1]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/31374/pinocchio-by-collodi-c...
Sad I can't read Italian. I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like.
An easy method these days is to get any frontier AI model to translate it for you.
I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.
Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software?
And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?
The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
But Grimms tales and 1001 night were not originally childrens stories. They were entertainment for adults.
Even the Disney Pinocchio movie is about telling kids to obey their parents, in ways that 2000s Disney movies probably wouldn't do.
"(the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering)"
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
There are cultural differences here though. Brüder Grimm aren’t quite as toned down in Germany as we see in US stories being Disney-fied.
The U.S. was born out of Puritanism. That prudishness and absolutism continues to echo through into its modern culture. Most people don’t even realize it does.
After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.
It's funny, because I think that to certain other cultures, for example the Japanese, Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) are Lovecraftian horror. Shinto isn't really a religion in the sense you or I know it, it's more of an animistic set of practices related to daily life. The kami are very much real to the Shintoist mind; the big ones, like Amaterasu, don't have much of a direct interest in your life, and the little ones are more like neighbors. You have to pay them their due respect, and they could grant you boons if you made them the right offerings. OK, now tell this person that there is only one all-powerful god who lives in the sky, that he is keeping meticulous track of everything you do, and that he will doom you to eternal torment if you do not meet his threshold for good behavior, or even fail to properly believe in him. (Japanese have a concept of hell, borrowed from Buddhism, but it's much more a place of repaying karmic debt than of eternal suffering. Japanese hell is time-boxed.)
To me there is a reason why when Japanese media invokes Judeo-Christian themes, it's with a sense of grandiosity and terror. Think all of Evangelion. Or how in a JRPG, any time there's a "pope" character, he's the bad guy (or at least the penultimate boss just before God himself).
>That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
Could you elaborate on this?
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
Yes. And we gave children Disney and television or Netflix, with only violence, with, when existing, a dumbed down plot.
if you're interested on liberliber[1] you can find some of Collodi's works in epub and audiobook formats (in italian)
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Are you Claude?
The whole website appears to be AI generated, including the core value proposition: books rewritten at the user's reading level (for language learning).
Yep, my thoughts exactly. This comment should be at the top.
The poster should disclose it is AI...
It's so creepy that my kids didn't want to hear it (being read to them) with all the burning and stuff. However they also didn't want to listen to the classic fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen which are super creepy as well. Just think of burning witches or some Anderson fairy tale I remember where one guy is put into a bag and thrown into the river. It's not that I deliberately wanted to read the most creepy stories to them but there's a creepy undertone to even the most famous and "harmless" ones, think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and so on.
It is weird even in the current version. Totally a horror story, not a children's tale.
> Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair
He may have run out of ideas and tried to fill in a story with a dark mood in mind (speculation). The thing is that this is not that uncommon in many fantasy novels. Anyone remembers "The Color of Her Panties" by Piers Anthony? I read it, it is very cheesy (also silly, in particular when you as target audience are, say, 10 years old or something like that) but not necessarily mega-creepy either. But then you also begin to wonder ... is it just "good fun" to pick such a title? But then it is not the only instance and you begin to find more oddities. Naturally this depends on the author; some authors never run into such issues, others run into such issues.
I only saw the Pinocchio cartoon, that anime-style animation, on TV. That version was harmless from what I remember. Never read the books, but I am not so surprised about books being darker. Anyone knows the Grimm brothers? They lived from 1785–1863 and 1786–1859 respectively. I clearly remember that some of those drawings were really dark. It's a bit like dark horror stories if you look at it today - here is a summary:
https://discover.hubpages.com/literature/Grimms-Fairy-Tales-...
It starts with "There are some fairy tales that are just not meant for kids.".
Some of the pictures by Grimm or illustrators are quite scary, such as the bleeding or weeping out of eyes ... is gross. Possibly these were more for adults, or adults who did not care, such as Pinocchio - perhaps. A puppet that has a growing body part ... that in itself is already super-weird. Are we certain the nose was meant? Is Pinocchio ... a prison item???