When I was a little child my mum used to tell me some fairy tales before I slept.
Me and my sister was in the bed, while my mum read the tales at the light of our bedsides lamps. The most of the times I slept before she finished to read the story, because the rhythm of her voice was like a lullaby for me. I did the same with my daughter, the same tales, the same quiet rhythm of the voice, the sensation to do a sort of ritual from generation to generation. It's something magical, but it's also an important thing to do to live the parenthood and, sure, the childhood ^_^
I've always thoughts tales are not "just" tales, but they are also lessons for our life. The tales help us to learn many different things:
1) In every life, in the life of a simple person or of a Princess, there something right and something wrong, something nice and something bad;
2) The beauty sometimes hides a bad soul, the ugly sometimes hide a wonderful soul;
3) If you are a good person, even if something bad can happens to you, there will be an happy ending;
4) sometimes the way to arrive at the happiness is very long, but you have to have patience;
and more other lessons, if you read well!
Since I started to work on some illustrations, I'm focused on tales and I'm reading (again ^_^) them, but in their original version. I don't know if it was the same in other countries, but here in Italy, when I was a child, the tales were published with some parts deleted because they were considered too scary for the little ones. For example, in the tales The little red riding hood (in Italian is "Cappuccetto rosso") the version for us was that, at the end, an hunter save the little girl killing the wolf. In the original tale written by Charles Perrault, at the end the wolf eat the little girl. This "tragic" end was because, as Perrault wrote to the readers
"From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers.
..."
Yes, my own, personal thought is that it's better to teach to our children to pay attention, because in the world there are many nice people, but also some very bad people!
Tales help us to teach some important things to our children, in a way that they can understand. It's another way to take care of them.
This week I bought this book, it's the last italian translation of the original version of the tales of Charles Perrault. I bought it because I personally know the translators who worked on it ( Giuseppe Girimonti Greco and Ezio Sinigaglia) and they said to me that it's really a translation of the original tales and I wanted to read the original version because I want to work on some paintings/illustrations based on them. For example, thanks to this, I "discovered" that in the Slleepy Beauty (In Italian is "La bella addormentata") there is also an ogress who want to eat the son and the daughter of the Sleepy Beauty!
The next book that I'll buy it will be the original version of the tales of Grimm brothers. I know they are more "disturbing" than others, but I want to know the real version of these tales that the writer collected for us from the voices of the old Europe.
Really intrigued!
After the tales, it's really time to go to bed!
Night night
Silvia
