Italian Popular Tales — Part 3: The Shepherd Who Made the King's Daughter Laugh · The Peasant and the Master · The Treasure · The Shepherd · Vineyard I Was and Vineyard I Am · The Parrot · Mr. Attentive · The Story of the Barber
Part Three of the Italy shelf: Italian popular tales, from Italian Popular Tales (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) by Thomas Frederick Crane (1844–1927), Professor of the Romance Languages in Cornell University, who collected these stories from the great Italian collections of his day — above all the Sicilian tales of Giuseppe Pitrè of Palermo, to whom the book is dedicated — and translated them into English himself. Billed by collector and book, as the tales Crane gathered; not a survey of all Italian tradition, and no completeness is claimed. The tales were screened in the order they stand in Crane's book under this shelf's standing rule, and a great many were set aside — every one stands named, with its reason, in the shelf register.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Shepherd Who Made the King's Daughter Laugh — a poor shepherd finds a ring that makes whoever wears it sneeze without stopping, and wins a princess who has not laughed for years; then, from prison, a basket of black and white figs wins back his stolen treasures one by one. The Peasant and the Master — a jest about mice, who cannot eat a poor man's cheese but can eat the points of his master's ploughshares. The Treasure — a story that cannot be finished until ten million million ants have crossed a river one by one in a nutshell boat. The Shepherd — a story that must wait, too, for the sheep to get over the stream. Vineyard I Was and Vineyard I Am — a steward's wife, suspected in silence, answers in a verse, and a king's oath proves her innocent. The Parrot — a viceroy, changed into a parrot, keeps a merchant's daughter from every visitor with the promise of a story, until her father comes home. Mr. Attentive — the story that lasts a long time and is never explained. The Story of the Barber — a nursery trifle, very short indeed.
Chapters:
0:35 Introduction
2:50 The Shepherd Who Made the King's Daughter Laugh
13:17 The Peasant and the Master
14:48 The Treasure
16:09 The Shepherd
16:53 Vineyard I Was and Vineyard I Am
19:22 The Parrot
22:05 Mr. Attentive
23:11 The Story of the Barber
Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) — public domain.
Narrated by Mira. Music: opening and closing theme, "Desert Cello Rhapsody," also heard as a short separator between the stories — the tales themselves are read dry.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
