Revisiting Non Piangere Cipolla, a Book From My Childhood
This post might be a little more personal and esoteric than most of what I write about here, but I thought this would be a good time to introduce my American English-speaking audience to a foreign language book that was a fairly big part of my childhood experience, as well as to reminisce about said book.
First, a bit of background. I was born in Ticino, Switzerland, where my parents were living. They were both American born, but they happened to be living there at the time, and we would continue to live there until moving back to the United States a month shy of my ninth birthday.
Two things I will say about the experience of growing up in a foreign country: 1.) As inevitably happens with children in that situation, I picked up both English and Italian from a very early age. 2.) I learned about other cultures besides my own, and this was in some ways quite enriching.
As for how I came across Non Piangere Cipolla: as part of a reading assignment in the second grade, we were tasked with picking out a book from the rickety old bookcase in the back of the classroom, and we were then challenged to read the book in a predetermined time frame. One little boy who had the book before me turned it in after finishing it, grumbling that it was “just poems.” I didn’t care which book I picked up, (I just wanted to get the assignment over with,) but I felt competitive towards that kid. “Well, maybe you didn’t like it, but I bet you I’ll like it way more!” (I was that cheeky child that wanted to annoy people all the time, whether by pulling pranks, or by showing off, or whatever else have you. If it was going to get me attention, whether positive or negative, I was all in!)
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Now on to the book itself: it was written by Roberto Piumini, an Italian children’s author, (born in 1947,) who’s had a few books translated into English. Notably The Saint and the Circus (1991), The Knot in the Tracks (1994), and Glowrushes (1987). Chances are that the average American hasn’t heard of him, but he was definitely in my top five authors growing up, and I would recommend his fun and engaging books to anyone.
This book is hands down my favorite book of his, as it is quite an interesting take on something otherwise very mundane: food. It’s something we all have to ingest three times a day in order to stay alive, and it isn’t often that we eat food so good that we would be tempted to write poetry about it, but yet this book is full of them. Everything from soup to nuts is lyricized in this collection of twenty-nine poems, each with an accompanying illustration on the opposite page.
The thing I loved most about this book is the creativity of the illustrations. The illustrator, Cecco Mariniello, is primarily an oil painter, or so his online art portfolio would indicate, and yet he crafted some very fanciful ink drawings to go with each poem. He poetically and enthrallingly reimagines the food Piumini writes so passionately about: whether it be as a carrot-nosed artist drawing a carrot using a carrot as a pen, or two royal monkeys dueling with bananas, or an elf eating oranges that peel and divide themselves in midair before satisfyingly plopping into his mouth.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, and even if you can’t read the poems themselves, the illustrations will still make it well worth your while.
If Mondadori, (the publishers,) are reading this: can we discuss an American English translation? I’d translate and illustrate it myself, but I would like to get the rights first…
As always, thanks so much for reading. What was your favorite book growing up? Please let me know in the comments.
Till next time…