Carnival in the Enchanted Forest E-Book

Silvia Corridoni

• Herausgeber: Silvia Corridoni
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Alice and Giallo: ten kids stories in which popular traditions and emotional steps are touched but not directly explained.

Here we are in the middle of the carnival with Alice and Giallo and the cultural and popular traditions. In fact Carnival is not a mere commercial tradition but give us the opportunity to brake down the rules to reset them and go back to a re-generated life. Let's go to see what's going on in the Enchanted Forest, let's go to see what carnival tell us about life. Let's go to read with our kids.

LeggiCON.blogspot.com
Collana Alice e Giallo

Leseprobe

Carnival in the Enchanted Forest

Author:

Silvia Corridoni

Ilustrations:

Andrea Giovannella

Translations:

Silvia Corridoni

Introduction

Carnival in the Enchanted Forest is the second appointment of Alice and Giallo the White Bunny with their young readers, the kids. Alice and Giallo are trying to create a simple and funny bridge between reality and fantasy.  Between conscious and unconscious. They want to provide common reference points in the stories that permit kids to feel sure and safe in exploring the Enchanted Forest. The forest, we know, represents a difficult  emotional moment to be overcome. Alice and Giallo are there to help kids in doing it.

In fact, Alice and Giallo are simply trying to communicate to the kids in a simple way but, easy to say simple, difficult to make it simple. Even if it seems they are using an educational targeted language, actually, through these stories, they are trying to create a bridge, a contact between their emotional and cognitive levels. As Christmas tale, the carnival one, still doesn't go into an emotional context. It remains in a traditional level, analizing cultural and popular values.

LeggiCON loves to keep the memory of the oldest and newest traditions. For this reason we try to explain the meaning of the carnival to our kids.

In a poor and childish language, we could say that in Catholic countries Carnival is the greedy feast before purification. Carnival, however, is a very ancient feast and evokes a bit the primordial chaos, the birth of the cosmos. Gosh! How difficult it is to explain. Let's simplify and talk about man instead of cosmos (from the top of phylogenesis, a step-down towards the simplest ontogenesis): at carnival the established orders and social obligations are broken for a certain period, creating thus a regenerative chaos time. At the end of the carnival/chaos, the order is reconstituted to be strictly adhered to and, followed by all until the new carnival, a year including all seasons.

Let's try to talk about philosophy. Touching the eternal recurrence through the carnival, the cycle is eternal but renewed, always starting from the same initial point: the chaos.

Carnival represent the metaphysical sense of the transcendent, the trait d'union between the earthly and the beyond, the afterlife.

A temporary body loan to the death souls, to make it up to them.

For Catholics, carnival is bad and they have tried to turn it into a period of reconciliation with God and our spiritualism, a time of reflexion.

Something too much complicated to talk in a book for kids. But LeggiCON would like to pick parents' attention on the importance of reading with their children, talk to them, tell them stories passing the sense of traditions, which are not purely commercial. In some Spanish and/or Hispanic areas, the burial of a sardine (el entierro de la sardina) celebrates the end of the carnival. A carnival parade that wants to be a parody of a funeral procession at the end of which a symbolic representing the carnival, is burnt. Normally a sardine. The ceremony evokes fires of the torches and tribal rhythms of the music on the banks, where Dionysus was protagonist.

Alice and Giallo also continue their journey toward a simple cognitive - linguistic stimulation for  kids. A stimulation that provide them of important tools for future reading, comprehension and exposure skills in different languages, different contexts and in front of images, now so important, in this new technological world.

Carnival in the Enchanted Forest

English

"Come on Alice, let's have a walk in the Enchanted Forest."

Alice rises up without making any noise, dresses up in heavy clothes and, with her magic hat on, she runs across the garden, climbs over the fence and enter the Enchanted Forest. Giallo pops out from Alice's magic hat and together they walk along the Path that leads everywhere.

Giallo white bunny, wants to show the Carnival in the Enchanted Forest to Alice. 

"Do you know what's the Carnival Alice?"

"Of course I know! It's when everyone masks himself to look like someone else" Alice said.

Giallo explains "yes it is, that magic moment when snow change into whipped crem and, suddenly, turn snow.”

The two friends go to the Old Oak Tree where usually take place the extraordinary events. All of them are going there. There is going Tortugo, the 100 years old tortoise.

"Here we are, finally!" As soon as Tortugo says these words, two big bunny-ears pop out from his head.

Alice gasps, "Oh Jesus, what's happening?"

"This is the moment Alice. Every color, and smell, and taste change. Like a precious, perfumed, spicy apple pie and a ridiculous rebounding of red and rose roll rolling around." 

A snake-tongue appears on mama Rabbit mouth, elephant-nose-and-ears on monkey head and a giraffe-neck on the frog's shoulder,  Bear-ears and cat-paew on Giallo.