Pinocchio has long been one of my favorite books, so I was overjoyed when, a few years back, Geoffrey Brock, the poet and translator of Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and Cesare Pavese, wrote me saying that if I was in the business of bringing neglected books back to light, why didn’t I consider Pinocchio, a very great book, as all Italians knew, but so taken for granted and, in English, so haphazardly translated, that it had hardly received its due. Brock was eager to translate the book, he said—it would be a labor of love—and I was eager to publish the translation. Here then, a few years down the line, is a beautifully clear and compelling new rendering of Pinocchio, in which this sly, savage, mystifying, funny, poignant, endlessly surprising work of art shines in all its prismatic glory.

It’s an event. For much too long poor Pinocchio has lived in the shadow of Pinocchio the movie star and Pinocchio the ubiquitous tchotchke, characters who have gotten in the way of his telling his own story. In my own case, certainly, Pinocchio’s Disneyfication acted as a deterrent to reading the actual book. It was around the house in my childhood, but by the time I was old enough to read it I wouldn’t go near it because I already knew all about its bubbly hero who was, for all his scapegrace pretensions, at heart nothing more than an aspiring priss. I was utterly wrong, of course, and sometimes I wish that I had had a chance to get to know Pinocchio earlier, but then again perhaps not doing so was a lucky break. Because when, sometime well into adolescence, on an actual or metaphorical rainy day I picked up the book and read it, it was a revelation.

Pinocchio is a book of fulgurating strangeness, unpredictable from start to finish. As Umberto Eco points out in his introduction to Brock’s translation, Collodi is busy up-ending expectations from the book’s very first lines:

Once upon a time there was….”A King!” my little readers will say at once. No children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a block of wood.

So much for an opening, but this story, like all stories—like everything—must come to an end: Pinocchio must become a real boy, e basta! A puppet’s life is too uncertain to go on forever, and real life can only go on outside the book.

Pinocchio is a book of deep intelligence and pure inspiration, a beautiful work that seems, like its hero, almost to have willed itself into existence. (Collodi, though an accomplished man, never accomplished anything remotely equivalent, and in Pinocchio he amusingly depicts a gang of boys bombarding each other with his books). On the cover of this edition is an image from an installation by the artist Tim Rollins and K.O.S., a collective of high school students with whom Rollins works. They read Pinocchio and in response put on a show that, at first sight, consisted of nothing but logs, some scattered on the gallery floor, some propped up against the wall. Viewed at close range, however, each log turned out to contain a pair of wide-open, staring eyes, a tireless avid unblinking spirit confronting the world. It’s a great image of Pinocchio, I think, and a great image, too, of what it means to encounter a great book, also a thing made out of wood with the presence and power of a living thing: it fastens its eyes upon you; it transfixes you with its gaze.

Edwin Frank is the Editorial Director at New York Review Books Classics. NYRB published Pinocchio last month in a new translation by Geoffrey Brock, and with an introduction by Umberto Eco.

This piece appeared in a longer form as a Letter From the Editor on New York Review Books’ own site.