Elizabeth Hand wrote this review.
Hans Christian Andersen — was there ever a writer of children’s stories who seems more likely to have fallen from the pages of one of his own works? The child of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman, Andersen (1805-1875) grew up in dire poverty, enthralled and terrified by the folktales told by his grandmother, who worked as a spinner in an insane asylum.
“The stories told by these old ladies, and the insane figures which I saw around me in the asylum, operated to powerfully upon me, that when it grew dark I scarcely dared go out of the house, I was therefore permitted, generally at sunset, to lie down in my parents’ bed . . . here I lay in a waking dream as if the actual world did not concern me.”
Yet the actual world very much concerned Andersen, as Jackie Wullschlager makes clear in her introduction to this sterling volume of newly translated tales, published to commemorate Andersen’s birth two hundred years ago in Odense, Denmark. Wullschlager is the author of Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, the definitive biography in English of this conflicted, brilliant writer; her succinct introduction to Fairy Tales provides an indispensable gloss to Andersen’s work, a working roadmap to the psychological milestones — his impoverished childhood, confused sexuality, unrequited loves, but also immense critical and commercial success — that marked his long and often unhappy life.
If there is a fictional character Andersen occasionally resembles, it is the schoolteacher Ichabod Crane: gawky, vain, social climbing, unlucky in love. His penchant for rich food and fine things was sated in later years when he became the toast of Europe. Wullschlager quotes a fan who observed Andersen praying, without irony, “I thank Thee, O Lord, that Thou has permitted me to enjoy another breakfast as I had at Mr. Bentley’s! Amen!” Andersen himself came late to an education. At fourteen he left home for Copenhagen, convinced that he would have a successful career on the stage — he had a sweet boy’s soprano. His first appearance at the Royal Theater was as a lowly troll, but he had already shown what would be a lifelong knack for ingratiating himself with his social betters, earning the support of several patrons who, when he was seventeen, arranged for him to attend grammar school. His classmates were eleven years old, but Andersen stuck it out for five years, at this school and then a second, enduring “the same bullying, tyrannical headmaster,” and, as Wullschlager says, “the most miserable [years] of his life.” His terrible grammar and spelling improved, but he retained the deceptively simple storytelling cadences of his childhood, so that even in his most sophisticated tales one can hear an echo of the voices of the old women weaving stories as their spinning wheels turned in the shadows of the Odense asylum.
As an adult reader, I am so suspicious of literature in translation that I seldom read it. As a child, of course, I had no such compunctions, and at any rate the characters in the Andersen stories I loved — the Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina, the Princess so sensitive she was bruised by a pea, soldiers steadfast or clever, Emperors naked or enchanted by mechanical nightingales — seemed not to have sprung from the imagination of a single man but from the same depthless Well of Story that the Brothers Grimm drew from, and Mother Goose. But when I grew older, and read Andersen’s darker tales, stories like “The Red Shoes,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen” and “The Fir Tree,” I was put off by a falsely elevated, cloying voice that I associated — wrongly, I know now — with Andersen himself.
“The fact is that Andersen’s style of writing is extremely difficult to translate,” writes Tiina Nunnally in her Translator’s Note to this new collection. “He uses colloquialisms, slang, and special idioms. He peppers his narrative with little ‘filler’ words and phrases such as, ‘you know,’ ‘after all,’ ‘I suppose,’ ‘of course’ — phrases that often don’t fall naturally info an English text. He also loves to make up words, especially when inanimate objects are talking, and he’s very fond of puns and wordplay . . . He’s also very funny, and humor is one of the hardest things to translate . . . .”
The English Victorians in particular were seldom happy to use one word when two or three would do, or to utilize a simple word rather than its multisyllabic synonym. Here is an example from my 1887American edition, translated by Carl Siewers:
Invisible we glide into the dwellings of mankind where there are children, and for every day we find a child that pleases its parents and gains their love, God shortens the time of our probation . . . But if, on the other hand, we meet with a wicked and naughty child, we must shed tears of sorrow, and every tear adds one day to the time of our probation. [“The Little Mermaid”]
And here is Nunnally’s version —
Invisible, we float into human houses where there are children. For each day that we find a good child who makes his parents happy and deserves their love, God shortens our time of trial . . . But if we see a naughty and bad child, then we have to weep tears of sorrow, and every tear adds another day to our time of trial.
The differences of economy and diction may be subtle, but they’re real and, needless to say, have a cumulative effect. Nunnally strips Andersen’s tales of the overwrought Victorian stylings that too often make the stories, already fraught and dark to the point of bleakness, tumble into mere fustian melodrama. To show some of these variations, Nunnally provides seven different translations of a line from “The Ugly Duckling.” Reading these is a fascinating little foray into the translator’s art, which Nunnally rightly describes as a form of alchemy, “a mysterious distilling process to transform one substance into another, always hoping that it will be the longed-for gold, that the translation, in its new form, will reflect the richness and beauty of the original.”
As for the stories themselves, Nunnally has chosen most of the best-known and best-loved works, including all those mentioned above as well as “The Little Match Girl,” “The Flying Trunk” and “The Traveling Companion.”
But there are also tales I had not read before, such as “The Wind Tells of Valdemar Daae and His Daughters,” which, in its sophisticated irony, anticipates the work of Andersen’s countrywoman, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen); the haunting “The Most Incredible Thing,” a story about Art’s ability to endure brutality, which Nunnally notes was published during the Nazi Occupation by several scholars who became leaders of the Danish Resistance; the Kafkaesque “Auntie Toothache,” an improbably titled fable about the struggle to write; and the Symbolist “The Wood Nymph: A Tale from the 1867 Paris Exposition,” its final lines reading as though they might be Hans Christian Andersen’s epitaph:
All this happened and was witnessed,
We saw it ourselves . . . during our time, the great, wondrous time of fairy tales.
Tiina Nunnally’s new translation makes 2005 a great wondrous time of fairy tales as well. The book is illustrated with Andersen’s own paper cutouts, lovely images that, like his written work, imbue both supernatural and everyday objects and people with an unsettling, seemingly effortless symmetry.
“You’re a poet!” Auntie Millie tells her young nephew in “Auntie Toothache.” “Just write down what you told me and you’re as good as Dickens. . . . You paint when you speak. You describe your house so I can see it. It makes me shiver. Keep writing! Put something alive into it: people, charming people, preferably unhappy ones.”
So Andersen did. Tiina Nunnally has given this great storyteller a wonderful gift for his two hundredth birthday, putting life back into all those charming unhappy people, match girls and robber girls, princesses and paupers, dancers and doomed snowmen.
“That’s the story of Valdemar Daae and his daughters. Go ahead and tell it better, the rest of you — if you can!” said the wind, and turned away. And it was gone.”
(Viking, 2005)
