LEGENDS
Andersen was also concerned about traditions, and though he became very cosmopolitan and developed a hate-love relationship with Denmark, he sought to mine the Danish soil, so to speak, to celebrate its richness. Throughout his tales he relied on references to Danish legends and proverbs to add local color to his narratives. Often on his trips in Denmark, he would hear a local legend or see something legendary that would inspire his imagination; two good examples are “Holger the Dane” (1845) and “Everything in Its Proper Place” (1853). While the legend about a king who rises from the dead to save his country can be found in many cultures, Andersen bases “Holger the Dane” on Danish lore; he wrote at a time when Denmark was engaged in a conflict with Prussia, and the story is clearly patriotic in spirit, something unusual for Andersen, who was a loyal Danish citizen but never really patriotic.
More typical of Andersen is “Everything in Its Proper Place,” in which he invents his own local legend about a family’s history and its house to comment on class conflict. Houses and mansions abound in Andersen’s stories, and though he knew some of their legendary histories, he was at his best when he invented legends; his inventions were always bound up with his real experiences and his realistic appraisal of Danish society.
Andersen’s range as a short-story writer was great. Not only did he experiment with a variety of genres; he also dealt with diverse social and psychological problems in unusual narrative modes. A master of self-irony, he often employed the first-person narrative to poke fun simultaneously at himself and at conceited people who tell stories that reveal their pretentiousness. Some of his more imaginative fairy tales are told in a vivacious, colloquial style that appears to be flippant, until he suddenly introduces serious issues that transform the tale into a complex narrative of survival and salvation. Though he could over-emphasize sentimentality, religiosity, and pathos, Andersen was deeply invested in the issues he raised in his tales. It was almost as if life and death were at risk in his short prose, and he needed to capture the intensity of the moment. This is perhaps why he kept trying to write from different vantage points, used different genres, experimented with forms and ideas borrowed from other writers, and inserted his own life experiences into the narratives.
Little is known in the English-speaking world about the tireless creative experiments of the tormented writer called Hans Christian Andersen. He tried to make a fairy tale out of his life to save himself from his sufferings. Whether he succeeded in saving himself is open to question, but he did leave us fantastic tales that still stun us and compel us to reflect on the human will to survive.
Jack Zipes is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and is a specialist in folklore and fairy tales. Some of his major publications include Breaking the Magic Spelclass="underline" Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales ( 1979) , Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion ( 1983 ) , Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England ( 1986) , The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), and Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2001). He has also translated The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and edited The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000) and The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001 ). Most recently he has served as the general editor of the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005).
Translator’s Preface
“There are so many delightful stories in this book,” said Hans. “So many that you haven’t heard.” “Well, I don’t care about them,” said Garden-Ole. “I want to hear the one I know.”
The sentiment expressed by Garden-Ole in Andersen’s story “The Cripple” is one that might be familiar to many English readers of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. It is tempting in reading a new translation to want to hear again the stories that we know. And most of the old favorites are here: “The Tinderbox,” “The Princess on the Pea,”. The Little Mermaid,” ”The Emperor’s New Clothes,” ”The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” ”The Ugly Ducking,” and others. But here too are ”many that you haven’t heard“—or, at least, have not heard as often. It is my hope that reading some of the less often translated tales will help the modern English reader understand why Andersen is considered by Danes to be at the center of the Danish literary canon, not primarily a children’s author, as he continues to be thought of in the English-speaking world.
When I told a friend that I was working on a translation of Andersen’s stories she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, “But hasn’t that been done?” I replied that of course it had, but while Andersen’s nineteenth-century Danish words remain forever unchanged upon the page, our splendid English language continues on its merry way, evolving and adapting and challenging us to renew the old stories in the idioms of our time. Many of the early English translations were quite deplorable, and while there have been good recent translations of “the ones you know,” the most complete edition of recent years, Erik Christian Haugaard’s comprehensive Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) can really best be described as an excellent adaptation rather than a translation. So the fact remains that many of Andersen’s less-often translated stories remain unknown to English readers in anything approximating their original forms.
The translations in this book were made directly from the first five volumes of the critical edition of H. C. Andersens Eventyr (Copenhagen: 1963-1967), edited by Erik Dal and Erling Nielsen. For the textual annotations to this collection, I made extensive use of the notes and commentaries by Erik Dal, Erling Nielsen, and Flemming Hovmann from volume 7 of this work, which appears on the Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur (Archive of Danish literature) website: http://www.adl.dk.
Andersen often made references to or citations from other texts in his work, and whenever a standard English translation was available, I have used that. These borrowings are recorded in the annotations, which immediately follow each story. Andersen’s own footnotes are indicated in the annotations by “[Andersen’s note].” Since this text is intended for a broad range of readers, no efforts have been made to censor Andersen’s expressions or adapt them to a younger audience.
It is a popular practice to lament the difficulty in translating Andersen’s style, and it is true that his fondness for puns and word play, alliteration, and stylistic originality can be challenging for the translator. In fact, as Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen writes in his excellent 2004 study Ugly Ducklings? Studies in the English Translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and Stories (see “For Further Reading”), “Andersen’s style is not easy to imitate in English and few have done so with success.” Despite this daunting observation by a native Danish scholar, I have made no conscious effort to convey a comprehensive stylistic whole, because I believe that Andersen actually used diverse techniques, depending on the demands of the story and at different times in his life. I have rather seen my task as one of capturing the mood and tenor of each individual story. My goal throughout has been to attempt to give the modern English reader a reading experience as similar as possible to that of a Danish reader of the original, one story at a time. This has sometimes necessitated taking a few liberties with Andersen’s text when conveying jokes and puns, adding alliteration when possible, and sometimes changing pronouns for the sake of consistency. The most notorious example of the latter (and one for which I expect to be severely criticized) is changing the single gender-specific pronoun referring to the nightingale from “her” to “it.” I did this because it is the male nightingale that sings, and because Andersen uses “it” except in this one instance. In a few rare instances, I have actually changed or even added a few words in order to keep a rhyme, a joke, or the sense of the original. For example, in “The Flea and the Professor,” when the professor ascends skyward in his balloon, the original has “‘Slip Snorer og Toug!’ sagde han. ‘Nu gaaer Ballonen!’ De troede han sagde: ‘Kanonen!’” [The final sentence translates as: “They thought he said: ‘the cannon!’”] I have changed this exchange to: “‘Let go of the ropes and cords,’ he said. ‘Up goes the balloon!’ They thought he said, ‘Let’s make a boom!’” The exchange makes sense only if the expressions rhyme. Such liberties with the original are rare and always deliberate.