Ordering the Tales: From the Familiar to the Strange

When we read Andersen to children today, we often rely on translations that fail to give us the full story. “The Red Shoes,” newly illustrated by Barbara Bazilian in 1997, has been adapted to eliminate the scene in which Karen’s feet, with the beautiful, magical shoes still on them, are chopped off. The little match girl, in a version of her story published in 1944, finds “warmth and cheer and a lovely home where she lives happily ever after.” And “The Little Mermaid,” under the spell of Disney Studios, appears in countless new print editions, each ending with a happily-ever-after wedding that contrasts sharply with the three hundred years of good deeds assigned to the mermaid at the end of Andersen’s tale.

New translations, many timed to coincide with the bicentennial of Andersen’s birth, have been more successful in capturing the letter and the spirit of the tales. Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank’s Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish stresses the importance of working from the original language, in part because so many of Andersen’s translators did not know Danish and relied on German versions of the tales. The Franks’ volume is part of a new wave of translations that shows respect both for the broad contours of the stories as well as for their telling details. Tiina Nunnally’s Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales seeks, in lively renditions of thirty tales, to capture the author’s “unique voice” with all its stylistic quirks. Neil Philip’s Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen offers forty “enchanting masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest storytellers” with the aim of providing family-friendly entertainment. Since the bicentennial of his birth, Andersen has gained much in translation.

In this volume, Julie K. Allen and I have returned to the original Danish in an effort to capture Andersen’s many different voices—impassioned yet also playful, unaffected yet also complex, sweet yet also doleful, and musical yet also maudlin. We have recognized that translations can never be pitch-perfect, but we have tried to re-create Andersen’s tales in English versions that lend themselves to reading out loud (a practice that Andersen himself endorsed for the stories) and to thinking out loud (a practice that we need to revive when we become aware of the full cultural force of these stories). Unlike the Grimms’ tales, which circulated in hundreds of different versions as part of an oral storytelling culture, Andersen’s stories are literary narratives in which every word counts and should be weighed and measured with care.

Today, we think of Andersen primarily as an author of books for children, but in his own day he was a prominent dramatist, a distinguished novelist, and a chronicler of travels that took him from London and Paris to Athens and Istanbul. To be sure, even in his own day, critics believed that his greatest accomplishment came in the form of fairy tales (“told for children,” as he frequently noted in the titles to his collections). And yet many of those fairy tales took up adult themes and, with time, Andersen shifted from enchanting stories that breathe the sweet air of miniaturized fancy and whimsical beauty to carefully constructed literary tales that pulse with dark existential torment and human suffering. In between, there are stories that appear crafted for children but that enlist a pedagogy of fear that does not square with our contemporary sense of bedtime reading. The selection of stories in this volume begins in the child-centered mode of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Snow Queen” and moves gradually to a darker Andersen—one not familiar to Anglo-American audiences—who is no longer thinking about the child as hero.

The first dozen tales in this volume may seem too harsh for children at times, but they constitute the Andersen canon, which has migrated successfully not only to the United States but also into 153 different literary cultures, as documented by the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense. The second set of twelve tales give us a less familiar Andersen, an author who worried about art, beauty, and the creative process and who sought to produce something so luminous and large that it would serve as a bulwark against suffering and mortality. We need to know something about the less familiar Andersen in order to fully understand what is at stake in more familiar stories like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This volume gives us both sides of Hans Christian Andersen, a writer whose commitment to the transformative power of art and beauty was so deep that it altered the landscape of children’s literature in profound ways, creating stories that may seem to take a moral turn but that in fact teach children that words and their art have the power to change you.

Andersen himself was aware of the fairy tale’s reach, and he defined the genre in a way that makes evident its appeal for young and old: “In the whole realm of poetry no domain is so boundless as that of the fairy tale. It reaches from the blood-drenched graves of antiquity to the pious legends of a child’s picture book; it takes in the poetry of the people and the poetry of the artist.” Taking the poetry of the people as his point of departure, Andersen also fashioned the poetry of the artist, giving us stories that are deeply familiar, hauntingly strange, and everything in between.