Fairy Tales

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.

If I have not been consciously concerned with a stylistic whole, I have been extremely conscious of Andersen’s use of poetic language in many of the later stories, and with his delightful sense of play and fun in his use of Danish. To this end I found Fritse Jacobsen’s H. C. Andersens ordspil (H. C. Andersen’s Puns; Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Center for Translation, DAO 9, 2000) very useful. Unfortunately, it has not always been possible to convey Andersen’s jokes and puns, with specific Danish cultural references, successfully through English. In some cases I have compensated for this loss by adding a joke of my own or slightly twisting Andersen’s original (my favorites include giving the darning needle “the bends,” and the deliberate misspelling of “do” in the story “In the Duckyard”). In some cases I have found that the best English solutions for jokes and puns have already been discovered. Those familiar with earlier translations will hear echoes of Leyssac, Hersholt, Spink, Haugaard, and Keigwin in my work. Scholars of all disciplines build on the work of others, and there is no reason why translators should not appropriate best solutions. The goal, after all, is the most perfect possible rendering of Danish to English, and despite Viggo Pedersen’s attempts to find influence between translators by comparing short sentences or paragraphs, there really are a finite number of possible ways to translate a set Danish sentence to a corresponding English one.

Many people helped in one way or another with my work. I would like to acknowledge and thank Gracia Grindal, Dennis Omoe, Ole Stig Andersen, Kathie Crawford, Erik Horak-Hult, Michael Hult, Jeffrey Broesche at Fine Creative Media, and my entire email address book for responding to my English language usage survey. I am deeply grateful to Anne Hvam for her countless hours of work on the poetic sections of “The Galoshes of Fortune.” I am confident that “Mormors briller” has never been rendered as well in English. Finally, I am enormously indebted to Jack Zipes for his careful corrections, enlightening commentary, and valuable suggestions throughout the project, and not least for his observations on the art of translating. All remaining errors in the “many delightful stories in this book” are my own.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

September 28, 2005

Marte Hvam Hult holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian languages and literatures from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, published by Wayne State University Press in 2003. She is working on a translation of Asbjørnsen’s Huldreeventyr.