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HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN - TOLD FOR CHILDRENSusanne Mørup Hansen a

a University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Online Publication Date: 25 November 2005

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HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN – TOLD FOR CHILDREN

Susanne Mørup Hansen, University of Copenhagen, Denmarksus0809@hotmail.com

AbstractDiscussing three fairytales by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, this article ad-

vocates that translations aimed at children – including high-quality adaptations and rewritings – should be taken as seriously by scholars as traditional, “philological” translations. The study examines target renditions of Li�le Ida’s Flowers, The Nightingale, and The Red Shoes and discusses differences between philological translations and translations for reading-aloud and their relations to the source texts. This article revolves around ‘storytelling’ and ‘children’ and it is argued that loyalty towards the target (child) reader is just as important as loyalty towards the author. Literature for reading aloud must be appreciated on its own terms: is it successful in a read-aloud situation or not? The examination discusses ‘loss’ as well as ‘gain’ in the stories in hand and concludes that a translation, in fact, can be ‘be�er’ than the source text. These features should not only be taken into account in Translation Studies assessments but also by translators who wish to ensure that classics of children’s literature, such as works of Hans Christian An-dersen, are kept alive and who therefore must aim to produce highly readable children’s versions of the classics.

Key words: English-Danish; ‘loss’ and ‘gain’; children’s literature; target-audience orien-tation; adaptation; rewriting; re-creations; definitions of translation.

PrefaceThis article is dedicated to my father. When I was a child, I loved to listen to

him when he read Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales out loud. The stories were marvellous and when my father used funny voices for the speeches of different characters, they came alive to me. Today, I understand that these read-ings were full of reciprocal joy: I enjoyed my father’s full a�ention, while his re-ward was twofold; he would appreciate the wit of Andersen’s language and was pleased with my delight. My hope is that such moments of wonder can continue to be recreated in different cultures by means of successful translations.

IntroductionIn May 1835, H. C. Andersen’s first collection of fairytales was published with

the title Fairy Tales – Told for Children. This was a reader’s manual, so to speak: a few months before, Andersen told a colleague that the four fairytales he in-tended to publish were not only wri�en for children, but were wri�en the way H. C. Andersen would have told them to a child. (Jens Andersen 2003: 356)

In my view, the key words are ‘telling’ and ‘child’. Danes find that Andersen’s fairytales address adults as well as children. However, in most of the more than one hundred languages into which he has been translated, Andersen is prima-rily known as a writer of children’s literature, and even so, only a handful of his more than 150 fairytales are popular and famous internationally. Naturally, non-Danish children and adults do not become acquainted with H. C. Andersen in his mother tongue, just like audiences and readers with no knowledge of Eng-lish have to read Shakespeare or Dickens in translation and consequently have – at best – only simulacra of the way these authors use their mother tongue.

In his study of English translations of Andersen, the Danish scholar Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen’s point of departure is that a translation is always of poorer

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quality than is the source text: “in the case of a great writer like Andersen, no translation is adequate.” (Hjørnager Pedersen 2004: 17) Having thus established that no translation is up to Andersen’s tales, Hjørnager Pedersen can conclude that, from a philological point of view, the majority of respected English An-dersen translations are much be�er than one might believe from the bemoaning remarks on the poor quality of English Andersen translations made by Dan-ish (and English-speaking) scholars. However, his study does not include 20th century (illustrated) versions targeted at child audiences, which, according to Hjørnager Pedersen, were created to make Andersen accessible to a modern international audience. This urge has also affected “otherwise serious transla-tors”. (Hjørnager Pedersen 2004: 283; 354)

It is certainly true that Andersen’s extensive and versatile production proves that he was not only a writer of children’s literature. However, it is also true that in today’s world with mass media entertainment, a modern international audi-ence is unlikely to read but a few of Andersen’s (early) fairy tales, and competi-tion is tough in children’s literature. I suggest that it is time to face facts: if the art of Hans Christian Andersen is to survive side by side with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Po�er saga and other popular children’s books, high-quality adaptations and rewritings aimed at children must be made and consequently be taken seri-ously and discussed by scholars on a par with “philological translations”, by which I mean translations that are both accepted in elitist circles and approved by scholars familiar with both the source and target languages and trained in contrastive studies.

To illustrate, I can present the view of the British scholar Susan Bassne�, an academic who praises fidelity. She deplores the general failure of prose transla-tors to retain the sentence structure of the source text and thus, in her opinion, the overall structure in translation. “Again and again”, says Bassne�, “transla-tors of novels take pains to create readable [target-language] texts ... but fail to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure.” (Bassne� 2004: 115) Apparently it does not occur to Susan Bassne� that a read-able target language text is of paramount importance for successful sales in the target culture, for a satisfied publisher, and for providing a living for the translator. This is even more so with children’s literature intended for reading aloud: the transla-tor has to create a text for oral rendition – the obvious way of doing this for translators is to read the translation aloud to themselves.

Let me be quite explicit: I am not in favour of rewritings that change the content of the source text radically and to which readers of the target text cogni-zant of the source text cannot ‘identify’. I merely suggest that, within whatever parameters we set up for this ‘identification of the source text’, the target text has to be highly readable, and since it is adults who buy the books that are read aloud to children, it is also important that such texts, including translations, read well. Translation is, in the words of Thomas Harder, ‘the art of the pos-sible’: “O�en [the translator] will be the only one to know where he ‘cheated’, and compromising with the theory of the perfect translation is not only forgiv-able, but an absolute necessity in order to reach an adequate solution.” (Harder 1995: 8)

Translations are o�en considered inferior to the source texts, the originals. Accordingly, adaptations (such as abridgements and adjustments for the target

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culture) are viewed negatively. But there is adaptation in all professional (liter-ary) translation and it is normally spurred by loyalty to the presumed audience. So, I argue that it is possible to create a translation, adaptation, or retelling of a literary work that is loyal to the original, precisely because it functions as an autonomous text that is to be read aloud successfully to children in the target culture.

Children deserve texts that adults enjoy reading aloud; the words have to flow and sound good – and it is an extra bonus if the children learn some new words in the process. Most people will remember the first narratives read or told to them as children as much as or even more vividly than the first stories they read themselves. Naturally, this o�en has to do with the intimate situa-tion surrounding the reading-aloud event. Cay Dollerup has described this as a “narrative contract” that is created between the child and the adult reading aloud (Dollerup 1999: 28-29). To this I would add that a successful narrative contract does not end the moment the story is over, for living on in the memory of a child is not only the narrative, but, more importantly, the intimacy and warmth created between the child and the adult and which prompts children to ask for ‘one more story’.

The stories selectedMy search for material has been systematic and extensive, but in this study

I deal with only three tales in depth. I examine and evaluate the differences between the adapted reading-aloud translations and the originals by means of contrastive exemplification. Whenever relevant, there are examples from a new philological translation of Andersen into American English, namely Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank’s highly acclaimed collection, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish (2003).

The tales under review are: Li�le Ida’s Flowers (1835), The Nightingale (1844), and The Red Shoes (1845). The reasons for each choice are discussed in the ap-propriate sections. The original H. C. Andersen texts can be found on the Inter-net.1

The translations examined are: Naomi Lewis. 1999. Elf Hill – Tales from Hans Christian Andersen. This collection includes Li�le Ida’s Flowers and The Nightin-gale; Meilo So. 1992; The Emperor and the Nightingale. Barbara Bazilian. 1997; The Red Shoes – Adapted from a story by Hans Christian Andersen; and Anthea Bell. 1983. The Red Shoes.

Analysis: The model of layersFor my analysis, I use the model developed for analyses of source texts and

their translations developed by Cay Dollerup.2 Karen Seago describes the mod-el’s advantages:

Discussing the imposition of societal norms by the receiving culture in terms of “lin-guistic/cultural incompatibility” or “- gatekeeping,” Dollerup establishes excellent, nonjudgmental criteria for his evaluation of the “adequacy” of a translation which avoids such conflicted notions as “fidelity” to the source text, or censorship operat-ing in the receptor culture. He proposes a model of … overlapping layers with which to analyze textual changes between the source text and the translation on the struc-tural, linguistic, content, and intentional level. The [intentional] level is particularly interesting and useful with respect to cultural specificities as it deals with the meta-

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understanding of the text as it relates to and expresses human experience in terms of moral orientation, for example. With this model and a clearly defined terminology to discuss strategies such as exclusion (the omission of undesirable elements), inclusion (the decision to retain unpleasant intentionalities), or rewriting (deliberate changes on any or all levels), Dollerup provides a framework that allows discussion of peren-nially difficult issues in both folklore and translation studies: the authenticity and textual integrity of folktales and fairy tales in their transfer between different forms of mediation, and between linguistic, historic, or cultural contexts as opposed to the “authenticity” of the mediated, translated, or adapted version. (Seago 2001: 120-121)

The layersDollerup’s model operates with six layers that may overlap:

- the structural layer (the textual order of elements, passages, and epi-sodes),

- the linguistic layer (including words, word order, phrases, repetitions of words, sounds, assonance, euphony and ‘style),

- the content layer (‘facts’ and points and elements in the structural and lin-guistic layers that can serve for interpretation),

- the intentional layer (external meta-understanding of the text as related to human experience),

- the paratextual layer (deals with the interplay between illustration and text), and

- the chronological axis (shows that expectations about readability change over time).

I comment on the last feature, the chronological axis, in my conclusion. Like other studies using the model, my investigation will probably show major devi-ations at all levels. In the appendix, I provide some figures that illustrate reduc-tions in the translations in relation to the source texts. This approach is admit-tedly open to uncertainty since figures cannot describe a translation adequately (especially not since word-for-word renditions – fortunately - are rare) and one word may easily correspond to a phrase in the other language. Nevertheless the table will serve to indicate the extent to which the translations present phrases and features in the original texts. The percentages refer exclusively to elements (counted in words) in the original that are adequately translated or rendered in the rewriting.

Li�le Ida’s FlowersLi�le Ida’s Flowers was published in 1835 as one of Hans Christian Andersen’s

first four tales “told for children”. The other three (The Tinderbox, Li�le Claus and Big Claus, and the Princess on the Pea) were all retellings of folktales that An-dersen had heard as a child. Li�le Ida’s Flowers, on the other hand, seems to have been a deeply personal story for Andersen, since it describes the relationship between Andersen and Ida, the four-year-old daughter of his friend J. M. Thiele. In it, Ida wonders why the flowers that are in bloom look withered the next day, and the student, Andersen, explains to her that they are tired from dancing at their secret and splendid nightly balls and must eventually wither and be bur-ied, then to spring forth the next year. Hauberg Mortensen has argued that, in telling the story to Ida Thiele, Andersen hoped to prepare her for her mother’s

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death (Hauberg Mortensen 1989: 25-27). In the story, Ida Thiele appears under her own first name. She is the protagonist and one easily recognises Andersen as the student, a great storyteller who can do paper cu�ings. Ida’s doll is her mother’s namesake: Sophie. In other words, Andersen describes Ida’s world as concretely as possible, and blending it with imaginative features, in order to teach her about the cycle of life.

Li�le Ida’s Flowers is not a traditional fairy tale (few of H. C. Andersen’s tales are). I chose it because it is rarely included in English collections for children and it does not appear to be popular with modern Danes. I found an English rendition “retold” by Naomi Lewis (1999). In their introduction, Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank refer to Li�le Ida’s Flowers as “the weakest” of H. C. An-dersen’s first four tales and therefore exclude it (Frank 2003: 13) despite the scholarly character of their translation, which has 281 footnotes.

In her rewriting, Naomi Lewis, according to my count, has rendered 63 per-cent of the original fairytale. This means that 37 percent has not been translated at all. When we apply the model of layers, it becomes clear which elements in the source text have not been realised.

Lewis renders the textual order of the elements of the original and her re-writing has roughly the same passages and episodes, except for the omission of some paragraphs: there is no longish description of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden, no mention of a woman, “Frk. Line”, etc. These references to places and people Ida knew were probably great fun when H. C. Andersen told her the story, but they do not contribute to the story in the eyes of modern, interna-tional child readers and listeners. One is hard put to argue that these omissions present a ‘loss’, since they merely adjust the story to new target audiences.

There is some reduction at the linguistic layer. Let us look at the openings. Lewis writes:

“Oh, my poor flowers – they look quite dead,” said li�le Ida. “Last evening they were so fresh and lovely [Missing]. What do think has happened?” She was asking the student, who was si�ing, as usual, on the sofa. Ida was very fond of him. He knew the most surprising stories, and with his scissors he could cut won-ders out of article – hearts with tiny ballerinas inside, flowers, witches, castles with doors that opened. [Missing] “Don’t you know?” said the student. “All last night they were dancing, and now they are tired out.”

The original was more extensive:

“Mine stakkels Blomster ere ganske døde!” sagde den lille Ida. ”De vare saa smukke ia�es, og nu hænge alle Bladene visne! [= and now all the leaves are drooping and with-ered] Hvorfor gjøre de det?” spurgte hun Studenten, der sad i Sophaen; for ham holdt hun saa meget af, han kunde de allerdeiligste Historier og klippede saadanne mor-somme Billeder: Hjerter med smaa Madammer i, der dandsede; Blomster og store Slo�e, hvor Dørene kunde lukkes op; det var en lystig Student! ”Hvorfor see Blom-sterne saa daarlige ud i Dag?” spurgte hun igjen, og viste ham en heel Bouquet, der var ganske vissen. [= was he a funny student! ”Why do the flowers look so sickly today?” she repeated and showed him a whole bouquet of withered flowers.] ”Ja, veed Du, hvad de feile!” sagde Studenten. ”Blomsterne har været paa Bal i Nat, og derfor hænge de med Hovedet!”

Lewis’ version is idiomatic and easy to read out loud. The sentences are short-er than in the original and the punctuation clearly signals when to pause. The

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sentences in bold in the original, where Ida repeats her question to the student and shows him the flowers, are not rendered in Lewis’ version, but overall the openings convey the same meaning.

Furthermore, Lewis adds the word ‘witches’ to the motifs among the stu-dent’s paper cu�ings. In Andersen’s story, there is a reference to ‘witches’ in a later description of paper cu�ings. This second description is le� out in Lewis’ text. Lewis thus employs a strategy of reduction as well as substitution.

Substitution and addition are used several times: sentences are added to make up for omissions of paragraphs, and sometimes a single word, o�en an adjective, is added to clarify a point implicit in the Danish original. For example, Lewis describes the dancing flowers as “sweet-scented” (51), and Sophie the doll is “rude”. (50) Lewis adds onomatopoetic words that make for exciting reading aloud, such as “Thump!” and “Thud!” (50; 51), and on several occasions, she addresses the child readers and listeners directly as part of the story by asking questions such as “Can you guess?” (51) and “What about Sophie?” (52)

Furthermore, Lewis inserts a few humorous phrases, e.g., “the saucy things” about the flowers that hide from a palace guard (46), and “Still, you can’t blame her for that” (47), and “She didn’t really mean it though” (51), both referring to the doll.

There are two culture-specific elements in the original, “Fastelavnsris” and “Røgmanden”. Lewis explicates the first one elegantly, for the international readers, as “the toy that Ida had been given at the Easter Carnival – a bunch of twigs, really, tied with ribbons and topped with article streamers.” (50) “Røg-manden” is a person smoking food, but the term is incomprehensible to modern Danes. In the original it is a porcelain figure of a “Røgmand”. Lewis renders this as a “chimney-sweep” of china, a substitution that functions well in the target text.

There are subtle instances in the rewriting at the linguistic and content layers of “cultural incompatibility” that cover “the adjustment to new target cultures and target epochs in which some of the morals and beliefs in old stories would be incomprehensible and perhaps even considered reprehensible” (Dollerup 2003: 91). We shall return to this point in the discussions of The Nightingale and The Red Shoes.

The original has two references to Ida’s parents: they both hint that they must not know her secret. This respect for parents is not conveyed in the rewriting.

The only religious reference in the original, “o Gud, hvor jeg dog gjerne vilde see det!”, (46) is rendered by a secular emphatic expression “Oh, I would like to see them.” (48)

Similarly, some, but by no means all, references to “death” or “dead” are rendered by phrases like “be gone” or they are le� out. It is in line with this that, at the end, Lewis inserts a “Farewell, flowers – until next year!”, which has no counterpart in the original. Therefore, the final note of Lewis’ version of the fairytale is more positive than is the original, which has “cut-off flowers”, but the English story still deals with the cycle of life. Therefore, the intentional layer of the original, in my opinion, is rendered intact in Lewis’ rewriting, for, as Hauberg Mortensen also points out when he offers his interpretation, Li�le Ida’s Flowers is not only a personal therapeutic text, it also addresses an audi-ence that is not familiar with Ida’s unhappy situation. It appeals to children by

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taking their views and their need for explanation and comfort seriously. Li�le Ida’s Flowers becomes an argument for the importance of the storytelling situ-ation – at the same time that it points back to one of the original functions of fairytales, namely to teach children how to cope with frightful things in life. (Hauberg Mortensen 1989: 25-26)

We must also take into account the paratextual layer, since Elf Hill: Tales from Hans Christian Andersen is a picture book collection. The book has beautiful, cheerful illustrations that appeal to children. The illustrations were made for Lewis’ retellings, but they are fairly free – leaving room for the imagination to roam, as well as for possible future translators, should the book some day be published as a co-print outside the English-speaking world.3

The Nightingale This fairytale takes place in China and tells the story of how amidst great

splendour and artificiality, a real, natural nightingale found in his garden re-vives the dying emperor of China. Since it is one of my own favourite Andersen fairytales, I also chose The Nightingale because I believe it is easy to transfer its universal theme to other cultures.

The story is translated by Naomi Lewis as The Nightingale in the Elf Hill col-lection and I shall comment briefly on this rendition at the end, while I devote more space to an interesting picture-book version, The Emperor and the Nightin-gale, retold and illustrated by Meilo So - “Inspired by H. C. Andersen”. Meilo So was born in Hong Kong and educated in the United Kingdom.

Let me state at the very outset, from the perspective of Translation Studies, Meilo So’s version of The Nightingale is extremely unconventional: it hardly makes sense to compare it to Andersen’s text in terms of structural and linguis-tic layers. Meilo So’s retelling is much shorter than the source text, as only 12.8 per cent of the elements from the original are actually rendered in the retelling. The retold text is divided into small paragraphs, each comprising one to eight periods ending with a full stop. Each paragraph is placed in a rectangular box on fully illustrated pages. The text reads well and the whole book can be read aloud in a fairly short time.

According to an analysis of the structural and especially the linguistic layers, the fairytale is “destroyed”: Andersen’s style is not rendered at all in Meilo So’s retelling. But then, does it make sense to discuss a picture book intended for reading aloud in the terms one would use for discussing a philological transla-tion of Hans Christian Andersen? Few picture books pretend to offer readers one-to-one relationships with originals, and So’s version must be treated ac-cordingly. As Rii�a Oi�inen puts it: “If we think of translation in terms of target-language audiences and ask the crucial question, For whom? we cannot keep to the equivalence (in the sense of sameness) as our guiding principle. Rather we have to ask, Is this translation successful for this purpose?” (Oi�inen 2000: 12)

With this in mind, we must take into account the target audience for the text in the examination of the content layer of Meilo So’s version. The ‘facts’ and points that can serve for interpretation are presented in a simple language and the plot is straightforward. All elaborate descriptions and details that have no direct bearing on the plot have been le� out; but despite the extensive reduction, the story functions well in the target language.

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The Danish original opens with a clever statement: “I China veed Du jo nok er Keiseren en Chineser, og Alle de han har om sig ere Chinesere.” (“In China, as you know, the emperor is Chinese and all the people around him are Chinese.” (My translation)) Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank translate the opening as follows: “You know of course that in China, the emperor is a Chinaman, and everyone around him is Chinese.” Andersen published The Nightingale in 1844, when the Orient was associated with mystique and a Chinese person would have been a rare sight in Denmark.

Andersen was widely travelled, and I do not believe that his reference to the Chinese emperor was intended to be derogatory. Nevertheless, such an inter-pretation seems to be behind Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank’s choice of “Chinaman”, which is today considered an offensive term for a person of Chi-nese descent. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank support their choice of the word with a footnote that refers to an essay that discusses this usage “that may offend some modern sensibilities.” (Frank 2003: 150)

Meilo So’s version se�les the question out of hand by simply stating, “This story takes place in China.” This brings us back to the concept of “cultural in-compatibility”: Meilo So has adjusted her retelling to another target culture and target epoch and avoids complicating ma�ers by the use of a term that may pos-sibly be reprehensible. It is not fair, let alone possible, to compare Diana Crone and Jeffrey Frank’s philological translation with Meilo So’s picture book on equal terms. They have different target groups.

For someone familiar with Andersen’s story, Meilo So’s illustrations of her retelling offer some details that have been omi�ed in the English text. For ex-ample, one illustration that covers a double page shows the nightingale on an outing followed by twelve footmen holding a silk ribbon tied to the bird’s legs. The caption reads: “She was permi�ed to fly outside the palace twice daily.” The mechanical nightingale is only black and white – in great contrast to the otherwise very colourful illustrations – which in fact emphasises its artificiality. In other words, reading the text and the pictures, a person who knows the ‘real fairytale’ will recognise The Emperor and the Nightingale as a story originally told by Andersen.

The intentional layer of the fairy tale exists in so far as the audience consid-ers it relevant: adults may appreciate Andersen’s gentle caution against snob-bery and artificiality. A child audience will probably enjoy the book because, unlike the brief text, the pictures allow for exploration and discussion before bedtime. The dominant role of the pictures targets the story fairly precisely. The Emperor and the Nightingale is suitable for young pre-school children who cannot yet read. Therefore, it can be argued that, in her retelling, Meilo So has extracted the essential points from the original for her purpose.

Naomi Lewis’ The Nightingale is targeted at children who are somewhat older and Lewis seems to have followed strategies similar to those she used for re-writing Li�le Ida’s Flowers in the same collection. Of the original, 71.2 percent was translated, the textual order of elements following those of the original closely except for omissions. No culture-bound words call for explicitation and Lewis makes fewer substitutions than in Li�le Ida’s Flowers, possibly because this tale is longer. One onomatopoetic word has been added, making the li�le silver bells on the flowers in the Emperor’s garden go “Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle”.

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(58) The ‘style’ of the fairytale is close to that of the original, and although the snobbery of the court has been toned down, the intentional layer survives.

The Red ShoesThe Red Shoes is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most cruel and most reli-

gious tales. In it, the vanity of a girl called Karen, expressed in her wish to have a pair of red shoes, is harshly punished and her feet are cut off to make her repent her sin. It is small wonder that this tale does not instantly appeal to modern adults looking for reading-aloud literature for children. Not all Andersen’s tales are equally suitable for sensitive souls.

In this case, I wish to illustrate pitfalls in the path of retelling, and have ac-cordingly chosen an adaptation by Barbara Bazilian (1997). This is compared to a somewhat older translation by Anthea Bell (1983), both with the title The Red Shoes.

The layout of The Red Shoes translated into British English by Anthea Bell, with illustrations by Chihiro Iwasaki, is a picture book. The cover in delicate colours shows a girl who dances and all pages have pictures and rather large, slightly italicised and reader-friendly looking typography. However, on close inspection, it becomes clear that if the book addresses children at all, they have to be fairly mature. This is a philological translation in disguise.4

Bell’s translation is faithful to the original at all levels: approximately 99.7 percent of the original was closely translated. The structural layer has been al-most perfectly transferred: each paragraph in the original has a page of its own in the picture book. From a philological point of view, only a few words have been translated somewhat ‘loosely’: “fa�ige Straakiste” (“humble straw coffin” (85)) is translated into “poor coffin”; “Vindue” (“window” (86)) is rendered as “balcony” and so forth. At other times, Bell stays so close to the original that her word order appears to be Danish: “he sat there nodding and said …” for “han sad og nikkede og sagde …”(86).

All religious features have been translated faithfully. Small wonder, for with-out them, the story would make no sense. On the other hand, the story requires that readers are either familiar with or willing to learn about the Christian church, specifically the Lutheran denomination, and its rituals, for neither An-dersen nor Bell explain the concepts of ‘baptism’, ‘confirmation’, or ‘the cove-nant with God’. To children in today’s secular environments, the story may well seem old-fashioned and be hard to understand, especially if they read it on their own. The story may not appeal to adults either as it seems to deal with exagger-ated or affected piety and religious zeal. The long paragraphs do not make for good reading aloud, and in reading out the whole piece, one discovers that the italicised types are not so reader-friendly a�er all – they weary the eye.

At the point when the girl decides to go to the ball wearing her red shoes, de-spite the fact that the old charitable lady, who has taken her in a�er her mother’s death, has fallen severely ill, Bell inserts a dry comment: “as she ought not to have done”, without any basis in the source text. For this very reason, however, there is no doubt the intentional layer is as clear in Bell’s translation as in the original. The story warns that children who stray from narrow path of piety and follow their passions will be punished by God until they repent their sins.

Barbara Bazilian’s American retelling of The Red Shoes was published four-

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teen years later. It is eminently obvious that the two translators worked from completely different perspectives. Anthea Bell is nearly an invisible translator: her name is not printed on the cover, which simply runs “Hans Christian An-dersen /Chihiro Iwasaki – The Red Shoes”. Bell’s name is given in the colophon a�er the title page. Conversely, Barbara Bazilian’s name appears on the cover of her book as an artist in her own right. This book is not only retold but also illustrated by Barbara Bazilian. I find her illustrations pre�y, albeit rather rosy, but, as we shall see, they match the content. The question is whether her ver-sion qualifies as a retelling. To the best of my knowledge, there is no generally acknowledged definition of a retelling, let alone a translation, so it may be more appropriate to call Bazilian’s story a “re-creation”, or merely to say that it is inspired by Andersen’s fairytale. On the inside cover, there is a brief summary: “A retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in which a girl’s desire for a pair of red dancing shoes almost dooms her to dance forever.” (My italics) It is the word almost that is interesting, as I doubt that Andersen and Bazilian would agree on how to interpret the story.

Bazilian renders 6.4 percent of the original. In other words, the structural lay-ers of the original and Bazilian’s version have li�le in common, except that a few words and phrases have been “translated” from the original, or are reminiscent of the original: the girl’s name is Karen, she ardently wishes to have red shoes, there is a ball, and she has to dance “up and down the hills, through the woods, over roads and paths, field and meadows, by day and by night, through rain and snow”. In literal translation, the original goes “and she danced, for dance she must, over fields and meadows, in rain and in sunshine, by night and by day, but it was most terrifying at night” (My translation)) (”og dandse gjorde hun og dandse må�e hun over Mark og Eng, i Regn og i Solskin, ved Nat og ved Dag, men om na�en var det grueligst.” (88))

Except for these few elements, the content layer in Bazilian’s text is a through-and-through re-creation. Instead of the opening of Andersen’s tale in which Karen buries her mother, wearing clumsy-looking red shoes, which the widow of a shoemaker has made for her, and which she wears when she is taken in by an old charitable lady, Bazilian firmly replaces these three women with only one, namely Karen’s grandmother. Bazilian’s romantic opening deserves to be quoted at length:

Once, long ago in another land, a girl named Karen lived in a small house with her grandmother and a li�le grey cat. When she wasn’t busy with school or chores, Karen enjoyed being with her grandmother or playing with her friends. She also liked to spend quiet time in the garden where she tended the flowers and fed the birds from her hand. Sometimes she sat under a tree and read aloud from her favorite books, with her grey cat curled at her feet to listen. Karen was happy most of the time, but she o�en wished that something different would happen to her – something unexpected and exciting.

Although, Bazilian places the story at a distance, “in another land”, it is clear that the story takes place in a modern Western (American) context, in which well-behaved children go to school and do their chores. In fact, there is not one single religious feature – so prominent in the original - in Bazilian’s version. Un-like the benefactress in Andersen’s story, Karen’s grandmother does not object to the red dancing shoes because they are inappropriate in church, but because

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“They are too bright for school.” In Bazilian’s story, Karen has no religious ob-ligations, but instead she has to do household chores. She neglects these chores and slams the door on her grandmother, while she shouts as a true (but polite) teenager: “Leave me alone! I’ll do it later!”

In Andersen’s story, an angel dooms Karen to dance forever, making her an example to all vain and proud children. God does not show mercy on her, until an executioner cuts off her feet and she atones for her sins by virtue of a pious life. In the end, Karen’s soul flies up to God. There are many other differences at the content layer: unlike Andersen’s charitable old woman who objects, Karen’s grandmother is merely napping when Karen sneaks off to the ball, her feet are not amputated, and in the end Karen is reunited with her grandmother: “They laughed and hugged each other. ‘ Grandmama, I have so much to tell you!’ Karen cried, and then began her story.” In brief, in Bazilian’s version, Karen returns to her life as a happy li�le girl. In Andersen’s tale, Karen is punished harshly, although God fills Karen’s heart with sunshine, peace, and happiness; Bazilian’s Karen is not punished. Her ‘sin’, her vanity, is much more innocent.

The above discussion is influenced by my own modern and secular views, and I appreciate that Bazilian may have had considerations along the same lines when she was dealing with the “culturally incompatible” elements in The Red Shoes: she a�empts to adapt an almost Gothic Andersen fairytale to modern - and in her view - more sensitive children and adults. I largely agree with Rii�a Oi�inen when she claims that “the translator, by being loyal to the reader of the translation, may be loyal to the author of the original.” (Oi�inen 2000: 6) And I would have no hesitation about substituting “creator of retellings” and “retell-ings” for “translator” and “translation”.

Nevertheless, I do not like Bazilian’s treatment of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes. The intentional layer seems to be rendered reasonably well: Bazil-ian warns her child readers that they must stay on the right path and be careful about what they wish for. But Bazilian has adapted the fairytale to a modern au-dience and rendered the target-text contents so differently that had it not been for the title, it would have been difficult to identify the story as an Andersen tale. In my opinion, Barbara Bazilian’s censors the source text so much that she robs modern children of the right to learn to be scared. As Rii�a Oi�inen puts it: “While listening to a grown-up reading aloud, si�ing close to her/him, a child can experience fear in a safe se�ing and is able to cope with the feeling of fear.” (Oi�inen 2000: 53) There is no doubt that it is hard to adapt The Red Shoes to modern audiences, but nonetheless, it would have suited Bazilian’s retelling if she had trusted her audience to be less sensitive.

ConclusionFinally, we can examine the discussed texts along a chronological axis. Their

number is limited and they cover only the brief time-span from 1983 to 1999, so conclusions must be cautious and tentative. Yet, when Anthea Bell’s philological translation from 1983 is compared with Naomi Lewis’ adaptations from 1999, it appears that either the strategy behind the creation of a picture book based on a work of literature has changed or that we are dealing with different considera-tions behind marketing and targeting potential audiences. In Bell’s 1983 ver-sion, only the illustrations were directed towards children (and adult purchas-

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ers). Would it be going too far to assume that in accordance with the dominant norms among translators and translation critics at the time, Anthea Bell valued ‘fidelity’ over readability? The book was published in the UK, the US, and also distributed in Canada. Yet I cannot imagine that it has been popular in read-aloud contexts. Naomi Lewis’s strategy in 1999 is entirely different: she omits and adapts freely and succeeds in creating a story that is suitable for oral rendi-tion. This general tendency is also found, albeit in other ways, in Meilo So’s and Barbara Bazilian’s very free renditions from 1992 and 1997, respectively.

My study bears out that literature for reading aloud and philological transla-tions cannot be assessed by the same criteria. Therefore, the versions examined are assessed as works of children’s literature in their own right and in the con-text of their purpose. The material permits only tentative and indicative statisti-cal analysis, and further research is required.

We have examined two adapted high-quality fairytales translated by Naomi Lewis from the Elf Hill-collection that had excellent read-aloud qualities. We found that deviating renditions and omissions in the content layers, especially in Li�le Ida’s Flowers, did not misrepresent the overall meaning or the intention-al layer of the source texts. There is, indeed, a strong case for arguing that – for her purpose – Lewis’ improves the fairytales in her translations. This is a claim that shows that the widespread belief among the common public and even among many Translation Studies scholars that a translation is always inferior to and of a poorer quality than the source text can be questioned. It is indicative that the Elf Hill-collection also includes the wonderful, magic fairytale Elf Hill, which is found in few respected English collections of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales and it is not even mentioned in Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank’s collec-tion.

Meilo So’s version of The Nightingale is interesting because it is so uncon-ventional. It gives pre-school children a chance to become acquainted with Andersen, long before they learn about norms and traditions of literature. The interplay between the simple text and the elaborate pictures creates a potential for intimate narrative contracts between children and adults when they read the story and see the illustrations together. In turn, this may influence the children’s future reading habits in a positive way. Conversely, Bell’s translation of The Red Shoes has not been adapted to a child audience at all, and in the context of this study it mainly offers a chronological perspective. It is clear from my discussion of Bazilian’s re-creation of The Red Shoes that I do not consider it loyal to its child audience and accordingly not loyal to H. C. Andersen either.

I am aware that the children’s books explored in this study are, for the main part, very free renditions of Andersen’s fairytales, and that most people, at least most scholars, would probably not consider them ‘respectable’ translations and take them seriously as linguistic renditions of Andersen’s original stories. I do not expect readers to change their personal definition of what constitutes a translation, but I find it worth pointing out that a generally accepted definition still remains to – and probably never will – be found. Gideon Toury has argued that the task of defining translation is ultimately up to the target culture, while, using empirical evidence, Cay Dollerup points out that “there are differences in a�itude within a society according to people’s background knowledge and position in the socio-literary system.” (Dollerup 1999: 298-299) I hope, however,

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that my selection of material, which spans children’s literature of both very high and very poor quality, illustrates the potential for ‘loss’ as well as ‘gain’ and also calls a�ention to a field of study that has so far mainly received condescending remarks from translation critics, Translation Studies scholars, and, in particular, scholars of Hans Christian Andersen.

The year 2005 has seen massive bicentennial birthday celebrations and the promotion of Andersen. But the truth is that the old poet’s fairytales no longer belong to the favourite read-aloud literature of families with children. Today, in a world in which the markets for co-prints are rapidly expanding and read-ing-aloud faces competition from an infinite number of other activities, it may be time to redefine the position of Andersen’s fairytales. It is no use to discuss translations of Andersen from a philological point of view, which also, implicit-ly, places his fairytales on a literary pedestal that is essentially o�en out of reach to most children. We should accept that the role is now reversing, as Dollerup puts it: “the translation of children’s books for reading aloud makes a mockery of much elevated thinking in Translation Studies.” (Dollerup 2003: 19)

This study was spurred by my deep affection for the writings of Hans Chris-tian Andersen and it is an a�empt to advocate the need to prepare, indeed adapt his fairytales to the challenges of our times and the demands of modern inter-national child readers and, not least, their parents and grandparents. I am con-vinced that children who are presented with high-quality, eminently readable children’s versions of Andersen’s fairytales, preferably with lively illustrations, are likely to return to his stories as adults. In other words, the reciprocal joy of the child and the adult reading his fairytales aloud makes the literature of Hans Christian Andersen come alive.

Notes1. The original H. C. Andersen texts can be found on the Internet at www.kb.dk → H. C. Andersen på Det Kongelige Bibliotek i 2005 → H. C. Andersen online → Eventyr, historier og romaner → Titelliste.2. Dollerup’s model as used here is presented in Dollerup (1999: 47-50; 199-236 (covering German and Danish)) and Dollerup (2003 (covering German, Danish, French, etc.)). The model also seems to work for other scholars referring to other language pairs.3. In their study of co-prints, Dollerup and Orel-Kos mention that “An exhaustive study of co-printing will require infinitely be�er bibliographical tools than those available to-day or … access to all publishing houses in a country (for a synchronic and exhaustive study) or a comprehensive and meticulous examination of a vast amount of books.” (2002: 91) In the context of my study, it suffices to point out that some of the stories dis-cussed appear to be co-prints. 4. The book appears to be a co-print since it is published by the German publishing house of Neugebauer. There is a German edition translated (from Danish) by Lisbeth Zwerger. It is impossible to tell whether the English text is translated from Danish or from German, but Anthea Bell has translated other books from Danish, so her translation is more likely to be directly from Danish (she has also translated German stories).

Works citedPrimary textsAndersen, H. C. 1835. Den lille Ida’s Blomster. 1844. Na�ergalen. 1845. De Røde Sko.Andersen, Hans Christian. Translated by Anthea Bell. Illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki.

1983. The Red Shoes. London: Neugebauer.Bazilian, Barbara. 1997. The Red Shoes – Adapted from a Story by Hans Christian Andersen.

Boston: Whispering Coyote.Diana Crone Frank & Jeffrey Frank. 2003. The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New

Translation from the Danish. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Lewis, Naomi (translator) & Emma Chichester Clark (illustrator). 1999. Elf Hill –Tales

from Hans Christian Andersen. London: Frances Lincoln.

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So, Meilo. 1992. The Emperor and the Nightingale. London: Frances Lincoln.

Works consulted and citedAndersen, Jens. 2003. Andersen - En Biografi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.Bassne�, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. London: Routledge.Dollerup, Cay. 2003. Translation for reading aloud. MεTA - Translator’s Journal 48. 81-

103.Dollerup, Cay. 1999. Tales and Translation. The Grimm Tales from Pan-Germanic Narratives to

Shared International Fairytales. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Dollerup, Cay & Silvana Orel-Kos. Co-prints and translation. 2001. Perspectives: Studies

in Translatology 9. 87-108. Diana Crone Frank & Jeffrey Frank. 2003. The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen – A New

Translation from the Danish. London: Houghton Mifflin.Harder, Thomas. 1995. Li�erær oversæ�else i praksis. Oversæ�else af li�eratur. Copenha-

gen: Center for oversæ�else.Hauberg Mortensen, Finn. 1989. A Tale of Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and Danish

Children’s Literature 3-4. The Nordic Roundtable Articles 5.Oi�inen, Rii�a. 2000. Translating for Children. New York & London: Garland.Pedersen, Viggo Hjørnager. 2004. Ugly Ducklings? Studies in the English Translations of

Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and Stories. Odense: University Press of Southern Den-mark.

Seago, Karen. 2001. Review of Dollerup, Cay. Tales and Translation. MARVELS & TALES. Journal of Fairy-tale Studies 15. 119-123.

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Appendix Story

Comment

Li�le Ida’s Flowers(Naomi Lewis)

The Em-peror and the Nightingale(Meilo So)

The Nightin-gale( Naomi Lewis)

The Red Shoes(Anthea Bell)

The Red Shoes (Barbara Ba-zilian)

Approximation of elements in the original rendered ad-equately

63 % 12.8 % 71.2 % 99.7 % 6.4 %

Structural layer Textual order of elements retained. Roughly the same number of episodes, except for clear omis-sions

The number of elements in the source text is great-ly reduced. The main plot is the same

Textual order of elements retained. Almost the same number of episodes, except for clear omis-sions

Almost com-pletely the same as in the original. One para-graph per page

It is mean-ingless to make a com-parison

Linguistic layer Successful renderings of culture specific ele-ments.Addition of onomatopo-etic words.Addresses the child reader

Very free and uncon-ventional retelling

Follows the wording of the origi-nal fairly closely. No ‘cultural incompat-ibility’.‘Style’ the same

Only a few words ‘loose-ly’ translated. All religious elements intact. Very close to Dan-ish word order

Only a few words and phrases sound like the original. All religious elements purged

Content layer Content mainly the same. Personal ‘Ida-Thiele’-references omi�ed

All ‘un-necessary’ details omit-ted

Close to original, but the snob-bery of the courtiers is toned down

‘Faithfully’ translated

Almost com-pletely ‘re-created’ and modernised

Intentional layer

‘Cycle of life’-theme intact. Death note toned down: opti-mistic end-ing

Can be rec-ognised but mostly by adults famil-iar with A.’s tale

Fairly close to original

At least as clear as in the original

Adapted to presumed secular and sensitive, modern souls

Paratexual layer

Cheerful illustrations. Fairly loose relationship between. pictures and text

Illustrations dominate and support the text = a picture book

Cheerful illustrations. fairly loose relationship between. pictures and text

Delicate illus-trations. Very li�le connec-tion between. pictures and text

Pre�y, rather rosy illustra-tions

Chronological axis See discussion on pages 173-174.Overall assess-ment

High-quali-ty rewriting, successfully adapted to modern child audi-ence, good read-aloud qualities

Suitable for very small children who cannot read them-selves yet

High-quali-ty rewriting, successfully adapted to modern child audi-ence, good read-aloud qualities

Philological translation in disguise, but cannot be assessed by same criteria as literature for reading aloud

Neither loyal to child audience, nor to H. C. Andersen

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