Grimm's Tales for Young and Old. Translated by Ralph Manheim. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1977. Pp. x + 633, translator's preface, index. $15.00)
Ralph Manheim, certainly one of the most capable translators of German to English, has turned his considerable talents to a new translation of Grimm's Tales. Manheim's previous work, which includes award-winning translations of Hermann Hesse, Gunter Grass, Peter Handke, and a complete edition of Bertolt Brecht, suggests that we are dealing here with a most accomplished translator. The reader will not be disappointed.
In the translator's preface, Manheim justifies this new edition of Grimm's Tales with words which hauntingly echo what Jacob and Wilhem Grimm wrote in their introduction to the first edition of the Tales in 1812-1814: "Since the times had caught up with the Tales, since there was no longer any reason to rationalize or bowdlerize them, and since they are such wonderful stories, I thought the time had come to attempt a new translation that would be faithful to the Grimm brothers' faithfulness." Indeed, this seems to be the only good reason to retranslate a book which no doubt is second only to the Bible in numbers of copies sold, read, or simply displayed in home libraries. Complete translations of the tales are readily found in good libraries, and collections of favorite tales abound in the smallest libraries of the hinterland. What has not been available is exactly what Manheim is offering in his new edition, a scrupulously careful rendering of the German text, in which, as he says, "the human voice takes on a wide variety of tones-mysterious, elegaic, hushed-and-frightened, poetic, whim- women as farmers, and dwelling especially on the Pueblo tribes of the Southwest who grow corn and grind it into fine meal, she includes the text of a Hopi corn grinding song and a Tewa tale entitled, "The Envious Corn Girls." These two examples support previous statements and are meaningful because they have been placed in a cultural context. As a coherent work, covering the extent and variety of duties and customs of Native American women, the book is successful, especially for a nonacademic audience. It could, however, have included more oral and written expressions of Indian women, especially since the setting for them was so carefully prepared. The material presented, however, has been conscientiously researched and appears to be ac- curate. By combining oral expression with descriptive material the writer creates an opportunity for the reader to gain an understanding of and appreciation for the realities of these women's lives. Daughters of the Earth presents much interesting material succinctly, uses examples intelligently, and allows the reader to perceive and contemplate the significance of alternative life-styles. I Am the Fire of Time never quite manages to capture that elusive spark.
Ralph Manheim, certainly one of the most capable translators of German to English, has turned his considerable talents to a new translation of Grimm's Tales. Manheim's previous work, which includes award-winning translations of Hermann Hesse, Gunter Grass, Peter Handke, and a complete edition of Bertolt Brecht, suggests that we are dealing here with a most accomplished translator. The reader will not be disappointed. In the translator's preface, Manheim justifies this new edition of Grimm's Tales with words which hauntingly echo what Jacob and Wilhem Grimm wrote in their introduction to the first edition of the Tales in 1812-1814: "Since the times had caught up with the Tales, since there was no longer any reason to rationalize or bowdlerize them, and since they are such wonderful stories, I thought the time had come to attempt a new translation that would be faithful to the Grimm brothers' faithfulness." Indeed, this seems to be the only good reason to retranslate a book which no doubt is second only to the Bible in numbers of copies sold, read, or simply displayed in home libraries. Complete translations of the tales are readily found in good libraries, and collections of favorite tales abound in the smallest libraries of the hinterland. What has not been available is exactly what Manheim is offering in his new edition, a scrupulously careful rendering of the German text, in which, as he says, "the human voice takes on a wide variety of tones-mysterious, elegaic, hushed-and-frightened, poetic, whimsical, rowdy, solemnly or mock solemnly moralizing, and so on." His purpose is to present the "natural human voice, speaking as someone might speak," and to rid these stories of "anything resembling the never-never, good-nursery, fairy-tale style prevalent in the English translations of these and other folk tales."
All 210 tales have been translated into contemporary American English. Gone are the words "fairy tales," which Manheim has replaced quite simply with the word "tales" as a translation of the German Marchen. He finds the British at fault here, reasoning that such "absurdities" were directed toward the children of nineteenth-century England. "The adults of the reading classes were much too busy making money, Empire-building, and finding scientific explanations for the sun and everything under it, to bother with village idiots who get to be kings, tables that set themselves, or stupid peasant women with identity crises. And since the tales were addressed to children, they were termed fairy tales and, by and large, gift-wrapped in a fairy-tale style that was supposed to appeal to children."
Grimm's Tales for Young and Old has put away some of this Grimm past. We now have a modern and accurate translation of the tales, the first in over fifty years, uncluttered by fantasy pictures of marching donkies and dogs, fire-breathing, seven-headed dragons, and wicked stepmother-witches peering out of dark forests at lily-white maidens. The book has no clutter! But that is also its greatest weakness for folklorists. There are virtually no notes except on page 95, where there is the brief explanation that when it snows in Hessen people say "Mother Holle is making her bed," and on page 533, where the German Zaunkonig is explained and translated as Hedge King-Wren. The scholar looking for the extensive notes to the Tales prepared by the Brothers Grimm will have to return to one of the older translations, such as the two-volume Grimm's Household Tales, translated in 1884 by Margaret Hunt. Also missing for folklore scholars is a new translation of the introduction written by the Grimms for the first edition of the tales, then revised for subsequent editions.
In reading the book for review purposes I attempted to look at the translation of the texts, the titles, individual phrases, and at the various rhyming verses found throughout the tales. The English phrasing is smooth and in most cases does not sound like English words with German syntax. The book reads well. Manheim says of the style used: "I have tried to use a simple, natural language, though when the original waxes literary (as in the story of "A Sparrow and His Four Sons") I wax with it." In a few cases a close rendering results in statements which are, in the opinion of this reviewer, more suggestive in English than the German original: for example, on page 24, in "Faithful Johannes," "and [the merchant] opened his apron and let her look" (German: "und iffnete sein Schiirzchen und lief sie hineinschauen"), and on page 37 in "The Twelve Brothers," "she wanted to give her brothers pleasure" (German: "[sie] wollteihren Bridern ein Vergniigen machen"). In other places Manheim skillfully renders a two-unit German phrase with the three-unit English equivalent. In "Rumpelstiltskin" (No. 55), when the queen is trying to guess Rumpelstiltskin's name, she guesses in German "Heifest du Kunz?" "Nein." Hei3est du Heinz?" In English she asks "Is it Tom?" "No." "Is it Dick?" "No." "Is it Harry?" There is no question here of "improving" the stories on Manheim's part, an accusation often leveled against the Grimms in the treatment of their field data.
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Dow, James R. The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 93, no. 369, 1980, pp. 356–358. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/540589. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020.
BY ISABEL HERNÁNDEZ
PUBLISHED
Folktales are as old as human civilization itself. A synthesis of the spoken and the scripted, a fusion of different accounts of the same story. The story of Cinderella, for example, appeared in ancient China and in ancient Egypt. Details in the telling change depending on the storyteller’s cultural origins. In Egypt, her slippers are red leather, while in the West Indies, breadfruit, not a pumpkin, is the transformative object. The story of Cinderella that appears in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of German folktales, first published in 1812, might shock those familiar with today’s version of a scullery maid turned princess.
In the brothers Grimm telling, the heroine is called Aschenputtel, and her wishes come true not from the wave of a fairy godmother’s wand but from a hazel tree growing on her mother’s grave, which she waters with her flowing tears. When the prince comes to find the dainty foot that will match the single slipper (which is gold, not glass), the stepsisters do not shove and shriek but dismember, one cutting off her big toe to try and make the shoe fit, the other cutting off part of her heel. And at the story’s close, Cinderella’s wedding to the prince includes two white birds, which rather than cheerfully tweet Cinderella on her way to happily ever after, peck out the stepsisters’ eyes. (See also: Germany's fairy tale road.)
The brothers Grimm published what would become one of the most influential and famous collections of folklore in the world. Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen), later titled Grimm’s Fairy Tales, are childhood-defining stories. The Grimms, however, had curated the collection as an academic anthology for scholars of German culture, not as a collection of bedtime stories for young readers.
Amid the political and social turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), as France conquered Germanic lands, Jacob and Wilhelm were driven by nationalism to highlight their homeland and heritage. They were inspired by German Romantic authors and philosophers who believed that the purest forms of culture, those that bonded a community, could be found in stories shared from generation to generation. Storytelling expressed the essence of German culture and recalled the spirit and basic values of its people. By excavating Germany’s oral traditions, the brothers urgently sought to “preserve them from vanishing . . . to be forever silent in the tumult of our times.” (See also: Fairy Tales are much older than you think.)
Like Cinderella and many of the characters in their folktales, the story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is a rags-to-riches one. The brothers were born one year apart in Hanau, in the Holy Roman Empire’s state of Hesse-Kassel (in present-day Germany, near Frankfurt). In 1796, just a few days after Jacob, the eldest, turned 11, their father died suddenly of pneumonia, plunging the once middle-class family of six children into poverty. Two years later, Jacob and Wilhelm left home to attend high school in Kassel, a privilege made possible by their aunt’s financial support. The inseparable pair shared the same diligent work habits, studying for up to 12 hours a day.
After graduating, Jacob moved to Marburg in 1802 to study law at the university; Wilhelm followed a year later. Most of the students from wealthier families received a tuition stipend, but the Grimms’ drastic change in financial circumstance and thus social status meant that they had to pay for their own education. But this setback later proved fortuitous. As Jacob later wrote in his autobiography, “Sparseness spurs a person to industriousness and work.”
The pair had entered the university intending to echo their father’s career in law and civil service. But identifying with the hardworking “folk” whose language and stories they would later preserve and publish, they instead discovered a vocation that would define their lives and their legacy.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2019/09-10/brothers-grimm-fairy-tales/
Humble Beginnings
There once were two brothers from Hanau whose family had fallen on hard times. Their father had died, leaving a wife and six children utterly penniless. Their poverty was so great that the family was reduced to eating but once a day.
So it was determined that the brothers must go out into the world to seek their fortune. They soon found their way to the university in Marburg to study law, but there they could not find luck from any quarter. Though they had been the sons of a state magistrate, it was the sons of the nobility that received state aid and stipends. The poor brothers met countless humiliations and obstacles scraping by an education, far from home.
Around this time, after Jacob had to abandon his studies to support his family, the entire German kingdom of Westphalia became part of the French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquering rule. Finding refuge in the library, the brothers spent many hours studying and searching for stories, poems, and songs that told tales of the people they had left behind. Against the rumblings of war and political upheaval, somehow the nostalgia of stories from an earlier time, of people’s lives and language, in the little villages and towns, in the fields and forest, seemed more important than ever.
This then is the strange rags-to-riches tale of two mild-mannered librarians, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (affectionately known as the Brothers Grimm), who went hunting for fairytales and accidentally ended up changing the course of historical linguistics and kickstarting a whole new field of scholarship in folklore.
The Brothers Grimm worked as librarians, which was then, as now, not exactly a lucrative career, even if you do work for the new king in the royal private library. The young, unemployed Jacob Grimm got the job after the royal secretary recommended him; they forgot to check his formal qualifications and (as Jacob suspected) no one else applied. (Wilhelm joined him as librarian soon after). As the only instruction he was given by the royal secretary was “Vous ferez mettre en grands caractares sur la porte: Bibliothbque particuliere du Roi” (“You will write in big letters on the door: the Royal Private Library”) this gave him plenty of time to do other things, like linguistics and collecting folklore. But what does language have to do with fairies?
Most people are aware that the Grimm brothers collected fairy stories, to the delight of children everywhere. For logical, rational folk, such statistically improbable stories, with their witches, fairies, princes and princesses, woodcutters, tailors, lost children, talking animals, all frolicking about the woods from May Day to the bleak midwinter, are often dismissed as sometimes strange, sometimes silly, never serious and certainly not scholarly.
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https://daily.jstor.org/the-fairytale-language-of-the-brothers-grimm/
Upon the hundredth anniversary of the death of Jacob Grimm, folklorists the world over have united to pay tribute to the memory of the Brothers Grimm.* The Institute for Central European Folklife Research at Ntarburg has brought out a memorial volume of essays entitled Brinder Grimm Gedenken 19631-a reminder not simply of the closeness of the brothers but of the ideals of brotherhood that their lives represent and that their works have done much to promote The astonishing thing about Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is the sweep of their learning in many related fields. Although they made enormous contributions to the study of folklore philology, and literary history, they transcend the boundaries of academic disciplines. "To see European literature as a whole,' wrote Ernst Curtius, another great German scholar on the model of the Grimms "is possible only after one has acquired citizenship in every period from Homer to Goethe." The brothers achieved this difficult citizenship and a view of European literature as a whole that has left its mark on all of their achievements. It is fitting, then, to approach the most universal of their works-the Kinder- und Hausmarchen as a great monument of European literature.
When the Grimms entitled their collection of folktales Kinderund Haus marchen, they did not mean to imply that they had compiled a volume of stories for the nursery. It was in part their purpose that, as has actually happened, generations of children should read their book and that it should become a household work. But the title implies primarily an idea of the fairy tale, not an audience for which fairy tales are destined. For the Grimms it meant that the stories preserved the simplicity and innocence that their generation-the first generation of romantic writers associated with childhood and the family hearth. In the foreword to the first volume Wilhelm Grimm wrote: "These stories are pervaded by the same purity that makes children appear so marvelous and blessed to US."3 In other words, it is not that the stories are primarily for children (though most children enjoy them), but the stories are like children, have lived among children, and have been treasured and preserved within the family.
This childlike sense of wonder and the moral simplicity that the Grimms saw in fairy tales were also qualities that they attributed to the earlier literature of the Germanic peoples, and it was primarily for what remained in them of the spiritual heritage of the past that the Grimms collected folktales. In the study and preservation of the literature of the past the Grimms had a cultural and moral aim: they were striving to make their own generation and future generations conscious of the national soul that, so they believed, had lived on subconsciously in the traditional stories of the folk.
The Grimms came to folklore through literature, specifically through the literature of the Middle Ages. Before they had published their first volume of fairy tales in 1812, the brothers had already brought out, individually or together, Uber den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811), Altdanische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Marchen (1811), and an edition of the Old High German Hildebrandtslied (1812). Their interest was drawn to folk literature by the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano with whom they collaborated on the third volume of Des Knaben Wunder- horn (1808)
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David, Alfred, and Mary Elizabeth David. “A Literary Approach to the Brothers Grimm.” Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 1, no. 3, 1964, pp. 180–196. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3813902. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020.
By Edwin McDowell Sept. 28, 1983 New York Times
After more than 150 years, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella will be joined by another Grimm fairy-tale character.
The character, referred to simply as a little girl, is the central figure in a recently discovered tale by Wilhelm Grimm, who with his brother Jakob published the world famous collection of folk tales known as ''Grimm's Fairy Tales.''
The tale is the first addition to the 210 fairy and folk stories compiled by the renowned German folklorists and published in two volumes between 1812 and 1815. Moreover, the work is thought to be the only original manuscript by either of the brothers Grimm outside the Bodmer library in Geneva.
''The new manuscript should also be of great interest to scholars,'' said Peter Demetz, Sterling Professor of German Languages and Literatures at Yale University. ''The Grimms are among the major figures of 19th-century culture and civilization.''
The tale, written in Wilhelm Grimm's crimped handwriting and addressed in 1816 to ''Dear Milli,'' has an uncharacteristic introduction in which the author explains that two human hearts can find each other over great distances. He adds that although they have not met, he is already fond of her and knows that she would like him to tell a story. Whereupon he writes, ''Once upon a time,'' and proceeds with a tale of about 2,500 words.
''As far as we can tell, the manuscript was in the possession of the family of this little girl,'' said Michael di Capua, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has purchased the 167-year-old unpublished manuscript and plans to publish it in about a year, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak.
Milli's family consigned the manuscript in 1974 to J. A. Stargardt, an auction house in Marburg, West Germany. It sold the work on June 12, 1974, to Martin Bresslauer, a New York dealer specializing in rare manuscripts and books who had outbid the Bruder Grimm Museum in Kassel, West Germany.
Mr. Bresslauer, in a telephone interview yesterday, said that he listed the manuscript for sale in his catalogue five years ago for $21,000. ''My catalogues are distributed among a small number of prospective buyers, and none of them was interested at the time,'' he said.
Mr. Bresslauer said that he then put the manuscript in a bank in New York. ''I forgot all about it,'' he said, ''because I have quite a lot of books. Earlier this year, Justin Schiller told me he was publishing a catalogue of children's books and asked if he could include this. I generally don't do that sort of thing, but I let them have it on consignment for $26,000.''
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https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/28/books/a-fairy-tale-by-grimm-comes-to-light.html