This article discusses the emergence of the European bourgeois fairy-tale as the outcome of translation. It is my thesis that the genre came into its own inter- nationally by virtue of translations of the Tales of the brothers Grimm into Danish, and of the Fairy-Tales of Hans Christian Andersen into German. Apart from comments made in passing in footnotes in stray articles which discuss relations at the strictly personal level between Danes and Germans at the time, and in the sweeping comments that both the Grimms and Hans Andersen wrote 'eventyr', there has been no serious and thorough examination of the relationship between the Grimm Tales and the Tales of Hans Andersen. By now both the Grimm and Andersen stories have been translated into more than a hundred languages.1 Their respective stories are often confused, so that editions that come out attribute stories by either party (and occasionally by the Frenchman Charles Perrault) to the other one. The historical setting is significant. It involves not only the wider historical background but also the Grimms' and Andersen's personal backgrounds and the social and cultural context in which the stories were first written and translated. Tradition pictures the brothers Grimm as the founders of folklore, earnest men who plodded around the German countryside collecting the genuine folk tales of the Germans. There is little truth in this picture. The two brothers,Jacob and Wilhelm, were born in 1785 and 1786 respectively in Hesse, the fief of a landgrave who amassed a fortune and built himself a splendid castle by hiring (leasing is the modern term) his army to the British to fight their wars, including the American War of Independence. The brothers were born in the small town of Hanau as the sons of a government official, an 'Amtmann'.2 He died while they were quite young and they grew up in Kassel, the capital of Hesse, with 20,000 inhabitants. The brothers were educated at school and at university during the Napoleonic period. Wilhelm suffered frail health and stayed in Hesse, but Jacob went to Paris to help one of his professors, the legal historian Savigny. Shortly after his return, Hesse, which Napoleon had turned into a Kurfurstentum, was overrun by French armies on their way to Prussia. The Kurffirst fled. A year later, in 1807, Napoleon established a new kingdom in Germany, Westphalia, which was made up of several minor German states, including part of former Hesse. Since it boasted a glamorous castle, Kassel became the capital of the sovereign state ruled by King Jerome, a brother of Napoleon. Westphalia was a model of French administration and thus promoted the cause of merit: that is, of education and middle-class diligence. Thanks to his antiquarian interests, Jacob was brought to the attention of the administration and secured a position as the King's private librarian.
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Cay Dollerup. “Translation as a Creative Force in Literature: The Birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy-Tale.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 1995, pp. 94–102. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3733256. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020.
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