translated literature Archives

Aucassin and Nicolette by an Out-of-the-Box Medieval Author

November 20, 2009 by Rebecca Reid

Aucassin et Nicolete was written in medieval France, but it’s not your typical roman d’amour.

I haven’t actually read any other medieval romances. My expectations of “typical” are all formed on stereotype. In many ways, Aucassin and Nicolette meets those fairy tale stereotypes. On the other hand, something goes quite “wrong” in this love story, for Aucassin seems to be a selfish weakling, a man frozen into inaction when things don’t go as he expected, and Nicolette is constantly called on to be the true heroine of the story.

I first read Aucassin and Nicolette during my first or second year of college for a history class. I loved it! I found it again this week for the Really Old Classics Challenge, and I still love it. Because I think Nicolette is such an awesome heroine, going beyond the stereotypes of Medieval France, I’ve decided to also count Aucassin and Nicolette as my first work for the Women Unbound Challenge.

Reading in Spanish (Neruda’s Poetry and La casa en Mango Street by Cisneros)

October 23, 2009 by Rebecca Reid

Pablo Neruda’s early poetry (specifically, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) does not have much to do with Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. Neruda was a Chilean who wrote love poetry (in Spanish) in the early 1900s at the age of 20. Hispanic-American Sandra Cisneros wrote in the 1980s a short volume (in English) of connected short stories about a Hispanic girl in Chicago. But I read both these works in Spanish (the Cisneros in translation) this month, and so the tenuous relationship between them is the language I read them in.Continue Reading

Beauty and the Beast + The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

April 20, 2009 by Rebecca Reid

The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of Perrault’s stories are retellings of other’s stories. My favorite was “Beauty and the Beast.”Continue Reading

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

March 3, 2009 by Rebecca Reid

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar stories with similar themes multiple times for their readers. They were, after all, trying capture the folk tales of the era; maybe those folk tales were likewise repetitive.

The Barnes and Noble edition I read did not include an introduction, so my experience was simply with the stories themselves. Despite the repetition of stories, I highly enjoyed reading the collection, especially as I took them slowly, reading a few stories (up to 20 or 30 pages) a day, mostly in the evening before bed. True “bedtime stories.”

But these stories probably aren’t for children, unless the children are pretty thick-skinned. (Note that I classify it, on this site, as Fiction, not Children’s Literature.) Grimm’s stories had blatant morals (such as how laziness leads to your death and wicked stepmothers who abuse children must, in the end, meet their horrendous end) and gruesome violence (such as stepmothers who decapitate stepchildren, girls so desperate to get a man they cut off their toes, and travelers who blind starving fellow travelers as payment for food).

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the retreat into a world in which the animals one meets on the path are really princes in disguise, in which the dead come back to life, and in which magical fairies and witches regularly rescue those who really are deserving of assistance.

I don’t want to live in the world of the Brother’s Grimm. The violence and retribution is horrendous. Yet, the fairy aspects of the tales made some of them magical, and I look forward to visiting other fairy tales in the future – including Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Have you read Grimm? What was your verdict: Violent or Magical? I, personally, am torn between the two.Continue Reading

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