Royall Tyler’s book, Henry Pourrat and ‘Le Trésor des Contes,’ is indeed a treasure trove of French folk and fairy tales. The book contains English translations of ninety-five tales, eighty-one of which were taken from Claire Pourrat’s seven volume thematic edition of Pourrat’s Le Trésor (1977-1986), with the remaining tales being translations of the oral source material collected by Pourrat and taken from Bernadette Bricout’s Contes et récits du Livradois: Textes recueillis par Henry Pourrat (Tales and Stories from Livradois: Texts Collected by Henry Pourrat, 1989). Divided into three main parts, it is the last section that contains the bulk of the almost four-hundred-page book with translations of seventy-three tales chosen by Tyler from the remaining stories not included in her previous translation work for French Folktales from the Collection of Henry Pourrat (1989). Given that C. J. Bjurström’s one-hundred-and-five selections for French Folktales were largely from Pourrat’s volumes on “Les Amours” (Love Affaires), “Les Fous et les Sages” (The Mad and the Wise), “Le Bestaire” (Bestiary), and “Les Fées” (Fairies); Tyler’s corpus contains more stories from the remaining categories of “Le Diable” (The Devil), “Les Brigands” (Bandits), and an almost equal amount from “Au Village” (The Village). Scholars and students interested in the legacy of the tales of Charles Perrault, or the overlapping relationship between literary and oral fairy tale traditions, will find the third section particularly appealing and useful, as it contains Pourrat’s variants of “Marion peau d’ânon” (Peau d’âne), “Le Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), and “La belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty). Readers familiar with Delarue’s “The Story of Grandmother” and Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” will be excited to find echoes of both variants in Pourrat’s version.
However, a major weakness of the translations is the abundance of (around five dozen) spelling mistakes, grammatical, lexical, and syntactical errors, and translation inconsistencies. For example, in the tale “The Lovely She-Devil” (189-98), there are several examples of misspelled or missing words, such as “though” instead of “through” or “for” and “to” absent in the following sentences: “If I could perform the three tasks the proprietor set [for] me… when his mother went out [to] feed the horses their oats” (196-97). Finally, near the end of the tale, the meaning of the following sentence is unclear: “They’d brought fresh walnuts and tucked into them, to improve the flavor of the wine” (197). Similar mistakes are found in “Marion Donkeyskin” (149-61), such as “on morning” rather than “one morning” (159) or “of” missing from the following sentence: “My dear, you do give me a lot [of] trouble” (152). Again, later in the tale the meaning of this sentence is obscured by the translation: “But the idea of bring her masters inside and seating them before the maie, the bread bin, in this house all dark-smoked wood, so old, so small, and so cluttered that there was hardly room in it to turn around!” (158). Finally, in the tale of “The Capuchin Friar” (333-37), multiple errors are found on the very same page, such as “he” rather than “the” in the first line, “remember” instead of “remembered” in the line “He remember how uncomfortable the woman of the house had seemed,” and the duplication of the words “be done” in the sentence: “It has to be done be done, so it must be done tonight” (334). The more minor typos or misspellings could be easily overlooked if they were not so prevalent throughout the book.
Despite these errors, one of the most valuable parts of Tyler’s book is the second section, “Sources and Style,” which contains a selection of eight tales from Le Trésor alongside their oral field variants collected by Pourrat. These translations, which were also not included in French Folktales, allow readers to examine the oral field versions and Pourrat’s edited and published variants side by side, along with Tyler’s remarks. Therefore, this section will be especially appealing to teachers who are interested in providing students with examples of the ways in which some European folklore collectors modified their oral field variants for publication. This section will also be important for scholars and students of the early modern literary fairy tales by women writers, such as Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, as well as Perrault, as it includes variants of “Finon-Finette” (The Clever Princess), “Cendrillon” (Cinderella), and “La Barbe Bleue” (Bluebeard). Ultimately, the integration of these oral field versions furthers the purpose of Tyler’s book, which is to “suggest that Le Trésor des contes deserves after all a place in the landscape of the folktale realm” (13).
Finally, the opening section of the book, “The Man and His Work,” provides key biographical information about Pourrat and the reception of his works and of Le Trésor in particular. After discussing Pourrat’s early life, Tyler explains the collector’s view of himself as a folk teller and clarifies the reasons behind his editorial choices. Tyler also comments on why Pourrat’s collection has been met with skepticism by folklorists and largely ignored by literary scholars, claiming that “Pourrat consciously ignored scholarly practice of which he was well aware” (12). Tyler situates Pourrat’s published tales between the highly stylized courtly and literary tales of Perrault and collections transcribed by academics with rigorous fidelity. Yet, the most interesting part of the introduction is the section on Pourrat and Vichy France that was removed from French Folktales at the request of Pourrat’s heir, according to Tyler.
All things considered, Henry Pourrat and ‘Le Trésor des Contes’ is a welcome addition to translated collections of French folklore and fairy tales such as Austin E. Fife’s translation of Paul Delarue’s The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales (1956), a valuable extension of French Folktales, and an important reference for Anglophone folklorists and fairy-tale scholars working with French tales.
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[Review length: 962 words • Review posted on May 13, 2021]