Charles Perrault’s Stories or Tales of the Past (Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé) is well known to folklorists as one of the classic collections of wonder tales, or fairytales. Many of its stories rank among the most familiar and most frequently recycled folktales, at least in the Western world, and, along with the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, are a principal source for children’s fairytale books. The eight tales in Stories or Tales of the Past are those that anglophone readers generally know as Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Blue Beard, Puss in Boots, The Fairies, Cinderella, Ricky with the Tuft, and Hop o’ My Thumb. In her renderings Christine Jones aspires, she says, to respect the wit, cultural background, and language of the original French texts more closely than previous English translators have done.
The book is structured into three parts. The first is a multifaceted introduction to Perrault, his works, and his times, followed by comments on different editions, translations, and interpretations of Perrault’s fairytale book (1-102); the second gives the tales in translation along with notes on Perrault’s French and on the culture, especially the court culture, of his day (105-163); and the third section is an annotated bibliography of Perrault’s Stories or Tales of the Past in English and French (165-205).
Jones begins with a discussion of the earliest form of Perrault’s work, a manuscript from 1695 entitled Tales of Mother Goose (Contes de ma Mère l’Oye) and consisting of five stories dedicated by Charles’s son, Pierre Perrault, to the princess Elisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans, niece of Louis XIV. Shortly thereafter (1697) the collection was enlarged to eight tales, renamed Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé, and published as a book. Like the manuscript, the book is dedicated to the king’s niece by Pierre Perrault, who represents himself as its author. Despite this claim, other evidence suggests that the book is the work of the father, and this is generally assumed to be the case.
The little work went on to enjoy great success, several of its characters even taking on a life of their own. Cinderella, for example, has become the type of the fairytale princess and her story the type of the fairytale plot. The tale of the rags-to-riches heroine has been much studied and interpreted by folklorists, psychologists, feminists, literary scholars, cultural critics, and others, and treated freely in fiction, illustration, films, and games.
Most of Jones’s introduction focuses upon the person of central interest, Charles Perrault (1628-1703), who, far from being a one-book author, was actually a prolific writer who was well known among the French intellectuals of his day. In his early role as a public relations official for the king, he was on intimate terms with the French court, and subsequently he headed the commission that created the first dictionary of the French language. His little book of fairytales appeared towards the end of his career. Filled as it is with tales about adolescents who find their way among oppressive adults and deal with the challenges of the courtly world, it may be viewed, Jones suggests, as a guide for the amusement and edification of aristocratic youth.
This initial part of the book concludes with Notes on Editions, Translations, and Interpretations (64-102). The first French edition of Stories or Tales of the Past was published in 1697 with permission of the king, but pirated editions soon followed. In 1729 the work was translated into English by Robert Samber, whose renderings of the titles of the tales and names of the characters--Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, and so on--became more-or-less traditional in subsequent anglophone translations and retellings. In the early 1800s the Brothers Grimm published their collection of German folktales, wherein they acknowledge Perrault, praising him for his simple, oral style. Later in the same century Andrew Lang included most of Perrault’s tales in his Blue Fairy Book (1889), and in the twentieth century two of Perrault’s tales, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, received Disney treatment in full-length animated films. The past quarter-century has seen a reflourishing of interest in the history and nature of the literary fairytale among folklorists and literary scholars, which has included attempts to appreciate the early literary sources on their own terms—the raunchiness of Basile, the developmental history of the Grimms’s books, the wit of Hans Christian Andersen, and so on. It is the aim of the present book, the author says, to do the same for Charles Perrault, to bring out his playfulness, to make his stories seem strange rather than familiar.
The centerpiece of Jones’s book is her translation of the Stories or Tales of the Past, consisting of Pierre Perrault’s dedication to Elisabeth-Charlotte and the eight short tales, each followed by one or more morals in verse that comment, sometimes ironically, upon the tale. Jones helpfully comments upon unobvious cultural elements. We learn, for example, that in the seventeenth century full-length mirrors of glass were very difficult to make, their manufacture being dependent upon technology recently developed in Italy; consequently, large mirrors were quite costly. So when Perrault describes the splendor of the furnishings in Blue Beard’s mansion, mentioning that it featured mirrors long enough to reflect a person from head to toe, he is characterizing this character’s immense wealth in terms of the luxuries of the day (122 note 9).
She also explains or defends many of her translation choices. Thus, when she renders the title of Perrault’s Le Petit Chaperon Rouge as “The Little Red Tippet,” a tale known in English for almost 300 years now as “Little Red Riding Hood” from Robert Samber’s rendering, she certainly succeeds in making the familiar strange. She defends this particular choice by explaining that French chaperon signified a particular kind of headgear that was fashionable from the Renaissance. Since this kind of gear lacks a one-word equivalent in today’s English, she settled for the name for part of this gear, the scarf, for which the English term is “tippet” (116 note 2). Readers must decide for themselves whether this and other untraditional renderings of proper names are felicitous or not.
But some of Jones’s translations definitely seem jarring or at least puzzling in terms of English diction, as when she writes “groomers” (109) instead of the simple and familiar word “grooms.” Elsewhere “Ah! que cela est joli” is rendered, not as “Ah, how pretty that is,” but as “Wow! That’s really something” (108). Another passage, “she was safe from enquiring minds that wanted to know” (110), will bring to the minds of some readers not seventeenth-century French but the motto of The National Enquirer. Similarly, “the prince felt all hot and bothered” (111), seems simply too colloquial in its context. Once or twice the translator slips undeniably into objective error, as when she converts the “bran” of the original to “bran seed” (128 note 6). Since bran is not a kind of grain, there is no such thing as bran seed.
The final section of Jones’s book is an Annotated Bibliography of the Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé in French and English (165-205), an extensive listing of Perrault’s book and its individual tales in French and English works from 1695 to around 1900. One of the pleasures of this section is that it allows one to follow little innovations that, like genetic mutations, enter the stream of tradition and become established. Thus Perrault’s first English translator, Robert Samber, rendered Perrault’s Cendrillon as “Cinderilla,” but one can observe this form being gradually replaced in the early 1800s by the almost but not quite identical “Cinderella.” A more significant innovation is that in an English version of Perrault published in 1763 in which Blue Beard’s coutelas, which Samber had rendered as “cutlass,” was translated as “scimitar.” This slight change initiated the practice of orientalizing Blue Beard, making him Middle Eastern (180).
Overall, Christine Jones’s book will be fascinating and worthwhile reading for anyone who is interested in the history of fairytale books. Although the author is not a folklorist, her book would make a fine resource in courses on the fairytale, whether folkloristic or literary. Bibliophiles will delight in the annotated bibliographies. And, if I do not always agree with her translation choices, I am grateful that she invites us to look over her shoulder as she works.
It remains to mention the unusually fine cover illustration by Matt Saunders.
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[Review length: 1405 words • Review posted on October 3, 2017]