Chekhov's Mistress
I’m Hans Christian Anderson
Okay, I’m not H.C. Anderson, but those are the words to the tune bouncing around my head from the 1952 MGM film with Danny Kaye. That happy smiley musical prompted me to crack open one of the new translations of his stories that my wife was given recently.
As it shockingly (!) turns out, Anderson was nothing like Danny Kaye; he was, in fact, something of an ugly duckling and a shameless self-promoter. He didn’t even like children! Okay, I hadn’t been this upset since I met Evel Kneivel. How could the great children’s story writer not even like the little thumbelinas he was writing for? Well, as it turns out, and I think I read about this in Bookforum last year but didn’t give it any thought until now, that Anderson was quite a prolific writer beyond the disneyfied works we know him by.
According to “The Real H.C. Anderson” in the new Frank and Frank translation, Anderson wrote 36 theatrical works, six travel books, six novels, hundreds of poems and about 170 fairy tales and stories. And he wrote something like 14 letters a day! (I know, I always think, “what a good blogger he would have made”).
So now I’m learning that a writer whom I always dismissed was quite influential among some of the important authors of his and later generations. An article in the New Observer says that:
…later writers like Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka have not hesitated to hail his genius and acknowledge his influence. When Graham Greene was asked how he was able to become a novelist, he replied, with a tribute to “The Snow Queen,” that it was because he had acquired, early on, a splinter of ice in his heart.
Hmm (Writers can also learn a bit of networking from Anderson. When he was only 28 and barely known outside his own country he reportedly dropped in uninvited on the likes of Victor Hugo and others). Well, we know past translations of Anderson were pretty bad, but what didn’t really dawn on me was that his style was far more ironic than one would guess from the simple, watered down tales we’ve grown up with. For instance, the Little Mermaid is much more a tale of eternity and mortality than a love story. I’ve long been a fan of folktales and old form of story telling, so this reconsideration of Han Christian Anderson is welcome, if I can just get that tune out of head.
Read widely, think well, and write often
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: We’re All a Little Mad: Final Thoughts on Don Quixote
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: July 12, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
