Instead, Tatar describes her experience on “entry through images.” Fascinated by the pictures, she would figure out which ones corresponded to which stories and then go to the library to look them up.
“Childhood reading stays with you in a way no other reading does,” Tatar says. In some indirect way, the Grimms led her to the study of German.
In graduate school, when Tatar discovered that the Grimms did not appear on any reading list, she decided to remedy it. “I came back to it through a sort of circuitous route,” she says.
Tatar says that her experience led her to understand “how deeply all of us are influence by these stories in childhood.” Furthermore, “it is often not the whole story, but only one moment that stays with us.”
Tatar calls this the Turkish Delight Syndrome, after a student who read about the candy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and grew to think of it as having almost magic properties. It wasn’t until years later that he actually tried the stuff, and discovered, much to his chagrin, that he didn’t like the taste.
All the stories in the volume are Tatar’s own translation. “There are actually quite a number of good translations,” Tatar says, “but since I was engaging with the stories at a kind of micro-level, the only responsible way I saw to do that was by [translating them myself.]” She wanted “to get the language as precise and poetic as possible.”
Easier said than done. “Over a period of about 40 years, the Grimms collected not one but several versions of their stories,” Tatar explains. They often conflated them, resulting in a style that is “raw, fairly coarse and conversational,” Tatar says. “When you translate them to print, it doesn’t quite work.” As a result, aesthetics were also considered.
Fans of Tatar will be pleased to hear that she is currently finishing another, more academic book on Bluebeard that will be released in December. They are also no doubt aware of a similar publication to her current work: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, released in 2002. Tatar describes this edition as “more archival,” her concern being history rather than storytelling.
This leaning is exhibited in, among other things, the way in which illustrations are included. In Classic Fairy Tales, images from a number of illustrators, often of the same scene, are included in rapid succession. Some stories have two or three pages of pure image to highlight the history that went into them.
Brothers Grimm, on the other hand, “is more user friendly,” Tatar says. The illustrations’ layout invites not examination, but aesthetics. They accompany the stories in much the same way that they would in a standard book of fairy tales.
Tatar explains that she decided to devote a book to the Grimms “because they give us both the magical enchanting side and also the dark side of fairy tales.” It allows her “to include the not as famous ones, the undiluted, historically authentic versions.”
At this afternoon’s talk, Tatar will discuss the importance of childhood reading’s excitement and revelation. Like the magic amulets within them, fairy tales are “an enabling mechanism.” By creating a link to literacy and knowledge of the adult word, they “allow one to escape socioeconomic realities through education,” she says.
-—Staff writer Jayme J. Herschkopf can be reached at herschk@fas.harvard.edu.