Puss in Boots is the boy’s counterpart of a Cinderella story—the hero-victim suffers less from his family, but is in sad straits nonetheless when a magic helper appears and brings about, in stages, a transformation analogous to that in Cinderella; poor orphan boy marries princess and becomes rich. However, there is virtually no sexual symbolism; the young man’s concealment naked in the river before meeting the Princess is suggestive enough in itself. 41 Most of the symbolism in the tale conceals the same terrors as in Hop o’ my Thumb, but again in mitigated form: the being who may be eaten is not the boy, but Puss, momentarily endangered at the beginning. When the same danger arises in the Ogre’s castle, Puss has already proved so resourceful that it seems to be just another problem to be ingeniously overcome.
Puss’s stratagems are often criticized for being merely deceitful, and the tale as a whole is clearly not edifying. It belongs more to the picaresque tradition in literature, stories of the enterprising rascal whose tricks are endearing rather than regrettable. There are also echoes of another ancient tradition, this time aristocratic, that of the clever valet whose ruses assist a noble master, the master himself necessarily being honourable; he can benefit from the servant’s lack of scruple but not instigate it. 42 Puss’s lies, as Louis Marin showed in his analysis of the tale, 43 are of a remarkable kind: they become true largely because telling them helps to make them true. Puss’s announcements about the Marquis of Carabas—with some contributions of his own—convince everyone that the young man is indeed a nobleman. Only then does he progressively acquire the necessary perquisites, a princess, an estate, and a castle. However, they are acquired in the wrong order, so to speak. In reality, a young man of merit rising through society would have made his fortune first, then bought estates, then married; only at a late stage would he be ennobled and given a title. But Puss’s plan assumes that if the title is given—by him—all the rest will follow, and to our delight it does.
In other words the attraction of the story is that it is almost pure entertainment: the lightest of the Contes, and one of the most skilful. What then of Perrault’s claim, in the Preface, that in all the tales the primary purpose was didactic? The narrative, he said, was simply an envelope for ‘une morale utile’, a useful moral lesson. This was conventional. The function of literature was invariably defined, in French theoretical writing, as a combination of the ‘useful’ and the ‘pleasant’, a formula that went back to Horace; few were those who even suggested that their main purpose was simply to entertain. In Perrault’s case, however, the argument that the tales are morally instructive is undermined by the Morals themselves, which are more often than not unserious. To critics they have often seemed frivolous or cynical. Certainly they contain a good deal of irony, which often goes unappreciated by the more solemn commentators. The conclusion of Bluebeard, for instance, is the remark that the modern husband is not a tyrant, but ‘quiet as a mouse’, which (in view of some other anti-feminist passages) is likely to be read as a masculine jibe at the modern wife rather than a comment on the story. Donkey-Skin ends with several ‘moral’ observations, some resembling the Bluebeard Moral, some so trite as to be meaningless (‘whatever trials life may send | Virtue will triumph in the end’). When the comments seem to be meant seriously, as with Cinderella, The Fairy, and Puss in Boots, they are prudential, that is, they concern the qualities that are needed to avoid risks and get on in the world, justifying self-interest rather than altruism. This is another way in which Perrault resembles La Fontaine, and like him he may use the Moral to make remarks which are not merely repetitions of what has just been expressed in the story. The second Moral to Ricky, for example, makes a common but worthwhile point about the nature of love.
The general impression given by the Morals, however, is that Perrault was seeking to distance himself and his adult readers from the more uncomfortable aspects of the stories. No Moral deals directly with the brutality which confronts the characters, whether from ogres, parents, or husbands. It is as if adults, rather than children, need to be protected from the ugly side of life. The same impression comes from considering the function of the symbolism. When the basic subject is cannibalism, or the risk of being eaten, the idea is disguised; the potential victim becomes an animal (Puss), or the aggressor a nonhuman being, an ogre or ogress. When sex is the subject, it is concealed by symbolic objects. Even where it is difficult to say what the symbols mean specifically, as in Bluebeard, there can be little doubt about the general implication. Again, in considering the probable revisions made by Perrault, it looks as though the purpose was to exclude or alter the more unpleasant episodes. The clearest cases are Sleeping Beauty and Red Riding-Hood, from which episodes known in other versions, such as the Prince’s violation of the unconscious girl and the wolf’s treatment of the grandmother’s corpse, are absent; if Perrault knew them, as seems probable, he must have decided against them on the grounds that they would be found offensive, and made the necessary alterations.
The result of all this is that the tales in prose, at least—the position is different with those in verse—became suited to the middle-class sensibilities of his time. These, so it would appear, did not alter fundamentally for centuries, despite some changes in Victorian times, when the classic fairy-tale text became the Grimms’ collection. As regards morality, in the widest sense of the word, Perrault’s stories seem to have been considered still relevant. Nor would their rural setting have seemed unfamiliar, when even town dwellers were still accustomed to the traditions of an agricultural society. Late in the nineteenth century came more significant changes. This is the time when Thomas Hardy’s novels were recording a world in which folktale would still have been a normal part of life, but which was not to last much longer. Perrault himself had made out, although the decor of the tales was that of his own time, that they came from a vaguely medieval past. By the middle of the twentieth century, his pretence of antiquity had become a reality. Even the medium of print was being superseded by electronic communications, just as print had superseded oral tradition.
It is common to lament the passing of fairy-tale as a consequence of these changes. In 1946 Stith Thompson said that ‘folktale has gone the way of the bow and arrow’. 44 However, it may be too early to pronounce it dead. Writers of books and makers of films go on using characters and plots from Perrault’s tales and others. We should perhaps accept that fairy-tales from the past have to be put into modern forms in order to be appreciated; that is preferable to oblivion. Perrault himself claimed to be doing no more, and no less, than countless other narrators who took stories they knew and presented them afresh. La Fontaine wrote, in the dedication to his second collection of fables, that a story ‘truly casts a spell’, because it ‘makes a captive of the soul’. Who would disagree? Those by Perrault have held a good few people spellbound over the centuries and we may reasonably suppose that they will go on doing so. For the majority among us, readers and listeners who lack the creative gift, it is to be hoped that they will also inspire others to follow his example.
NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION
AN asterisk in the text signifies a note at the back of the book.
There is no question about the choice of text to follow: the only full text is that of the 1697 edition of the Histoires ou Contes, left unrevised by Perrault. As regards variants, there are significant differences only for Sleeping Beauty and The Fairies, on which see Appendix B, although the 1695 manuscript contains numerous variant readings of minor importance. I have mainly used the edition by Collinet, but have frequently consulted also those by Rouger and Soriano (the latter being the only one to give all the variant readings). All provide much assistance with seventeenth-century meanings and the biographical, historical, and literary background.
I have usually left the traditional titles untouched, except for Ricky the Tuft, which is better than the unidiomatic Ricky with the Tuft. For Le Petit Poucet I have preferred Hop o’my Thumb to Little Thumbling, the common alternative. (Tom T
humb is a different character.) The only verse tale title calling for comment is Three Silly Wishes, the standard alternative The Foolish Wishes having, I think, too much alliteration. Children’s editions of the tales are often given the general title ‘Tales of Mother Goose’ or similar; Contes de ma mère l’oie was not used by Perrault himself except in the 1695 manuscript of the first five tales, although the words are to be seen in the frontispiece of the 1697 Contes, and has been so often used for other collections that a less quaint title seemed preferable.
I believe this to be the first complete English translation in which verse is rendered in verse. The full Griselidis has never been translated, as far as I know. Usually all or some of the verse tales, when they are included, are put into prose. The Morals which Perrault added to the prose tales are sometimes translated into verse, sometimes into prose. Of the prose tales, the first English translation is now generally attributed, following the Opies (The Classic Fairy Tales, 24 n. 1), to Robert Samber, in 1729: Histories, or Tales of Past Times. By M. Perrault. However, the old attribution to Guy Miège is still common in library catalogues. Samber’s translation is probably the most commonly reprinted, under varying titles. It is lively and picturesque, but none too reliable as regards meaning, and was accurately revised by J. E. Mansion in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Harrap, 1922; reprinted as Charles Perrault’s Classic Fairy Tales, London: Chancellor, 1986); here Three Wishes and Donkey-Skin are adapted for prose. There have been many other translations and innumerable adaptations, among which I have benefited from the translations or adaptations by Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957) and Neil Philip and Nicolette Simborowski (under the title Little Red Riding Hood, but including all the tales; London: Pavilion, s.d.). Angela Carter, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Gollancz, 1977), includes Three Wishes and Donkey-Skin in prose; the translation is loose, but moves well. I have as far as possible avoided consulting other translations, and may well have missed some that should be mentioned; many appear among the countless editions of single tales or selections.
My primary concern has been fidelity to the original meaning, but without sacrificing readability, bearing in mind that Perrault must originally have intended his stories to be read to children. In the prose tales, the language is usually simple, no doubt for the sake of effective narration, but is not without subtleties, and has greater variation in register than is sometimes supposed. Sometimes the simplicity of the vocabulary can be misleading. Often the meanings of words have changed, to a greater or lesser degree, and it is all too easy to assume that one understands a word without realizing what has changed. The verb penser, now ‘to think’, was often used to mean ‘almost to do something’: Bluebeard’s wife did not really ‘think that’ she was breaking her neck as she ran downstairs, or (a moment or two later) that she was dying of fright: in English she ‘nearly’ did so. Again, the nasty sister in The Fairies is said to be ‘brutale’ at one point, meaning not that she was brutal, or even rough, but merely impolite and inconsiderate. On this matter I owe a debt of gratitude to French editors, who have done all the hard work of checking in seventeenth-century dictionaries.
Like his immediate predecessors Molière and La Fontaine, Perrault had an ear for colloquial speech, including that of children, and seems to have enjoyed reproducing it when opportunities arose, as with Red Riding-Hood’s exchanges with the wolf or Cinderella’s with her sisters. Here the translator should employ a different register from that required in Ricky the Tuft, where the conversation (apart from when the Princess is still stupid) is in courtly or salon mode, the measured elegance of Mme de Lafayette’s characters in La Princesse de Clèves, which Perrault was probably imitating. In The Fairies it is of course essential to try to reproduce the politeness of the kind sister and the coarseness of the unkind one; if I have overdone it, I plead good intentions.
In the narrative sections Perrault quite often employs colloquial turns of phrase, as in the opening of Sleeping Beauty. However, the problem I have found in his narrative prose is not to do with register, but syntax. It seems likely that children at the end of the seventeenth century were expected to cope with more complex sentences than are usual today. His syntax is difficult by modern standards, and I have frequently felt the need to simplify it. Like most writers of his time, he arranges his sentences hierarchically: there is one main verb, the clause in which it appears being preceded and followed by rank upon rank, or so it sometimes seems, of subordinate clauses, introduced by whos and althoughs and so on. English often prefers to join clauses in the same sentence with conjunctions, and, but: ‘and he’ not ‘who’, ‘but’ not ‘although’, or else will split what might become a lengthy sentence into two or more. It is remarkable that even when he is using complicated constructions Perrault’s narrative moves rapidly and smoothly; I have tried to keep its virtues, but am all too aware that I have often stumbled after him.
Generally, my views on translating from French have been much influenced by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958; available in English since 1995), an invaluable survey of the many diverse ways in which the two languages differ in idiom, not only as regards single words or phrases, but also at the level of clauses or even whole sentences. (My remarks just now about French and English sentences derive from this book.) It is an essential corrective to the naive view that each word in French corresponds exactly, or even approximately, to a word in English—I have already given an example of this: the un-English title Ricky with the Tuft for Riquet à la houppe—and tends to argue that translation is more a matter of adapting content written in one language to the repertoire that the other language provides. This used to be taken for granted when ancient Latin or Greek had to be put into modern English, or vice versa for some persecuted students, but now it is a lesson that has to be learned afresh.
When the original is in verse, problems and priorities are rather different. Fidelity to the sense remains important, but poetry is not written mainly to convey an exact sense. The sound of words is also important, especially, of course, in rhyming poetry, and relates the words to each other in a manner independent of sense. Moreover the rhythm of verse ensures heavier emphasis on some syllables than on others, giving them greater significance. It is therefore a misapprehension to suppose that a prose translation will be the most faithful. To neglect the aesthetic appeal of metre and rhyme is at least as much of a betrayal as, with prose, it would be to rewrite rather than to translate. Besides that, in verse originals the style differs from that habitual in prose; even when the author avoids poetic diction the language of verse is usually more concentrated, which is why prose translations of verse are almost inevitably strained and unnatural. Even poorly turned verse is, I hope, better than the unreadability that easily results when a ‘literal’ prose translation is made. Conversely, the lift that rhyme and metre can give even to quite dull meanings justifies almost any attempt—and there have been some pretty bad ones—to keep the attractions of verse.
French is more generous with its rhymes than English, partly because its words are invariably stressed (though more lightly than in English) on the last syllable, and partly because it has a multitude of words ending in homophonous suffixes such as -age, -eur, -ant (or -ent), -elle, and many others. This is particularly true of the rather abstract language of the seventeenth century. It is some compensation that modern English has a wider vocabulary, rich in what are called concrete words. The result is often that the English sentence gives a more abrupt and down-to-earth impression than its more lucid and elegant French counterpart. This is not necessarily a disadvantage when the verse is humorous, but when it is measured and stately, as in many passages of Griselidis, the English version can all too easily turn awkward and high-flown; I have done what I can to avoid it. French is also quite at ease with the rhetorical style, often cultivated deliberately, which English is not, preferring the rhythms of the common language.
Perrault offers his own example in the early passage in Griselidis when the orator exhorts the Prince to take a wife and the Prince responds more naturally. Even so, in much that relates to the Prince the style—of a type cultivated assiduously by Perrault and many others in an epoch obsessed with grandeur—may well seem pompous rather than eloquent. When the tone is less elevated, as in the other two verse tales and the Morals, it is correspondingly easier to convey the ironic or simply comic effects that he aims at.
Perrault was not a great poet, but he was a very good one. He wrote easily in verse—he said that from his schooldays he preferred it to writing prose—and could produce almost any style, precious, lyrical, reflective, grandiloquent, or humorous, as required. The kind which seems to have come most naturally to him was light and mildly satirical, often making fun of his subjects but without malice, as in Three Wishes. In the verse tales he follows La Fontaine’s Fables in using what passed for free verse at the time, that is, obeying the numerous strict rules on rhyme which seventeenth-century convention imposed on poets, but mixing lines of varying lengths, twelve, ten, or eight syllables, and occasionally indulging in a triple rhyme rather than the pairs (in different combinations, aabb, abab, abba, varied at will) which were normal. The English line of verse is normally measured by ‘feet’, iambic or dactylic (combining one stressed and one unstressed, or one stressed and two unstressed—to put it unprofessionally), usually in fives for a more serious tone, the famous iambic pentameter, or in fours for lighter effects—though Andrew Marvell used the tetrameter for both. I have mixed these two lengths of line, as Perrault does, and varied the rhyme-scheme as he does, but without trying to reproduce the patterns of his verse except occasionally. Nor have I observed anything like the invariable French rule of alternating pairs of feminine rhymes (those ending in -e, now unsounded) with masculine (those ending otherwise). The only possible English counterpart for the feminine rhyme is the two-syllable rhyme, such as relation/situation; it almost always sounds overdone, although it can be excellent when humour is called for.
Complete Fairy Tales Page 4