TITLE: Does it really matter? AUTHOR: Tavia DATE: 6/22/2008 01:57:00 PM ----- BODY:
Stephen and I have been laboring with love and devotion for many weeks narrating and producing the series of Plain Tales Classics. It's been a rich project, and a very demanding one. We were contracted by publisher Brian Keairns to produce classic, original children's stories that, including Oscar Wilde's short stories The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, The Velveteen Rabbit, Rosy's Journey by Louisa May Alcott, and tales from The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit. Brian also commissioned productions of translations of children's stories, including The Nightingale and The Emperor's New Clothes, stories that the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) wrote and Mrs. Edgar V. Lucas translated. [I can't find much of anything online about who Mrs. Edgar Lucas was, but Wikipedia has an article about her husband, Edgar Lucas (1868-1938).] We've also produced a series of fairy tales translated by Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1844-1912). Two of Lang's translated fairy tales include Hansel and Gretel and The Fisherman and His Wife, which were originally published by the brothers Grimm. Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859) Grimm were German linguists, who, according to Wikipedia, gathered folktales from peasants and villagers and then penned and published the stories. In the early 1900's, Andrew Lang published translations of The Arabian Nights, and we've just completed productions of Scheherazade, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. The One Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights, are ancient stories that cannot be attributed to any one author, an exact time of origin, or even any one culture. Our immersion in story and language has generated many conversations and questions. We worked hard to track down the right versions of each story, and found that there is rarely one exact right manuscript of any story. Sometimes a few words from an Andrew Lang translation would vary from book to book, so if we recorded the script published in one place, like Lang's Red Fairy Book, when we proofed the story against the same tale published in Lang's Fifty Favorite Fairy Tales, the versions would vary slightly. Another example: when we recorded Nesbit's The Book of Beasts from one script, we later picked up another printed copy of the story, and discovered it was the version printed for American audiences and referenced "soccer" instead of "football," as well as other slight shifts. Even the beloved Velveteen Rabbit was found to have a few differences of wording from publication to publication. Language is so important to both Stephen and me. It's important enough that even when the temperature in my woefully unventilated studio has risen to an uncomfortable degree, we still worked late into the evening to make even just one-word final corrections in stories recorded from these shifting scripts. Before we realized that even printed books published decades ago had these inconsistencies, I was convinced that the internet was to blame for any inconsistency. I do believe that the web does more harm than good by making books available online. We first read our scripts online, stories that had been pulled from websites that make copyright-free materials available, and stories which were riddled with misspellings, sections completely absent, and syntax that was not true to the original story. It concerns me that people will read Rip Van Winkle online, but they won't be reading Washington Irving's version of it. They'll be reading a version that has been corrupted by a well-meaning volunteer who typed it into Project Gutenberg and didn't take the time to make sure it was word perfect. So we have put a huge amount of time into proofing and researching the Plain Tales project, to make sure that what McGil Audio (my production company with Stephen) produces is of the highest quality, despite language corruption that may now exist. I am concerned that the more stories are put online, and the more people move to doing research and seeking information exclusively online, the less accurate the information and the less informed people will become. (I do recognize the irony here - that I have several times referenced Wikipedia in this post. So lets review the facts listed herein with wiki-skepticism.) But I was surprised and interested to have discovered the variations in language in printed book publications, as well as in the e-book versions. Since I've discovered that the language in these stories is not constant - that I can rarely grasp the absolute, unequivocal right version of it - my questions have moved out of the minute and have become broader and more difficult to answer. I'm still curious as to why there were slight differences between publications of Lang translations of fairy tales. But I'm more interested in who Lang was, why he invested so much of his life in creating countless volumes of fairy tales, and what his agenda or mission was. What was happening in the world and in the place and time when Andersen and the Grimm brothers were writing stories that have such specific gender roles and exemplify the standards of docility and strength, beauty and power, right and terrible behavior? I want to find out answers. I have so many questions after this project, and I would love to produce a series of audio documentaries that explore some of the background about the stories. I want to know who Oscar Wilde was skewering in The Remarkable Rocket. I want to know where Kenneth Grahame wrote The Reluctant Dragon. I want to walk the places Beatrix Potter loved in the Lake District that inspired her queer and compelling children's stories. And I want to know how much fairy tales changed over time. What were they originally? Were the women always so wicked, like Hansel and Gretel's mother, or Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law, or the Fisherman's Wife, or did those stories change to reflect the culture and politics of the time in which they were finally published? Language matters. But these contextual questions interest me more than anything. These stories stand on their own, but the context for story is as important to me as the story itself. I want to explore.

Labels: , , , ,

----- --------