Tatar Talks Tales

Devotees of fairy tales need not wait until next year for Fairy Tales Core professor Maria Tatar’s explanations of them. They need only head to the Harvard Bookstore today at 3 p.m.

Tatar, who also holds the titles of Dean for the Humanities and John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, will be discussing The Annotated Brothers Grimm, her new lushly illustrated and thoughtfully glossed book on some of the most famous (and most obscure) fairy tales in the world.

“Our culture has different portals for fairy tales,” Tatar explains. She points to the obvious Disney portal, which is all about the magic so “you’re not supposed to analyze. At the other end of the spectrum is Will Bennett, whose Book of Virtue transforms every tale into “a single lesson, a single moral.”

Tatar says she wants to create a new portal, one that “gives you the aesthetic side, but points to the fact that there are multiple meanings.” Annotations “emphasize differing moments we can enter the story,” she says, that allow us to “find some kind of meaning for us and for our children.”

There are 210 tales in the Grimms’ complete collection. Tatar’s book includes 46, arranged in the order of the original volume. “I’m trying to capture a historical document,” Tatar says, “to let it unfold as it would for a nineteenth century reader.”

Still, many of the Grimm’s tales are “quite dull,” according to Tatar. Fables, peasant tales and bumpkins all represent “a culture [that] is sort of lost to us.” She chose the stories to include not only to reflect the breadth of subject matter, but also to appeal to her audience.

Tatar says she wants readers both young and old to enjoy the stories. “It’s really cross-generational,” she says. “The hope is that it will be a kind of contact zone for adults and children to talk about these stories that have grown so important to our culture and that are constantly recycled.”

That being said, there are a number of tales at the back of the book for adults only. These are shorter than the others, though Tatar admits that this is “more of an accident” than indicative of a pattern. “I suppose I didn’t want to torture readers with the longer ones,” she laughs.

Though they contain prominent references to magic, the adult stories are not so much fairy tales as sensational bits of gossip. Tatar says this points very clearly to the fact that fairy tales “had their origins in a culture of adult storytelling,” spreading bits of news across the country in much the way TV or even pornography does so today.

Some of the adult stories are grisly and disturbing, such as “The Jew in Brambles,” about a Jew who is forced to dance in a thorn patch and is later hanged. “[These stories] are so incredibly different from what we’re familiar with,” Tatar says. “But they’re still widely anthologized in a sort of mindless way.” “The Jew in the Brambles,” for example, has recently been included in a collection of the Grimm’s Tales specifically marketed for children.

“We see the Grimms as these cultural icons,” Tatar says. “A sort of reverent attitude, especially in Germany, that they could do no wrong. I want to point out that we have to question these stories and think about them even as we keep retelling them.”

Tatar wants her readers to remember that “the versions of the Grimms aren’t necessarily our versions.” People’s eyes are gouged out. Parents attempt to eat their children. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper.

Tatar says that parents have the right to decide what aspects of the stories are appropriate. “If you don’t want to read your children about the bloody heel, don’t do it!” she insists, and suggests they can get to it when they’re older.

It was in fact through the Brothers Grimm that Tatar first became interested in the study of fairy tales. In her office she has a volume of their stories barely kept together with rubber bands and duct tape.

“The book was not read to pieces, it was looked to pieces,” Tatar explains. It’s written in German, and when she first owned it as a child, she couldn’t read the language.

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.