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  • From the Editors

This issue is dedicated to fairy tales and translation. It features not only new scholarly articles on the history of fairy-tale translation, but also translations of tales from Europe, Japan, and Hawai‘i, as well as translations of historically important essays on the fairy tale and fantasy. The issue’s focus developed spontaneously from a sequence of related submissions that reflected the growing interest in the phenomenon of translation, which cuts across many disciplines. The Modern Language Association (MLA), for example, recently announced that the theme of the Presidential Forum at the 2009 MLA convention will be “The Tasks of Translation in the Twenty-First Century.” In the field of fairy-tale studies, the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, sponsored an international symposium in September 2008 called “Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema,” which addressed important questions concerning the translation of folktales and fairy tales.

The fairy tale itself has flourished thanks to cross-cultural contamination or cross-fertilization of one tradition by another through translations and adaptations. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian tales were read and adapted by seventeenth-century French tale-tellers. When Antoine Galland translated the Arabian Nights from Arabic into French in the early eighteenth century, he unknowingly launched the literary fashion of the oriental tale. Galland’s translation subsequently was translated into German and English, influencing tale-telling in those countries. As scholars like Heinz Rölleke, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes have demonstrated, even the Brothers Grimm, who claimed to have gathered authentic stories from the German folk, had collected many tales that in fact were German adaptations of French tales, many of which had Italian roots.

The essay by nineteenth-century French writer Théophile Gautier that has been translated for inclusion in this issue is basically a review of a French [End Page 13] translation of the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose works were fundamental in shaping the nineteenth-century French tale. In his piece on James Robinson Planché, Paul Buczkowski examines Planché’s techniques in translating Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and how he adapted her works with a nineteenth-century English audience in mind. Planché notably would go on to produce fairy-tale extravaganzas based on d’Aulnoy’s tales. Ute Heidmann and Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère move from examining the translation techniques used by Angela Carter in her modern English version of Charles Perrault’s tales to how she ingeniously transforms his “Bluebeard” to write “The Bloody Chamber.” Bryan Kuwada explores how a Hawaiian translation of “Bluebeard” necessarily takes on new meaning within a culture unfamiliar with the foundational stories of Eve and Pandora that inform Western readings of the tale. As each of these articles demonstrate, translations of tales lead to creative and even subversive adaptations of their sources. Anatole France’s nineteenth-century “Dialogue on Fairy Tales,” made available here in English, provides not only a notable historical document in the fairy tale’s history but also an interesting challenge to the practice of fairy-tale studies, which translates creative works of imagination into scientific discourse.

An issue on fairy tales and translation would be incomplete without translations of tales, which has always been an important feature of Marvels & Tales. Included here are translations of tales from France, Hawai‘i, Italy, Japan, and Spain, which were influenced, as the translators’ introductions make clear, by tale traditions outside of their homelands, and whose translations can only enrich the global corpus of tales. [End Page 14]

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