Fiaba e Modernità in Hans Christian Andersen: Atti del Convegno Internatizionale di Studi Roma, 24–26 ottobre 2005 (review)

Five years separated the conference held in Rome in commemoration of H.C. Andersen’s bicentennial and the publication of the papers read at that conference. The title Fiaba e Modernità [The Fairy Tale and Modernity] catches the spirit of this miscellany quite accurately. Andersen’s genius makes him a contemporary of every next generation, while scholars vie with one another in applying various literary theories to his tales and discovering depths that may or may not be there (a variant of the romantic spleen briefly mentioned below). The sound of Andersen’s voice echoes and reechoes in innumerable works, and this trait is also part of his undying “modernity.” No unifying creed underlays the presentations. Some participants are close to French structuralism and post-structuralism (Rolande Barthes, Michel Foucault), but the most common point of departure, in theory-oriented works, is “polyphony.” No doubt, Andersen combined naïveté (feigned naïveté), irony, and seriousness, which makes his tales a fit object for a Bakhtinian interpretation. Yet there is some danger in making “the plurality of voices” a master key that will open too many doors, a concept applicable to any important writer, even such as are vastly different from Dostoevsky, the object of Bakhtin’s study.

The book contains twelve chapters, four of them in English, the rest in Italian. All have English summaries of various lengths. Below I will cite the papers by the English titles as they appear in the summaries. Pages 207–12 inform us of the contributors’ background. The Biblioteca Angelica in Rome holds many original editions of Andersen’s works and even more translations into Italian. Mads Nyegaard Outzen gave an overview of those holdings. Andersen in Italy shared the fate of practically all nineteenth-century Scandinavian authors who later achieved fame: the first translations of their prose were made from German and less often English. With regard to Andersen, this vicious practice came to an end only in 1904. Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen (“Tone and Style in English Translations of Hans Christian Andersen”), whose dissertation on the topic of this talk was published under the witty title Ugly Ducklings?, chose a conciliatory tone. Nothing is easier than to criticize translators, especially when the original is a masterpiece. Fortunately, Pedersen was ready to give credit where credit is due.

Andersen was a child of the romantic age with its keen interest in antiquities. The first edition of the Grimms’ Haus- und Kindermärchen appeared in 1812, and in 1846 William J. Thoms coined the word folklore. It was therefore a good idea to open the collection with Paolo Di Giovine’s paper “Fairy Tales and the Rediscovery of the Linguistic Roots: Andersen and the Grimm Brothers” (only a short introduction by the editor precedes this paper). However, as Di Giovine admits, Andersen did not write anything on linguistic topics, and no evidence points to his familiarity with Rask’s and Bopp’s works. Other than that (regardless of their personal contacts), the Grimms’ influence on Andersen is apparent. Characteristically, “The Tinderbox,” the first tale of his oeuvre, is a version of “Das blaue Licht,” but Andersen always “retold” the tales and later became independent of tradition. (Compare also Pietro Clemente’s observation [102] that even “The Tinderbox” begins with “A soldier went marching along the high road: one two” rather than “Once upon a time.”) I am not sure I can quite follow the idea that Andersen, like the founders of Indo-European linguistics, had an interest in recovering the Indo-European past, but Teresa Pàroli (“Echoes of Old Norse Culture in Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales”) showed that Andersen was far from indifferent to the Scandinavian past as preserved in Saxo (Gesta Danorum is, for obvious reasons, particularly relevant), the Eddas, and some of the greatest sagas. Pàroli’s contribution, an essay with multiple detailed footnotes, rather...