Hans Christian Andersen. Udvalgte eventyr og historier. Contes et histoires choisis ed. by Cyrille François (review)

For more than half a century the basic Andersen book in France was the selection and translation by D. Soldi, originally published in 1856 and now presented in a bilingual, scientific edition by the Swiss scholar Cyrille François. However, the very first text by Hans Christian Andersen translated into French was not one of his fairy tales, but a poem, “The Dying Child” (“L’enfant mourant”), written in 1826, when Andersen was still a school pupil in Elsinore (Helsingør). The poem was to become one of Andersen’s most widespread and popular texts, printed in 1827 simultaneously in Danish and German. But it was a French author by the name of Xavier Marmier, who in 1837 brought Andersen himself as well as the poem to European fame. Marmier visited Copenhagen that year and met Andersen, who told him the story of his life. Based on Andersen’s own words, Marmier published, still in 1837, a lengthy article presenting young Andersen and his poem to the French readers, who had never before heard anything of him. The article was published in the literary journal, Revue de Paris, October 1837, and reprinted in Marmier’s book, Histoire de la littérature au Danemark et en Suède (A History of Literature in Denmark and Sweden, 1839).

Already in 1837 Andersen heard from his German translator that a French edition of his first novel, The Improvisatore, would appear the following year. But no such early translation is registered. It had to wait ten years. And in the following year, 1848, French translations of some of Andersen’s fairy tales began to appear. The breakthrough for his fairy tales in France, however, came in 1856 with a comprehensive volume translated by D. Soldi with Marmier’s 1837 essay as a preface. This edition has—in the series of Bibliothèque de chemins de fer (Railway Library)—been reissued numerous times down through the rest of the nineteenth century and together with a later additional collection right until 1934, both notably illustrated, a feature of importance to the popularity of both Danish and foreign editions of Andersen tales.

Recently no less than two independent editorial initiatives have presented the old Andersen/Soldi edition in new bilingual clothes: in November 2016, a 336-page publication, Contes in the L’Accolade Éditions, and in 2017 the edition by the Swiss scholar, Cyrille François in Classiques Garnier. The latter, which is the object of review here, is a scientific edition: 46-page introduction, timetable, etc., footnotes, bibliography, and reprint of two French nineteenth-century essays on Andersen: that of Marmier and that of a professor of literature, Philarète Chasles (“Le Perrault scandinave et les petits enfants,” 1869). The concluding bibliography includes nearly all relevant sources—with one exception: Andersen et le monde francophone (2006).

The twenty-three stories presented by Soldi in 1856 were a selection from the texts originally published by Andersen between 1835 and 1849, which Soldi in no way arranged according to chronology. The title of his 1856 Andersen book was Contes d’Andersen. Nevertheless Cyrille François calls this edition Contes et histoires choisis, which reveals the praiseworthy scientific effort to tell the “true story” about the Soldi translation and at the same time introducing a later genre distinction, but thereby departing from the original title. Soldi’s title suggests a pre-knowledge by French readers of the author he was translating. In terms of “contes” or maybe even literature in general Andersen seems to have been an already established name to the French public.

A similar problem of translation in the interaction between François and Soldi surfaces in the title of the story, known in English as “The Little Mermaid” (Danish: “Den lille havfrue”). In his learned preface François makes a distinction in the literary tradition of mermaids, leading him to prefer the word “ondine” (German: Undine, cf. the tale...