Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics

4. Doing the Somersault of Love: From “Le Chat botté” to “Puss in Boots” and “Puss-in-Boots”

The Comic Interlude of “Puss in Boots”: Capering Along with the Figaro of the Nursery, or the Smiling Cat as Authorial Double What a joy it is to dance and sing! —ANGELA CARTER, WISE CHILDREN, 232 “Puss in Boots,” Angela Carter’s translation of Charles Perrault’s “Le Maître Chat, ou le Chat botté,” is the third tale in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, and it brings comic relief after the human drama of “Little Red Riding Hood” and the shuddering suspense of “Bluebeard.” The fact that Carter translated and rewrote the tale for The Bloody Chamber and for radio shows how much she liked a story that lends itself particularly well to experiments in genre, medium, and style. Flexibility in fact characterizes the tale as much as its feisty animal hero, as a contrapuntal analysis of the translation, short story, and radio play confirms. Taken together, all three versions draw attention to the multicultural make of the tale, as Puss’s adventurous travels follow the story’s rich history of cultural adaptations. Based as it is on Perrault’s text, Carter’s translation for children bows to the French fairy-tale tradition, but her radio play rather winks in the direction of “Dick Whittington and His Cat,” an English folktale recounting the feats of the cat who makes his master’s fortune overseas: “One fine day, curled up in an empty barrel, overcome with fumes, nodded off, next thing I knew, woke up in Genoa—took service as a ship’s cat, learned to roll my Doing the Somersault of Love from “le chat botté” to “puss in boots” and “puss-in-boots” 4 158 c hapter 4 r’s in Marseilles, to caterwaul in Spain” (Yellow Sands, 122–23).1 The radio play exploits the tale’s comedic and musical potential, and it pays homage both to the riotous spirit of the commedia dell’arte and the popular English pantomime tradition. As we move from translation to rewriting, Carter’s multilingual Puss takes us not only from France to England but also further back to Italy, where he salutes his predecessors in Straparola’s “Costantino Fortunato” in Piacevole Notti (1553) and “Cagliuso” in Giambattista Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti, also known as the Pentamerone (1634–1636). In this early version the trickster cat is female, which must have pleased the feminist Carter very much. Materializing the amorous (and productive) encounter between these various traditions, Carter’s “Puss-in-Boots” features a male and a female cat (and, predictably, their litter of kittens at the end). In other words, the author stresses the promiscuous exchanges between the Italian, English , and French versions of the tale, and she explores its connections with popular theater and opéra bouffe and ultimately with the radical tradition of Enlightenment drama and rococo art. In this sense the worldly-wise and well-traveled cat who makes his master’s fortune comes to embody the circulation and adaptation of the tale in its manifold guises throughout Europe and its ramifications with art forms that all toy with extravagance and excess . In his antics Puss himself incarnates the spirit of comic subversion as he turns the world upside down for our amusement and delight. Carter explains in the preface to Come unto These Yellow Sands that the scripts of “The Company of Wolves” and “Puss in Boots” both “started off as short stories” but that “these aren’t adaptations as much as reformulations ” (10). Her preference for the term reformulation calls attention to the aspect of formal experiment in the creative process. Despite Carter’s manifest interest in the tale’s potential for re-creation in different media, it has attracted surprisingly little critical attention to date.2 Nonetheless, examining the translation in counterpoint with its prose and dramatic retellings sheds light on Carter’s understanding of the tale and on the translationrewriting dynamic. These related if distinct projects inflect the story in three main directions . The translation rereads Perrault through folklore as a trickster tale; the short story activates its sexual subtext and subversive edge and enhances its stylistic and visual exuberance; finally, the radio play explores its comic, musical, and even farcical side in the mood of “All the better to kiss Doing the Somersault of Love 159 me with” (Yellow Sands, 146). Based on intrigue, mistaken identities, and fast-paced action and dialogue but...