Snow White and Her Dedicated Dutch Mothers Translating in the Footsteps of the Brothers Grimm

Abstract

In this essay I depart from Donald Haase’s reflections on the ownership and reception of fairy tales in “Yours, Mine, or Ours” and The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and apply them to the practice of fairy-tale translators, who played an important role in giving the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen its current status as an international classic. I treat these translations, and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen itself, as forms of “written folklore,” Aleida Assmann’s concept of written texts that are transmitted in a way that is traditionally associated with oral storytelling. I illustrate the way that translators of fairy tales freely negotiate between the Grimm tales, their own target audience, and their sociocultural context by referring to a selection of Dutch translations of “Snow White” published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

In 2013, Donald Haase’s Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales celebrated its twentieth anniversary. After two decades, this book is still a must read for every scholar studying “the tales’ world-wide reception and popularity” (Haase, “Introduction,” 9). In his introduction Haase stresses that we must not project the current canonical status of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen onto the past: “The history of Grimm reception, then, is not the simple success story of a good book that has been widely accepted because of its moral and aesthetic appeal” (12). This observation, which is elaborated by Ruth Bottigheimer in her contribution to The Reception of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, is surely affirmed when applied to the Dutch translation history of the Grimm tales. Despite its geographic, linguistic, and cultural proximity to Germany, the Netherlands did not initially welcome the Grimms’ fairy tales, not even when they started to gain fame in their country of origin in the course of the nineteenth century. The reception of the first Dutch translation, Sprookjes-boek voor kinderen (Fairy-Tale Book for Children, 1820), was decidedly negative. Part of its lack of success was due to a rather literal translation of a selection of Grimms’ tales, carried out by an anonymous translator who expressed his or her deepest respect to Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the preface. Believing that the Grimms’ collection presented an authentic rendition of the folk’s oral tradition, this translator had not wanted to interfere with the tales’ style and content. Dutch readers and critics did not share the translator’s awe for this oral tradition, and Sprookjes-boek voor kinderen failed to introduce the tales in Dutch to a large audience.

The Grimms’ tales were not widely known in the Netherlands before the late nineteenth century, when freely adapted versions of selected magic tales (rather than the so-called Schwankmärchen, or more coarse tales) started to appear in high numbers (Joosen). In Grimms’ Tales Around the Globe (Joosen and Lathey), contributors from various countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America affirm that canonization and adaptation often went hand in hand when the Grimms’ tales traveled abroad. In “Yours, Mine, or Ours?” Donald Haase points to the sacrilegious status that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen holds for many (353). Although the first Dutch translator also expressed his or her admiration for the presumed authenticity of the tales and translated them faithfully as a consequence, many others have not hesitated to interfere with the content and style of the stories. The flexibility of the Grimm tales turns out to be key to their international success.

In this essay I start from Haase’s observation that “the reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a … dynamic process characterized by diversity and dissonance” (“Introduction,” 12). Central to my discussion of a selection of Dutch versions of “Snow White” is the role of translators, who have contributed to the Grimms’ international success story by adapting the tales to the conventions and needs of their local audiences. The Dutch translations of the Grimm tales can be considered “written folklore,” a term coined by Aleida Assmann in 1983 to describe a form of textual transmission that carries features usually associated with the oral diffusion of stories. With regard to both the freedom with which they adapt the tales to their own social and stylistic norms and the content of their revisions, the translators frequently tread in the trails of Wilhelm Grimm, whose editorial interventions changed some tales substantially between 1812 and 1857.

The Kinder- und Hausmärchen as Written Folklore

In 1857 the seventh edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appeared, the so-called Ausgabe letzter Hand. This publication marked the conclusion of an ongoing editorial process that had started about a half-century before, with a number of letters by the Grimms and the Ölenberg manuscripts as the first written documents. Between 1810 and 1857 the Grimm tales underwent big changes, which scholars such as Heinz Rölleke, Jack Zipes, Siegfried Neumann, Ruth Bottigheimer (Grimms’ Bad Girls), and Eric Hulsens have documented: the number and selection of tales varied, and the style and content of the tales evolved. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and especially since the 1970s, scholars have gained an increasing awareness of the adaptations that the Brothers Grimm made when they published and edited their fairy tales. The stylistic and ideological changes that Wilhelm Grimm applied to the tales led to the establishment of the so-called Gattung Grimm (Grimm genre).

The Grimm tales were further altered when they subsequently traveled through Europe and passed through the hands of various editors and translators. After the initial lukewarm reception in Dutch, by the end of the nineteenth century the Grimm tales were among the most popular and most frequently translated or adapted narratives for children in the Netherlands. The number of Dutch free translations and adaptations by far exceeded the faithful renderings, and they still do so today. These free translations match Assmann’s concept of written folklore: they are written texts that display features and a flexibility usually ascribed to oral, folkloric transmission. Assmann developed this concept in response to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s, A. Wesselski’s, and the Russian formalists’ reflections on the transmission of folklore. She was critical of Lévi-Strauss’s equation of folklore with oral tradition and instead stressed that literature and orality are not mutually exclusive (Assmann, 176). The flexibility and spontaneity that is usually associated with storytelling can also apply to writing. Just as oral tellers deal with stories creatively, texts can also be imbued with personal amendments as they are recycled in script.

Assmann was writing in the 1980s and developed written folklore as a reaction to the problematic dichotomy between written and oral transmission underpinning folklore studies: “Folklore and literature form a set of opposed concepts from various perspectives” (176).¹ Her term written folklore aims to deconstruct that opposition, even though the modification of the noun by the adjective written might suggest that folklore is purely oral. Since the 1980s the study of the interface between the oral and the literary transmission of stories has continued in the works of various scholars. One of the most comprehensive discussions is Re-Situating Folklore, by Frank de Caro and Rosan Augusta Jordan (2004). Like Assmann, de Caro and Jordan reflect on the different characteristics of literature (as well as other forms of art) and folklore, yet they stress the various areas of overlap and interaction and make a convincing analysis of intertextual connections between both: “Folklore is a re-situated part of a great variety of twentieth-century literary and artistic works,” they conclude (De Caro and Jordan, 265). In the rest of this essay I use Assmann’s more abstract categories to explore how this overlap between literature and orality has taken shape both in the Grimm collection and in their translations. Although Assmann argues against understanding folklore as being oral only, her discussion and use of the term does sometimes rely on that narrow understanding of folklore (for lack of a better term), as will my discussion of it. Assmann herself did not invoke fairy tales as examples, but her theory certainly applies to them and makes clear that some of the processes that affected the making of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen were continued in their international reception. As a written collection of folktales and fairy tales, the Grimms themselves have literally positioned their Kinder- und Hausmärchen as a form of written folklore, even when their collection was presented with an aura of authenticity and fidelity to the oral tradition. In fact, their collection displays many features of written folklore as conceived by Assmann, and most of their translators have further enhanced these features.

Assmann divides the characteristics of written folklore into five categories. First, both in their macrostructure and microstructure, fairy-tale translations are what she calls eine offene Einheit, or “an open unit” (179). On a macrolevel it is well-known that the Grimms shifted, added, and deleted tales in the different editions of their collection and made a smaller compilation that became known as die kleine Ausgabe (“the small edition,” Neumann, 28–29). In translation the Grimm tales are often detached from the collection as a whole and recombined in smaller selections, often including tales by other authors. That shifting mixture of elements also happens on a microlevel. The Grimms are known to have constructed their tales by “contaminating” variants of the same tale. Their first English translator, Edgar Taylor, similarly combined several Grimm tales into one. For example, his “Adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet” is a combination of three stories from the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Sutton, 19). In several Dutch translations features of a Grimm tale are mixed with passages from Charles Perrault or local folktales.

Second, in translation the Grimm tales have partly kept their status as variants rather than as canonical, fixed texts. Although faithful translations have reinforced the canonical fixation of the Grimm collection, especially of the final edition, they have always stood side by side with a much bigger corpus of more idiosyncratic renderings. Translators have taken the freedom to place their own accents, abbreviate and expand the tales, adapt them to local features (in a process of so-called domestication), update them, and so forth.

Third, this freedom is implicitly granted because written folklore has a different relationship to an author and to authority than other written texts do (Assmann, 180). The author of written folklore does not grant the stories authority and is often obliterated in the process of transmission. Rather than putting themselves in the spotlight, the Grimms themselves were eager to call on a collective folk spirit and to put forward other tellers, most notably Dorothea Viehmann, as the embodiment of this collective spirit. In “Yours, Mine, or Ours?” Haase cites the German writer Wolfdietrich Schnurre, who provocatively blames the folk for what he believes to be the fairy tale’s loss of value: “The primary guilt of the decline of the fairy tale … rests with those who [originally] made them. They forgot to impress the stamp of copyright” (354). Whether the fairy tale is in decline is a matter that is open for debate. There is certainly no decline in number: fairy tales in various media are booming. In terms of content and quality, it may be true that many contemporary fairy tales serve commercial interests and reduce the Grimm tales’ complexity, yet these popular versions stand side by side with a rich and ever-growing body of aesthetic, experimental, thought-provoking fairy tales in literature, theater, and film and on the Internet (see, among others, Bacchilega). Yet Schnurre is right in pointing out the fairy tales’ lack of copyright as one of the causes for the many free renditions of the tales that have been circulating for centuries. As Haase clarifies: “So who owns fairy tales? To be blunt: I do. And you do. We can each claim fairy tales for ourselves. … We claim fairy tales in every individual act of telling and reading” (361).

The brothers would not be world famous today if their name had been consistently obliterated as that of many storytellers was. Many translations of their tales appeared with their name, which over the years became a label that invoked a sense of quality, authenticity, and nostalgia. Nevertheless, not only have the Grimms minimized their roles as authors of their tales, but also several translators, publishers, and adaptors have in turn obscured the Grimms’ role as collectors of the tales and obliterated their names, sometimes claiming ownership for themselves instead. Haase has rightly addressed this point: “While folktales remain in the public domain because of their anonymous origin in the oral tradition (which accounts in part for their popularity among publishers), there has been a growing tendency to stress private ownership by individuals or even corporations. … When Disney called his animated fairy tales by his own name—Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and so on—he was not simply making an artistic statement, but also laying claim to the tales in what would become their most widely known, public versions” (“Yours, Mine, or Ours,” 361). Some Dutch translators have mistakenly attributed Grimm tales to Perrault or substituted the Grimms’ names with their own names, even when delivering a rather faithful translation of Grimm. Jan J. A. Goeverneur, whose work I discuss later, is such an example (fig. 1). But Goeverneur was a popular children’s writer whose name could help sell his translations. Many other translators, however, have functioned rather as what Gillian Lathey calls “invisible storytellers,” who are not mentioned in the colophon and whose identities can no longer be retrieved. Quite a large number of Dutch translations are published without any author reference, either to Grimm or to anyone else. The result, which is also Assmann’s fourth feature of written folklore, is a chain of versions that linger for a while, sometimes coexisting, until they are replaced by new translations and versions. Repetition is key to the preservation of written folklore (Assmann, 181). In Dutch this led to an innumerable corpus of versions since 1820, some of which were published in only one edition and others which have lingered for several decades.

Fig 1.

Jan J. A. Goeverneur, a popular Dutch children’s writer in the nineteenth century. His name helped to sell Grimms’ fairy tales in the Netherlands. Portrait by G. J. Thieme.

Source: http://boekenmuseum.nl/goeverneur.htm.

The final feature of written folklore is that these texts serve specific purposes (Assmann, 181–82). The Grimms themselves indicated the use of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to some extent by calling it an Erziehungsbuch, or pedagogical book. That suggestion has often been picked up by publishers and translators, who have not only compiled specific editions for schools but also adapted the tales according to the pedagogical mores of their time. I elaborate on this aspect in the rest of this essay and show how Dutch translators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries specifically adapted the role of Snow White’s biological mother to match contemporary pedagogical and social concerns and conventions. The seeds of their elaborations were often already sown by Wilhelm Grimm, so that in this sense too the translators were treading in his footsteps.

Snow White’s Many Mothers

It is well-known that the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen features a number of adaptations to make the tales more child friendly, the most famous (or infamous) being the replacement of Snow White’s jealous, vengeful mother with an evil stepmother (Tatar, 36). Wilhelm Grimm’s substitution served the preservation of the good, idealized mother and the reinforcement of the ideology of the nuclear family. The role of Snow White’s biological mother was always kept brief. In the 1857 edition, which offers the longest version of the tale, her part in the story is confined to only a few lines (here rendered in Maria Tatar’s translation):

Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when snow flakes were falling from the sky like feathers, a queen was sitting and sewing by a window with a black ebony frame. While she was sewing and looking out at the snow, she pricked her finger with a needle, and three drops of blood fell onto the snow. The red looked so beautiful against the white snow that she thought to herself: “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.” Soon thereafter she gave birth to a little girl, who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony, and she was called Snow White. The queen died after the child was born. A year later the king married another woman.

(Grimm, “Snow White,” 83)

The passage is riddled with gaps, which leave room for the reader’s or translator’s imagination. For example, it is not specified what parts of her child the queen would like to be white, red, or black, nor is it explicitly stated that she opens the window before she pricks her finger. These are small factual details that have led to minor additions and explanations in the translations. But more important, the beginning of “Snow White” is told in a rather distant style when it comes to the characters’ emotions. As Max Lüthi shows, the European magic tale is action driven and the characters’ motivations and psychological processes are often left implicit. It is here especially that translators have stepped in and claimed their roles of interpreter and storyteller.

With the exception of the first half of the nineteenth century, throughout the Dutch reception history of “Snow White,” translators have extended the mother’s role and intensified her longing for her unborn child. The ideological implications of the additions are substantial: the translators reinforce the Grimms’ introduction of the good queen, who grows into a role model for the caring, all-giving mother, whose main concern is her child’s well-being. Lisa Rowe Fraustino points out “the significant role of children’s books in the reproduction of patriarchal mothering” (57) and the idealized image of the all-giving mother, whose life is entirely focused on the happiness of the child and the creation of a domestic idyll. As such, children’s books transmit this ideology not only to young readers but also to the adults reading aloud or along with the child, including mothers. The messages they could pick up from “Snow White” versions at the turn of the twentieth century mostly imbibed them with the ideal of the all-giving mother who is devoted to her child and whose life gains meaning from raising a family.

The intensification of the mother’s love is already present in some of the earliest translations of “Snow White” in Dutch. Jan J. A. Goeverneur (1809–1889) was among the most popular authors and translators of his time and one of the first to render a somewhat more liberal translation of the Grimm tales in Dutch. In his Oude sprookjes (Old Fairy Tales, 1861), it is suggested that the young mother’s love for her baby is lethal: “Shortly thereafter she had a wonderfully beautiful little daughter, who was white as snow and red as blood; she called her Snow White. And so happy was she with her sweet child, that she died of joy” (21).² Although her joy is not a logical explanation for her death, Goeverneur’s addition seems to serve first and foremost to express the intense affection of the all-giving mother for her child and to prepare the contrast with the evil stepmother who will replace her.

A decade later, George (c. 1870/1880), a pseudonym, offers a strongly romanticized version of “Snow White” in rhymes, in which the biological mother plays a prominent part (fig. 2). When she pricks her finger and three drops of blood fall onto the snow, the mother is as “happy and cheerful as a sparrow feasting after long deprivation” (1).³ Whereas it is clear that the sparrow has been deprived of food, it is not hard to guess either what the queen has been longing for. When later she starts singing, she expresses her impatience for a child, “the long expected one, my darling, my child.”⁴ The addition that Snow White is a child for which the queen has had to wait for a long time can be found in many subsequent translations. It makes the mother’s love all the more intense and her death all the more sad. In George’s translation the mother’s wish for a child white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony wood (as it was rendered in Grimm) is replaced with an affectionate description of a small baby, rich with romantic and religious metaphors and diminutives that underline the mother’s love and care. The baby is pictured as the most beautiful little creature in heaven’s shine, the most precious and cutest baby that will ever be born. Little is left of the brief wording that the

Fig 2.

The cover of George’s “Snow White.”

Source: George, Sneeuwwitje: Berijmd door George (Amsterdam: J. Vlieger, n.d. [c. 1870]).

Grimms used to describe the mother and her wish; instead, the scene is loaded with the romantic elaborations by George himself.

The young woman’s subsequent death is described in a dramatized style:

But now the mother’s fate was decidedShe died and was buriedThere in the coffin now lay that dear, dear oneWho could never feed her darling.

(George, 3)⁵

Just as the mother has expressed her affection for her child, the narrator now describes her fondly as “that dear, dear one.” In addition, George uses a significant image to stress the tragedy of the mother’s death. The Dutch word laven implies breast feeding, a practice that had been strongly encouraged since the late eighteenth century also for women of the higher classes (Bakker et al., 158). A wet nurse was considered proof of motherly indifference (110), and naturally, a childless stepmother like Snow White’s could not replace the mother in breast-feeding a child. George uses the image of breast feeding to reinforce the unique bond between mother and child and the great tragedy that the queen and Snow White have in missing out on this.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the intensified love of Snow White’s mother was a common feature of the more liberal Dutch translations, to which some translators added more details and scenes. At the turn of the twentieth century the number of female translators rose; many of them also wrote stories for children. They often delivered free translations with ample attention to the characters’ psychology. Christine Doorman (1916), for example, gives the biological mother a more detailed profile and depicts her as a particularly lonely woman: “The Queen, who often felt lonely, when the King was sometimes abroad and gone hunting, had only one passionate wish and that was to have a little child. And when she was once more sitting there so lonely, sunk in thoughts and watching the snowflakes, that wish rose in her more intensely than ever” (2).⁶ Doorman here fills in a gap in the story: where is the king at the time of the opening scene? And for those who wish to dig deeper between the lines, is his frequent absence the reason why there is no child? Doorman’s queen is not only cast as a mother and wife but also as a royal. When the queen dies, the people lament her death and seem to know about her intense wish, in which they have perhaps shared: “The Queen was much loved for her kindness and charity. And the people said to each other, ‘How sad it is that our poor Queen will now never see her passionately wished for little daughter and will be unable to care for her’” (2).⁷ Unable to care for her “here on earth” (hier op aarde), Doorman significantly adds. Whereas the deceased mother in the Grimms’ “Cinderella” continues to help her daughter from the grave, their Snow White is on her own after her mother’s death. Doorman, however, seems to draw inspiration from “Cinderella” when she adds: “But those people didn’t know that she [the mother] always looked down upon her little child from heaven, and guarded it even better than she could ever have on earth” (2).⁸ Not only is the sorrow of the mother’s death softened by her being granted an afterlife, but it is also even suggested that it is more beneficial to have such a celestial guardian. Like George, Doorman thus helps strengthen the Christian dimension that Wilhelm Grimm had added to the tale. The final edition of the Kinder- und Märchen was riddled with Christian symbols that had been absent from previous versions of the tales—and these were mostly Wilhelm Grimm’s work. As Eric Hulsens notes: “The dwarfs and Snow White have the right relationship with God—they call out to God, and Snow White prays, while their antagonist the queen is situated out of God’s order: she is godless, swears and uses witchcraft” (29).⁹ Doorman reinforces the contrast established by Wilhelm Grimm by including Snow White’s biological mother in the good, pious camp. The celestial mother and her angelic daughter work as strong counterparts of the infamous godless stepmother.

Not only can a mother’s love transcend the boundary between life and death, as Doorman suggests, but it also erases class differences, as Johanna Wildvanck’s translation from 1917 stresses (fig. 3). She sketches the good mother’s preference for a simple, domestic life rather than the royal lifestyle she is required to lead:

Long ago, at a time when there were still dwarfs, there was a sweet and good Queen, whom everyone loved. She was never proud, and, oh, so simple. Her husband, the king, was very rich, so that the good queen had to attend many parties, which she did, because this was her duty; but most of all she was just alone and thought of a little child, that she longed for, because she didn’t have any yet. Finally the little child was due and the good queen was so happy that she didn’t think of anything else. She would sew and embroider the baby’s clothes herself; no one else was allowed to do so.

(Grimm, Sneeuwwitje, 5)¹⁰

Again, the good Queen is characterized in contrast to her successor, who is proud and attaches great value to outward appearances; and like Doorman, Wildvanck mildly criticizes the king, who takes his wife to parties but often leaves her alone. Wildvanck’s introduction communicates a clear moral to children—and, we must not forget, to the mothers who may be reading the

Fig 3.

Wildvanck’s modest queen, as illustrated by Sijtje Aafjes.

Source: Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Sneeuwwitje, trans. Johanna Wildvanck; illus. Sijtje Aafjes (Amsterdam: Scheltens & Giltay, n.d. [1917]), 5.

tale to them. She spells out what is suitable behavior for a young mother: simplicity, modesty, a sense of duty, and complete dedication to the children. The fact that the queen sews the baby’s clothes herself is symbolic of her placing motherhood above royal status. That she has the potential to be the perfect mother is illustrated when she takes care of a group of frozen birds in the snow. The rest of the opening of this translation displays a strong influence of sentimentalism: it is described how the mother grows ill. In her last moments she presses the baby in her arms and begs the heartbroken king to take good care of their daughter: “And as the queen kissed her little daughter for the last time, she died softly and without pain” (Grimm, Sneeuwwitje, 7).¹¹ The ideological implications of Doorman’s death scene were made explicit a few years later by another translator, Go Kriens-Deus (1920s): “As is the case with all true mothers, it was here: the last thoughts were still dedicated to the child” (11).¹² Indeed, several subsequent Dutch translators, who clearly used Wildvanck’s translation as a source of inspiration, further expand the tearful scenes that the mother’s death evokes. In doing so, they affirm the appeal of Wildvanck’s ideological and sentimental additions to the audience for whom she was translating.

Conclusion

With each new addition or other alteration, translators of fairy tales position themselves as producers of written folklore and as cocreators of a new literary product, attuned to their target audience and dominant sociocultural perspective. Pedagogues such Bruno Vanobbergen et al. (428) have noted the rise of the image of the vulnerable child in politics and legislation of the early twentieth century, and mothers were pictured as primarily responsible for guarding a family’s well-being and the children’s health and happiness. The Dutch translators of “Snow White” reinforce that image by stressing the sorrow of a childless mother, the unique bond between mother and child, and the vulnerability of a motherless child. They thus reinforce Wilhelm Grimm’s adaptations in terms of content: they further strengthen the idealized image of the good mother and elaborate on the contrast between the good, religious mother and the evil, godless stepmother.

The narrative flexibility that Wilhelm Grimm and the Dutch translators claim is also manifest in their adaptations of the fairy tales’ style. Moving further away from the concise formulations of the first versions of “Snow White” in the Ölenberg manuscript and the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which were highly action driven and left many gaps for the reader to fill in, the translations I have discussed here move closer to the stylistic features of the sentimental novel and melodrama, where moments of joy and sorrow are intensified, emotions are elaborated, and suffering and tragedy are indulged in. These genres, like our most popular fairy tales, rely on black-and-white characterization and intense moments of drama, yet they do so in a more elaborate style and focus more on character psychology. Although these translators of the Kinder und-Haumärchen could thus be said to move away from the stylistic features of concise, action-driven folktales, they are close to that folk tradition in spirit, by claiming their own right to retell the stories in such a way that can once again captivate the attention and gain the appreciation of a new audience. “If the fairy tale needs saving,” Donald Haase writes, “then we need to abandon the untenable views of its ownership that put us in its power” (“Yours, Mine, or Ours,” 364). Instead, we “must take possession of it on our own terms” (364). Translators do so, negotiating—like all good storytellers—between their own views, their audiences’ views, and the nature of the story they are retelling. Fairy tales are not sacred, and their ability to gain new meanings as they are continuously adapted is not their weakness but their strength.