The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim by Christian Bärmann, and: Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale by Pyotr Yeshov

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim by Christian Bärmann, and: Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale by Pyotr Yeshov Jan Susina (bio) The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim. By Christian Bärmann. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Detroit: Tiny Mole and Honeybear-Wayne State University Press, 2019. Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale. By Pyotr Yeshov. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. The Children's Literature Association's annual Anne Devereaux Jordan Award is given to an individual who has made significant contributions in scholarship and/or service to the field of children's literature. At the 2019 ChLA Conference, the award went to Riitta Oittinen, partly in recognition for her extensive work as a translator of English-language children's texts into Finnish. In choosing Oittinen, the first translator and translation scholar to receive this award, ChLA was both recognizing her individual contributions and reaffirming the importance of translation as a vital, although sometimes overlooked and even controversial, form of children's literature scholarship. Another important area that is sometimes given short shrift in terms of scholarship is the historical recovery and bringing back into print of significant older children's texts, accompanied by scholarly scaffolding. Thanks to Google Books and various digital archives, access to once difficult to obtain children's titles is increasingly available to scholars. But books, especially children's books, are more than literary works; they are also aesthetic objects of print culture. Important series such as the New York Review Children's Collection and Princeton University's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales are reissuing compelling older children's books in print editions. When I teach my version of the history of children's literature course, I am grateful to publishers such as Dover and Broadview Press for offering historical children's books in affordable paperback editions. My own research on nineteenth-century literary fairy tales has greatly benefitted from reprinted anthologies such as Jonathan Cott's Beyond the Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairy & Fantasy, Michael Patrick Hearn's The Victorian Fairy Tale Book, Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher's Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, Mark West's Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America, and Jack Zipes's Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. For those who do not have convenient access to special collections dedicated to children's books, facsimile editions, such as those reprinted in The Bodley Head's Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books or Garland's Classics of Children's Literature, are invaluable. Zipes has contributed to this area of historical recovery of children's texts with two newly translated literary fairy tales, one from Germany and the other from Russia. Pyotr Yershov's Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump is the better known of the two tales. First published in 1834, it quickly became a popular story for children and adults and was eventually recognized as a classic of Russian children's [End Page 456] literature. Inspired by the verse folktales of Alexander Pushkin, Yershov published The Little Humpbacked Horse, which features Foolish Ivan, a well-known figure of Russian folklore. Foolish Ivan is the Russian equivalent of Jack in the English Jack tales. In Zipes's translation, Ivan Petrovich is the foolish but kind-hearted third son who succeeds in various seemingly impossible tasks and eventually marries the Heavenly Princess, thanks to the guidance of his faithful little horse. Zipes acknowledges that he has taken "a good deal of poetic license" (Yershov 87) in translating and transforming Yershov's poem into a prose fairy tale, while retaining its oral style. Kornei Chukovksy, the famous writer of Russian nonsense poetry and stories for children, praised Yershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse as "a work of genius" in his study of children's language, Two to Five (1933), and singled out Yershov's skillful capturing of the colloquial speech of common people (Yershov 81). The tale became so popular that it quickly appeared in multiple chapbook editions and re-entered the Russian oral...