The untranslated grimms

Abstract

This paper examines the issues surrounding the translation of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which were originally transcribed from oral tradition for an audience of children and adolescents but later gave rise to serious debate as to whether they should be classified as children's literature or should be more aimed at an adult target audience, since, according to various scholars, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen can be also viewed from several different perspectives such as Freudian, Jungian, Marxist and feminist. The paper mainly involves the exploration of different tales and concentrates on ‘untranslated’ fragments of texts, which were either omitted or altered in translations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, a comparative translation approach is employed and different translations of the same tales are compared with the juxtaposition of source and target text examples. The German originals that are explored comparatively with the translated texts are the versions mainly used in translations throughout both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and the translation examples are derived from various translations, such as Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories (1823, 1826), Household Stories (1853), Margaret Hunt's Grimm's Household Tales (1884), Wanda Gág's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) and Ralph Manheim's Grimm's Tales for Young and Old (1977).