Erik Christian Haugaard, guest blogger

Erik Christian Haugaard's Introduction to his 1974 translation of Hans Christian Andersen's complete fairy tales and stories is remarkable. I have loved Andersen's stories all of my life, and Haugaard's translation of all of them, which I first read in the 1990s and am re-reading with Michael now, are infinitely more enjoyable than the sterilized, edited, Danny Kayed, and Disneyfied versions I learned as a child.

I have set ten of these stories to music (using my own free adaptations of Haugaard's translations) over the past twenty-five years. These stories that have meant so much to so many people from so many times and from so many cultures are extremely meaningful in this fraught-ridden second quarter of the twenty-first century.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction that I find particularly meaningful:

These stories that Andersen heard as a child were all very simple tales, and their characters were probably more archetypes than they were individuals. They were not meant to surprise--let alone shock--the listener. Indeed, their attraction lay in the fact that they were familiar. The mean, the petty, the evil, the good, and the kind were so in the manner that one was used to; it was the plot itself that held one's interest. We of the twentieth century, who are so used to plotless novels with heroes so infinitely complex that, after having read the book, it is easier for us to describe the characters' nervous systems than to tell what the story was about, hardly ever come into contact with this early form of literature. Yet these stories, stripped as they are of the fashionable and the modish, give us—at least for a moment—that peace which is necessary for survival. Man must live in his own time—he has no choice--but for the sake of his sanity he must sometimes escape its tyranny--if only to be able recognize it. Once upon a time denies time and thus curtails its power over us. 

Once upon a time is a definite point in the infinite. It exists somewhere but has no particular date, which is a feat that is hardly explainable--and yet, maybe it is. We have divided time into precise periods. Was once upon a time in the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, or the thirteenth century?" we ask, for we are enlightened. But the peasant who heard a fairy tale in the market place and retold it to his family when he came home had no such conceptions. Time, for him, stretched from the creation till that moment which can best be described as now. And though he knew that raiment and customs changed, he did not believe they had very much influence on people. He knew the Bible well, yet it did not disturb him to see the Virgin portrayed as if she were a rich Florentine lady. Were not Saul and David like the kings he knew? Was Eve much diferent from his own wife?  Once upon a time was not magic or poetic, as it is to us. But then, the twentieth century has produced no fairy tales.

Andersen was the last great teller of fairy tales. We may create tales of imagination and fantasy, but they are not fairy tales. The fairy tale and the folk tale take place in the real world, no matter how exotic and strange their backgrounds may be. Witches, trolls, or mermaids may appear; but they are not figments of anyone's imagination; they are as real as the princess or the peasant. We who are manacled by a belief in progress and theories of natural behavior find it hard to understand this. We prefer to escape into fantasy, into worlds that are safe because they never have existed and never will. 

You can look at a preview of the book through this Canadian Random House site, and order a copy of it in the regular places.