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Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales by Christine A. Jones

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2017.0049

1553-1201

Anne Cirella-Urrutia,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales by Christine A. Jones Anne Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales. By Christine A. Jones. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. In her inaugural study, Jones, a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, traces the importance of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (originally published in 1695 as a handwritten manuscript with a dedicatory epistle to Princess Elisabeth Charlotte de Bourbon d'Orléans titled Contes de ma mère l'Oye) since their publication in 1697. In retranslating the eight fairy tales that constitute Perrault's collection, Jones hopes to [End Page 495] "help denaturalize the stories" (19). Because translation, like Disney, has traditionally operated as a stabilizing force in the collection's meaning, she argues that this authority has loomed over Perrault's stories and has created substantial expectations, making her rediscovery a challenge. Jones analyzes how these fairy tales deal with adult issues, such as gender roles, and stand to appeal to a twenty-first-century audience as "innovative relics" (79). In reconfiguring the history of Perrault's tales, her critical and translation study reveals that many iterations do not correspond at all to the popular ideas that Anglophone readers, especially in North America, bring to these tales today and that "Perrault's are among those that do not, except in the most superficial ways, look like Disneyfied versions" (19). The first section, "Introduction: Mother Goose and Charles Perrault," reviews and explores inherited knowledge about the plots and characters in the Histoires ou Contes through a critical lens that interrogates common and sometimes cherished interpretations of the tales. The discussion is divided into three subsections, each one highlighting a key figure in that cultural history: Princess Elisabeth (first princess of France and niece of Louis XIV) and Mother Goose, Cinderella as a case study in North America, and Perrault himself. In her discussion of the latter, Jones emphasizes major texts in his bibliography as anchors for rethinking the textual strategies that emerge in the fairy tales. She concludes this sixty-three-page section with the aim of answering the following questions: Can Perrault's invented name "Cendrillon" be retranslated into anything other than "Cinderella"? Is it possible to elude the Anglophone tradition and view the original French collection anew with a critical interest in heroes and heroines that have become frozen in time? The following thirty-eight-page section, "Notes on Editions, Translations, and Interpretations," focuses on the scholarly movement that analyzes classic fairy tales and locates the Mother Goose tales within the collection's translation history. In considering translators of other national traditions who have returned to these fairy tales, Jones discusses how they have been able to revise dated language, local idiom, and other ideological choices that pertained to translations over the centuries. Such is the case of the British persona of Mother Goose (La mère l'Oye), which Robert Samber introduced in his 1729 translation Histories, or Tales of Past Times. Although Mother Goose had a history before Samber used it, this didactic figure gained in popularity because of the frequent reprinting of his translation over the next few generations. One likely effect of this reprinting was to help scholars forge the image of the Perraultian corpus. In the concluding section, "Stories or Tales of the Past," Jones retranslates each of the eight classic tales with substantial annotations that grapple not only with the strangeness of the French language of the time but also with the ubiquity and familiarity of plots and little heroes and heroines in their famous English versions. These well-known tales include "The Little Red Tippet" (Le petit chaperon rouge), [End Page 496] "The Little Thumblette" (Le petit Poucet), "The Master Cat; or, Cat-inthe-Boots" (Le maître chat ou le chat botté), and "Ashkins; or, The Little Slipper of Glass" (Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre), among others. In returning to their original names and forms, Jones stresses the importance of rediscovering these classic French tales before they became enshrined in a world of "Disneyfication" (79). In historicizing them...