问题描述：
读安徒生童话有感（英文）
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If you remember Thumbelina, The Nightingale, The Ugly Duckling or The Princess and the Pea, they are all here in a wonderful collection of stories written by Hans Christian Anderson. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and recorded popular tales, Hans Christian Anderson wrote his own "folk" tales, which also contain Danish history and foreign literature.
Not all of his stories end well, yet this is a side of life children should learn about so they can be aware of it later in life. Your child might be horrified to learn that not everything ends up quite as magical as it would in a Disney movie. My favorite tale has always been "The Little Mermaid." She wanted to be something she was not meant to be and for me that is a lesson of how we should be who we really are. She actually ends up not marrying the prince. I quote:
The little mermaid lifted up glorified eyes towards the sun, and felt them, for the first time, filling with tears. On the ship, in which she had left the prince.she saw him and his beautiful bride searching for her; sorrowfully they gazed at the pearly foam, as if they knew she had thrown herself into the waves.
Some of the stories are very moralistic, yet he retains a mischievous sense of humor in some stories. His stories always reflect his fertile imagination. This particular collection was translated by Mrs. H. B. Paull, H. Oskar Sommer, Jean Hersholt and several other unknown translators. Six distinguished artists helped to illustrate this book. These are black and white illustrations and there are not really very many of them. To me a fully illustrated book should be fully illustrated. Nonetheless, this is not a book just for children. In fact, I see this more as a book which should be read to children by their parents. In this way parents and children can discuss items of interest. This book on its own would most likely not appeal to a child, due to the lack of pictures. It is meant to be read to them as far as I can tell. I also would recommend it to adults who remembered these stories as I did and want to read them again.
Perhaps I also remember the story about the tinder box very well. It is a magical story of a soldier who goes into a hollow tree and finds a passage with doors which lead to chambers. It sounds frightening at first but has a lovely happy ending.
Books can take us to another world and this one will take a child to many places they will never forget. And so the first story begins: "Far down in the forest, where the warm sun and the fresh air made a sweet resting place, grew a pretty little fir-tree; and yet it was not happy, it wished so much to be tall like its companions¯the pines and firs which grew around it. The sun shone, and the soft air fluttered its leaves
2
There are not many people now, perhaps there are none, who can write really good fairy tales, because they do not believe enough in their own stories, and because they want to be wittier than it has pleased Heaven to make them.
-Andrew Lang, The Green Fairy Book (1892)
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, who died seventeen years before Andrew Lang's lament, was the last great writer of fairy tales. Andersen certainly believed deeply in his stories, many of which have obvious autobiographical sources, and he was, both in conversation and in his tales, a genuinely witty man. While Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm dramatized many of the conflicts and complexities in human nature-- most obviously wicked stepmothers, negligent parents, and the tyranny of greed and passion-in such tales as "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Rapunzel," they simply collected or embellished existing myths and oral folklore. Andersen, on the other hand, created original symbols that have entered our cultural consciousness as deeply as any primal myth.
The more directly Andersen's tales draw on his own emotional vulnerabilities or satirize his contemporaries, the more powerful they are. Awkward and unattractive, but blossoming when telling stories, he is the Ugly Duckling. Morbidly sensitive yet convinced of his artistic nobility, he is the Princess proven by the pea. An ardent but perennially unrequited lover, Andersen is no less the Steadfast Tin Soldier, the forsaken Little Mermaid, and the Snowman desperately in love with a stove. Raised in dire poverty, he is at once the Little Match Girl, and, never quite content with the fortune and fame he eventually obtained, the discontented Fir Tree. He renders the vanity and pretensions of Denmark's staid, conformist merchant class with just enough humor and distance to soften the satirical bite without sacrificing any of his criticism's truth in "The Emperor's New Clothes," in the complacent snails of "The Happy Family," and in a spinning top's inability to recognize the ball he had been courting in "The Top and the Ball," "for love, you know, dies when your sweetheart has been soaking for five years in a gutter."1
Filled with such asides and colloquial twists, Andersen's stories sparkle, particularly when compared to the monotone of the Grimms' anonymous tales. "You know, don't you?" begins "The Happy Family," "that the biggest green leaf in this country is the leaf of the wild rhubarb; if you hold it front of your little tummy, it's just as good as an apron." His innovations in the fairy tale were not just stylistic. In fact, Andersen completely transformed the genre. He added irony and humor and vastly expanded the repertoire of characters. There are plenty of princes and princesses, witches, enchanted animals, and poor innocents in his tales, yet he was the first to give inanimate objects personalities of their own. A shirt collar, a darning needle, an old tub or a coffee mill becomes a memorable character in its own right with particular foibles and virtues, whereas in traditional folk tales such objects serve merely as props to explain the origins of, say, a weathervane or the dark seam on black-eyed peas.
Andersen also introduced into his tales the dark undercurrents of fatalism and absurdity he had absorbed from his literary hero Charles Dickens and the elaborate Kunstmarchen or "art fairy tales" of the German writers Adalbert von Chamisso, Ludwig Tieck, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Although similar to fairy tales, their Kunstmarchen are actually intricate supernatural tales. They lack the fairy tale's simplicity and ability to dramatize or distill a particular aspect of human nature into a symbolic form accessible to any reader regardless of his or her cultural background. Nonetheless they showed Andersen a way to write stories with unhappy endings while avoiding the sentimentality and melodrama that plague his novels. Andersen even rewrote one of Tieck's tales as "The Shadow," complete with a self-deprecating acknowledgment of his predecessor. In this tale, a scholar traveling through Italy finds that he has lost his shadow.
It annoyed him, not only because the shadow had gone, but also because he knew that there was a story about a man without a shadow, a story that was known to everybody in the cold countries, and if the learned man returned home and told his own story, they would say he was just repeating the old one; and after all, he was a man with original ideas!
The shadow eventually reappears, having gained substance and an elegant wardrobe. At first he supplants the scholar who has grown thin and pale with grief at the neglect his writing has suffered. Finally, the villainous shadow has the learned man "put out of the way" and lives happily ever after with a princess.
In many of his over 150 tales, Andersen flirts with mercilessness and amoralism. The soldier in "The Tinderbox" kills a witch who has made him rich simply because she refuses to explain why she so wants a particular tinderbox. The soldier is amply rewarded for this murder. Ultimately, however, Andersen could never fully adopt so bleak a vision of the human condition and often tacked a sanctimonious moralizing coda onto otherwise rather brutal stories. The Little Mermaid, strictly speaking, should have turned into seafoam upon her death, having lost the chance of gaining an immortal soul when the prince married another. She turns instead into one of the children of the air, destined to float through space for three hundred years before reaching the Heavenly Kingdom. Furthermore, God will shorten her probation in this airy limbo by one day every time she finds "a child who brings joy to his parents, and deserves their love," but He adds a day for each tear she sheds when she sees "a bad and naughty child." Or, in "The Red Shoes," a young girl named Karen is punished for her vanity when she thinks only of her new shoes while taking communion. Her fancy shoes become fixed on her feet and force her to dance without stopping until she finds an executioner who will chop off her feet. Yet physical suffering alone does not bring redemption. Karen tries again and again to hobble to mass on crutches, but the shoes keep barring the church door until the Angel of God is satisfied that her repentance is genuine.
Not all of his stories end well, yet this is a side of life children should learn about so they can be aware of it later in life. Your child might be horrified to learn that not everything ends up quite as magical as it would in a Disney movie. My favorite tale has always been "The Little Mermaid." She wanted to be something she was not meant to be and for me that is a lesson of how we should be who we really are. She actually ends up not marrying the prince. I quote:
The little mermaid lifted up glorified eyes towards the sun, and felt them, for the first time, filling with tears. On the ship, in which she had left the prince.she saw him and his beautiful bride searching for her; sorrowfully they gazed at the pearly foam, as if they knew she had thrown herself into the waves.
Some of the stories are very moralistic, yet he retains a mischievous sense of humor in some stories. His stories always reflect his fertile imagination. This particular collection was translated by Mrs. H. B. Paull, H. Oskar Sommer, Jean Hersholt and several other unknown translators. Six distinguished artists helped to illustrate this book. These are black and white illustrations and there are not really very many of them. To me a fully illustrated book should be fully illustrated. Nonetheless, this is not a book just for children. In fact, I see this more as a book which should be read to children by their parents. In this way parents and children can discuss items of interest. This book on its own would most likely not appeal to a child, due to the lack of pictures. It is meant to be read to them as far as I can tell. I also would recommend it to adults who remembered these stories as I did and want to read them again.
Perhaps I also remember the story about the tinder box very well. It is a magical story of a soldier who goes into a hollow tree and finds a passage with doors which lead to chambers. It sounds frightening at first but has a lovely happy ending.
Books can take us to another world and this one will take a child to many places they will never forget. And so the first story begins: "Far down in the forest, where the warm sun and the fresh air made a sweet resting place, grew a pretty little fir-tree; and yet it was not happy, it wished so much to be tall like its companions¯the pines and firs which grew around it. The sun shone, and the soft air fluttered its leaves
2
There are not many people now, perhaps there are none, who can write really good fairy tales, because they do not believe enough in their own stories, and because they want to be wittier than it has pleased Heaven to make them.
-Andrew Lang, The Green Fairy Book (1892)
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, who died seventeen years before Andrew Lang's lament, was the last great writer of fairy tales. Andersen certainly believed deeply in his stories, many of which have obvious autobiographical sources, and he was, both in conversation and in his tales, a genuinely witty man. While Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm dramatized many of the conflicts and complexities in human nature-- most obviously wicked stepmothers, negligent parents, and the tyranny of greed and passion-in such tales as "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Rapunzel," they simply collected or embellished existing myths and oral folklore. Andersen, on the other hand, created original symbols that have entered our cultural consciousness as deeply as any primal myth.
The more directly Andersen's tales draw on his own emotional vulnerabilities or satirize his contemporaries, the more powerful they are. Awkward and unattractive, but blossoming when telling stories, he is the Ugly Duckling. Morbidly sensitive yet convinced of his artistic nobility, he is the Princess proven by the pea. An ardent but perennially unrequited lover, Andersen is no less the Steadfast Tin Soldier, the forsaken Little Mermaid, and the Snowman desperately in love with a stove. Raised in dire poverty, he is at once the Little Match Girl, and, never quite content with the fortune and fame he eventually obtained, the discontented Fir Tree. He renders the vanity and pretensions of Denmark's staid, conformist merchant class with just enough humor and distance to soften the satirical bite without sacrificing any of his criticism's truth in "The Emperor's New Clothes," in the complacent snails of "The Happy Family," and in a spinning top's inability to recognize the ball he had been courting in "The Top and the Ball," "for love, you know, dies when your sweetheart has been soaking for five years in a gutter."1
Filled with such asides and colloquial twists, Andersen's stories sparkle, particularly when compared to the monotone of the Grimms' anonymous tales. "You know, don't you?" begins "The Happy Family," "that the biggest green leaf in this country is the leaf of the wild rhubarb; if you hold it front of your little tummy, it's just as good as an apron." His innovations in the fairy tale were not just stylistic. In fact, Andersen completely transformed the genre. He added irony and humor and vastly expanded the repertoire of characters. There are plenty of princes and princesses, witches, enchanted animals, and poor innocents in his tales, yet he was the first to give inanimate objects personalities of their own. A shirt collar, a darning needle, an old tub or a coffee mill becomes a memorable character in its own right with particular foibles and virtues, whereas in traditional folk tales such objects serve merely as props to explain the origins of, say, a weathervane or the dark seam on black-eyed peas.
Andersen also introduced into his tales the dark undercurrents of fatalism and absurdity he had absorbed from his literary hero Charles Dickens and the elaborate Kunstmarchen or "art fairy tales" of the German writers Adalbert von Chamisso, Ludwig Tieck, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Although similar to fairy tales, their Kunstmarchen are actually intricate supernatural tales. They lack the fairy tale's simplicity and ability to dramatize or distill a particular aspect of human nature into a symbolic form accessible to any reader regardless of his or her cultural background. Nonetheless they showed Andersen a way to write stories with unhappy endings while avoiding the sentimentality and melodrama that plague his novels. Andersen even rewrote one of Tieck's tales as "The Shadow," complete with a self-deprecating acknowledgment of his predecessor. In this tale, a scholar traveling through Italy finds that he has lost his shadow.
It annoyed him, not only because the shadow had gone, but also because he knew that there was a story about a man without a shadow, a story that was known to everybody in the cold countries, and if the learned man returned home and told his own story, they would say he was just repeating the old one; and after all, he was a man with original ideas!
The shadow eventually reappears, having gained substance and an elegant wardrobe. At first he supplants the scholar who has grown thin and pale with grief at the neglect his writing has suffered. Finally, the villainous shadow has the learned man "put out of the way" and lives happily ever after with a princess.
In many of his over 150 tales, Andersen flirts with mercilessness and amoralism. The soldier in "The Tinderbox" kills a witch who has made him rich simply because she refuses to explain why she so wants a particular tinderbox. The soldier is amply rewarded for this murder. Ultimately, however, Andersen could never fully adopt so bleak a vision of the human condition and often tacked a sanctimonious moralizing coda onto otherwise rather brutal stories. The Little Mermaid, strictly speaking, should have turned into seafoam upon her death, having lost the chance of gaining an immortal soul when the prince married another. She turns instead into one of the children of the air, destined to float through space for three hundred years before reaching the Heavenly Kingdom. Furthermore, God will shorten her probation in this airy limbo by one day every time she finds "a child who brings joy to his parents, and deserves their love," but He adds a day for each tear she sheds when she sees "a bad and naughty child." Or, in "The Red Shoes," a young girl named Karen is punished for her vanity when she thinks only of her new shoes while taking communion. Her fancy shoes become fixed on her feet and force her to dance without stopping until she finds an executioner who will chop off her feet. Yet physical suffering alone does not bring redemption. Karen tries again and again to hobble to mass on crutches, but the shoes keep barring the church door until the Angel of God is satisfied that her repentance is genuine.
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