Fairer

Charlotte-Rose de Caumont La Force,

Laura Christensen (Translator),

James Robinson Planché (Translator)

4.33 · Rating details · 3 ratings · 2 reviews

Once upon a time there was a princess so beautiful that her people named her Fairer-than-the-Fairies. Of course, with a name like that, Fairer was destined for trouble.

When the wicked queen of the fairies hears of Fairer's reputation, the wicked queen swears to avenge her fairies' pride. She captures the princess and condemns her to complete an impossible task by daybreak ...more

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Kindle Edition, French Fairy Tales & Folklore #2, 74 pages

Published November 4th 2019 by Amazon Digital Services (first published 1698)

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Mar 06, 2020 Marquise rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, fairy-and-folk-tales, fairy-tale-retellings, beauty-and-the-beast-theme, 4-5-stars, charming-story, legend-retellings

This was one of the literary salon fairy tales from 17th century France that escaped my attention until writer Laura Christensen mentioned this struck her as a "Cupid and Psyche" retelling in her Rapunzel mini-anthology, and it intrigued me so that I ran to read this next.

Christensen wasn't wrong, this really does read like a Cupid/Psyche retelling. Or, rather, like Cupid/Psyche without the jealous sisters and with a great tale of female friendship and an evil fairy queen in place of vain Aphrod This was one of the literary salon fairy tales from 17th century France that escaped my attention until writer Laura Christensen mentioned this struck her as a "Cupid and Psyche" retelling in her Rapunzel mini-anthology, and it intrigued me so that I ran to read this next.

Christensen wasn't wrong, this really does read like a Cupid/Psyche retelling. Or, rather, like Cupid/Psyche without the jealous sisters and with a great tale of female friendship and an evil fairy queen in place of vain Aphrodite. It starts pretty much the same way: a baby girl is born to a king and queen, so beautiful that she's called Plus Belle que Fée (Fairer-than-the-Fairies or Fairer-than-a-fairy depending on translation), a name that wounds the vanity of a bad fairy queen that manages to kidnap the girl when she grows up, taking her to a castle where she meets another fellow prisoner, Princess Desire, kept captive for similar reasons and with whom she bonds famously. Whilst there, she's sentenced to a series of impossible tasks together with Desire, designed to get rid of both as failure is assured, and which call back either to the Greco-Roman legend of Psyche or to bits of Ancient history & lore (Cleopatra's pearls, Icarus' wings, etc.). She manages to succeed with each task and helps Desire succeed, too, thanks to the help of the evil fairy's son, Phraates, and on the side manages to free the former, true queen of the fairies, thus winning her happy ending.

It's a lovely story. It struck me that, for all its following of Cupid & Psyche's key plotlines almost in its entirety, it got rid of the "mysterious monster husband" element that makes it the proto-Beauty and the Beast story. Although it has romance, it isn't as romantic: the friendship and interactions between Fairer and Desire is given more screentime and shown to grow onpage than the relationship with Phraates. In fact, Phraates just drops out of the blue and tells her he loves her, and there's no mention of where he saw her first and why he loves her, unlike what we see with Cupid. But unlike Cupid, who leaves Psyche to work through her tasks alone, we are treated to seeing this fairy prince earn the love of Fairer by helping her and her friend achieve the task goals. He works for her love with good deeds, in other words, and that's not frequent in fairy tales.

Nor is female friendship, especially between two beautiful women. It was refreshing that these two girls weren't jealous or bitchy or overcompetitive but became a team instead. I'm starting to sense a leaning on Mlle. de La Force's stories for depicting women as collaborating. I like that very much, because to me that's the real stength of women contrary to the Strong Woman stereotype.

Because this tale is very little known and hasn't been re-edited in English for 200 years since J. R. Planché translated it for his Four and Twenty Fairy Tales, Laura Christensen decided to tackle a new, modern translation, adding her notes and thoughts without having read Planché's, and then she transcribed Planché's translation from the aforementioned book, adding a compare & contrast section after. So, in this edition, the contents are lined up like this:
1. Laura Christensen's translation, Fairer-than-the-Fairies
2. Her commentary on the process of translation, observations, struggles, and so on.
3. James Robinson Planché's translation, Fairer than a Fairy.
4. Commentary on Planché's process of translation by Christensen, noting differences, similarities, who added what and where, who omitted what and where, who mistranslated what, who translated what better, and so on.

All this was immensely interesting and engrossing to me, and since Ms Christensen left it up to readers to decide who did it better, her or Planché, I'm going to hazard my own evaluation. I think both have their fortes and weaknesses. For Christensen, the strengths are: accesible prose and being the closest to the original French, and the weaknesses are: literalism and a tendence to miss the poetic flow. Planché? For him, the forte is: he isn't a stickler for meaning over style & rythm, so he gets the Old Fairy Tale "voice" perfectly as well as being better suited than Christensen for getting the poetic flow of La Force's French and the poems; and his weakness is a tendency to overexplain. He also omits passages, but that's probably that he was also doing editor work (a lot of Victorians did self-censoring for morals) and not a weakness as a translator as Christensen implies. I mean, the first translation of Apuleius' tale of Cupid & Psyche into English was also sanitised by the translator!

To wrap up, I really loved the experience of meeting a new tale, it was very educational. ...more

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Dec 09, 2019 Blake added it

Wonderful fairy tale of love friendship and impossible tasks

If you enjoy fairy tales and would like to see behind the scenes of the translation process, this book is for you. The fairy tale is very different than those I am used to and goes on to explore all different kinds of love. The thoughts on translation process are very interesting, especially the case of the missing footnote. Laura bravely included an alternate nineteenth century translation to compare. Very enjoyable.

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