Snow White and Her Dedicated Dutch Mothers: Translating in the Footsteps of the Brothers Grimm

In this essay I depart from Donald Haase’s reflections on the ownership and reception of fairy tales in “Yours, Mine, or Ours” and The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and apply them to the practice of fairy-tale translators, who played an important role in giving the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen its current status as an international classic. I treat these translations, and the Kinder- und Hausmärchenitself, as forms of “written folklore,” Aleida Assmann’s concept of written texts that are transmitted in a way that is traditionally associated with oral storytelling. I illustrate the way that translators of fairy tales freely negotiate between the Grimm tales, their own target audience, and their sociocul- tural context by referring to a selection of Dutch translations of “Snow White” published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries