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 different 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.

“Once upon a time there was a boy who was so very, very poor that all he owned was the suit of clothes that he was wearing; and that was too small for him.…” That could have been the opening of a fairy tale or a description of Hans Christian Andersen setting out from his native Odense to seek his fortune in Copenhagen. Did he see witches, fairy godmothers, and trolls? He did indeed, as certainly as Odysseus heard the Siren sing. Like the heroes of the fairy tales, Andersen went out into the wide world, with a good deal of naïveté, curiosity, and lust for life as ballast. He sought the princess and half the kingdom. Nothing less would do, for he was a real poet. And he did win, if not the princess and half the kingdom, then something even better: fame in half if not the whole world. Did it make him happy? I think it did, for it meant that his suffering had not been in vain. Out of his personal grief and unhappiness, beauty had been born. Yet it was not Andersen but we who gained most from this struggle. The artists, musicians, and poets are the richest of all human beings, for they can leave a legacy that will last as long as men breathe.

Andersen adopted the most ancient literary forms—the fairy tale and the folk tale—and changed them into something that was his own. He was not a collector of folklore, a reteller of what had already been told, as were the brothers Grimm, whom he admired very much.

What often happens to great authors happened to Andersen as well. The enormous success of some of his fairy tales cast a shadow on the rest of his stories and they have been overlooked. How many people have ever heard of THE SHADOW, a brilliant Kafkaesque tale, or ANNE LISBETH, an unsentimental naturalistic story about a girl who abandons her illegitimate child? Andersen felt that each of his works should dictate its own style; and he was constantly experimenting. His very last story, AUNTIE TOOTHACHE, is strangely modern, a psychological fantasy, so different from the literature of the age to which he belonged. The hope that some of Andersen’s lesser known stories might now receive the attention they deserve was one of the greatest inducements for starting out on this huge task, and it was an encouragement throughout the work.

A translator is a servant of what he is translating; it is, after all, reduced to sentences and even single words, whose double he has to find. He must try not only to translate the sense but the spirit as well. This is his art, this is what he should and will be judged by. He must be faithful to the original and yet produce a fluent, readable version in another language. But these demands of fluency and readability must not be excuses for changing the author’s literary style. Andersen’s prose in Danish is not smooth, it is choppy and abrupt; and that is part of his charm. I hope that I have “translated” this as well.

The translator must not let his own personal opinions, or those of his times, influence him. Unfortunately, many of the early translators of Hans Christian Andersen were Victorians, and they had a tendency to make a kiss on the mouth, in translation, land on the cheek.