Darrell J. Pursiful

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Read a Newly Rediscovered Bavarian Fairy Tale

The Enchanted Quill and some 500 other fairy tales were transcribed by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in 1850. A few of those made it into a published collection, but most were lost until quite recently. They have now been translated into English for the first time by Maria Tatar in The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics, 2015). The prose seems a bit more modern that one might expect from a fairy tale (one of the characters shouts “No way!” at one point), but I can’t fault the translator for attempting to move away from the stilted, formulaic style you usually see in this kind of story (and which I even attempted to imitate in a couple chapters of Children of Pride).

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