![]() ![]() Like many French retellings of Perrault’s tale, “Le loup” is full of inventive wordplay and verbal acrobatics that are virtually impossible to translate into English. Surprisingly, “Le loup” is not one of the tales included in the volume illustrated by Sendak, even though it is a charming story in which the protagonists, Delphine and Marinette, allow the “reformed” wolf into their house in spite of the fact that he admits to having eaten Little Red Riding Hood in his youth. More fortunate than many national children’s classics, Les contes du chat perché has been translated into English, but The Wonderful Farm (1951) is not well-known in the anglophone world even though it is the very first children’s book that Maurice Sendak illustrated. Marcel Aymé plays cleverly with Little Red Riding Hood in “Le loup” (The wolf), the first story in his timeless French classic, Les contes du chat perché (1939). This paper examines some of the interesting translation issues encountered in my travels with modern Little Red Riding Hoods. Many contemporary retellings of the world’s best-known fairy tale are by major, award-winning authors and illustrators, but all too often they remain completely unknown in the anglophone world. One of the greatest challenges in preparing the book was the fact that the majority of the texts written in other languages have not been translated into English. An impressive number of international children’s authors and illustrators have retold the story of Little Red Riding Hood in one form or another and I collected well over two hundred retellings from twenty countries in twelve languages while researching a book titled Recycling Red Riding Hood. My research on retellings of Little Red Riding Hood began several years ago on an entirely French corpus, but was extended beyond French borders for the tricentenary conference of Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé ( Stories or Tales of Past Times, 1697), organized by Jean Perrot at the Institut International Charles Perrault, in order to illustrate that the famous fairy-tale heroine celebrating her three-hundredth birthday was an inveterate globetrotter (see Beckett 1998: 365-75). ![]()
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