![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My aunt J is a person who cycles through a lot of different hobbies (relatable), and one of her recent ones has been translation. This book is a collection of folktales which she translated into English from German - some of them are originally German tales, and some of them are stories from other sources for which she found German translations and then she translated the German into English. I can't speak to the quality of the translation, especially for the stories that went through multiple levels of translation, but Aunt J's writing style is clear and a pleasure to read.
It's a lovely collection of stories; Aunt J has good taste, or perhaps I should say similar taste to me :P She focused largely on stories that feature women and girls who play an active role in the story, which is a subset that often has not gotten a lot of attention from the (mostly snooty academic male) folklorists of the past.
The collection includes many stories I already knew, but also some stories that weren't familiar to me, which is truly impressive! Though often there were still elements that were familiar even in those stories, because there are often thematic patterns you'll find in traditional stories.
It's a self-published book that was self-edited, so there are a couple small proofreading errors, but honestly it's doing great by the standards of self-publishing, and even by the standards of some professionally published books, lol. As I would expect from Aunt J and her perfectionist tendencies! (you should see the CORNERS and the PERFECTLY DYED COLOURS on the art quilts she made in a previous hobby!)
This book has been my bedtime reading for the last few weeks and it was a lovely read. So glad Aunt J gave me a copy of this collection at Christmas, and that I finally got round to reading it.
It's a lovely collection of stories; Aunt J has good taste, or perhaps I should say similar taste to me :P She focused largely on stories that feature women and girls who play an active role in the story, which is a subset that often has not gotten a lot of attention from the (mostly snooty academic male) folklorists of the past.
The collection includes many stories I already knew, but also some stories that weren't familiar to me, which is truly impressive! Though often there were still elements that were familiar even in those stories, because there are often thematic patterns you'll find in traditional stories.
It's a self-published book that was self-edited, so there are a couple small proofreading errors, but honestly it's doing great by the standards of self-publishing, and even by the standards of some professionally published books, lol. As I would expect from Aunt J and her perfectionist tendencies! (you should see the CORNERS and the PERFECTLY DYED COLOURS on the art quilts she made in a previous hobby!)
This book has been my bedtime reading for the last few weeks and it was a lovely read. So glad Aunt J gave me a copy of this collection at Christmas, and that I finally got round to reading it.
