#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 14: Why do you write in the form you do (poem, short story, novel, etc)?
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#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 14: Why do you write in the form you do (poem, short story, novel, etc)?
It all derives from my goal - faithfully translate old German folk tales into English, and make them accessible to an international audience.
"Faithfully" means that I alter the tales as little as possible, only making minor adjustments to make them more readable. I do _not_ "retell" them or attempt to fit them into a modern context. While I would see nothing wrong with such an approach - many folk tales basically qualify as #fanfiction , after all - I will leave such approaches to others. In fact, I encourage it - I publish my translations under a #CreativeCommons Zero license (the equivalent to public domain).
But the actual translation is the _easy_ part. The difficult part is "making them accessible". These tales were told in a context (i.e. rural 19th century Germany) that will be unfamiliar to most of my readers. Thus, I have to _explain_ the context, and this is the reason why all my translations have added commentary, and my books have hundreds of footnotes.
Thus, my folk tale collections have a style not dissimilar to academic textbooks.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 14: Why do you write in the form you do (poem, short story, novel, etc)?
It all derives from my goal - faithfully translate old German folk tales into English, and make them accessible to an international audience.
"Faithfully" means that I alter the tales as little as possible, only making minor adjustments to make them more readable. I do _not_ "retell" them or attempt to fit them into a modern context. While I would see nothing wrong with such an approach - many folk tales basically qualify as #fanfiction , after all - I will leave such approaches to others. In fact, I encourage it - I publish my translations under a #CreativeCommons Zero license (the equivalent to public domain).
But the actual translation is the _easy_ part. The difficult part is "making them accessible". These tales were told in a context (i.e. rural 19th century Germany) that will be unfamiliar to most of my readers. Thus, I have to _explain_ the context, and this is the reason why all my translations have added commentary, and my books have hundreds of footnotes.
Thus, my folk tale collections have a style not dissimilar to academic textbooks.
@juergen_hubert That's a huge problem in my readings of folk tales of various Chinese majorities. I need footnotes, endnotes, and other such things but these are highly variable in quality across books, and making up for their absence is rendered more difficult when the people themselves are obscure, and thus hard to find information about in other sources.
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@juergen_hubert That's a huge problem in my readings of folk tales of various Chinese majorities. I need footnotes, endnotes, and other such things but these are highly variable in quality across books, and making up for their absence is rendered more difficult when the people themselves are obscure, and thus hard to find information about in other sources.
Yeah, I'm encountering the same thing in old German folk tale collections. Some folk tale collectors took their roles as researchers and scholars seriously, while others... did not.
