Cinderella, Cinderella

Reading the Grimm version of "Cinderella" became an exercise in studying the translation of the German story to English rather than studying the story's content. I've read the German version several times, and the way it is written in German must have been almost exactly the way the Grimm brothers first heard it. They, like anyone in Europe at the time, had probably heard a dozen version of the same - involving glass, gold, and fur slippers - but they chose this version to represent the tale. I think they wrote it as closely to the way it was originally told by a storyteller, not from memory, because their job was one of collecting what they saw as pieces of a culture. It was not just about publishing an entertaining collection of stories. Since it's a simple story, moved by plot instead of character development, the translations read very similarly - but it's a European story, and very obviously not American.

Anne Sexton's poem, "Cinderella", read like an entertaining critique. The first line, "You always read about it", sets the poem up as containing subject matter that the reader will be familiar with, no matter how the poet treats the writing. Lines such as, "Or the nursemaid,/ some luscious sweet from Denmark", and "She slept on the sooty hearth each night/ and walked around looking like Al Jolson", are both funny and sardonic. There are odd connotations to some of the lines: when the prince looks for Cinderella, Sexton writes, "Now he would find whom the shoe fit/ and find his strange dancing girl for keeps;..." - the words "dancing girl" made me think of a gypsy entertainer, which, whether or not others thought something similarly, is an odd thing to think of. When Cinderella fits the shoe, it fits, "... like a love letter into its envelope". At the end, the newlyweds are compared to Bobbsey Twins - my notes read, "as in, after the "happily ever after", they freeze and remain the same? Kind of macabre". It was a creepy, dry treatment of an otherwise bland and sunny fairy-tale. Beyond the material being the same (one text evolved directly from the other), the writing styles, and the point of the poem and the story, are entirely different.