Cinderella Tales

A captivating collection of Cinderella tales translated from more than fifteen languages and cultural traditions, revealing surprising new dimensions to an iconic storyThis anthology brings together fresh, contemporary translations of lesser-known Cinderella tales representing the story’s full geographic range. With an emphasis on Asia and the Middle East, it includes orally transmitted lore along with highly crafted literary tales. Many of these stories are presented here in English for the first time.The tales in this volume challenge popular assumptions about what a Cinderella story ought to be. Though sharing familiar core elements—a dead mother, a cruel stepmother, a magical helper, a lost shoe—they diverge from the well-known storyline in startling ways. Fairy godmothers are vanishingly rare, and fish, cows, frogs, and even ogresses play the part of magical helper. While the heroine is often identified by a shoe, romance tends to remain on the margins. Instead, bitter rivalries between sisters and enduring bonds of affection between mothers and daughters drive the plots. Each tale is accompanied by a brief note introducing its source and cultural context. The book’s invaluable introduction explores the transformations that Cinderella tales have undergone in traveling across languages, cultures, and time, and the role of translation in these transformations.The contributors to this volume, many of whom are award-winning literary translators and writers, have produced splendid new translations that inspire us to reexamine our assumptions about one of the most recognizable fairy tale heroines.The languages from which the tales are translated include Chinese (modern and classical), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, HMoob, Tibetan, Persian, Arabic (from Iraq, Oman, and Egypt), Hausa, Greek (modern and ancient), Yiddish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, and the Bolognese dialect of Italian.