Voicing Authenticities through Translation: Framing Strategies in the Multicultural Fairy Tale Collections of Andrew Lang and Angela Carter

This article discusses the question of authenticity and translation in two multicultural fairy tale collections in English, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (1889-1910) and Angela Carter’s two-volume The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990-1992). Although they both deploy comparative folkloristic methods in editing their collections, they point in two opposite directions. On the one hand, Lang’s collection homogenises stories from different cultures into a single framework, smoothing out cultural differences in the service of a supposed universalism whose cultural bias is made invisible through Lang’s editorial strategies. On the other hand, Carter’s collection re-presents multiple authenticities by allowing different storytellers and translators to speak in their own voices while explicitly contextualising the stories in the framework of a feminist story collection. This article concludes with a reflection on the implications of Carter’s framing strategy for understanding the fairy tale and translation in a global context.