Talk:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales/The Nightingale
Add topicThe title of the fairy tale
[edit]Even though the nightingale in the fairy tale is owned by an emperor, the English title is just The Nightingale (a direct translation of the Danish title Nattergalen), not The Emperor's Nightingale, as evidenced by these Google searches:
- +"hans christian andersen" +"the nightingale" - 39,700 hits
- +"hans christian andersen" +"the emperor's nightingale" - 925 hits
Where the latter title is used (very infrequently indeed), it often refers to (the U.S. version of) a 1949 stop-motion puppet animation of the tale made in what was then Czechoslovakia. [1]
Therefore, I made the page The Emperor's Nightingale redirect to the page The Nightingale. I did the same thing on Wikipedia and fixed links where necessary.
--Bwiki 17:40, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
A note on translations
[edit]The page The Emperor's Nightingale contained an unsourced, unformatted translation that had been moved from a Wikipedia page. That translation turned out to be identical (except for the title) to Jean Hersholt's acclaimed 1949 translation, which can also be found on the website of the Hans Christian Andersen Center at the University of Southern Denmark along with his translations of most of Andersen's other tales. [2]
The page The Nightingale contains H.P. Paull's 1872 translation. That translation does not follow the Danish text as closely as Hersholt's and to me (a Dane) it does not seem to convey as much of Andersen's peculiar style. However, I chose to keep Paull's translation because the other Andersen translations here at Wikisource are by him. Also, I am not absolutely certain if Hersholt's translations have fallen into the pulic domain yet.
I would recommend the Hans Christian Andersen Center website [3] over Wikisource for English translations of Andersen's tales.