#271: BLESSING THE TELLERS OF TALES.  Perhaps no contemporary writer has been more committed and persuasive—both in his own work and in his critical writing—about the power and necessity of telling stories than Philip Pullman, most famously the author of His Dark Materials. It was the common theme of his collection Dæmon Voices, with essays ranging from Kleist and Dickens and Milton and Tove Jansson and Arthur Ransome to more formal pieces on narrative and storytelling (as well as illustration); there are pieces about the tale of creation in Stephen Hawking’s science, and about what kind of story is being told in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  Clearly this is a man who believes in knowing his masters, and one of the essays is “As Clear as Water,” which is the introduction to his 2012 book Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (Penguin).  The prize blurb quote on the book cover is from Gregory Maguire (known to do some new versions of old stories himself): “You didn’t know you needed to reread Grimm. You do.”  I certainly hadn’t known, and I picked the book up for Pullman as much as for Grimm.  The last I’d read of the Grimms was in the seventies, when the selection translated by Lore Segal and illustrated by Maurice Sendak so rightfully got a lot of attention, in its beautiful, slip-cased, two-volume hardcover edition (it was a Christmas present).  Pullman’s one-volume selection—fifty tales of the original 210—couldn’t be better, more graceful—as clear as water indeed, with so fine a flow—but also, perhaps odd to say, more up-to-date and of the moment.  In the introduction he points out that, just as the Grimms were critical of an earlier German collection for its freedom in cutting and altering the old stories, so they themselves were criticized for a similar approach in their own books.  Pullman insists—in line both with modern critical theory and old practice—that the tales are not texts, immutable things, but individual versions of stories many times retold.  This frees him up, and he details very exactly (in the excellent end notes to each story) where he may occasionally have altered, cut, added.  But go back to his versions and it’s obvious Pullman has done this always cautiously, modestly, and in terms of the tale, not something he wants to make of it.  “The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming,” he writes.  In the end notes he often tells us who the informant for each tale was, and of other versions from other languages.  “To keep to one version or one translation is to put a robin redbreast in a cage.”  Certainly so, but I’m also guessing Pullman’s versions will be the ones I return to in the near future.  When Pullman reaches the certain masterpiece of the collection, “The Juniper Tree,”—“For beauty, for horror, for perfection of form, this story has no equal”—he gives great detail of its provenance, its variants, its parallels, its precision.  “What a privilege it is to tell this story,” he says.  There, if you haven’t seen it before, is the proof that Pullman is a man who knows—and honors—his masters.

      Another blessed discovery of late has been my finding a copy of Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa, in a beautiful translation by Julius Bester.  Think for a second about the difference your ear registers between the words “story” and “tale” and you will realize how appropriately and accurately the latter word has been used here.  Think of the difference between what’s here and, say, a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy or Alice Munro.  Everything Pullman describes in characterizing the Grimm tales may be said of Miyazawa’s: the speed, the want of psychology, the moral and fantastical elements.  All those are here, but there is something different, something individual as well, something Japanese beyond the names and settings.  There is something in them of the fable, but they often refuse to sort themselves out into anything so simplified as a moral.  One distinct difference: Pullman says the traditional tales “lack any close description of the natural world,” and I thought instead of the quickly evoked landscapes through which Miyazawa’s characters move, often with the quality of snow-covered fields not yet tracked across.  This allies closely to another quality that helps us perceive how Miyazawa’s voice is genuinely not quite like any other, in its mix of humor and pathos, its animism, the ways in which the stories never press their advantage.  This sense of moral spaciousness, of compassion, of innocence: Bester says “Without any suggestion of immaturity, Miyazawa’s mind is as innocent, as untinged with a desire to bully, as his landscapes and the clean wind that blows across them.” Once and Forever is a trove of pleasures for, as one reviewer put it, “readers who haven’t outgrown imaginative stories.”  May we never….

Once and Forever was published by New York Review Books in 1993 and is still in print.  Miyazawa’s best-known story, not included in Bester’s selection, is the title story in Night on the Galactic Railroad and Other Stories from Ihatov, translated by Julianne Neville and published by One Peace Books. It’s no surprise a quantity of his works have been reimagined as either manga or anime—it’s a very short road from Miyazawa to Miyazaki.