Learning from Fairy Tales

I just finished an article about fairy tales in the works of Carmen Martín Gaite, one of my favorite novelists from Spain. She wrote a whimsical book, Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan, where she deconstructed the fairy tale gender. Her protagonist, ten-year-old Sara Allen, takes a strawberry cake to her grandmother every week, but unlike in the original by Charles Perrault, she doesn’t end up in Mister Woolf’s bed—despite his name. The young girl only wants to be free and reach the Statue of Liberty going underwater as if it were one of the tunnels in and out of Manhattan.

As I was writing, I learned from Maria Tartar’s literary theories that the fairy tales we read as children can help shape our personality. This got me thinking about which was my favorite tale as a little girl, but I realized that I didn’t read fairy tales growing up. I read them to my daughters, that I know, although they preferred the Dr. Seuss’s’ stories and Mother Goose’s tales.

My favorite fairy tale could be “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen. I was a somewhat sickly child, compared to my brother and my cousins. I definitely was the skinniest and one of the shortest. Suffice it to say that now I’m the tallest of the bunch, including my brother—much to his chagrin. How did this happen? I remember that on my first trip back to Spain, I was teased that it must have been due to drinking so much Coca-Cola.

I reread “The Ugly Duckling” now and I don’t feel so connected to the story; first of all, the duckling is male, although Peter used to say that I was as beautiful and calm as a swan above water, but underneath I was pedaling as fast as hell. The question is where did I come up with such a romantic idea of life if it wasn’t from fairy tales? Where did I first hear about love, passion, desires, romance?

Now I realize that what my parents read to me was poetry. If I sighed, my father would say: “La princesa está triste, ¿qué tendrá la princesa? (The princess is sad, what’s wrong with the princess? He could recite “Sonatina,” the entire poem by the Nicaraguan modernist poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), with its eight stanzas. And we were off to the races, because I learned it by heart myself and I know it to this day. Here is the first and last verses to give you an idea about my upbringing:

Sonatina

Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa,
que ha perdido la risa, que ha perdido el color.
La princesa está pálida en su silla de oro,
está mudo el teclado de su clave sonoro,
y en un vaso, olvidada, se desmaya una flor.

‘Calla, calla, princesa’—dice el hada madrina—;
‘en caballo, con alas, hacia acá se encamina,
en el cinto la espada y en la mano el azor,
el feliz caballero que te adora sin verte,
y que llega de lejos, vencedor de la Muerte,
a encenderte los labios con un beso de amor.’

The princess with strawberry lips is sighing, / she has lost her smile, she has lost her color. / The princess is pale on her golden chair, / her sonorous harpsichord is mute, / and in a glass, forgotten, a flower faints.

‘Be quiet, be quiet, princess’—says the fairy godmother—; / ‘in a winged horse, riding towards here, / in the belt a sword and in the hand a hawk, / the happy gentleman who adores you sight-unseen, / arriving from faraway, winner over Death, / to warm up your lips with a kiss of love.’
(My translation).

I rest my case!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2025 at 3:13 pm by conchaalborg and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.