Yep. The tigers turned into melted butter, which Little Black Sambo enjoyed with his pancakes.
I remember a story my mother read to me. It was the tale of a cake that somehow fell out of the bakers van on the way to market. This was a talking cake with intelligence, a personality and a face. It was lying at the side of the road next to a puddle of rainwater. And the puddle was also intelligent, with a personality and a face, and could talk. And they were both unhappy, because the cake had been looking forward to being eaten, and the puddle had very much wanted to be drunk. But there’s a happy ending, along come a mother duck and her ducklings, who eat the cake and drink the puddle. And as they die the cake and the puddle say goodbye to each other, and how happy they are. Even aged about five, that disturbed me.
It was a masked ball, with the unmasking at midnight.
Hah, in the original version of the story, SW’s mom wants her killed because the king, SW’s dad, has fallen in love with her (SW) and is planning to marry her.
The Grimms were big on “justice” and made sure the bad guys suffered horribly for their crimes (they came up with some really inventive executions, such as being rolled down a hill in a barrel studded with nails), but they carefully cleaned up all the sex, incest and infanticidal mothers.
JRB
The Grimms didn’t actually invent the stories, btw, they were legitimate scholars not storytellers. They studied German culture and language, and made important discoveries in the field of linguistics. One part of their work was to collect folklore that was already in circulation, and *mostly *they wrote it down as it was told to them.
For years I have needed to answer this question, but was too embarrassed. Dammit, now is the time.
How is it that the verses rhyme in English, if the story was meant to be in German?
Ok, so I guess my memory is not as good as my indignation. But the Little Match Girl does freeze to death waiting for someone, or something, doesn’t she? And with reference to the OP, the character of Sambo is one that we wouldn’t encounter today, regardless of who got turned into butter. Crap, it was over 60 years ago that I first read it! I’m lucky I can remember that I even HAD books. 
Re the Brothers Grimm it was always a bit jarring in their tales when a solider or similar adventurer would meet a witch and more or less instantly behead her or roll her down a hill in a barrel with nails on the inside. Rough justice for witches!
Very careful translators. Or else, rather lax translators.
Either way, the intent with translating verse is (usually) to capture the structure as well as - or sometimes rather than - the meaning.
This can be difficult, of course.
Disney’s Little Match Girl
How about the part in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (or one of the Narnia books) where Lewis describes little Lucy going around the house “making love to everybody”? Wonder how much longer we’ve got before that gets whitewashed out.
“Im the Hip-Hop-opotomus
My rhymes are bottomless … *”
It was in the Silver Chair, and it wasn’t Lucy, it was Eustace’s friend, Jill.
And what made it an exceptionally funny scene to me was that it took place in a giant’s castle. (Oooow, poor Jill. >_>)
That book was one of my favorites when I was younger, I hadn’t thought about it in years.
It was definitely strange that Sterling was left alone as much as he was. IIRC his older sister was pretty horrified at the state of the house when she came to visit.
Being a boy in his early teens (?) Sterling probably thought it was pretty cool to have as much freedom as he did, but all in all I imagine he would have been happier to have his mother around. His father came across as loving but unable to provide anything resembling a normal familly life.
In life, she is cold, poor, beaten by her father, hungry and shunned.
In death, she is warm and happy, and is carried to heaven by her grandmother, who loved her.
It’s a christian story about hope, in other words, written by a kind-hearted man who had nothing but sympathy for his character, and the real children like her who still existed in his day.
The creepy bit for me is not that she dies, but that the description (visions, feeling warm at the end etc.) pretty much matches what really happens when you freeze to death :eek:
Not as old as I thought, but the Butter Battle Book from Dr. Seuss definitely qualifies for this thread:
Calormenes, from Calormen.
And, as if spending the rest of their lives with mutilated feet weren’t enough, while riding to Cinderella’s wedding to the Prince, some different birds swoop in and peck their eyes out! :eek: :eek:
That’s Grimm justice for you!
My take: neither racist nor progressive.
Not racist, because the nasty taunting boys are not punished by becoming African boys, but by becoming ignominously be-inked German boys. (BTW the English verses are a very free translation. They imply e.g. that it would be desirable for the black boy to be white “For if he tries with all his might,/He cannot change from black to white”; the German text says “How is this Moor to be blamed/for not being white like you?”. Also the descriptive terms esp. “Mohr”, while not PC nowadays (the euphemism treadmill also works in Germany), would be merely descriptive at the time.
Not progressive, because anti-black racism wouldn’t be a social issue at the time, to be fought by progressives. Black people weren’t a minority at the time, but a few isolated individuals. The didactic story doesn’t make a ‘don’t be racist’ point but a ‘don’t be a gratutiously nasty child’ one.
A fascinating note, showing us again how much can be lost in translation - in this case, virtually all. And, in fact, the message of the line you quote is of tolerance, not racism. (And here in the U.S. there is growing antipathy toward having children learn more than one language. This is a good example of what multilingualism can reveal to us.)
CC writes:
> And here in the U.S. there is growing antipathy toward having children learn
> more than one language.
Cite? A citation in this case would be a survey showing that there has been a change in the attitude towards children learning foreign languages. Individual statements about this issue aren’t sufficient.