As long as you are a swan egg, it doesn't matter if you are born in a chicken farm.
A sentence in "The Ugly Duckling" is used to compare the author Andersen, perhaps the best footnote.
Born 212 years ago today, into a poor family, his father a shoemaker and a mother a washer, if he had to add some romantic overtones, his father was "gifted with poetry and spirituality" to give wings to his imagination.
He did not have good soil, his father died early, and the family was surrounded by walls. Nevertheless, he never gave up the chase, and in the end, achieved his own fairy tale life.
All over the world, in every place where the sun rises, there are people reading his fairy tales, not just children. Many children will still pick up this book when they grow up, and resonate with the author from the beautiful laying out, beautiful metaphors, and deep emotions.
Some resonance is wonderful. Even Tolstoy would say that Hans Christian Andersen was lonely, very lonely...
In fairy tales, not all are deceitful
As a writer, Andersen has many works, and the world-famous ones are fairy tales.
The translator Lin Hua has this comment on him, which is quite appropriate:
Andersen's fairy tales, in the world's circulation second only to the Bible, the Bible found God, and Hans Christian Andersen found man, God ultimately comes down to man, and Hans Christian Andersen is directly from man to man.
But anyone who has read Andersen's fairy tales, as long as they compare them with other fairy tales, will find that it is completely unintelligent, it does not have those simple structures, although it also has fantastic ideas, but with sincerity and emotion, it is a real literary creation.
Some people divide his fairy tales into three periods: early, middle and late.
In 1835, he began to write fairy tales, early stories, more romantic, such as "Little Itida's Flowers", "Thumbelina", "The Princess on the Pea"; in the middle, romance and reality coexisted, such as "The Little Girl Who Sold Matches" and "The Ice Queen"; later, more realistic, such as "Dream Under the Willow Tree", "She is a Waste", "Bachelor's Nightcap".
These fairy tales, all included in the "Andersen Fairy Tales", spanning decades, I can not strictly distinguish the period, but several classifications, it is true, especially the realist fairy tale theme, gloomy and profound, reading the moment, as if you can hear the cracking of the face, tell you, fairy tales, not all are deceitful.
This experience may be related to himself.
Innately, he has wonderful imaginations, but limited to the background, he will also encounter walls everywhere.
From an early age, he was able to speak well, and the neighbors and mothers-in-law liked him, thinking that he was an unusually intelligent child, worried that "the child is so smart that he does not live long", and in order to reward his chatter, they told him fairy tales. A world as wonderful and rich as "Heavenly Nights" appeared before his eyes.
He was sensitive, delicate, lonely, and when he was a child, he had emotions that other children did not have, for example, he was afraid of the night.
In the autobiography, there is such a sentence:
I often climb into bed at sunset, close the cotton curtains, and immerse myself alone in my thoughts and dreams, as if the real world did not exist.
He left home at a young age and ventured into Copenhagen, the city now famous for him, and when they first met, they did not give him any favors, and drifted like grass.
Even the words he was proud of were frequently frustrated when their ideas were not based on culture.
He had written a play, a tragedy, titled The Robber of Weissenberg, spelled it, and hardly a single word was correct. After the tragedy was sent, in strong anticipation, it took six weeks and the script was sent back. The rejection letter says:
Scripts like this that lack the minimum basic education should not be sent to the theater in the future.
If I was good looking, I would get married
Andersen never married.
It is said that shortly before his death, he said this to a young writer:
I paid a huge, if not incalculable, price tag for my fairy tale. For the sake of fairy tales, I rejected my own happiness and missed a time when, how powerful and glorious the imagination was, should give way to reality.
Although he was never married, he was also quite popular with women, and there are several stories, all of which are extremely moving.
The most widely circulated is this paragraph.
Once, Hans Christian Andersen went to Verona and fell asleep in the carriage, but unexpectedly a noise from the women outside the carriage surprised him from his sleep, and it turned out that three girls were going to hitchhike.
The coachman thought that the girls were paying too low a price and would not let them get into the car. When Hans Christian Andersen learned of this, he agreed to pay for the fare, and the coachman agreed. When getting in the car, the driver joked:
Well, come on, you've met a foreign prince!
In various formulations, Hans Christian Andersen was called "a kind man with an ugly appearance." One of the three girls, Yelena, recognized the man who was talking eminently, Andersen, and repeatedly invited the other to her house.
Yelena was the daughter of a rich family, and later, confiding her heart to Hans Christian Andersen, but was not accepted by the other party, Andersen said:
My love is in a fairy tale.
Compared with the legendary color of this section, between him and Linde, it is more like a long stream of thin water.
Linde is a singer from Sweden who met in Copenhagen and wherever they are, they will have a happy party, but Linde will always call him "dear brother".
Once, Hans Christian Andersen traveled to England, where Linde performed, and Hans Christian Andersen went to her residence, and many people were around to see the "Swedish Nightingale", but she just closed the door. Suddenly, the door opened, and she came out with a spring breeze on her face, and from the window, she saw Hans Christian Andersen coming.
Whether the two have affection or not is unknown, but there is a friendship, and later, a young artist has sculpted a bust for them, which is displayed in a museum in Copenhagen City.
Why was Hans Christian Andersen alone? Accounts differ and opinions vary.
Some people say that Hans Christian Andersen is because of inferiority, thinking that repeated love is unsuccessful, one is because of ugly appearance, and the other is because of poverty.
In his diaries and letters, he wrote these words many times:
Since I am ugly and will be poor forever, no one will want to marry me; if I am beautiful, or have money, and have a small decent office, then I will get married and have a family...
But that doesn't necessarily hold.
After all, there are also many who say that danish painter Christian Satman said that Hans Christian Andersen "had an impressively beautiful appearance". At the same time, in the autobiography, we also know that since Hans Christian Andersen was 30 years old, works such as "Improv Poets" and the first fairy tale collection were published, as well as government subsidies, not necessarily rich, but certainly not poor.
It is also said that Hans Christian Andersen's unmarried was the shadow of his childhood when he saw a.
In his autobiography, he mentioned that once in the old man's shelter, where his grandmother worked, he followed the staff to the crazy area where idle people were not allowed to enter, peeked through the crack in the door, and saw a naked woman, wearing her hair loose, singing a moving song. Suddenly, she bounced up, cried and rushed over, slamming the door, grabbing him with her arm and scaring him half to death.
This fear caused him sequelae, and Hans Christian Andersen wrote:
There's always an inexplicable sense of disgust for girls over 20, and with them, I really shudder.
On the other side of the imagination, The Scissor hand Hans Christian Andersen
If words are Andersen's weapon for walking the rivers and lakes, paper-cutting is his hidden skill.
In places such as the Royal Library of Denmark and the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, many fans and fans have found an interesting thing, that is, Andersen's different nearly a thousand works: paper cutting.
Elves, dwarves, witches, magicians, beasts... Andersen's paper-cutting is like the reproduction of a fairy tale, and the text constructs an imaginary wonderful world, and the paper-cutting brings this world to life from the scissors.
Feng Jicai also wrote an article, saying:
Andersen's paper cuts are not all traditional European silhouettes, some are very similar to Chinese paper cuts. I saw some of his paper-cut works, which looked very similar to the paper-cuts of the Hezhe and Manchu beliefs in northern China, vivid, casual, simple, and the image was still a little strange. These figures are not gods, but fairy tale figures bouncing around in Andersen's head.
It is said that Hans Christian Andersen never sketched, but improvised, cutting and changing. In some narratives, Andersen used to carry a pair of scissors with him, and when he was traveling, when writing, he cut it at any time with the paper at hand.
The scissors he used to cut paper, the scissors were long, the scissors were very sharp, when traveling, he would take the scissors with him, once took a carriage to Odense, accidentally sat on the scissors, and was stabbed by the tip of the knife.
He also likes to cut paper while telling stories to children.
The child sat around, he was in the middle, this man who had a wonderful idea since childhood, let the story flow out, at the same time, a piece of paper also danced up and down with the scissors, and when the story was finished, the scissors stopped, he opened the paper, and a small fairy tale appeared in front of the child, as if he could see the children's eyes rounded and sighed.
Perhaps, this is Hans Christian Andersen, who, as the autobiography says, had a fairy tale life.
Cover News - West China Metropolis Daily reporter Zhang Luyan