Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a French writer and poet as well as a member of the Académie Française. In 1697, at the end of his illustrious career, Perrault published a collection of eight Contes du temps passé, literally “tales from times past” (Bouchenot-Déchin 2018). These included stories we know today as Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Cinderella, and all of them were written in prose. These stories have been told and retold so many times, and in so many ways, that they’ve become ingrained in our cultural imagination.
Searching Rauner’s collection for items using the keywords “(Cinderella OR Cendrillon) AND Perrault” yields 12 results. The earliest of these dates from 1697, the year the Contes was originally published in Paris, but Rauner’s copy is an unauthorized (pirated) edition that was likely printed in Amsterdam by Jacques Desbordes. In fact, the 1697 edition isn’t even attributed to Charles Perrault; its author is listed as “le Fils de Monsieur Perreault [sic] de l’Academie François” (the son of M. Perrault of the Académie Française). This minor literary mystery was resolved in short order, and it wasn’t long before new editions listed Charles Perrault as their author.Thirty-two years later, in 1729, a British writer and translator named Robert Samber published the first English translation of Perrault’s Contes. Samber seems to have worked from the pirated Dutch edition of the text that we have in Rauner rather than the original Parisian edition, although that would not have made a substantive difference because the content is identical (Bottigheimer 2002, 5).
Samber gave Cinderella her English name (originally “Cinderilla”), and it stuck. I looked at ten English translations of Perrault’s Cendrillon in Rauner’s collection, ranging in date from 1785 to 1963, and every one of them refers to the protagonist as Cinderella/Cinderilla. (Note that this is just a small fraction of Rauner’s fairy tale collection!) Not one of them changes the name Samber gave her. I doubt Samber had any idea how much influence that one decision would have on readers, Disney viewers, and even college basketball.
But Cendrillon isn’t actually the protagonist’s name. It’s a nickname, and we never learn what her parents named her. In fact, it isn’t even the only nickname used for her in the story. According to the original, “Cucendron” was the name commonly used for her in the household, and it was the younger stepsister (described as less mean-spirited than the older one) who called her Cendrillon instead. Cucendron basically translates to “Cinder-butt” and relates to Cinderella’s habit of sitting in the hearth to take a break from her manual labor.
Given how consistent all of these English translations are about calling our protagonist “Cinderella,” it’s remarkable how widely their interpretations of “Cucendron” vary. These ten translations contain seven different versions of the mean-spirited nickname: Cinder-breech, Cinder-wench, Cinder-slut, Cinder-girl, Cindertail, Cinder-scraper, and Cinder-clod. Cinder-breech, which was Samber’s initial translation, appears in just two of these editions, and two of them avoid the matter completely by omitting those lines. Still other translations have turned this nickname into: Cinderpuss, Cinderseat, Cinderbottom, and Cinderbutt.
Why does this matter? Aside from helping readers gauge just how mean those stepsisters are, this detail doesn’t impact the story’s narrative arc at all. But it’s one small way that generation after generation of translators was able to put their own mark on the text–whether they received any credit for their translations or not. (Five of the ten translations I studied do not explicitly name their translators.) With so many aspects of this story locked in place, this seemingly minor nickname gives the translator an opportunity to demonstrate that literary translation is a creative, interpretive process and not a simple matter of carrying meaning across a linguistic barrier. Translators have immense power to shape our understanding of the world, and of each other.
To see the 1697 pirated edition of Perrault's tales, come to Rauner and ask to see Rare PQ1877 .C513 1697. The various translations are as follows: Sine Illus R53fait ("Cindertail"); Sine Illus A66per ("cinder-girl"); Sine Illus D86sle ("Cinder-slut"); and Chapbook 50.5 ("Cinder-wench").
This post was written by Rachel Starr, Research & Learning Specialist at Dartmouth Libraries.
