Book Review - French folk tales - Henri Pourrat

Because part of the mission of this blog is to speak about literature in other languages, which has been translated and/or is often itself a translation from another language and/or medium, I want to use this posting to talk about a French writer who has very recently been making an impact on me. You know how much I love children's literature, especially in French. SO here's an article I've put together about a writer called Henri Pourrat who has collected many regional, traditional tales throughout France, and published them over many years during the twentieth- century. I'm not yet sure if Pourrat's tales have been translated into English, but I think it would be a welcome initiative.


Les fous et les sages (Le Tresor des contes) (French Edition)
A collection of folk tales with a difference!

I still have many more of the wonderful collected folk-tales of the French writer Henri Pourrat to enjoy over the coming months and years, and this prospect is, of course, for me, an enormous treat, given that I have always really enjoyed reading all sorts of tales (’contes’) in both English and, especially, French, over many years but especially nowadays since I began studying and researching French literature and reading translated and adapted literature in earnest over the last twelve years.

Thus have I greatly enjoyed, in both English (translation) and in French, the classic, often adapted and varied in numerous versions, stories of Hans Christian Andersen (translated from Danish, which I don’t unfortunately read, into French and English etc), the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, (in French and English renderings), the ’Contes du chat perché’ (Contes rouges, bleus, etc.) by Marcel Aymé, and collections of ’contes’ from Greek and Roman mythology in French, together with anthologies of such stories from many other traditions. These include the collected traditional, regional folklore tales of such French regions as the Languedoc, Picardie, Auvergne, Paris and of the Middle Ages in France. I can recommend the Dublin-based médiathèque of the Alliance Français, at 1, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, for access to a veritable cavern of such treasures of children’s and popular, traditional French and Francophone literature which, of course, appeals to all age groups. The wonderful tropes and images to be found in the works of contemporary fantasy writers such as J.K. Rowling, are echoed, back into the mists of time, by the witches, wizards and mythical creatures of the most traditional, simplest tales. An ideal way to relax at night is to dip into one or several of these delightful contes and to literally be transported from your armchair to an escape to a parallel world intertwined with our own.

But to talk specifically about Pourrat; this writer undertook a project in the twentieth century which is reminiscent of that of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the Germany of a century earlier. Pourrat collected French regional tales from the countryside, villages, forests and high mountains of many French rural communities, listening to the born storytellers who, perhaps like Ireland’s Kitty the Hare, had a special gift for telling a story to a group of enthralled listeners, using special local, intimate, colloquial language and traditional oral storytelling narrative techniques to capture and retain the rapt attention of her (not exclusively young, by any means) listeners. When reading Pourrat, one is constantly aware of the colloquial, oral, aural language experience and of the immediacy of the intimate storytelling moment.

Pourrat published his Treasury of Tales between 1948 and 1962, and the tales have often, as in the book being reviewed here, been selected according to different themes by other anthologists and published as shorter thematic collections. For instance, Pourrat’s collection of Christmas-related tales describes the magical adventures of country people, farmers, tailors, shopkeepers, princesses, fairy godmothers, local curés etc., on Christmas Eve. The tales all seem strongly anchored, then, in specific rural locales in deepest ’provinces’ all over France. Yet they often combine their local flavour and local, idiosyncratic, often archaic rural dialect and lexis with clear influences of universal themes equally present in Grimm, Perrault and also in world myths.

Local characters thus, in Pourrat’s world, have their kind deeds rewarded at Christmas through unexpected meetings with Joseph, Mary and the Infant Jesus, and with the Angels who heralded his birth, and with the shepherds and indeed the farmyard animals present in the stable to breathe on the newborn Christ to keep him warm. (Remember, on Christmas Eve, all animals can use human speech to communicate in memory of those Nativity animals and can thus help humans).

An example of Pourrat’s informants making universal tales specific to their own lived, local experience, is the tale of a childless couple of bakers who have their wish for a son or daughter finally granted through the sudden appearance of a sort of little ’bonhomme’ who forms himself from the scrappings of ingredients of his parents’ baking recipes. Tom Thumb, Thumbelina and the Little Gingerbread Man, of course, instantly come to mind. And just like those other miniscule creatures, Pourrat’s discovered infinitesimally small child becomes a great source of fun and adventure, helping his parents achieve wealth and happiness, and surviving a series of dangerous adventures, in which he variously finds himself swallowed several times by the same wolf, by a cow, a fox, and so on.

A couple who long to be wealthy are offered three wishes by a fairy godmother, but their hapless wishes bring nothing more than a long string of pudding which then attaches itself to the wife’s nose. In the end, they realise that fun and happiness arre more desirable in life than material wealth. The ’moralité’ of the worldwide ’conte’ is, therefore, often a feature of Pourrat’s collected tales. These specific examples are from a collection of Pourrat’s ’Christmas’-themed tales. However, the overall themes of the intensely local, and uses of local, intimate language, apply to all of Pourrat’s contes.

What I most love about Pourrat’s short stories are the very qualities he states that he has sought to infuse them with. These qualities include the following. The language use is non-standard and oral, so that the reader can truly ’hear’ the fireside storyteller engage her listeners; the vocabulary is often little-known as it refers to very specific local plants, flowers, creatures, foods, giving us the authentic ’terroir’ in which the tale unfolds. The oral storyteller is transferred to the page by Pourrat, yes; but the raconteurs whose tales are documented so lovingly and painstakingly by Pourrat do not lose their authentic ’voices’ in the (inter-semiotic, intra-lingual) ’translation’ from an oral to a written medium. Rather, Pourrat’s writerly mission - superbly accomplished - has been to bring local speech and characters alive, and to convey and preserve the local dialects of the regions and the idiolects of the individual speakers.
If, for example, you as an Irish reader enjoyed the tales of Kitty the Hare or Sile de Valera, among many others, and if you read French, I urge to you to try out Pourrat’s stories. Where Grimm and Perrault versions are often presented to us in a standardized form of language, Pourrat’s tales are steeped in place and people, making the local community universal, in much the same way that the contemporary Carrick-on-Suir poet Michael Coady brings his (and my) small provincial native town to life, making our particular place universal. Pourrat and Coady celebrate the wonderful local characters, local tales and perhaps urban myths, local traditions, local events and things and most of all, local dialect and idiolects. This is the people’s spontaneously produced oral poetry, as Coady has noted of some of his work (e.g. in which he sees colourful, traditional local nicknames as passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, uncle to nephew, etc. as an example of such poetry and local character and humour).
For Coady, and Pourrat, the magic is not merely in the events recounted, but also in the homeliness and tradition of small places, the village, the small town, its nearby rivers and mountains which regulate daily life over centuries, the forest and the countryside and their local legends, those unique small communities which are the ’universe’ of their small and closely-bound groups of citizens.