http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/philip-pullmans-twice-told-tales-fairy-tales-from-the-brothers-grimm.html
Translators of fairy-tale collections have always played fast and loose with the rules of their craft. The “television and pornography” of an earlier age (as John Updike tells us), fairy tales migrated into the nursery during the nineteenth century, and no one objected when they were edited, adapted, bowdlerized, and cleaned up to suit the younger crowd. The Brothers Grimm did some of that tidying up on their own in six successive editions of the tales, cutting out a story called “Hans Dumm” (in which a young man impregnates women just by looking at them) and removing any causal connection between Rapunzel’s twins and the prince’s visits up to the tower. “A fairy tale is not a text,” Philip Pullman reminds us in his “Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm”—it is always mobile and magnetic, picking up bits and pieces of its cultural surround. His “New English Version” celebrates the bicentennial of the collection with fifty of the most popular tales from the two hundred and ten that appeared in the Grimm’s compilation.Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/philip-pullmans-twice-told-tales-fairy-tales-from-the-brothers-grimm.html#ixzz2CueT4YCo