The writer Lore Segal has died; the
New York Times has
an obituary. Two of Segal's novels have been on and off my to-read list for years, though I confess that I've never quite gotten around to them; I'm putting
Other People's Houses and
Her First American back at the top of the queue. What I
have read, and re-read often, are her brilliant translations from the Brothers Grimm collected in
The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm with the delicious illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Segal was without peer in being able to capture both the lyrical beauty of the tales and their sinister horror, as in the refrain from the title tale, which I believe I first heard on the radio in the 1970s.
My mother she butchered me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Ann Marie,
She gathered up the bones of me
And tied them in a silken cloth
To lay under the juniper.
Tweet twee, what a pretty bird am I!
No comments:
Post a Comment