Wednesday on Zenda. Wednesday of foreign non-fiction. Wednesday, in this case, devoted to The Modern Fairies, a work by the English writer Clare Pollard (Bolton, 1978) that has just been published, with Spanish translation by Isaber Márquez Méndez, for the imprint Impedimenta. A poet, playwright, and narrator, Pollard unleashes in this spellbinding book those imaginative effects she has inherited, and makes them interact without hesitation: thus, fictional characters tell stories invented by others, intertwine, and show us that, in the subtext of those narratives from which we learn to tell our own stories, shared structural violences beat.
The publisher notes, about the work: “Paris, late seventeenth century. While Versailles bleeds from poisonings, paranoia, and perfumes used to mask the stench of the chamber pots, in a Parisian salon a group of noble women — led by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, recently rehabilitated after a scandal, an imprisonment and a child marriage to a brutal baron — gather to recount what the hostess herself has just dubbed as contes de fées. A century before the Brothers Grimm, they, together with a widowed and recently expelled from the court Charles Perrault, are founding the modern fairy tale: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, witches and poisoned princesses that are merely coded versions of their own lives, marked by violent husbands, confinements, daughters sold, and lovers who disappear. Among them, however, a wolf has slipped in: someone who listens, takes notes, and betrays, and who threatens to lead them to the gallows one by one”.
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Author: Clare Pollard. Title: The Modern Fairies. Translation: Isabel Márquez Méndez. Publisher: Impedimenta. Retailer: Todos tus libros.