curious the fairy tales i remember from my childhood are not andersen's - only i am not sure about that either - i don't remember them well - besides which i read them all in chinese, so i don't know their names in english counterpart - nor, in those days, because i didn't bother with authors - especially not the transliterations, did i ever know who i was reading. when i find them in english translation now, i feel - less a pleasure of recognition than - uneasiness or alienation - and i never like the english translations as much as the chinese i had read as a child, somehow. i was deeply enchanted then too, but now in the english i'm only impatient and strangely displeased with the language. today i came upon one of the stories i remember - remember is not the right word - i think i don't remember - but have retained impressions and images - so deep that i can instantly call up turbulent feelings in response - though i do not remember the story per se. this one is called little ida's flowers (flowers seem to come up in andersen much more than in anyone else.) and i remember - or remember myself remembering - as a child - that this story was fact - not fiction - to me. that today i read it and reason that she dreamt - but then i knew she really did. it seemed more delicate, magical in the chinese though. i instinctively - dislike - most fairy tales in english. (i can't say why i take to certain things translated in different languages. i'm better with the russians and japanese in chinese, the french too, but with the czechs and the italians and the dutch i need english translations.) in the case of fairy tales i'm sure it isn't only a linguistic divide - though i think it is there too - but that - then i could read and believe, and now, willy nilly, i'm analysing, have been trained, these past 6 or 8 years, to analyse - so that the enjoyment and belief is allied with the language i had read them in as a child, and the impatience and analysis with the one i read them in now.