更新时间:2019-12-18
PN1995.9 • 小美人鱼:Kiss the Girl
I remember when we were lying in bed one morning, N told me about the plot from the Disney version. That he couldn't recall much except that Ursula was the villain, that they sang Kiss the Girl, and that it's a happy ending. In turn, I told him about the one I remember from my childhood, the "original" Andersen version, about having her tongue cut out and walking on the tips of blades, about seeing the prince fall for the wrong girl, about the sisters who gave their hair to the witch in exchange for the dagger to be plunged into the prince's heart, about sacrifice and eternal soul, about true love and kindness and turning into bubbles. I think he trembled in my arms when I got to the gruesome part about having to plunge the knife into the prince's heart by sunrise, so she could have her voice and body back. He chuckled when I expressed my indignance at her throwing the knife far away into the sea, and that her sisters wasted all that beautiful mermaid hair for nothing, for a man. As I told it, I realized how violently sharp it all sounds, and how wildly inappropriate this is as a fairy tale. Not least because of the part about death - I remember being confused when I read about the bubbles and the foam rising from the sea, and how the God embracing her from heaven looked like her father, and she felt home. It wasn't this glossy version laced with catchy songs and two-dimensional villains, of somewhat self-conscious snarky cynicism towards a patriarchal society preferring mute women over those who spoke; it was about how all magic came with a price, about heartache, anguish, and pain. I remember finding an English version the following day and reading it over lunch:
"I'll brew you a potion, but you must swim to land, sit down on the shore, and drink it off before sunrise, and then your tail will split and shrivel up into what men call nice legs; but it will hurt, it will be like a sharp sword piercing through you. All who see you will say you are the loveliest child of man they ever saw. You will keep your lightsome gait, no dancing girl will be able to float along like you; but every stride you take will be to you like treading on some sharp knife till the blood flows. If you like to suffer all this, I'll help you."
"She has given us a knife, here it is, look how sharp it is! Before the sunrises you must thrust it into the Prince's heart, and then, when his warm blood sprinkles your feet, they will grow together into a fish's tail, and you will become a mermaid again, and may sink down through the water to us, and live out your three hundred years before you become dead, salt sea-foam. But hasten! Either you or he must die before sunrise."
"And the knife quivered in the mermaid's hand -- but then she cast it out far into the billows, they shone red where it fell, it looked as if drops of blood were there bubbling up out of the water. Once again she looked with half-breaking eyes at the Prince, plunged from the ship into the sea, and felt her whole body dissolving into foam."
So much for love.
"I'll brew you a potion, but you must swim to land, sit down on the shore, and drink it off before sunrise, and then your tail will split and shrivel up into what men call nice legs; but it will hurt, it will be like a sharp sword piercing through you. All who see you will say you are the loveliest child of man they ever saw. You will keep your lightsome gait, no dancing girl will be able to float along like you; but every stride you take will be to you like treading on some sharp knife till the blood flows. If you like to suffer all this, I'll help you."
"She has given us a knife, here it is, look how sharp it is! Before the sunrises you must thrust it into the Prince's heart, and then, when his warm blood sprinkles your feet, they will grow together into a fish's tail, and you will become a mermaid again, and may sink down through the water to us, and live out your three hundred years before you become dead, salt sea-foam. But hasten! Either you or he must die before sunrise."
"And the knife quivered in the mermaid's hand -- but then she cast it out far into the billows, they shone red where it fell, it looked as if drops of blood were there bubbling up out of the water. Once again she looked with half-breaking eyes at the Prince, plunged from the ship into the sea, and felt her whole body dissolving into foam."
So much for love.
