Living a Fairy Tale; The bicentennial of Hans Christian Andersen's birth brings a spate of new works revealing his darker side.

Byline: Emily Flynn

Once upon a time there was a lonely writer from Copenhagen whose stories were filled with tragedy. His heroines died or suffered dismemberment, and critics panned his conversational writing style. Soon, however, sanitized translations of his tales became best-selling children's books in the neighboring lands of Germany and Britain. The Danish hailed their storyteller as the genius creator of a new literary genre: eventyr, or fairy tales. But among Copenhagen's 19th-century elite, he was still seen as an outsider--the lowly son of an alcoholic washerwoman. His love life was tragic: he fell for men and women, artists and the bourgeoisie, but they all rejected him. He died alone in 1875 at the age of 70, a far cry from living happily ever after.

The storyteller was Hans Christian Andersen, and next year is the bicentennial of his birth. To celebrate, more than 100 new works inspired by Andersen's darker side promise to bring the storyteller out of the Victorian nursery. The works include books, plays, ballets and operas, and transcend all cultural boundaries. Chinese director Feng Xiaogang's "Peach Blossom" re-imagines Andersen's doomed love story "Under the Willow Tree"--about childhood sweethearts parted by the demands of adulthood--in a Chinese town during the Cultural Revolution. The first Arabic translation of Andersen's fairy tales is due out next summer. And in New York, the Dimpho Di Kopane South African theater group is performing an adaptation of "Snow Queen" (through Nov. 28), whose sadistic lead character forces boys to make puzzles out of ice in her frozen castle. "Like Andersen's own stories," says Lars Seeberg, director of Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen 2005 Foundation, "not all of it is appropriate for children."

Andersen's fairy tales have undergone puritanical rewrites and shoddy translations--from the 1840s, when translators excised passages they found offensive, to the 1980s happy ending that Disney stuck on "The Little Mermaid." This year, two new English translations stay true to Andersen's comically morbid prose. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank's "The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen" captures the medieval tone of his early tales. In "The Tinderbox," the soldier demands that the witch reveal what she's going to do " 'or I'll pull out my sword and cut off your head.' 'I won't,' the witch said. So the soldier chopped off her head, and there she lay." Tiina Nunnally's new translation goes back to basics, using the shadowy paper-cutout illustrations Andersen favored in place of colorful glossies. With J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket bringing black magic to the top of today's children's literature, the moment seems ...