The Little Mermaid E-Book

Hans Christian Andersen

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 56

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A beautifully illustrated new translation of a beloved Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale At the bottom of the deepest sea, six sisters dream of seeing the beauty of life on land. Most eager of all is the youngest mermaid, who waits impatiently for her fifteenth birthday, when she will finally be allowed to explore the upper world. Her first sight above water is the spectacular birthday celebration of a handsome prince: as sailors dance and fireworks sparkle, she falls deeply in love. With her heart set on joining the prince on land as a human, the little mermaid sets out on a quest to leave her underwater life behind, no matter the cost. Romantic, heartbreaking and full of wonder, The Little Mermaid remains one of the most powerful fairy tales ever written. This volume also includes The True-Hearted Tin Soldier, Andersen's moving tale of love and sacrifice. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker. The king helped to pay for his education, enabling him to become a short-story writer, novelist and playwright. He remains best known for his fairy tales, which include The Red Shoes, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling. Pushkin Children's also publishes The Snow Queen and The Wild Swans.

Leseprobe

 

 

Contents

Title PageThe Little MermaidThe True-Hearted Tin SoldierAbout the PublisherCopyright

The Little Mermaid

AR OUT AT SEA, the water is as blue as cornflower petals and as clear as the purest glass. Yet it’s very deep—deeper than the reach of any anchor rope. You’d have to stack a lot of steeples on top of each other to reach from the bottom to the surface. And down at the bottom is where the sea folk live.

Now, you mustn’t think that the sea floor is only bare white sand—no, because the most marvellous trees and plants grow there. Their leaves and stems are so flexible, the smallest movement of water makes them sway as if they were dancing. All the fish, big and small, flit through their branches, just like birds in the air up here. In the deepest spot of all stands the palace of the Sea King. Its walls are coral and its high pointed windows the clearest amber, while the roof is made of clamshells that open and close with the current. It looks magnificent, because in each shell there are glistening pearls, and any one of them would be the pride of a queen’s crown.

The Sea King had been widowed for many years, and his old mother ran the royal household. She was a wise mermaid, though proud of her high rank; so she paraded about with twelve oysters on her tail, while the other mermaids at court could only have six. But she was admirable in all other things, especially her affection for the young sea princesses—her granddaughters. There were six of these lovely princesses, but the youngest was the most beautiful of all. Her skin glowed like a rose petal and her eyes were as blue as the deepest sea. And just like her sisters, she had no feet, for her body ended in a fish’s tail.

All day long they played in the great palace halls, where living flowers grew from the walls. When they threw open the tall amber windows, the fish would swim inside, just as swallows fly through our windows when we open them. But these fish swam right over to the little princesses, ate from their hands and let themselves be petted.

Outside the palace lay a large garden with trees that were fiery red and navy blue. The fruit shone like gold and the flowers looked like burning flames, their stems and leaves forever flickering. The ground was the finest sand, but it was the blue colour of sulphur when it burns. Everything was bathed in a wonderful azure glow, so that you might imagine you were high in the air, gazing only at the sky above and below you, rather than at the ocean floor. When the sea was calm, you could glimpse the crimson flower that all the light seemed to be streaming from—the sun.

Each princess had her own little garden plot where she could dig and plant just as she wished. One made her flowerbed in the shape of a whale, another preferred a small mermaid, but the youngest made hers perfectly round like the sun, and only planted flowers that glowed with the same red colour. She was a strange child, quiet and thoughtful. While the other sisters decorated their gardens with the many marvellous things they had taken from shipwrecks, hers had only one thing besides its rosy red, sunlike flowers. This was a beautiful marble statue, a handsome boy carved from bright white stone, which had sunk with a ship to the bottom of the sea. Next to this statue she planted a red weeping willow that grew wild and lush. Its long, slender branches hung down over the boy and stretched towards the blue sandy seabed, where they cast violet shadows that were always moving, just like the branches. It looked as if the leaves and roots were playing a kissing game.

Her greatest delight was to hear stories about the human world above, and the old grandmother had to tell her and her sisters everything she knew about ships and towns, people and animals. It amazed the little Princess that up on land the flowers had scents, as they didn’t smell of anything at the bottom of the ocean; and that the forests were green, and the fish in the branches could sing so loudly and lovely, it was pure pleasure. “Fish” was what their grandmother called songbirds, for otherwise the princesses couldn’t understand her—because they had never seen a bird.

“The day you turn fifteen,” their grandmother told them, “you’ll be allowed to go up into the open air, sit on the rocks in the moonlight and watch the great ships sail past. You’ll see towns and forests too!”

Later that year, the first of the sisters would be fifteen, but the others—well, there was a year between each of their ages. That meant the youngest had five long years to wait before she could swim up from the bottom of the ocean and glimpse the things that you and I see every day. But each sister promised to tell the others the best things she saw and heard on her first day above water, because their grandmother didn’t tell them nearly enough. And there was so much they wanted to know.

No one was filled with more longing than the youngest, who was precisely the one who had to wait the longest and was so quiet and thoughtful. Many nights, she lingered by her open window and looked up through the dark blue water, where the fish were flapping their fins and tails. She could see the moon and stars shining—quite faintly to be sure, yet through the water they seemed much larger than to our eyes. Once in a while, something like a big black cloud would glide overhead and blot them out, and then she knew it was either a whale swimming above her, or a ship sailing past, filled with people. They certainly weren’t thinking that a sweet little mermaid might be far beneath them, stretching her white hands up towards the keel.

Then the oldest princess turned fifteen and ventured up above the surface of the sea.

When she returned, she had a hundred things to tell. But the loveliest thing of all, she said, was lying in the moonlight on a sandbar in the calm sea and looking up at the big town near the shore, where the lights twinkled like a hundred stars; listening to the music, and the clatter and racket of wagons and people; seeing all the steeples and spires; and hearing how the bells pealed. Since she couldn’t go up on land, those were things the oldest sister yearned for most of all.