TATAGA'S CHILDREN is a selection of fairy tales by Grozdana Olujic, a novelist well-known in Serbia, and published in nearly two dozen translations world wide. Her various books for children have been printed in editions of hundreds of thousands, in languages from German all the way to China. They have not appeared in English translations however, which is a pity, since they are in the tradition of the fairy tale known to many cultures around the world, a tradition not much known, honored or welcomed in English literature, at least not in the past 200 years. The reasons for this are obscure, and one is hard-pressed to explain them, a problem that I have discussed in my after words to this collection. Suffice it to say that Grozdana Olujic's models may be found in many of the kinds of folk tales and fairytales collected anonymously by the Brothers Grimm, and often elaborated by French authors, and writers like Hans Christian Andersen, who made great literature out of such materials. She has also drawn from classical models in Slavic tales, from India, and the Persian/Arabic. Her pieces offer a variety of modes, but all are clearly written to be read to children today, or better, read by children today. If they can the young ones of our strange, contemporary, and, to my mind, rather cartoonized and unimaginative, meaningless, and mostly uninteresting, because violently distorted, sensational, and reduced culture, then Olujic will have found a new readership. To put it another way, perhaps the readers of English will find themselves in the company of most of the rest of the world, when it comes to telling stories to little children.
