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149 illustrations (including historiated initials) in book 'Die Mooiste Sprokies van Grimm'. (pp284, translated from the German by Marita van der Vyver, with illustrations by Piet Grobler).

These illustrations responded to a selection of Marita van der Vyver’s translations of the ‘definitive’ (or final, 1857) edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (conceived by the Grimm brothers as an educational manual). Grobler’s, van der Vyver’s and their publisher’s shared aim for this Afrikaans edition echoed Frankfurt School-influenced scholar Jack Zipes’ conception of fairy tales’ original purpose as being to ‘create authentic bonds’ and ‘help forge civilised communities’. They aspired to produce a standard family collection for a socio-historical context in which the tales were already familiar, given the Western-European cultural ancestry of most Afrikaans speakers in South Africa.

Underpinned by his engagement with skopos theory, Grobler aimed to achieve accessible ‘rewriting’ of the source-text represented by van der Vyver’s loyal, literal translations. Rather than seeking to be loyal to tales’ ‘original’ cultural environment (so far as such an environment could be determined), or to any early or ‘original’ visual representation of them, his images were purposefully ‘hybridised’, with costume, landscape and architecture, for example, drawing on early European Medieval painting, as well as his own, idiosyncratic picture book ‘code’. Executed in water colour, they deployed humour and caricature as a means of interpretation.

Grobler drew on translation theorist Lawrence Venuti’s discussion of seemingly opposing theories of domestication and foreignization as two approaches to the rewriting of a text: domestication suggests that the rewriter (Grobler’s conception of his role as illustrator) translates/rewrites the text seamlessly, as if it were originally created in the language or cultural environment of the translator; foreignization, on the other hand, emphasizes the cultural distance between source text and rewriting. Illustrations consciously proposed a synthesis of the two, at once confirming van der Vyver’s loyal translation and extending it through a ‘democratic’ visual language and picture book ‘code’ culturally familiar to the target reader.