A scan and translation of "The story of a mother"

[lakrids404.insanejournal.com]

Repost from old scans-daily, which now follows the new rules.

Peter Madsen have illustrated H. C. Andersen story The story of a mother When I saw the story in a book shop, I took a look at it, with really no intention of buying it. I looked at some of the pages, and then I bought it. And which I have then scan-translated, to the best of my English abilities,




























She follows Death through countries and kingdoms that she never had heard about, until she come to the ocean. And as she have no way crossing it, she tries to drink it all up.








She arrives to Death garden, and she meets with death gardener, who demands hers hair, in trade for information on how she can find her child. All the plants in Death garden is a human life. And with help of the gardener she finds her child.





























She let go, and they went into the unknown country.

Comments

[alschroeder.insanejournal.com]

Beautiful and powerful.

Maybe too powerful. (Thinking of my eldest son, whom I lost nearly a decade ago.)

[lakrids404.insanejournal.com]

H. C. Andersen is not afraid to write about hard questions. But Peter Madsen did also a do great work with translating it to the comic medium and update it, and I really like his drawings.

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

wow... just... wow... That's some strong storytelling right there, and some amazing art.

My only question is, this is only a third of the book? What on earth can the rest of it be like?

[lakrids404.insanejournal.com]

It's part of H. C. Andersen birthday celebration. So there are some easays about the writer, that I have counted with. But I think I have cut further down to keep inside the limit, tough decision

[mllesatine.insanejournal.com]

This is one of my favourite Andersen stories. Really great to see it in comic form. Thanks for sharing it with us.

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

The only happy people in Andersen's stories seem to be the dead people. But my favorite was the story of the angel carrying the dead child to God and how happy they were to bring the dead flowers to Heaven.

[lencannon.insanejournal.com]

I wanted to cry starting half way through this, I don't know why i didn't. I just lost my best friend. I like I would do anything to have him back, do anything, pay anything, hurt anyone. But sometimes I think it is just selfish. I think the mother realized it better than I could. I could not make that decision.

I could not resist this icon

[ceru.insanejournal.com]

Wow, that's stunning.

There are some pitfalls in adapting a fable or fairy-tale to a sequential visual medium--if you want to convey the mythic quality, you need to keep the images from being either too concrete and literal or too vague to tell a story--but this has a good balance. It's good sequential art, not just supportive illustration, but the gorgeous, intermittent, textless full-page images give it that sense of hugeness, the universality of these emotions, and the vast depth of them, and the abstractness of the actual events--this is the embodiment of the idea of pure, perfect motherhood, this is the embodiment of death, this, the embodiment of elements of nature. There's detail and nuance where the style needs it, but each sequence is visually distinct and disconnected from the others, not grounded in the same physical landscape, because this is not a physical journey--it's a mythic, emotional, internal journey.

I think my favorite image here is the garden of Death, where she's this little figure in the huge garden, cringing in the shadow of Death. What is that light that halos around him, by which Death casts a shadow? It is by far the best image of Death in the whole thing, because not only can't we see the face of Death, we can't even see his figure properly, just the way that he changes the landscape, with the shadow--just the terrifying idea of it. The garden of flowers, the unknown light, the approaching shadow: it's a mystery. A compelling, transcendent mystery.

Re: I could not resist this icon

[lakrids404.insanejournal.com]

this