In Queen and Carcass, Anna van Valkenburg creates a world imbued with fairy tales. To understand this world, the reader must know that it is inspired and informed by the story of Rusalka.
Rusalka, first of all, is a water spirit of Slavic origin. Though originally not evil, it eventually became so; in the form of a woman, the spirit commonly lured men to a watery death. In the opera Rusalka, by Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, the protagonist is a water nymph who falls in love with a prince against her father’s wishes. She gives up her voice and her immortality in return for the human form granted her by the witch Jezibaba. But she gambles here, and the stakes are high: she must win the prince’s love, or he will die and she will suffer eternal damnation. She refuses to kill him with a weapon and instead becomes an evil water spirit. Eventually she kisses the prince and he dies. Although the story has a family resemblance to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” it is in reality much darker, with a horrifying ending rather than a happy one.
What van Valkenburg does with this material is interesting. She does not transform the opera into free verse, nor does she reduce the plotline to a simplified form, sanitizing away all the tragedy. Instead she imitates the scene shifts of Rusalka, borrows some of its characters and imagines how things might have turned out had the story ended differently. The poems at the beginning of the book are set in the city; from there we move to the edge of the forest, and then deeper into it, and eventually we see the encounter between Rusalka and the prince. Although one poem does suggest a tragic ending for Rusalka (p. 58), the poet ultimately veers away from the devastating dénouement of Dvořák.
But that is not all, since the magical world van Valkenburg creates is not one of Czech opera, nor is it limited to the world of Slavic folklore. It includes a wider range of fairy tales, for we are introduced to “The Imaginary Town of Grimm” (pp. 14—16), and meet various characters from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. One poem, “Genie”, even alludes to the supernatural being we know from One Thousand and One Nights. This eclectic use of various sources extends also to the references she makes to poets from various countries and traditions (see especially the notes at the end of the book).
