So many questions...

So there we are - all the way from Asterix to Zou. A couple of things I noticed as I was compiling my lists for this blog series set me wondering:

Why do so many translated children's books tackle "difficult" themes (see Brothers, Traitor or The Bear and the Wildcat for example)? And why do a large number of the rest of them seem to be in the fantasy genre?

From my own experience of pitching a translation to publishers it helps if there's some kind of hook, something that makes it stand out from what is already being published in English, so perhaps a different perspective on events, personal experience of war, an unusual topic provides a selling point. But then why aren't books on war, death, illness and so on already on the market? Do UK and US authors just not want to write about them? Or are publishers afraid of them unless they already have a proven track record in another country?

What about fantasy? Where does that come in? There's a particularly strong tradition of fantasy writing in Germany, represented here by Cornelia Funke, and given the Harry Potter phenomenon, perhaps it was just a way of tapping into what was already available to feed the boom. There's also Silverhorse, The Neverending Story and The Book of Time. On the other hand, perhaps I just noticed the fantasy books because it's the sort of thing I liked to read myself as a kid, and still do from time to time.

I don't know - I don't have answers to all these questions. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has any insight into it though...

Image from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

W is for Weigelt

Udo Weigelt is a German author of picture books who also writes under the name of Moritz Petz.

His picture books include Spring Fever (North-South Books, 2006), illustrated by Sarah Emmanuelle Burg and translated by Marianne Martens, and Fair-Weather Friend (North-South Books, 2003), illustrated by Nora Hilb and translated by J. Alison James.

As you can see, they both feature cats, which is always a good start when it comes to getting our boys interested in them. They're also both quite sweet little stories - Spring Fever is about a tomcat named Freddy, the joys of spring and love in the air. Fair-Weather Friend features a hamster and a cat who are best friends. This doesn't go down too well with the other neighbourhood cats until the gang leader gets into danger and Fritz the hamster saves the day.

Fils cadet has sadly refused point-blank to read either of these so far, and fils aîné was rather more taken with the illustrations than the story, but hey.  You can't win them all.

U is for the Upside Down Reader...

...by Wilhelm Gruber. A great first chapter book for beginning readers, it's the story of Tim, who learns to read by looking at his sister's school books across the table. Of course this means that he can only read if the book is upside down. Because they think he's too little, his family don't believe that he can read until Grandma comes to stay. Then he surprises everybody by reading the station signs perfectly, but he has to stand on his head first!

Published by NorthSouth Books, the illustrations by Marlies Rieper-Bastian show a German family and a German Bahnhof with the S for the S-Bahn, yet the station names have been changed to Bristol, Salem and Hartford. (From my experience of NorthSouth Books, that might have been an editorial decision rather than one taken by the translator.) The translation by J. Alison James is slightly odd in that it refers to "Mother" and "Dad" - presumably so did the German, but personally I'd have changed it. Otherwise though, it's fine and pitched at just the right level for the target readership. Sadly, once again the author and illustrator gets biogs at the back but not the translator.

Again I had to track down a second-hand copy, but it's worth looking out for if you get a chance. Fils aîné found it very funny and instantly wanted to turn the book upside down to see if he could read it that way too.

T is for Traitor...

... my own first published translation.

For my MA dissertation, I chose to write an annotated translation of Die Verräterin by Gudrun Pausewang and I was lucky enough to find a publisher, at Andersen Press, for whom the story resonated with his own experience. Traitor was published in 2004.

It's the story of Anna, a teenage girl living in the Sudetenland at the end of the Second World War. Although this area is now in the Czech Republic, she and her family are German. Anna is fairly ambivalent towards the Nazi regime, but her older brother is fighting in the German army while her younger brother, Felix, is a passionate member of the Hitler Youth. When she meets an escaped Russian prisoner of war, instead of doing her duty and reporting him to the authorities, she helps him - finding him a safe hiding place, bringing him food and clothes. Anna hopes that he will soon escape over the Czech border. As her relationship with Maxim deepens, Anna finds herself questioning more and more about the society around her and becoming much more politically aware.

Pausewang herself lived through this era, in this area, until she and her family were forced to flee from the advancing Russians in 1945. As a girl she was as fanatically pro-Hitler as Felix, yet she became a pacifist and vehemently opposed to war and injustice - her changing views can be seen represented by Anna, her family and friends.

I was particularly keen to translate the book because it presents young readers with a different angle on the Second World War and shows that not all Germans were Nazis. As the fascination with the Third Reich shows no sign of waning, it is good to get this message across. At the same time, negative stereotypes of Germany came about for a reason and I also wanted to challenge any ideas that "This couldn't happen here". Anna's dilemma shows that nobody can ever know how they will react in any given situation. It challenges the reader to wonder what they would have done and flags the importance of individual responsibility. I'm pleased to see from various reader reviews on Amazon, goodreads.com and elsewhere, that other people have responded to the book as I hoped they would.

And, if you'll pardon my blowing my own trumpet a little, who wouldn't be pleased with a review like this?

Haiku Day and Beautiful Blogger Award

I was very flattered to be nominated for a Beautiful Blogger Award by Suzanne at The Tales of Missus P - thank you!

So, this is what happens when you’re nominated:

• You write seven facts about yourself
• You link to the blog of the person who nominated you
• You link to seven bloggers who you think deserve the award
• You let those bloggers know they have been nominated

So, here goes...

1. I still really, really enjoy colouring in...
2. I have spent most of my life in south-east England but...
3. I spent three months with a family in the Central African Republic and a year in Saarbrücken, Germany.
4. I was an extremely picky eater and now so are my kids - what goes around comes around!
5. I grew out of it so, hopefully, so will they...
6. I can never pick my favourite book because I have so many.
7. I'm not very good at poetry - see below.

Today is also Haiku Day on the WordCount Blogathon. I'm not very good at poetry - reading it or writing it - but here's what I came up with.

Outside, cold and grey:

I open another world -

lost in a good book.

Inspired by that thought, here are seven lovely blogs where we can discover new worlds:

Yes, I'd rather be there than here today!
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1. Lindsay at The Little Reader Library - a really pretty blog and a wide range of interesting reviews.
2. Sandra Hume at Little House Travel - a fellow Blogathoner, writing about all things relating to the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
3. Sarah at Norfolk Bookworm - thoughts of a book blogger local to me.
4. Katy Derbyshire at Love German Books - a fellow (but much more prestigious!) German to English translator, based in Berlin - insights into the German book world.
5. OK, so it's not book-related, but Venetia is a fellow translator and her Dolcis in Fundo food blog really is beautiful and inspires me to cook!
6. Desperate Reader also highlights fascinating books.
7. Karen at Euro Crime posts snippets on British and other European crime books, TV and film.

Now I'm off to let them know and tomorrow we'll get back to the A-Z!

S is for (Andreas) Steinhöfel...

... a multi-award winning German author and translator. His books Dirk und Ich (My Brother and I) and The Centre of My World have also been translated into English, but the most widely available is The Pasta Detectives, published in 2010 by The Chicken House and translated from the German by Chantal Wright, one of my MA colleagues. It also features new illustrations by Steve Wells. The US edition (2011) is published under the title The Spaghetti Detectives and seems not to be illustrated.

It's the story of Rico, aged 11 and a "child proddity"

-  "That's a bit like being a child prodigy, but also like the opposite. I think an awful lot, but I need a lot of time to figure things out." - 

who lives in Berlin with his mum. He has trouble telling the difference between left and right, and gets all kinds of things mixed up, yet he also notices a lot that other people don't see. He becomes friends with Oscar, who is a child prodigy but also prone to anxiety. Together they manage to solve the mystery of what exactly is going on in Rico's building, the "Aldi Kidnapper" or "Mr 2000", and the significance of the "deeper shadows".

This is another book with lots of wordplay as Rico often misunderstands what he hears. He also has difficulty with spelling, so when his teacher encourages him to write a diary the results are interesting, to say the least. As well as managing these challenges adroitly, the translation really catches Rico's voice and his view of the world - his head swirls with ideas like the balls bouncing around in a lottery machine. Some of Rico's ideas are very funny, while others are genuinely thought-provoking. You can see why it was shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation. The book also won the 2011 NASEN Inclusive Children's Book Award and, with a first person narrator who seems to be somewhere on the austistic spectrum, it has invited comparisons with Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

There are two more books featuring Rico and Oscar, so let's hope that they will soon also be available in translation so that English-speaking readers can find out what happens next.

N is for 'The Neverending Story'

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende was first published in Germany in 1979 and translated into English by Ralph Manheim in 1983. It is possibly better known for the film  released in 1984 - I certainly came to read the book in my teens precisely because I'd enjoyed the film as a child - and yet the film only covers the first half of the book. Apparently, Michael Ende felt that it was so different from what he wrote that he sued the production company when they wouldn't stop production or change its name. He lost.

It is the story of Bastian Balthazar Bux, a boy who runs into a bookshop to escape from bullies. There he discovers a book called 'The Neverending Story' in which the land of Fantastica is under threat from the Nothing, the Childlike Empress is sick and a boy warrior named Atreyu is attempting to find a cure for her illness. As Bastian reads of Atreyu's adventures with Falkor the luckdragon, giants, werewolves and racing snails, he becomes literally drawn into and involved in the book. Eventually he realises that it is up to him to save this world. This is the point where the film finishes, yet Bastian goes on to have further adventures of his own in the world of Fantastica, until he realises that he is in danger of being trapped there forever.

As well as dealing with the importance and power of imagination, and the perils of getting what you wish for, it is about friendship, loyalty and identity. Imagination is not just restricted to the plot, either: each chapter begins with an ornamented initial capital - there are twenty-six of them in alphabetical order - while in some editions, although not the one I read, the text is colour-coded according to whether the action takes place in Fantastica or the real world.

Incidentally, if you'll pardon the digression,  David J. Peterson at dedalvs.com invites us to spare a thought for translators working into languages with other script systems. This led me to look into the Japanese translation. I didn't discover how that particular difficulty was overcome, but I learnt that Ende himself was fascinated with Japan and had a huge following there. His second wife was Mariko Sato who translated some of his books into Japanese.

Manheim's translation, meanwhile, deftly follows the German in alternating between a slightly old-fashioned, fairytale manner for the Fantastican parts and a more down-to-earth style. He also clearly had a lot of fun with the names! There were a few minor issues that struck me as odd - in some places the English seemed more extravagant than the German, while on other occasions it was the other way round. All the same, it's well written in either language, and an engrossing read. And if anybody has read it in a non-Latin script, I'd be fascinated to hear how it works!

G is for Grimm

 Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (above, right) and Wilhelm (above, left), surely need little introduction. Their collection of German folktales in the 19th century has formed the basis of a wealth of children's literature and film around the world.

Mostly, though, we get re-tellings or adaptations of the stories. Concerns about violence and their suitability for children date right back to the first publication of Children's and Household Tales so they have been sanitised, tidied up and disneyfied many times over the years.

I wanted to re-read the original tales but my copy is 100 miles away in my parents' house. But then inspiration struck - this is the 21st century, the old translations are in the public domain, I've got an eReader... So, off I went to Project Gutenberg and hey presto, a free download of the 1884 edition, translated by Margaret Hunt and published as Grimm's Household Tales. A note before the text informs me that "Margaret Hunt's translation is very true to the German original", and on comparison with the German text of the first story The Frog King, (which is available here on wikisource.de: Der Froschkönig) it certainly is. Personally, I would prefer a slightly freer and more idiomatic translation - the use of "thou" to translate du is both archaising and distancing, for example - but then I'd have to pay for it!

This one, for instance, The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, looks lovely and I'm encouraged that the translator, Matthew R. Price, has been given space for a translator's note on the webpage as well as in the book. He says:

Taschen edition

"initially I had little sense how best to unpack these stories for today’s English-speaking readers—and listeners. I leaned on my training: countless hours of living with the language, and theatrical instincts I’d honed for years. In my mind I saw fantastic animated films as I worked through these stories. They were dark, complex, and arcing versions, not the Disney films associated with the material. There is no denying the unforgiving morality or the harshness of daily life one finds in the tales. But even more striking, finally, was the full range of emotion, especially the comedy and delight of the characters and their antics."

Source: http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/classics/all/06787/facts.the_fairy_tales_of_the_brothers_grimm.htm 

 Then there's the Vintage Classics edition, translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes, an expert on fairytales and retired professor of German. It claims to be the only complete edition of all 279 tales - I certainly had no idea how many of them there were before I started researching this!

Now, this is a confusing one: Wordsworth Editions have three versions, including The Complete Illustrated Tales of The Brothers Grimm, apparently illustrated by Arthur Rackham (which from the cover looks frankly improbable) and containing "darker tales such as 'Death's Messengers' which deserve to be better known". The translator is uncredited, yet the cover looks sweet and childish. Then there's Grimm's Fairy Tales, selected and translated by Lucy Crane, and "illustrated throughout by Walter Crane's charming line drawings." So is the other version translated by Lucy Crane too? Who knows?

So there you are. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Or you get them for free and put up with the thees and thous.

F is for Cornelia Funke

Cornelia Funke is a hugely successful, award-winning German author of fantasy and adventure books for children of all ages - they range from picture books to young adult novels. She started out as an illustrator before beginning to write herself and became very popular in Germany in the nineties before her books began to become known in English a decade or so later. She is probably best known for the Inkworld trilogy, the first book of which, Inkheart, was also made into a 2008 film with what you might call an all-star cast.

I was just about to write that Funke is an author I hadn't previously read, when I checked her publications list and realised that fils aîné had borrowed The Princess Knight (tr. Anthea Bell, Chicken House, 2003) from the library a while ago. It's the story of the entirely non-girly Princess Violetta who wants to be a knight like her brothers and is disgusted when her father holds a tournament with her hand in marriage as the prize. With ingenuity and determination, "Little Vi" manages to outwit them all and choose her own path in life. It's also beautifully illustrated by Kerstin Meyer and a welcome antedote to all the Disney princess stuff that makes me glad to have boys!



Anyway, although I was aware of the Inkworld trilogy, I hadn't read any of Funke's fantasy novels because they came along too late for my childhood and the boys are still too young for them. In the last couple of weeks, I've read Igraine the Brave (tr. Anthea Bell, Chicken House, 2008) and Dragon Rider (tr. Anthea Bell, Chicken House, 2005) and hope that they provide a fairly representative sample of her work - I couldn't get hold of Inkheart etc in time for this project.

Igraine is another little girl who wants to be a knight. The book is for younger children, 7+ according to the publishers, and I hope it's the sort of thing fils aîné might be getting round to before long.  Her parents are famous magicians who manage to accidentally transform themselves into pigs. This means that Igraine has to put things right, meeting dragons, giants and all kinds of adventures on the way. It would be a good introduction to chapter books, chivalry, knights in armour and so on because none of the dangers ever get beyond what the film industry calls "mild peril", and it's short at 224 pages. It is also wittily told by both Funke and Bell, and illustrated by the author.



Dragon Rider, also illustrated by Funke herself, is a more ambitious undertaking altogether. Weighing in at 560 pages, it's for the 10+ age group and tells the story of a dragon named Firedrake, a brownie named Sorrel and a boy named Ben. Together they set off on an epic journey to find the long-lost valley where the last dragons can live in peace, undisturbed by human greed. Of course there are plenty of dangers to be overcome here too, and an ancient enemy is on their trail... Reading as an adult, I quite enjoyed it but felt that it lacked depth. The characters seemed rather too obvious, the dangers rather easily overcome. And I do always feel a little irritated when the journey out takes 550 pages and the return leg can be summed up in a couple of lines! Probably despite the length and the 10+ label it might be suited to a younger audience still. I can imagine that in a few years' time, the boys will love it.

E is for 'Emil and the Detectives'

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner was first published in Germany in 1929 and had its first UK edition not long afterwards, in 1931. Gillian Lathey has argued that Emil was the Harry Potter of his day in terms of the appeal to children, the buzz around the book and the freshness of the writing in comparison to what had gone before. For more details see this article from New Books in German. It was the first book to feature a child as a detective and, in a radical departure for children's books of that time, used the street slang of Berlin in the dialogue.

Original German cover

Emil is sent by his mother to Berlin by train with a substantial sum of money for his grandmother. On the way, his money is stolen and the adventure consists of him tracking down the thief, with the help of a group of other boys, and retrieving the money. We read this book in primary school but most of what I remember about it from that time was my Dad's anguish at my excruciating pronunciation of the unfamiliar German names... (My accent has improved at least slightly since then.) I had certainly forgotten that there is a goodly chunk of book on either side of the actual detecting - I was quite surprised how soon the villain was caught as it seemed to take weeks in my memory. Due to the pace of reading in class, no doubt. Anyway, it then transpires that the thief was a wanted bank robber, Emil gets a huge reward and his mother comes to Berlin for a party. The moral of the story may, or may not, be: never trust strangers, "children shouldn't be allowed to travel alone", or that "money should always be sent through the post!"

This is the cover I remember from school...

There is an array of English translations out there: the first UK one was done by Margaret Goldsmith in 1931 and another in 1959 by Eileen Hall, which is the one still in print as a Red Fox Classic. I haven't read the Goldsmith version, but I understand that, like Hall, she rather unfortunately makes the Berlin street slang sound more like something out of the mouths of Enid Blighton's nice middle class children. See also here for more discussion of this issue...

Red Fox Classics edition, tr. Eileen Hall

As a child, I had no idea of how the original text was written and, being more than a little addicted to the Famous Five, I was unperturbed by dialogue like:

 "Cheerio Emil. Gosh, I'm looking forward to this. It's going to be smashing!" (p. 92) 

 On my recent re-reading, though, I was aware that I'd have a completely different idea of the backgrounds of the various children without prior knowledge of the source text.

More disconcerting is the fact that Emil's 120 marks, his mother's monthly salary, has become "seven pounds". With the effects of inflation, this gives modern children no idea at all of just how much money is at stake. Besides which, given that Hall has scrupulously maintained the German names of both people and streets, it is most incongruous for the boys to be talking about shillings, "one and eightpence", "ten bob" etc.

US edition, tr. May Massee

In the US, meanwhile it was translated in 1930 by May Massee who, according to Lathey, kept a much more plausible tone to the dialogue:

 "the American translation [...] is far closer to the original German in its rendering of street slang than the conservative British version with its entirely inappropriate middle class register." Source: http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2003/v48/n1-2/006970ar.html?vue=resume

As far as I'm aware, she also maintained the German marks.

A new American version by W. Martin has also recently been published, which curiously changes Emil's surname from Tischbein (table leg) to "Tabletoe", and has had mixed reactions to its attempts to update the slang.

Finally, there is a Penguin Readers edition, retold (and apparently considerably abridged) by Rod Smith. This changes Emil's surname to Fisher, his friend Gustav's name to Paul and moves the action to England, Emil now coming from Newtown rather than Neustadt.

So there we are. Plenty to chose from.

But after all that, if there are any publishers reading this, and you'd like to take up the challenge of producing a version for the 21st century, I'd be very willing to help you out...

Domestication vs Foreignisation via Red Rage

This post was originally published on Lisa Carter's Intralingo blog a month ago: http://intralingo.com/domestication-vs-foreignisation-via-red-rage/

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One of the eternal debates in translation studies is whether to favour the domesticating or the foreignising approach, and one of the most famous quotations on the subject comes from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On The Different Methods of Translating of 1815:

  “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”

(For a more detailed look at the article as a whole, check out this excellent post by Susan Bernofsky at Translationista, which I discovered while making certain I’d remembered the wording correctly: http://translationista.blogspot.com/2011/02/friedrich-schleiermacher.html )

On only my second ever book translation, I got the chance to see a practical application of each approach. Allen & Unwin in Australia and Annick Press in Canada had jointly bought the rights to Rote Zorn by Brigitte Blobel and I was approached to translate it. Relatively early on, I enquired whether to use the metric or imperial systems for weights and measures, given the differing approaches of the varying readerships to metrication. Leave them as they are, I was told. We’ll sort that out later.

But that was only the start. In the end, the two editions of the translation came to exemplify the foreignisation/domestication debate. Red Rage is the story of Mara, a sixteen-year-old girl, her dysfunctional family and the problems caused by her uncontrollable anger. The Canadian publisher decided to leave the reader in peace and move the story to a generic city high school somewhere in North America. The Australian publisher decided to leave the writer in peace and keep Mara in her post-war estate* in Essen.

Now this is where things start to get interesting. If we move the writer towards a North American reader, as well as using miles, we have to change most of the characters’ names. Mara stays the same, but her parents Günther and Beate become Gary and Beth, for example. The nationalities of the immigrant neighbours change. Suddenly sixteen-year-olds can no longer (legally) drink beer or ride a moped.

It is certainly true that anger, fear, dysfunctional families and rough estates* can be found anywhere. Perhaps it is easier for a North American teen to identify with a character if they don’t have to worry about cultural differences. All the same, I regret the loss of Mara’s father’s back story. His one great achievement had been to escape to the West from East Germany; after that, though, he’d never amounted to anything, and this goes a long way to explaining the way he acts now. Obviously, once the translation is no longer set in Germany, this section has to go. It’s only a couple of paragraphs, doesn’t affect the main plot. But it does add something. The author put it in for a reason…

I’ve gained more experience since then. Perhaps if the situation were to arise again I’d argue the case for leaving the writer in peace. It depends though. The balance between the writer and the reader shifts from book to book. I recently translated a series of detective novels set in London. As a result, I aimed to make them as smooth as possible. To use the imperial system, to make the dialogue sound British so as to avoid jarring the reader. But maybe it would have been interesting to see ourselves as the Germans see us?

No, there isn’t a simple answer, but I’d be interested in what anyone else thinks about it!
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* UK housing estate = US housing project. Thanks to Amalia Gladhart for making me aware of that little Pond difference.