B is for Babar

A series that has been running even longer than Asterix is that of Babar the Elephant. Begun in 1931 by Jean de Brunhoff with Histoire de Babar, it has been continued since 1946 by his son Laurent, the most recent book being Babar's Celesteville Games. The first book was translated in 1933 as The Story of Babar and is now published in the UK by Egmont. While the American edition was translated by Merle S. Haas, the translator of the British edition is uncredited. (Translation theorists may also be interested in 'Time, Narrative, Intimacy and the Child' by Gillian Lathey: Meta: Translators' Journal, Volume 48, Number 1-2, May 2003, p. 233-240, which discusses various aspects of the translation itself.)

The Story of Babar tells of a young elephant who runs away to the city (a thinly disguised Paris) after his mother is shot by a hunter. He is adopted by an Old Lady, takes to dressing in a green suit and spats, learns to drive a car and so on. Once fully civilised, he returns to the jungle marries Celeste, becomes King of the Elephants and has three children.

The book I remember best from my own childhood is Babar's Birthday Surprise by Laurent de Brunhoff (1970). In it, Celeste has arranged for a giant sculpture of Babar to be carved into the side of a mountain. I'd actually forgotten the title and most of the plot is pretty hazy, but I vividly remember the illustrations and the lengths they have to go to to keep the present a secret.

A host of controversies rage around Babar - is it appropriate to read the death of the mother to young children? is the book colonialist propaganda or an ironic satire on the benefits of civilisation? - and so on.  (For a detailed take on some of these, see this article from the New Yorker: 'Freeing the Elephants; What Babar Brought' by Adam Gopnik, 22 September 2008.) Yet despite all this, these charming stories with their beautiful illustrations continue to be a global phenomenon, helped on by the TV cartoon series and no shortage of merchandising.

We have the first story in a compendium of classic children's stories and, for what it's worth, read the death of the mother part. It seems quite popular with the boys but is rather long for a bedtime story at the moment. Here's hoping they'll discover it properly eventually, and maybe even branch out into the rest of the series!

A is for Asterix

Where else would you start with a canter through children's literature in translation?! The Adventures of Asterix by Goscinny and Uderzo recently celebrated their 50th anniversary and are still going strong. Asterix, Obelix and the rest of the village of indomitable Gauls have been thumping the Romans since their first publication in France in 1959. While it was ten years before Asterix the Gaul appeared in English, they have had the same English translator ever since. Taking a somewhat loose approach to historical fact, and playing on all kinds of national myths and stereotypes (Asterix in Britain is instructive in how the French see us...), they have travelled the world, meeting such figures as Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and spreading mayhem and merriment in their wake.


The series was certainly one of my first conscious encounters with books in translation and it must have been the same for countless other children around the world. The Official Asterix Translation Exchange reckons that the books have now been translated into 107 languages and dialects, while their current UK publishers, Orion, put it at 111:

"Asterix is the world’s highest-selling book series, and has sold over 350 million copies worldwide."       Source: http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/promotions/asterix

Reading Asterix in English was also, although I didn't know it at the time, my first encounter with the great Anthea Bell OBE. Working with Derek Hockridge for many years, and then on her own, she created the names and jokes that were a big part of my childhood, even if a lot of them went over my head. They have produced elegant solutions to the problems of translating humour, topical references, visual gags and puns, many of which have literally become textbook examples, and in this interview she explains some of the processes involved and how it all got started in the first place.

Asterix was also one of the first real books I read in French - school text books don't count. The familiarity made it a good starting point and the pictures provide plenty of clues to help with the meaning. Lacking an understanding of the topical references and so on - I only discovered from reading Anthea Bell's interview, for example, that the Roman official Preposterous in Obelix and Company is based on a young Jacques Chirac - I was convinced that the books just aren't very funny in French. This misconception certainly increased my respect for the translators and their punning.

So let's raise a gourd of magic potion to Asterix and Anthea Bell, and a real tour de force of translation!

"Like being at home in a strange land" (Philip Pullman)

Image: Surachai / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So here I am, at the beginning of the Blogathon and having picked a theme with plenty to write about. But why children's literature in translation? Partly because I know about it, partly to raise awareness of it, partly because there's more of it out there than you might think.


Translating children's books shares the same challenges as translation for adults when it comes to tricky cultural references, "untranslatable" words and concepts, ambiguities, grammatical structures and so on. It also brings extra dimensions of its own, however. Two factors pointed out by Riita Oittinen in Translating for Children are that children's books are often illustrated and often intended for reading aloud. I stumbled across both these issues in my early forrays into translating for children.

For a student project, I worked on a translation of Janosch's Post für den Tiger (German link). When the Bear and the Tiger invent postboxes, my reaction was to say "and they painted them red" instead of yellow - the books aren't set in any particular country and red would be more familiar for British children. But turn over the page and there's a lovely big picture of them putting little yellow boxes all over the forest. So yellow they had to remain.

Another example: I translated Fips' Birthday before I had children. I read the translation through to myself and it sounded fine. Once fils aîné came along, though, and I found myself regularly reading it aloud to him, I realised that it just didn't flow. Quite embarrassing. I have now rewritten my translation for reading aloud, should the publishers produce a new edition.

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

On the other hand, translating for children also has many benefits and advantages. Children are generally hugely interested in everything. They can be much more willing than adults to explore new worlds and ideas. Philip Pullman has written a foreword to Outside In, Children's books in translation, eds Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini (Milet Publishing), which can be read here: on the TES website. In it, he says that reading translated books as a child was "like being at home in a strange land":

"There are children today in this country who will find a book, or books, in this guide satisfying a hunger they didn't know they had, and exciting a passion they had no idea they were capable of feeling. We don't know who they are, and we don't know which books will have that effect; but if we DON'T offer children the experience of literature from other languages, we're starving them. It's as simple as that."  Source: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2137315

A is for Asterix, B is for Babar...

Between the 2012 WordCount Blogathon and a random chain of thoughts fizzing around in my head, I've decided to see if I can blog an A - Z of children's literature in translation through the month of May.

At the moment I've managed to line up potential subjects for nearly every letter of the alphabet, but I'm a bit stuck on W and Z! If anybody has any suggestions, I'd be more than happy to hear them...

Edit: Oops, I mean X, not Z...
 
I don't quite know where I'll be going with this at the moment, or where it might lead, but I think it'll be fun, and it'll certainly be a challenge!

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Norwich: UNESCO City of Literature?

By KoS (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Norwich is a lovely place to live, most of the time, but having just got back from visiting my brother in London, it can seem a little, um, lacking in bustle. And then there's being the butt of lazy jokes about in-breeding, webbed toes etc. So it was rather a pleasant change to read that the Writers' Centre Norwich is leading a bid for our Fine City to become England's first UNESCO City of Literature (Edinburgh is one already).

Obviously I particularly like this bit from  UNESCO's list of criteria:

"Active effort by the publishing sector to translate literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature;"

but the whole idea sounds pretty exciting. Apparently they are expecting news in the next six months or so.

I was also fascinated by the list of literary firsts in Norwich (from the Writers' Centre website):

from the first battlefield dispatch (1075) to the first woman published in English (Julian of Norwich – C15th), the first recognisable novel (C16th), the first blank verse (C16th), the first printed plan of an English city (C16th), the first published parliamentary debates (Luke Hansard – C18th), the largest concentration of published dissenters, revolutionaries and social reformers (C18th /19th ) including Tom Paine and the 30 million bestseller, Anna Sewell; the first provincial library (1608), first municipality to adopt the Library Act (1850), first provincial newspaper (1701), first British MA in creative writing (the first student of the first MA was Ian McEwan (1971)), the UK’s first City of Refuge (2006) for persecuted writers and a founding member of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) and to cap it all, the Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library (C21st) has the highest number of visitors and users in the UK – by far. 

Julian of Norwich and Thomas Paine I knew about, and the MA in creative writing is pretty inescapable in these parts, but the local connections of Anna Sewell and Luke Hansard were new to me.

So I wish the bid every success and will wait to see what happens. Meanwhile I will enjoy being a very small cog in a much more literary machine than I ever realised!

By Lin Kristensen from New Jersey, USA (Books of the Past) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

I've been meaning to review Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos for some time now, having been given it for Christmas. I found it a fascinating book and very entertaining, although not always as playful as its title. Whether or not it would be such an easy read for somebody with no prior knowledge of translation, I don't know, but I enjoyed the chatty, annecdotal tone as well as insights into aspects of the profession I'm unfamiliar with. The history of simultaneous interpreting, for example, or the mechanics of translation at the EU or the UN, as well as the dragomen of the Ottoman Empire. I also appreciated Bellos' spirited defense of the importance and possibility of translation - he firmly believes that everything can be translated - and the way he takes issue with the idea of les belles infidèles (beautiful but unfaithful, whether referring to women or translation),  poetry getting "lost in translation", that translation is no substitute for the original, and so on.

(I must confess that I was rather childishly pleased to see lolspeak among the languages into which the title is translated on the inside cover of the book: U has gots fish in ur eer?!11 Translayshun and da Meening of stuffz...)

I am, however, less convinced than he seems to be about the usefulness of Google translate, having seen articles like this one, for example, although I take his point that a sentence such as:

"On the part of for the protection of the mansion building occurring it was made valid that a feedback of the building condition was not at all possible on the time Klimts due to documentation lacking."

 is clearly nonsense, where an inaccurate translation produced by a human being would be impossible to spot without knowledge of both languages.

 This is such a comprehensive survey of the history and practice of translation that it would be impossible to summarise here. If you think it's going to be about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (as some Amazon reviewers seem to have done), then you might be in for a disappointment. If, on the other hand, you're even the slightest bit interested in words, language or what it is that translators and interpreters actually do then I'd highly recommend that you read this book! 

Anything by Emily Gravett

My current answer when asked for picture book recommendations is "Anything by Emily Gravett," and here's why: I haven't yet come across one of her books that I haven't liked, and they're big hits with the boys too. All her books are beautiful, as befits someone who has twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration, and the stories are equally charming.

Fils cadet is particularly taken with Blue Chameleon at the moment, while Fils aîné prefers Again!

Blue Chameleon is very simple and definitely more suited to younger ones, yet it has plenty to discuss on each page. It tells the story of a little chameleon looking for a friend and adapting its shape and colour to match the various objects it finds along the way - a snail, a sock and a cowboy boot, for example. As well as spotting the colours, we can discuss the way the chameleon is feeling as it gets progressively more dejected until at last it meets another chameleon and the two walk off together in a joyful explosion of colours.

Again! introduces a scenario familiar to every parent and child at bedtime. Cedric the little dragon has one favourite story, and he wants his mum to read it. And again, and again, and again! Dragons being what they are, when Cedric loses his temper, the results are startling and very funny. Fils aîné thinks so anyway, bounding around with excitement and bellowing "again!" I, on the other hand, find myself entirely in sympathy with Cedric's mum, wearily changing the story with each repetition before falling asleep herself...

Both of these are books we've had out of the library before, and have out of the library at the moment, and undoubtedly will have out of the library again in the future, given the rapture with which they were rediscovered last week. Others that I'd particularly recommend are Meerkat Mail for older children and Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear for younger ones. But like I said, anything by Emily Gravett is bound to be good!