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...

D is for Duquennoy

Jacques Duquennoy is an author I'd never heard of until recently, but then fils aîné brought Ghost Party home from school and it became a major part of our lives. Translated from the French by Antonia Parkin and published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books in 2004, it stars a ghost named Henry who invites his ghostly friends round to the castle for a dinner party. With each course, the guests turn the colour of the food or drink they're consuming, until the final flourish - dessert so light it melts in the mouth, making Henry and his friends vanish altogether. That's pretty much it for the plot, but the boys love it! In fact fils aîné (aged 5) says it's his "best book ever". I've just checked with him about what he likes best and he says "when they change colour and when they go invisible". Fils cadet (aged 2) says his favourite part is when Henry says "Boo!"

As this demonstrates, the illustrations are simple but fun, and Henry gets up to all kinds of tricks. Since we first made Henry's acquaintance, he has reappeared in the book bag several times and also been borrowed from the library.

There seems also to be an older, out of print, translation called Phantom Feast, published by Orchard Books in 1994, translator unknown. And, in the course of researching this post, I discovered to my joy that there are other books in the series to look out for... Loch Ness Ghosts and The Ghosts in the Cellar. Mind you, I won't be paying £128.92 for that last one, even if it is a first edition!

We managed to borrow Loch Ness Ghosts (Frances Lincoln, 2005, tr. Antonia Parkin) from the library today and fils aîné reports that he maybe even likes it a little bit better than Ghost Party, which is saying something!

Henry reads in the newspaper that the Loch Ness Monster has been spotted again so he sets off with three friends to try and find it. Obviously, a bagpipe playing Scottish ghost by the name of MacShortbread lives in the castle on the loch and he helps them in their search. Now, in the best traditions of farce, Nessie appears behind the ghosts every time they turn away - the boys find this hysterical and scream "it's the monster!" They go home disappointed, but when they get their photos developed (yes, the French edition predates digital cameras!), there's a surprise in store...

C is for...

'Cinderella' by Anne Anderson (1874-1930)

... Cinderella, source of one of the most famous translation myths in the world. It's widely believed that the glass slippers are the result of pantoufle de vair (fur slipper) being mistaken for pantoufle de verre (glass slipper) when Charles Perrault's French version of the tale was translated into English. I couldn't remember where I first read a debunking of this idea, but it seems quite likely that it was on fellow translator Jill Sommer's blog: Were Cinderellas Glass Slippers a Mistranslation? quoting snopes.com. Certainly fur slippers sound more comfortable than glass ones, but somewhat out of place at a royal ball!


I was also surprised to read the Grimm brothers' version of the story in which the fine clothes and slippers first "embroidered with silk and silver" and then "of pure gold" are thrown down - on three occasions - from a hazel tree over her mother's grave by a white bird who grants her wishes - no fairy godmothers, pumpkin coaches or enchanted footmen in sight. I wonder why Perrault's telling has stuck in this country rather than any of the countless other variations out there...
 
C is also for Clementine by Sebastian Loth and Chih-Yaun Chen, author of Guji-Guji - two books which sound like a lot of fun and which I am adding to my mental wishlist for the boys...  Reviews can be found at Outside In Inside Out.

"Once upon a time, a very strange egg rolled into Mother Duck’s nest. When a baby crocodile hatched, she thought nothing of it and raised Guji Guji along with the rest of her ducklings… as a duck. Everyone gets on fine until some big bad crocodiles turn up one day. The big crocs make Guji Guji question who he is and want him to place his duck family in danger. What will Guji Guji do? Is he a crocodile? Is he a duck? Will he save his family or side with his species?"

http://www.outsideinworld.org.uk/bookdetail.asp?start=1&textpage=&mainpage=&id=162

"Clementine the snail loves everything round—hoops, wheels, balls, balloons and most of all, the moon. She longs to glide gently over the moon’s surface so she makes a daring decision— "I'm going to fly to the moon," she whispered into the night . . ." Her best friend Paul helps her to find an ingenious way to travel to the moon and soon Clementine is setting out on the most amazing journey."  

http://www.outsideinworld.org.uk/bookdetail.asp?start=1&textpage=&mainpage=&id=1360

 If you've read either of these, I'd be happy to hear what you thought of them!

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