I’m not a big TV watcher. So, I don’t see a ton of commercials, but one of my favorites is this one from State Farm. Same exact lines, two very different interpretations based on context. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately in relation to translated texts. As with the commercial, the reader of a translated picture book has the images to clarify the text. The way the actor delivers the lines gives context and interpretation in the commercial, but that is the job of the reader in picture book format.
Then what happens when the text on the page doesn’t match up with the illustrations? Or what about when our interpretation is based on our own perception without considering the context? In today’s post, I want to look closer at what I think may be an example of each of these that could contribute to a book being “lost” in the translation process. As I’ve noted since the beginning of this category, these are my reactions to each of these texts, what I’ve noticed that I thought was worth diving into a little deeper to see if I could figure out the “why” behind why it didn’t set quite right with me.
By: Fang Suzhen
Illustrated by: Sonja Danowski
Translated by: Huang Xiumin
When I started researching, this book popped up on my radar pretty quickly as one to check out as it was a 2016 Batchelder Award Honor Book. For a long time, I considered adding it to my death post in the Controversy category as I thought the story itself was a beautiful depiction of how illness, death, and mourning was viewed through the eyes of a very young child. The illustrations are beautiful, almost photographic, making me feel as if I was almost part of the story. The two elements on their own (in spite of a rather clunky, in my opinion, translation, for example, “it had been a long time since he saw her”) were exemplary representations of children’s literature.
But together, I just couldn’t make the whole thing mesh. I kept getting drawn out of the story because I couldn’t believe the child the narrator was speaking about could be the same child illustrated on the page. The child spoke in complete, complex sentences that showed advanced thinking such as “Don’t cry! Your mom has gone to heaven to drink afternoon tea with her mom. Grandma, do you have wood sorrel in heaven? Does anybody play games with you?” In Danowski’s illustrations, this is that child:
In my mind, the child pictured was no older than three, and I’m not sure I can remember ever encountering such an articulate toddler. I found that I kept getting so distracted by trying to suspend my disbelief between text and image that I couldn’t fully enjoy the book. It was disappointing because, as I said, I really liked the two elements on their own, but as a whole, it didn’t sit right with me. It bothered me enough that I decided to put it here in “lost in translation” to see if I could make any sense of why.
The first thing that I noticed was the two different nationalities of the author and illustrator. Suzhen is a Taiwanese author with quite a few other titles to her credit that have not been translated. Danowski is German, who has authored and illustrated quite a few titles of her own, including a number that have been translated into multiple languages. It seemed odd to me that the two had been paired together and I wondered why a publishing company had chosen to pair Suzhen’s manuscript with Danowski’s illustrations.
If you’re not as familiar with the world of children’s literature, you may not know that very rarely does an author have any say in who illustrates their work, especially novice authors. In fact, once a publisher has chosen a manuscript the author has very little input in not only who will illustrate it, but how it will be illustrated and what the end product will look like. One of my own personal most fascinating children’s literature encounters, was attending a break-out session at a SCBWI conference where Newberry award winning author Linda Sue Park and illustrator Jennifer Black Reinhardt discussed their book, Yaks Yak. Before that session, they had never been in the same room together and could count the number of times they had spoken to each other directly on one hand. I was shocked! Park said she had seen early sketches, made a few suggestions via her agent, and then not seen any further work until much further along in the process. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how all this works, but from what I’ve learned, this is a fairly good representation of the author-illustrator relationship during the creation of picture books.
But I wondered, in the case of Grandma Lives In A Perfume Village, if this was an even greater divide as it also spanned language and culture could have contributed to the disconnect I was experiencing. Further thought also made me realize that Suzhen’s original text would not even be what Danowski would be working from; the source text would have been translated into German for her to create her illustrations. Additionally, the two different cultures have to be considered and how that may have affected how Danowski drew the realistic images of the people in the story. It’s worth considering that she was illustrating from outside of the culture she was depicting.
Which then leads me back to the question of why. Why would a Chinese publisher choose a German illustrator for this text? It took some digging, but I was able to come up with an answer. First, it helps to know that the children’s book market in China is a rapidly expanding industry, largely because it went unrecognized until about the past fifteen years. According to this 2017 article by Publisher’s Weekly looking at China’s current children’s book market, “ Though there were barely 20 dedicated children’s book publishers in the country back in 2003, now more than 580 publishing companies are plying the market. In the past three years, an average of 45,000 children’s titles have been added to China’s book market annually.” As it relates directly to picture books, “The history of picture books in China is less than 12 years old, making it a baby compared to the American and European markets. The potential for growth is immense.”
Of course, that means that the next step would be to find a way to make the texts being created marketable outside of China. Part of this means that they will be appealing to not only Chinese readers, but globally as well. It seems that Grandma Lives In A Perfume Village was one of China Children’s Press & Publication Group (CCPPG), the largest children’s publisher in China, attempts to do this. In a 2015 article on global reciprocity in the form of book rights, CCPPG discussed its “effort to help promote cross-cultural exchange” by “inviting Chinese authors/illustrators to work with international illustrators/authors to create high-quality picture books.” The publisher noted that the collaboration between Suzhen and Danowski was one of the first books created through this exchange. The hope then was that Danowski’s international appeal would work to have publisher’s around the world purchase the rights to translate the text, therefore spreading the picture books created by Chinese authors/illustrators globally.
While all this information didn’t solve the problem of the disconnect for me, it did help me understand why Danowski had been chosen to illustrate the text. Though I found the pairing problematic in this case, I am interested in seeing how it may work in other instances. The article noted that another early trial of this effort was “Feather,” which I mentioned a few weeks ago has just recently been published in the US. Hopefully, given the reception of Grandma Lives In A Perfume Village as an award-winning title and starred reviews Feather is already receiving, this may eventually lead to international publishers purchasing the rights for additional children’s books from China so they can be read globally.
That may explain why text and art sometimes don’t connect, but what about when a book is perhaps taken out of context? What about when it was viewed as “appropriate” in one time or place but may be received in another completely differently? Does that suddenly make it off-limits or “bad”? Or perhaps should we as readers should be expected to be a little more conscious of the original context?
I’ve mentioned before that over time what has been considered children’s literature has evolved, as has the intention of that literature. Without diving too deeply into the history, we’ve traveled from texts that were strictly educational to those more didactic, with a clear lesson/moral often meant to induce fear in a child reader, to an era that is more pleasure-filled, meant to be more entertaining and engaging. (Wow is that boiled down! Know that there is much more in there to consider, but for sake of brevity…) With that in mind, expecting a text from a one hundred seventy-five years ago to “pass muster” by today’s standards is completely unrealistic. Case in point, I give you….
In “Standard English” translation
Written and illustrated in 1844 by Hoffmann, a German doctor, as a Christmas gift for his three-year-old son, Struwwelpeter, or “Shock-Headed Peter” as it is known in English, is a book of “cautionary tales.” Each of the ten illustrated tales in rhyming-verse are presented in a way to provide a clear moral, depicted by showing what disaster befalls those who do not behave accordingly. The lessons vary from the titular Peter being unpopular because he lacks proper grooming, to Pauline being burned to death when she plays with matches, to death by starvation of Augustus who refuses to eat his soup.
Did I mention that this is a children’s book?
The most well-known of the stories, though, is probably The Story Of Little Suck-A-Thumb, in which Hoffman introduces a bogeyman like character, known as The Tailor. When Conrad, after being repeatedly warned by his mother, fails to stop sucking his thumb, the “great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man” springs from out of no-where to “Snip! Snap! Snip” off both his thumbs.
The story has found itself crossing into American culture even more recently. Fans of The Office may remember when Dwight shared the tale on the show’s "Take Your Daughter to Work Day" episode in Season 2, and Family Guy did its own abbreviated version, calling it a “German bedtime story.” I wonder how many people believed that either of those depictions came from a REAL book actually intended for children. I would venture to guess that the horrified reactions of the adults in The Office may closely mirror how many would react to the text if they fail to consider when and where it came from and what was considered children’s literature at that time.
It’s also one of those books that I think requires the ability to see the humor in the gross exaggeration of the situations. Take Augustus –the pudgy boy in the first picture is not going to turn into the stick figure seen by the fourth day because he didn’t eat.
These are not stories that are meant to be read literally, and I think that many young readers, even today, will grasp that and see the humor in how outlandish the stories are. It’s important to remember that this book was penned near the same time as the Grimm Brothers were collecting German versions of oral folktales, many of which contain similar instances of violence (and worse!). Those original tales have been “cleaned up” quite a bit since then. As we discussed back in the fairytale category, what we “know” as a specific version of a fairy tale isn’t often the original tale. I know I may be considered more liberal than many by what I “allow” my kids to read, but they both love Struwwelpeter. In fact, Mikayla was furious with me last year when I suggested that it was perhaps not the best book for me to share as a guest reader in her first-grade classroom. While I did not put it past her classmates to react similarly to how she had by being able to recognize the extremes and find humor in it, I also know that there are kids out there (and were in Hoffmann’s time as well) that may not separate the two. It goes back to the original point of what I think can often be “lost” with these types of text when we, as the reader, fail to understand the context under which it is being presented.
While the disconnect between author-illustrator interpretation and that of context is not restricted to translated texts, both are possible reasons why readers react unfavorably to a translated book and earn it that “weird” or “bad” label. What it does mean, though, is that we as readers have to look beyond the “weird because it’s translated” label to what else is going on. We have as much of a role in making sure a book doesn’t get “lost” in translation as does the author, illustrator, translator and publisher.
On Friday I’ll be back with the last post in this category where I want to take a closer look at one of those specific roles – that of the translator. They are, in my opinion, too often the unsung hero or villain in the way a translated text is received, and I think it’s worth further consideration and discussion as to why. See you back here then!
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