First Page Excerpts from Signal #88, January 1999 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ----------------------------------------------------------- ------------- INDEX: The Shared Moment: Thoughts on Children & Poetry Neil Philip 3 Playing in the Phase Space: Contemporary Forms of Fictional Pleasure Margaret Mackey 16 Edward Blishen: Teacher versus Critic Nicholas Tucker 34 Other Sides of the Story: War in Translated Children's Fiction Gillian Lathey 48 The Second Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation Anthea Bell 59 Every Year is a Year of Reading: The Patrick Hardy Lecture Liz Attenborough 61 Endpapers 69 including Lissa Paul & Peter Hunt on Ted Hughes Contributors 75 ***************************************************** The Shared Moment: Thoughts on Children & Poetry NEIL PHILIP Poetry for children has been at the centre of Signal's concerns from its very beginning in 1970: the first issue, published in January of that year, contained Alan Tucker's essay 'On Poetry and Children' and 1979 saw the establishment of the Signal Poetry Award, until recently the only award for English-language children's poetry. So the publication of a full-length history of poetry for children*, from John Bunyan to Benjamin Zephaniah, has a particular interest and importance for Signal and its readers. Previous historians of children's literature, notably Harvey Darton, May Hill Arbuthnot and John Rowe Townsend, have paid substantial attention to poetry, but this is the first book exclusively devoted to tracing the history of this important genre. In her approach to the subject Morag Styles closely follows the pattern established by the Opies in their selections for The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Given the Opies' innate conservatism and Morag Styles's more radical agenda, this may seem surprising, but it only emphasizes the impeccable scholarship Iona and Peter Opie brought to the task of defining children's poetry as a separate literary tradition.The legacy of that scholarship imposes a burden of accuracy on the Opies' followers to which Morag Styles is not always equal, as Brian Alderson has recently pointed out. Nevertheless, this is a major book, which despite some flaws is essentially well balanced and well judged. Readers who want to understand the development of children's poetry as a distinct genre can now, with Opie and Styles at their side (plus, of course, Roger McGough's delicious 'The All-Purpose Children's Poem' from Pillow Talk), settle with confidence to the task. As readers who remember her Signal article 'Lost from the Nursery: Women Writing Poetry for Children 1 to 1850' will expect, Styles responds with particular insight and sympathy to the work of women poets, and writes well on such half-forgotten figures as Charlotte Smith and her sister Catherine Ann Dorset, as she does on major writers such as the Taylor sisters and Christina Rossetti. She defines one of the hallmarks of women's writing for the young as 'simplicity without [*Morag Styles, From the Garden to the Street: An introduction to 300 years of poetry for children, 304 pages, Cassell, 1998, simultaneous hardback & paperback publication} ***************************************************** Playing in the Phase Space: Contemporary Forms of Fictional Pleasure MARGARET MACKEY Storytelling has always been an important part of any society, and the forms and techniques of story adapt to the possibilities and pressures of different social arrangements. In our contemporary era of major technological change, we can see stories shifting and altering their borders even as the world of make-believe expands beyond anything our ancestors might have imagined. Television provides instant access to fiction day and night in an unceasing flow; video games offer extended hours of highly concentrated immersion; collaborative online fictional sites open the doors to co- operatively mandated and organized forms of storytelling where no one narrator is completely in charge. The commercial world supplies numerous prosthetics to fictional engagement in the form of toys and games and various 'lifestyle' accoutrements. An entire magazine industry feeds on back-up information about television and film stars, special effects and computer graphics, and the whole elaborate decision- making process involved in the creation of screened fiction. Contemporary citizens of most societies, not just the Western or most prosperous ones, will recognize all or part of this picture, yet the vocabulary for describing new hybrid forms of story that cross media boundaries and variously impinge on our daily lives is surprisingly limited. A fiction describes a possible world, but the boundaries of that world may seem nebulous when it can exist, more or less recognizably, in print, film, CD-ROM, audio, and website form, to name just the most obvious. The death of the author may or may not be finally established, but the issue of what is 'authorized' is one that affects stories in many ways, commercial as well as intellectual. How far can a story be attenuated through sequels and spin-offs before its original power is diffused through dilution and/or over-exposure? It is commonplace to see many transmutations of a single story: a picture book is made into an animation and turned back into a newly reworked picture book that then becomes a board book, to take a single and highly representative example. How many generations does it take before the sense of what made the story matter in the first place is rendered indecipherable, replaced by a generic impression that plurality and reproduction are the key elements of storytelling? ***************************************************** Edward Blishen: Teacher versus Critic NICHOLAS TUCKER Edward Blishen died, aged seventy-six, in December 1996. Known fondly to many in the book world and my own close friend for over thirty years, he was a uniquely charming and lovable person. He made a considerable contribution to children's literature in his time. Exploring some of his views now is not just an act of affectionate homage; it also raises issues as topical today as they were forty years ago when Edward first began writing about children's books and reading. In A Second Skin, one of his fourteen volumes of autobiography, he explained how he started out as an expert in children's literature. 'In the fifties I'd been the librarian at Stonehill Street, a battered London secondary modern school, and had alluded to the fact in one or two sketches written for the Manchester Guardian. In no time I was converted into a major spokesman on questions of what children actually read: and also what they ought to read and what, my goodness, they ought not' (17). Reviewing in the broadsheets and weeklies, broadcasting frequently and a familiar character on the lecturing circuit, he was a convincing advocate, speaking with the confidence of someone who had spent thirteen years in the company of books and children before leaving to become a freelance. And what children: those who read Roaring Boys and This Right Soft Lot will look in vain for comfortable staffroom reminiscences and roll calls of distinguished Old Boys. Put in charge of the brand-new school library, seen at the time as a daring innovation, Edward worked not at the surface but at the very coalface of children and reading. While he went on to describe every aspect of his life in his books, Edward never wrote at length about children's literature. What remains are more a series of autobiographical asides, along with legions of book reviews, some articles including a couple in Signal, and a short introduction to his edited collection The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children. It is typical of the regard Edward inspired that for this volume he was able to assemble almost all the important writers of his time, from Nina Bawden to Philippa Pearce. But apart from his editorship of the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, and his co-authorship with Leon Garfield of The God Beneath the Sea and The Golden Shadow, a controversial retelling of Greek myths, the first volume of which won the Carnegie Medal in 1970, there is little left now to show why he was ***************************************************** Other Sides of the Story: War in Translated Children's Fiction GILLIAN LATHEY The short but wide-ranging list of titles submitted for the second Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation is at first sight as baffling as it is intriguing. However passionate the commitment of individuals to broadening children's cultural horizons may be, the groundswell of interest is not sufficient to create a reliable market, and publishers cannot afford to invest freely in translations. So which books are currently considered worth the risk? Two titles on saints translated from the French reflect a trend for attractively illustrated nonfiction series; North-South offer a tale of a young girl nursing her poisoned dog back to health (Abby, set in Ireland, original text in German), while Jostein Gaarder's mind-teasing Hello? Is anybody there? is for younger children than his hugely successful Sophie's World. Particularly striking, however, is the emotional and historical weight carried by the titles set in wartime. The recent spate of World War II anniversaries and the tragic scenes in the former Yugoslavia have reinforced the determination of writers across Europe to confront young readers with the realities of war. Publishers can approach war titles with some confidence in attracting public interest, an interest shared across the generations, which is often rewarded by insights no British writer could offer. The three Marsh Award submissions on the subject of war are concerned with both past and present conflicts. Tatiana Vassilieva's memoir of a childhood spent in German forced labour camps (A Hostage to War) and Gudrun Pausewang's fictional account of a Jewish girl's journey to her death in a concentration camp (The Final Journey) both arise from the lingering pain or guilt of childhood experience, while the Dutch author Els de Groen's carefully orchestrated grouping of adolescents from different factions of the war in Bosnia (No Roof in Bosnia) follows the disputed Zlata's Diary (Filipovic)by detailing the shattering effects of that recent revival of ancient disputes on the lives of young people. The reader of these books is not protected from the degradation or the tedium of war and is invited in each case to identify with young people who are unable to influence the events that overtake them. Both approaches-the trend towards realism and the child's view of war-are found in translations of war stories that have appeared in English in the years since World War II. It is worth speculating what these ***************************************************** The Second Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation ANTHEA BELL The three of us on the jury panel for the second Marsh Award- Elizabeth Hammill, Wendy Cooling and I-did not find it easy to pick a single outright winner. The quality of the books submitted was generally high; the quality of the translations very high, though under a dozen titles in all were entered. Given reluctance on the part of British publishers to consider foreign-language children's books, however, it is possible that the submissions actually made up quite a creditable score for UK publication over a two-year period. We read the books in the summer, and when we met to exchange views found that some of our first impressions had changed but some were reinforced at a second reading. Pooling our different specialist areas proved illuminating. One book with narrative passages extremely well translated, but containing dialogue which struck me as a little wooden on the page, had worked well for Wendy Cooling with a group of children. As the translator among us I also read the books in the original languages-well, I couldn't have read the Russian original of A Hostage to War, but the translation was made from its German version-so on this occasion we did not need to co-opt other members of the Translators' Association to tell us how far the English version diverged, if at all, from the original. I am familiar with a problem that can sometimes surface here: what degree of adaptation is to be regarded as permissible in assessing a translation? Juries deliberating on translation awards for adult books tend to expect little in the way of cuts, changes or adaptation. The 1998 winner of the Schlegel- Tieck German translation prize, for instance, Mike Mitchell's version of Herbert Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China, differed in several respects from the original text seen by the jury panel, and one of my colleagues there felt that too many liberties had been taken. I suspected that we were dealing with either a revised German edition or adaptations made for the English-language market; the former was the case. I think that a large amount of editing is more common in translated children's books than in adult books, for a variety of what are usually very good reasons. The expertise of a specialist children's editor is a skill to be greatly respected. As it happens, none of the books on our eventual shortlist (even ***************************************************** Every Year is a Year of Reading: The Patrick Hardy Lecture LIZ ATTENBOROUGH I'm honoured to be asked to give this year's Patrick Hardy Lecture, not least because it has given me the opportunity to be nostalgic about the time I spent working with Patrick at Kestrel (as it then was) back in the late 1970s. In fact it's twenty-one years ago that I joined him at Penguin to work on his award-winning list. Jan Mark's first novel, Janet and Allan Ahlberg and The Old Joke Book, Leon Garfield at the height of his powers, awaiting with excitement a new book from Philippa Pearce, the utter thrill of the new phenomenon of the pop-up book, a field in which Patrick was a pioneer with Robert Crowther's Most Amazing Hide-and-Seek Alphabet Book and the revival of Lothar Meggendorfer. And that was just my first six months working with him. Working with Patrick taught me so much-he reinforced the importance of the excellence of the writing, and he particularly taught me about the author/editor relationship. He took enormous pride in the importance of the work he did, believing-as we all do-that children's publishing was at the heart of our industry, and the field that mattered above all else. He could get quite snappy with anyone wishing to discuss budget cuts or affordability of children's books. 'Everyone surely knows that it's as important to feed a child's mind as to feed its body,' he would cry. But I was never sure that he really liked children themselves, as a breed. I remember telling him that I was pregnant, and after the silence that greeted this news, he just said, 'Well, August is usually a pretty quiet time.' It was probably a reaction to the thought of the disruption to work that mattered most to him, as he was an exceptionally hard-working publisher. I know that Patrick would have heartily approved of the aims and objectives of the National Year of Reading. It is the most fantastic opportunity to make a lasting and sustainable difference to the culture of this country and its attitude to reading. I'm having an amazingly interesting time, meeting an enormous range of stimulating people around the country, all involved in the common purpose of encourag- [The Patrick Hardy Lecture is given annually under the auspices of the Children's Book Circle. 'Every Year is a Year of Reading', here slightly abridged, was presented on 10 November 1998 at the Royal Overseas League in London.] ***************************************************** ENDPAPERS Peter Hunt & Lissa Paul on Ted Hughes An e-mail exchange between Lissa Paul in Toronto and Peter Hunt in Cardiff, shortly after the death of Ted Hughes in October 1998, revealed a difference of opinion about his poetry for children. The following notes are based on this correspondence. Peter Hunt writes: You can hardly blame a man for his obituaries, but some of the hagiography that appeared on the death of Ted Hughes demonstrated the woeful state of criticism when actually confronted with poetry rather than personality. The verbal gestures in the press were largely embarrassing or depressing. John Carey, in The Sunday Times, wrote about Hughes's 'sleekly muscled language', Daniel Johnson in The Daily Telegraph about 'this regal presence', and Marina Warner in Time managed both to be ludicrous ('It did not seem possible . . . that this giant of a man could be felled') and to produce a splendidly metropolitan patronizing of a few million Yorkshirepersons (Hughes had 'an oddly gentle voice in which the flat vowels of the Yorkshire moors still sounded their old-world sonorities'). One of the few to demur was David Sexton in the Evening Standard: he felt that Hughes was a poetic bully: 'rhythmically and verbally crude, a species of assault and battery', with the endless repetition of certain key words. Among all the sycophantic gibberish there must, of course, be vast amounts of love and respect, and in any case you might argue that the criticism of poetry (the articulation of response to poetry) is generally as futile, and as regrettably risible, as criticism of graphic art or of wine. But it does not take much cynicism to suggest that having a 'great' poet around makes life simple (especially if the world of children's books is grateful that the glory of a 'great' poet can reach down to their intellectual level). If a poet is 'great', we don't have to attend too carefully to what he has actually written. That is, a poem is only as good as the kind of reading given to it, which means that it is very difficult to be a new poet (especially if you are a child), and very easy for an established writer to get away with murder. This seems to be even more obvious in the case of poetry for children, where definitions and criticism are more complex than in poetry for adults (as decades of Signal Poetry Award articles demonstrate). All the more reason for the children's book world not to follow the adults' book world into playing safe by setting up 'the great' and reducing the infinite (and what should be the infinitely democratic) variety that is poetry to a simple hierarchy. That children are widely encouraged to write and to value their own writings (by, among others, Ted Hughes) is wonderful: but not if, somewhere up there, someone-for some sinuous, earthy, shuddering and generally incomprehensible reason-is writing 'the best'. My point is not why, or whether, Ted Hughes was a good poet, or a good poet for children (as these are imponderables), but why anyone ever thought he was a good poet for children. I'm not attacking Hughes the man (whom I never met); whether he was good or bad, inspired or whatever, is not relevant here, and any such judgement would, in any case, be ill-timed. (I don't mean that knowledge of Hughes the man is irrelevant to a reading of his poetry-or where would biographers be? For many readers-possibly more of the adult persuasion-the person is part of, and possibly the larger part of, the experience of the poetry.) ***************************************************** CONTRIBUTORS Neil Philip is the editor of several poetry anthologies for the young, including The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse and most recently War and the Pity of War (New York: Clarion, 1998); he is working on an appreciation of Ted Hughes for a future issue of Signal. Margaret Mackey teaches at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada; she is North American editor of Children's Literature in Education and author of The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, just published by Garland. Nicholas Tucker, lecturer in child psychology and children's literature at the University of Sussex, writes and reviews for the Independent, the New Statesman and all three Times supplements; his best-known work, The Child and the Book: A Literary and Psychological Exploration, has been reprinted by Cambridge University Press in their Canto 'Classics' series. Formerly an infant teacher and now a lecturer at Roe-hampton Institute, Gillian Lathey has a long-standing interest in translation and German literature; she is adminstrator of the Marsh Award-presented this year on 28 January at the Arts Club in London-on behalf of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature. Anthea Bell has contributed a number of articles about translating to Signal; her next will be on the poetry of Josef Guggenmos. Liz Attenborough, Project Director of the National Year of Reading, was for many years Director of Puffin Books; her anthology The Children's Book of Poems, Prayers and Meditations is published by Element Children's Books (1998). The Open College of the Arts, mentioned on page 67, may be reached at Houndhill, Worsbrough, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 6TU. ***************************************************** © The Thimble Press, 1999 END For further information about Signal, please, contact The Thimble Press, Lockwood, Station Road, Woodchester, Stroud, Glos. GL5 5EQ England phone: 01453 87 3716; fax: 01453 87 8599