First Page Excerpts from Signal #90, September 1999 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- INDEX: Books before Lunch Joan Aiken 155 Translating Pictures Emer O'Sullivan 167 Presencing the Past Valerie Krips 176 The International Case of Little Colourless Babaji: Reracinating, Returning and Retaining a Classic Sanjay Sircar 187 Endpapers 212 Peter Hollindale on journeying childnesses Annual Index: Volume Thirty 214 Contributors 219 ***************************************************** Books before Lunch JOAN AIKEN Education is very much on everybody's mind just at the moment-what we should teach children, and when, and how; should we nail the three R's to the mast or throw them out of the window-so I thought that, instead of talking about how I wrote my books, I'd ruminate a bit about my own education, and the kind of educational progression that led to my writing such a large number of books (and, perhaps, whether this was a good thing or not). To begin: basic precepts. I can remember my mother saying to me, 'Use your wits! Think about what you are doing. You have got to learn to think. You have got to learn to use your mind all the time. When you sweep a room with a broom, you will raise a lot of dust, so after you have swept with a broom, then you must go round and polish the tops of tables and chairs with a duster. Whereas, when you clean a room with a vacuum cleaner' -electricity did not come to our village until about 1940, when I was sixteen, so this was pertinent; we had only just acquired a vacuum cleaner-'when you vacuum, you suck up all the dust as you go so you want to do the tops of the tables first.' My mother became very indignant with people who never formed the habit of using their minds even when performing simple tasks. Because, she said, if you use your mind, then you will do the job better, and very probably faster, so you will save time, which can be put to some other useful purpose; but in any case a job well done is more satisfying than a job sloppily done. Slipshod was one of my mother's worst terms of disapprobation. She was fond of that poem by George Herbert which goes: 'A servant with this clause,/ Makes drudgery divine; / Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws / Makes that and the action fine ...' In fact my mother tended to question the existence of drudgery altogether. And my first husband, who died when I was thirty-one, held very similar views about efficiency and motion-study. I can remember when he was having a terrible time trying to put up a curtain rail to support the blackout blinds in our first London flat, and I came and held up the length of rod from below, with a mop, his exclaiming enthusiastically, 'That is what distinguishes you from an ape-the ability to use tools ... ***************************************************** Translating Pictures Emer O'Sullivan The 'language' of pictures is generally regarded as international, capable of transcending linguistic and cultural boundaries. How, then, can we speak of translating pictures in picture books when, in most cases, these remain materially unaltered? It seems to me that in the translation of picture books, neither element-words or pictures-can be isolated, nor are they isolated when the translator translates. I think that, in a genre combining words and pictures, an ideal translation reflects awareness not only of the significance of the original text but also of the interaction between the visual and the verbal, what the pictures do in relation to the words; it does not verbalize the interaction but leaves gaps that make the interplay possible and exciting. The reader of the ideal translation is left to do the same work as the reader of the original. This paper looks at how translation changed this interaction in two picture books: Michel Gay's Papa Vroum (French into English) and John Burningham's Granpa (English into German). First, a general point. The communication in children's books and around children's literature is asymmetrical; indeed asymmetry is one of the defining characteristics of this branch of literature. As is frequently observed, adults write, publish and sell books for children, adult critics write about them, librarians recommend them and teachers bring children's books into school. Adults act on behalf of children at every stage in this literary communication. In itself this is not a bad thing but it is not always easy to distinguish between adults enabling children and controlling them. The asymmetrical communication is mirrored when children's literature is translated: the various steps from the selection of texts to the details of how individual lexical items are to be translated are subject to the assumptions of publishers and translators as to what children can understand, what they enjoy, what is suitable and acceptable. These norms and suppositions function on educational, sociocultural, ideological and aesthetic levels. An example of a text being altered in translation to conform to views on suitability can be found in the German translation of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Långstrump. In the original Swedish Pippi and her friends play in the attic with pistols; in the German edition Pippi declares that children shouldn't play with guns and that she will put them back into the chest.1 Picture books present a special challenge to the translator, as the ... ***************************************************** Presencing the Past Valerie Krips In his book On Living in an Old Country Patrick Wright remarks that the past as 'heritage' has come to provide an experience of meanings which are virtually incommunicable and indefinable . . . a kind of sacrament encountered only in fleeting if well remembered experiences which go without saying to exactly the extent that they are taken for granted by initiates, by true members of the ancestral nation (83). In this paper, which is part of a larger project that indicates the especially powerful way in which children's books calibrate cultural change, I want to link the development of the kind of heritage that Wright discusses with a contemporaneous phenomenon, living history, which has had an important impact on the way that heritage came to represent the past. I begin in the 1950s and 60s, the period in which, in my argument, 'heritage' as we now know it in Britain began to make its appearance. This was the period in which, according to the British historian Raphael Samuel, the phenomenon of living history emerged. In part a response to the 'decade's cult of immediacy' and its desire to cast away formality, living history is as heteroclite in its origins as it is pervasive (192). Deriving from the work of social historians, and what Samuel calls resurrectionism, living history's emergence was marked by the preservation of steam trains, the staging of historical pageants, the collection of oral histories and interactive displays in museums, and so on. However, it had its most important formulation in the classroom with the institution, in 1965, of the CSE history examination,which required of the child, above all, 'empathy', a willingness to put her or himself in the place of historical actors. Just what is implied for representations of the past it is the purpose of this paper to investigate, as I indicate how books written for children demonstrate the changes in thinking about time and place implicit in living history. History as heritage The most admired British writer of historical fiction for children of the 1950s and 1960s was Rosemary Sutcliff. The best known of her many novels are set in Roman Britain. The Lantern Bearers is a distillation of her version of Britain's past and its projected future. In it she includes the story of a king who will ensure peace for a brief period before .... ***************************************************** The International Case of Little Colourless Babaji: Reracinating, Returning and Retaining a Classic Sanjay Sircar 'Helen Bannerman, who was born in Edinburgh in 1863, lived in India for thirty years. As a gift for her two little girls, she wrote and illustrated The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), a story that clearly takes place in India (with its tigers and "ghi,"or melted butter), even though the names she gave her characters belie that setting. 'For this new edition of Bannerman's much beloved tale, the little boy, his mother, and his father have all been given authentic Indian names: Babaji, Mamaji, and Papaji. And Fred Marcellino's high-spirited illustrations lovingly, memorably transform this old favorite. He gives a classic story a new life.' - Cover blurb to The Story of Little Babaji by Helen Bannerman, illustrated by Fred Marcellino; also reproduced, abridged, at the end of the book. 'With the exception of one story, which I will discuss later, all of the selections were written and illustrated in the twentieth century. 'Sometimes . . . the beloved books of an earlier age can offend and hurt. The transformation of The Story of Little Black Sambo, originally published in 1899 and the only story in this anthology written before the turn of the century, into The Story of Little Babaji, published in 1996, is a triumph in finding an authentic way to preserve the best of a long-time favorite story. 'Helen Bannerman, the author and illustrator of the original book, lived in India when she wrote this tale about tigers who chased each other so furiously that they turned into a pool of "ghi," an Indian word for melted butter. Unfortunately, the names she gave her characters and her amateurish illustrations depicted them as gross stereotypes of Africans. Millions of children in America grew up with the story until mid-century, when American librarians, both black and white, made us realize how offensive the illustrations were. I have closed this anthology with The Story of Little Babaji, in which Fred Marcellino has given Mrs. Bannerman's characters real Indian names and created beautiful new illustrations that are clearly set in India. Thus a wonderful story, nearly one hundred years old, has been given a new life for all children.' 'This story was originally published as The Story of Little Black Sambo. On page vii the Note to Parents explains its happy transformation in 1996 into The Story of Little Babaji, a presentation that is more in tune with social mores today.' - From 'A Note to Parents' in Janet Schulman's 20th Century Children's Book Treasury: Celebrated Picture Books and Stories to Read Aloud and (final sentence) the textual rubric on page 293. The centenary of The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman, first published on 31 October 1899, does not seem to have been widely ***************************************************** Endpapers Peter Hollindale opened Homerton's fifth conference on children and literature, Odysseys of the Mind-The Future of Reading, which was held 3-5 September 1999 at Homerton College, Cambridge. We invited this summary of his lecture for the interest of Signal readers who are familiar with his Signs of Childness in Children's Books (Thimble Press). Peter Hollindale writes: Since Signs of Childness in Children's Books was published two years ago it has brought me helpful and stimulating correspondence from surprisingly distant places, and at least preliminary indications that the gap I had found in critical vocabulary, and hoped to fill with 'childness', is not a gap in English alone but in other languages where children's literature is at last being taken seriously. The problem with any unfamiliar word, which inevitably seems abstract and academic to begin with, is to find some examples that will put flesh on its bones and help people to make sense of it. 'Childness' for me is not so much a concept as a conceptual method-a term that prompts us to start teasing out and separating and identifying the many strands of belief and feeling that go to make up what we think a child is. And those beliefs and feelings are always in the process of changing and evolving, for everyone but especially for children's writers and the children who read their books. So where could I find the theme that would make the word more accessible and show it vividly in action? When Morag Styles invited me to speak on 'childness' at the 1999 Homerton Conference, the chance was there. The Homerton conference brings together professionals from the whole spectrum of work on children's literature-writers, critics, teachers, publishers-and some of them, I knew, would be familiar with my book whereas others would be meeting the word 'childness' for the first time. At least one person there was translating the book into Japanese. All this made Homerton a challenging place to lift 'childness' off the page. So where was my would-be revelatory theme? The subject I found was journeys, and the title eventually became 'Odysseys: the Childness of Journeying Children'. No standard narrative theme reveals more vividly the collisions that I think occur-in literature and life alike-when someone's composite sense of what a child is or ought to be comes into dramatic confrontation with someone else's. Especially when the 'someone' is an adult and the 'someone else' a child. I found a very clear and helpful distinction, central to what I wanted to say, in a passage by the critic Carol Anne Howells, though the context was not children's literature but Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea: 'Identity is constructed as a relational definition imposed by others, while subjectivity is an infinitely complex structure constituted by memory, desire and language which eludes any identity definition.' This may sound even more abstract than 'childness', but apply it to journey narratives for children, in which a (usually) solitary child makes a significant journey, encountering a variety of people on the way, and I think the practical reality of childness stands out as an important element in this major theme of children's literature. I chose four journey narratives as ex- .... ***************************************************** (c) 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