Children's column: translations matter

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 23 January 2009 08:11

Anthony Horowitz’s eloquent speech at this week’s Marsh Award for Children’s Books in Translation (see BookBrunch story) raised – not for the first time in the history of the award – important points about our cultural small-mindedness. While as many as 40 per cent of the books published in other European countries are books in translation, some 3 per cent of ours are. And the books shortlisted for the Marsh awards were a fine sampler of works with big themes that ask to be read globally. Not least among them was Valérie Zenatti’s Message in a Bottle (Bloomsbury), translated by Adriana Hunter, about the conflict between Israel and Gaza, from which Horowitz read an extract so timely it might have described an incident in this week’s news. The stumbling block for our publishing sans frontières, Horowitz rightly pointed out, was our attitude of mind.
So what can be done, any more than the Marsh Award is already doing, to change it? We have to stop believing that, in literature, everything is lost in translation. Consider our culture without Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Ugly Duckling, The Tortoise and the Hare, Heidi, Pippi, Asterix, Tintin … Consider recent adult publishing without Perfume, The Name of the Rose, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, The Shadow of the Wind, Suite Francaise … These lists alone ought to persuade us that stories can and should travel and that translated stories can sell.

One organisation is doing a good deal to convert us. Since 2007, in the wake of Sian Williams’s Children’s Book Show with this theme, Outside In - founded by Alexandra Strick, Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini - has set out, like the Marsh Award, to bring the world’s books to Britain, with projects, workshops, events and exhibitions in schools and elsewhere, and by helping foreign authors and illustrators to understand the British book market. They also published their own guide to children’s books in translation, Outside In; and their website, outsideinworld.org.uk, highlights a translated book every week. They deserve applause and support. So too does Aurora Metro, the plucky publisher of three Marsh shortlisted titles, and other children’s publishers such as Winged Chariot Press and the Chicken House, which have made a point of publishing books that originated in other languages. (Among the Chicken House’s latest is The Princess Plot by Kirsten Boie, a compatriot of Cornelia Funke.) More mainstream publishers should follow the example of Walker Books, who had the confidence to produce a beautiful package for the Marsh winner, Timothée de Fombelle’s Toby Alone (and a sequel) translated by Sarah Ardizzone. Booksellers should get behind them. We will all be the richer for it.

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