Children's Literature in Translation

Challenges and Strategies

Jan Van Coillie, Walter P. Verschueren, Jan Van Coillie, Walter P. Verschueren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138138988
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317640387
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Children's classics from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Astrid Lindgren, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are now generally recognized as literary achievements that from a translator's point of view are no less demanding than 'serious' (adult) literature. This volume attempts to explore the various challenges posed by the translation of children's literature and at the same time highlight some of the strategies that translators can and do follow when facing these challenges. A variety of translation theories and concepts are put to critical use, including Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, Toury's concept of norms, Venuti's views on foreignizing and domesticating translations and on the translator's (in)visibility, and Chesterman's prototypical approach.

Topics include the ethics of translating for children, the importance of child(hood) images, the 'revelation' of the translator in prefaces, the role of translated children's books in the establishment of literary canons, the status of translations in the former East Germany; questions of taboo and censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in different translations of a Swedish children's classic, the handling of 'cultural intertextuality' in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions, functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the dual audience in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Dual Readership and Hidden Subtexts in Children’s Literature

The Case of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’

METTE RUDVIN & FRANCESCA ORLATI¹

University of Bologna, Italy

Abstract. This paper investigates the translations of Salman Rushdie’s children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) into Italian and Norwegian. As Rushdie’s first book after the publication of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa pronounced against him by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, it was initially presented as an ‘unthreatening children’s book’ despite its politically potent subtext. Thanks to the ambivalent status of its dual target readership and the metaphorical structuring of the attack on censorship, the text managed to communicate with its readership, bypassing the censors. This paper examines the strategies used by the translators to solve textual and subtextual translational challenges and discusses how they influence the text’s more oblique political subtext. It also examines how the translators address the characteristically Rushdian technique of the ‘literalization of metaphor’. Given that translators’ strategies mirror the societal, literary and publishing norms of the target culture, a series of interesting translation issues emerge here: the micro-structural co-ordination of culture specificities, the macro-structural marketing policies dictating the translating strategies of the political subtext through metaphor, the positioning of the target reader as child or adult, and the place of translators and translations within the literary polysystem and the wider social system.

Part One

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (hereafter Haroun) was the first book Salman Rushdie published after he went into hiding² subsequent to the fatwa pronounced against him in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988).³ Readers will no doubt be familiar with the hostile reception of The Satanic Verses by Muslim militants and the impact it had on the book’s author as well as its publishers and translators, several of whom were wounded and/or killed. The tragic effects of the reaction to The Satanic Verses led the publishing world to exercise caution in its promotion. This paper suggests that a general mood of caution prevailed in the managing of the political subtext of Haroun, the result of which was to market it primarily as a children’s book rather than as a political commentary or attack on the fatwa episode. In fact, written and marketed as a book for children, it falls within that category described by Zohar Shavit (1986) as a text with an ‘ambivalent status’, that is a text written for (and/or received by) both adults and children at various textual levels of both production and reception.⁴ This book’s multi-layered structure is richer than even most ‘ambivalent texts’: presented as an unthreatening ‘children’s book’ (children and children’s literature being at the margins of the establishment and of its polysystem), its politically potent subtext is easily overlooked. The metaphorical structuring of the attack on censorship coupled with the ambivalent status of the target reader (child/adult) allows the text to communicate with readers behind the censors’ backs.

In a perceptive essay on the role of censorship in Haroun, Mina Chandran (2002) reminds us of Jorge Luis Borges’s comment that “censorship is the mother of metaphor”, a comment particularly pertinent to the text at issue not only because of its metaphorical structuring of the attack on censorship, but also because of the ambivalent status of its target reader child/adult. Although critics in academia and the more sophisticated literary journalists soon began to show an interest in and to appreciate and address its political subtext for an adult readership, the book initially received scant attention on the international publisher’s market, despite the fame (and at that time notoriety) of its author. Indeed, that very lack of attention – especially given the circumstances and despite the excellent reviews by several leading critics – is indicative of the low prestige accorded to children’s literature generally.

A brief description of the book

Haroun is an exciting adventure story for children, a good yarn drawing on literary traditions spanning millennia in their intertextual allusions (from Persian literature and The Arabian Nights to The Wizard of Oz)⁵ and spanning vast geographical territories (from Iran to the Isis in Alice’s Oxford), but at the same time following a time-honoured fairy tale structure. It tells the adventure of the boy-hero Haroun and his quest to save his storytelling father (Rashid/Rushdie) who has lost his ability to tell stories as the result of a psychological trauma: his mother’s elopement with the story-hostile neighbour. At this primary level it has much in common with so many of the children’s literature classics – it is the story of a child, told to a child (in Rushdie’s case to his son) following the tradition of Lewis, Milne, Barry, Kipling and Kingsley in a re-evocation of a childhood realm of fantasy and idyll. It is a story about the healing nature and ability of childhood and children; and it is the story of a child’s development and maturation subsequent to a crisis by traversing, psychologically and spatially, a series of obstacles and vicissitudes.

The plot of Haroun could be summarized as follows: In the sad city of Alifbay (the Hindi- Urdu word for ‘the alphabet’) lives our hero Haroun with his father Rashid, a famous storyteller. One day Haroun’s mother Soraya runs off with their sourpuss neighbour Mr. Sengupta who doesn’t approve of Rashid’s prolific story-producing imagination. Haroun, angry with his father for not preventing the tragedy, asks “what’s the use of stories that aren’t true?!”. From that moment, Rashid loses his gift for story telling and is struck dumb during his next public appearance at Dull Lake (clearly a mimetic symbol of the famously beautiful Dal Lake in Sringar, Kashmir). Lodged on a houseboat on the Lake, Haroun is joined by a series of mythical creatures (Iff the onion-like water Genie, Butt the Hoopoe, Mali the vegetable-like gardener, the Plentimaw fishes) and embarks on an adventure to save his father’s storytelling abilities. Even more ambitiously he aims to save the Sea of Stories, the source of all narrative, from the dangerous scheming of Khattam Shud (meaning ‘finished’) and his men, whose malevolent project of destruction is to poison the sea of stories and destroy narrative, fiction and imagination for ever, imposing on the world a reign of terror and silence. Haroun and his father are aided in their quest by the mythical creatures of Gup City (Gupshup means ‘gossip’), a world of eternal sunlight and speech ruled by King Chattergy and his son Prince Bolo (which means ‘speak!’) and aided by General Kitab (meaning ‘book’). Gup City is thus the binary opposition to Khattam Shud’s reign of darkness and silence. Although clearly following the structure of a children’s text and in part an elaborative fairy tale, the repertoire of narrative strategies employed in Haroun evokes the magical realism of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s literary breakthrough. Eric Yu describes Haroun as basically “a fairytale for children, with a sci-fi touch” and notes that it includes the main components of the European wonder-tale, (using Jack Zipes’ analytical framework): “the lack of concrete, real temporal and geographical references, the presence of supernatural powers and magical agents, relatively straightforward characterization in diametrical opposition of good versus evil, and above all, the happy ending” (Yu 2001).⁶ With its Kafkian undertones in the Land of Chup (‘silence’), the shadows and the shadow warrior, and with the sophisticated intertextuality, the book also appeals to adult readers as a story as well as a political critique.

The ambivalent target

As David Galef notes in ‘Crossing Over: Authors Who Write Both Children’s and Adult’s Fiction’, there are three broad categories of writers who write for both adults and children, and with Haroun Rushdie falls (albeit not squarely) into the first, most frequent category: writers of adult fiction who take up children’s literature in mid-career, the impetus often being the birth and/or growth of their first child (Galef 1995:29). Not ‘squarely’ for several reasons: firstly it is to date Rushdie’s only children’s book and as such is not a career-turn; secondly because the subtext of this particular book seems to be aimed at a specific event in the writer’s life. It holds therefore an even more peculiar status in the interface of adult-child readership than most so-called cross-over writing. In terms of language complexity it seems to address a juvenile audience, roughly the age of the son to whom the book was dedicated. Perhaps one could also relate the theme of crossover writing to Rushdie’s meta-commentary on dialogue and the reintegration of binary opposites. As Teverson (2001) says, “In a tale that is largely about oppositions – between fantasy and reality, between child and adult, between good and bad – Rushdie is being careful to suggest that there can be dialogue and crossover between categories”. The genre cross-over inherent in the text could also be read then as ‘dialogue’, as parallel texts functioning reciprocally, symbiotically generating meaning concomitantly rather than separately. By functioning synchronically each of the elements feeds into and enriches the other – adult literature is being enriched by children’s literature and vice versa.

Language in Haroun: for children or adults?

Clearly, the language in Haroun is more indicative of a juvenile readership than an adult readership. Although Peter Hunt (1991) is quick to note that any definition or classification of children’s literature is condemned from the outset to over-simplification and over-generalization, he provides us with a useful list of typical (perhaps stereotypical) characteristics of the language and style of children’s literature which, for what concerns language and structure, could be summarized as follows: child-orientedness, simplicity, easy structure, a narrow range of grammatical and lexical patterns, simple lexis and register, standard set phrases, words from everyday life, repetitions, short texts and sentences (see Hunt 1991:62). Other traits considered typical of literature for children are that dialogue and incident are more prevalent than description, introspection or thought; the concrete is privileged over the abstract, the indeterminate or the ambiguous; the pace of the plot is fast rather than slow; and movement and action prevail over stasis, inaction or reflection. Haroun respects these norms both at the primary level of plot, and at the various sub-levels as a dream or as reflection employing a child-like range of lexis and grammatical structures, especially in the narrator’s and the main protagonist’s voice. In terms of the use of standard set phrases and idioms rather than experimental language, Haroun operates on both levels: the simplicity of register and lexis is belied by the originality and creativity in the plot and by a varied range of speech patterns employed by the members of the cast. Haroun fits quite comfortably into the children’s book model described above in terms of language, except perhaps for the extreme and complex playfulness found in the punning and the ‘literalization of metaphor’ technique (much like the linguistic playfulness of Carroll). Conventions are freely used, both linguistic, literary and social conventions, but at the same time are playfully subverted and twisted. The language is fertile, vivid, alive, and new words appear as the characters make them up. The language is eternally playful, appealing to children directly and to adults for its multi-layering and subtexts manifested in that very playfulness, also through the pregnant allusions in names and place-names. The nonsensical element in language, content and the continuous allusion to ‘gup/nonsense’ also upholds the children’s book ambience in the tradition of Alice and Lear. Further strengthening the ‘power of nonsense’ is the abundance of fantasy creatures such as the Plentimaw fishes, Goopy and Bagha, all speaking interactively in verse.

Typical children’s literature motifs and traits at the level of content would be lack of historical detail or context (a timeless setting); lack of technical or specific details; clear-cut moral schematism, an optimistic rather than depressive outlook; certainty rather than probability; the prevalence of magic-fantasy-simplicity-adventure; themes such as childhood, friendship, familial relationships, maturation processes; avoidance of themes such as death, violence, sex, horror, disease, war, controversial social norms, alcohol and swear words. All of these apply to Haroun. Hunt also notes the common (erroneous) assumption that quality literature with high levels of complexity in form and content is incompatible with literature targeted for children, bringing us to the heart of the discussion of dual readerships: how can a text that follows the structures of children’s language appeal to adults and vice versa? How can a ‘real’ children’s text function as an effective and powerful critique of the adult world – on the adults’ own premises and according to their parameters and literary norms? Like Carroll and Swift, Rushdie resorts to irony, allusion, metaphor, intertextuality and ‘hidden’ adult subtexts to create, successfully, this double target. At the level of content, then, Haroun successfully caters to a dual readership. It will be interesting then to investigate how this duality is expressed in the various target texts in Part Two below.

The theme of Imagination

One of the key subtexts of the book, closely interwoven with its political message, is that of the writer’s Imagination. It might ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• The Translator Revealed: Didacticism, Cultural Mediation and Visions of the Child Reader in Translators’ Prefaces
• Why Does Children’s Literature Need Translations?
• No Innocent Act: On the Ethics of Translating for Children
• Flying High – Translation of Children’s Literature in East Germany
• From Breaktime to Postcards: How Aidan Chambers Goes (Or Does Not Go) Dutch
• A Prototypical Approach within Descriptive Translation Studies? Colliding Norms in Translated Children’s Literature
• Translating Cultural Intertextuality in Children’s Literature
• Translating Cultural References: The Language of Young People in Literary Texts
• Character Names in Translation: A Functional Approach
• Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in Translation
• Dual Readership and Hidden Subtexts in Children’s Literature: The Case of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• List of Contributors
• Index