Other tongues

Translated books give us intimate access to other lives, other cultures and different perspectives, says children's book translator Sarah Adams
  • The Guardian,

In 1982, I was moody and 12 years old. That same year, L'Oeil du Loup - a startingly crafted fable about a boy called Africa and a wolf from the Barren Lands of Alaska, by the maverick writer Daniel Pennac - was published in France. It's the kind of tale that lodges in your brain, and it hasn't been out of print since its first publication. Pennac's oeuvre, meanwhile, has been translated into more than 30 languages - the English translation of Eye of The Wolf was its 32nd. I should know. I translated it.

So why the wait? Why did it take 20 years for a masterpiece on the theme of displacement to reach our shores? Eye of the Wolf (Walker Books) has what's called universal appeal. But let's call a spade a spade, or - as the French say - a cat a cat. This is resolutely not "world literature-lite". It offers no ghastly "global village" experience, and refuses to bash out recycled clichés about somewhere else. What it does do is take an animal whose visual vocabulary is rooted in snow and mountains, a boy whose ability to paint pictures in words has been etched by the desert sand, and it pits them against one another. Suspense lies in the search for dialogue. Through the wire mesh of a city zoo cage, these two wanderers meet each other through the power of stories as they flex that muscle called the imagination. Quite simply, their story is their passport.

As if these weren't compelling enough reasons to publish it, Eye of the Wolf was piloted this year on the Reading Differences project, a scheme launched by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and the Qualifications & Curriculum Authority, to put teachers and children in touch with challenging books from around the world. But why do so many foreign books become "lost in translation"?

Pennac likes to quote the wily aphorism of his editor at Gallimard: "It's easier to persuade the Japanese to buy a French car than it is to sell a French novel to the English." Approximately 40% of books published on the Continent are translated, as opposed to about 4% in the UK.

In excess of 300 languages are now estimated to be spoken in London alone. The rise of world music (that baggy, hold-all term) means we don't bat an eyelid at tuning into lyrics from across the globe, while subtitled and multilingual cinema as well as sur-titled theatre are increasingly accessible. There is a whole world out there gasping to be interpreted, and you could argue that books are our most direct fix. In A Whole World (Milet Publishing), Katy Couprie and Antonin Louchard capture this process of making sense and finding connections, which for me is the starting point of all translation.

I tend to explain the peculiar literary ventriloquism of my craft in terms of finding the right voice: I'm a parrot, a bridge-builder, an undertaker, a midwife and an editor all rolled into one. I'm bent on bringing original words back to life in a new context, owning them to some extent and backing off again, making them real and familiar without diluting where they've come from. In my translation of Just Like Tomorrow by Faïza Guène (a young woman born in the Paris suburbs to Algerian parents), I was trying to find a parallel for French/Arabic backslang in British urban street slang, with its roots in, say, Jamaican patois and "Benglish." Without substituting one immigrant culture for another, my job was to tap into expressions of humour, anger and frustration. It's an exhilarating journey that's taken me from the slangstas of Live Magazine in Brixton to the heart of the Algerian community in Marseille.

As I write, I am surrounded by a pile of extraordinary books that have recently given me - through the prism of translation - intimate access to different voices and perspectives. Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis (Jonathan Cape) about growing up in Iran is still groundbreaking, while Baghdad teenager Thura Al-Windawi's Diary (Puffin), written during the Allied invasion, contrasts well with Valerie Zenatti's memoir of her time in the Israeli army, When I was a Soldier (Bloomsbury). Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's tear-jerking account of a boy with leukemia and 11 days to live (Oscar and the Lady in Pink, Atlantic) resonates with Guus Kuijer's The Book of Everything, (Young Picador) which articulates, in John Nieuwenhuizen's dextrously naïve translation, the pain of a little boy putting a stop to his father's violence as Holland shakes off the bullying residue of the Nazis. Bigotry, scapegoats and corporate greed are wonderfully satirised by Greek author Eugene Trivizas in The Last Black Cat (Egmont). Closer to home and further away too, the Gond tribal art in Bhajju Sshyam's The London Jungle Book (translated from the oral by Sirish Rao and Gita Wolf for Tara Publishing) has lent me eyes to see London anew.

The ever-lithe form of the fairytale is currently driven by the double-offensive of lean translations and dynamic illustrators such as Pablo Bernasconi's Argentine offering The Wizard, The Ugly and the Book of Shame (Bloomsbury), or Sara Fanelli's fabulously ludic Pinocchio as retold by Emma Rose (Walker Books). As notable is Anthea Bell's close translation of Rapunzel and other Magic Fairy Tales (Egmont) - did you know that "rapunzel" is German for a variety of plants including lambs lettuce? There is coming of age with a vengeance in Andreas Steinhöfel's Centre of my World (although publisher Andersen Press only credit translator Alisa Jaffa on the copyright page - part of a worrying US trend to disguise the fact that translated books have emerged from another language). On a more positive note, picture book publisher Winged Chariot offers web downloads of authors reading in the original version on titles such as Sweets (Dutch) and The Moon Has Written You a Poem (Portuguese).

A fine starting place for a healthy overview of such titles is Outside In, a guide to children's books in translation. Published in 2005 by Milet, it's the first of its kind (Outside In 2 is now in the making). And possibly of much more use than any comprehensive Japanese guide to French cars.

· Sarah Adams is the current holder of the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation

A passport to the rest of the world

The vocabulary of difference is all around us. Immigration has been one of the watchwords of recent months. "Faith schools" are high on the public agenda, while the government has set up a Commission for Integration and Cohesion. For some, such as Trevor Phillips at the Commission for Racial Equality, we risk "sleepwalking into segregation".

As someone brought up in Northern Ireland, one of Europe's more segregated societies, I have some idea of the dangers of social demarcation; the sense of uneasy otherness engendered by segregation; the notion of difference, of inequality, of separateness. I have watched people lead lives of polite wariness at best; the cemeteries are testimony to what happens at worst.

What has this to do with children's literature in translation? Quite simply, at Arts Council England we are acutely aware that the need to understand cultures other than our own has never been more urgent. One route to such empathy is through literature, the pleasure of reading books that invite us into other lives, other worlds. Children make no distinctions; they are open to difference; for them, a story is a story is a story, whether set in Derry or Darfur. We owe it to them to make the literature of the world their literature. The Arts Council's support for translation can help make this happen, enabling publishers to offer young readers the beginnings of understanding.

Gary McKeone, Literature director, Arts Council England

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