April to June 2021: Childhood — Books for or about children in different cultures around the world

Please stand by while Cindydavid4 sets up our new quarterly theme....

      

      

This is my first theme here, so Im a little nervous. Wanted to show you what I am thinking of, but very much want to know your thougts on books on the subject.

In the meanwhile, to whet your appetite, heres a list of books put together by members of Reading Globally. Feel free to add other works you think might be of interest.

So when I was nine, I went to Disneyland with a children’s group. Lots of good memories from that trip, but the best part of it was insisting we go ‘just one more time’ on the “ It’s a Small World After All “ ride. I wish I could apologize to the staff; I suspect that song was an earworm for the rest of the trip…

That began my love of all things global, and interest in lives of children all over the world. When it was time to pick a theme, I didn’t have to think long before I chose. While I’m sure the topic was part of many themes over the years, I didn’t see a theme dedicated to them. So, here we are!

The focus of this theme are books written for or about children to give a picture of children growing up in a particular culture or time period, written preferably from someone in that culture though not mandatory. This focus is subject to change without notice and according to whim of members.

See this list for books added by members of Reading Globally as suggestions for this quarter’s theme. Feel free to add any you think would be helpful

Childhood bookos for or about children in different cultures around the world

Other links include

Exploring Diversity https://coloursofus.com/25-multicultural-books-about-children-around-the-world

Children's Literature: https://www.librarything.com/groups/childrensliterature

Children's Fiction: https://www.librarything.com/groups/childrensfiction

Books in translation, issues in translation
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/translation/search/index.html

Please feel free to add any others along the way

How long is childhood anyway?. In Anglophone countries, think of ‘coming of age’ around 18-21 (depending on the drinking laws in the state) There are communities with a different take: Jewish children are Bar/Bat Mizvhad at 13, girls in Latin communities have Quinceañeras at 15 How do different countries/cultures/communities define childhood, when do they consider a child ‘coming of age?’

For our purposes I am considering childhood from birth to 18. If some YA reads come in to play all the better. I divided the examples between books written for kids and books written about kids generally for adults but not nec

Book for kids

Childrens Literature (or kiddie lit as my prof called it) Book suggestions can be found in the links above

- classics in their own countries

- fairy tales, legends, myths

-books written for children in a variety of genres – sci fi, mystery, fantasy etc.

-folk tales

-books from different eras

-picture books, chapter books

-coming of age books for older kids

-books in translation

-teaching children about diversity

-non fiction reads on science, mathematics, history, biography, the arts….

About Kids but not for kids

-memoirs Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds

-travel Heidi's Alp: One Family's Search for Storybook Europe

-history Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life

-Coming of age There There

-Children In war, Child Soldiers A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldierby Ishmael Beah

-Reads in Translation

add you wish

We have till the end of June - Happy Reading

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For more inspiration, there's an entire blog dedicated to the topic of children's literature in (English) translation: https://worldkidlit.wordpress.com/

!!!!!Wow just perfect! Another rabbit hole I can fall into (and I thank you for it!) Noticed several interviews and books about authors as well.

However stuff like this drive me up a tree.

M: The title of the US edition was The Bird in Me FliesOriginaly the bird within me Do you know why this title was used, rather than the UK one, and were there any other differences between the US and UK versions?

BJE: There are some small differences between the two editions (mum/dad versus mama/papa, for example). I think in most cases it was a matter of considering audience expectations, and in some cases it was simply about editorial preference.

I learned rather early that there are different words for the same thing. I learnedc what ema and aba meant, and handled other such words with little problem. Why do this? Kids are not dumb

That being said the interview really focuses on issues in translation and I enjoyed reading it. i

I'd recommend Nancy Pearl's Book Crush for further ideas.

The list is good but I don't think they include any that are not in English.

I had a kind of false start for this theme by reading Martin Walser's Die Verteidigung der Kindheit ("the defence of childhood"), which had spent seven years on my TBR shelf. It turned out not really to be about childhood at all, more about a central character who gets stuck in a kind of false childhood in adult life.

The next one was a bit more on-topic:

Austrian writer Brigitte Schwaiger was best known for her first novel, Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer?, which was a huge best-seller in the late seventies and is also sitting on my TBR shelf.

Mein spanisches Dorf (1978) by Brigitte Schwaiger (Austria, 1949-2010)

  

The short prose pieces, parodies, monologues (and a couple of poems) in this collection are all drawn from the author's childhood experiences as a doctor's daughter in the small community of Freistadt in Upper Austria, the "Spanish village" of the title. "It's a Spanish village to me" is a proverbial German expression for something puzzling and unintelligible, a variant of the more common "Bohemian village", which wouldn't fit very well here, Freistadt being on the Czech border. And it's also a personal joke, since Schwaiger lived in Spain for some years with her first husband before returning to Austria. However strange Spain may have been, when she looks back, the Austrian village where she grew up is stranger.

The book divides roughly into three equal parts: in the first part, the viewpoint is that of a naive young child, looking at the adult world with a critical and unprejudiced eye, and of course putting her finger on precisely the thing the adults don't want her to notice. She teases her parents for their snobbery and the nuns at school for their blinkered view of the world, conspires with domestic servants and causes trouble with the future bad-girl of the village. In the second part, the narrator is an adolescent confiding to her diary her secret (and sometimes embarrassingly-public) adoration for various boys who don't appear to be interested, whilst avoiding other boys who do. And in the third part the viewpoint switches around between all sorts of narrators: neighbours, dogs, members of the author's family, and occasionally the grown-up author herself, looking back. In one piece she even adopts the voice of her own ex-husband, answering criticism of her previous book.

There's a lot of fun with dialect and rustic comedy, but there's often a hard core of social criticism under the knockabout stuff: the legacies of the Nazi period and the war are still there in the village, of course, the place is full of men who haven't woken up to the sexual revolution, and there are new forms of hypocrisy and intolerance to deal with as well as the old ones. It's not exactly Elfriede Jelinek, but it's not without its bite, all the same.

>13 thorold: It turned out not really to be about childhood at all, more about a central character who gets stuck in a kind of false childhood in adult life.

Have read about lots of similar characters - used to be called the Peter Pan syndrome, never growing up. And some became writers of childrens books!

A while back I read The Beauty of Humanity movement* by Camilla Gibb, about a young adult vietnamese american going back to see if she can find what happened to her father. Not a book about children, but it lead me recently to another book Inside Out and Back Again Told in verse, story of a young girl from Vietnam who becomes, along with her family, one of the boat people we learned about after the fall of Saigon. She uses few words to conjure up memories of her life there, of her father, gone missing, her travel to US and growing up in Alabama of all places. Her isolation and her longing are palapable and I ached for what she was going through, what all refugees go through. Its written for children, that doesn't shy away from very serious issues.

*This book lead me to find out just what this Pho was all about. Enjoyed several visits to some of the many Vietnamese in the valley, and was hooked.

The Martin Walser book did have the positive effect of reminding me that there was someone else very relevant to this theme who came from Dresden and had a peculiarly close relationship with his mother. Emil und die Detektive was one of my absolute favourite books a long time ago, as were Das fliegende Klassenzimmer and the wonderfully surreal Der 35. Mai, probably the best book ever written about a roller-skating horse.

The first of these is a re-read of an old favourite I probably haven't looked at since I was about 12; the second a recent anthology that was part of the German books avalanche that hit my TBR shelf last month:

Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (1957; When I was a little boy) by Erich Kästner (Germany, 1899-1974), illustrated by Horst Lemke
Kästner im Schnee : Geschichten, Gedichte, Briefe (2009) by Erich Kästner (Germany, 1899-1974), edited by Sylvia List

   

The shelves of the world's libraries are groaning with childhood memoirs of the great and the good, but Erich Kästner is unusual in that he chose to address his main autobiographical work, describing growing up in Dresden before 1914, specifically to young readers. "Dear children and non-children" is the formula he uses to open his Foreword, and it's obvious throughout that, whilst the presence of non-children is to be tolerated, it's not exactly encouraged, and they are admitted only as long as they keep quiet and don't interrupt. They would be wise not to provoke expulsion, because there is actually at least as much in this book that is interesting for adult readers as there is for children.

As always, Kästner treats his young readers as responsible, intelligent people, with a clear, sane gaze capable of puncturing the stupidities and hypocrisies of the adult world. He doesn't shelter them from "difficult" topics: we are told about how he had to help his mother through episodes of depression when she would go missing and he would find her standing on one of the bridges over the Elbe, looking longingly at the water; about how his fear of and disgust for a brutal teacher changed to compassion when he spent time with the man outside school and realised how trapped he was in a job he wasn't fitted for; and about his reaction to returning to the destroyed city after the 1945 bombing. And we learn a lot about how class-prejudice worked in Wilhelmite Germany, about poverty and child mortality, about militarism and pacifism, about what intellectual life looks like from the perspective of a working-class child, and much more.

It's a charming, funny, period piece, and the illustrations by Horst Lemke are a delight, of course, but it certainly isn't a trivial book. Still just as interesting as it was sixty years ago.

Kästner im Schnee is a mixed bag of Kästner's writings about snow and the strange German cult of winter-sports holidays, something that he was extremely fond of, although his heart problems meant that he was mostly restricted to sitting on sunny terraces watching the skiers exert themselves. We get the snowy bits of several of his full-length books for children or adults (Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, Drei Männer im Schnee, Der Zauberlehrling), plus a couple of short stories and newspaper articles, some lyrics, and a large selection of postcards and letters written to his mother from places like Garmisch, Oberstdorf, Kitzbühel and Davos. Most of the material is from the 1930s.

There's a lot of amused observation of the complex social world of the alpine Grand-Hotel, of the odd ways city-dwellers behave on holiday in the mountains, of the ingenious ways indigenous people find to make money out of them, and so on. He's amused by the way farm-boys turn into sex-gods when they declare themselves to be ski-instructors, by the interesting sexual ambiguity of ski costume, and by the strange rules of the fancy-dress ball (the unfortunate who turns up at an "Apache Ball" in Native American dress, unaware that to the fashionable mind, an Apache is a French gangster...). And, like every observer of the winter-sport theme before and since, he jokes about the prevalence of broken legs and bemoans the way mass tourism is ruining the mountains. Not that that stops him boasting (for the censor's benefit) about finding himself lunching at the next table to Reichsführer Rudolf Hess and friends. I imagine his mother would have been able to guess how he really felt about that.

This is a nicely-produced book, issued by Kästner's long-standing Swiss publishers and helpfully annotated by Sylvia List, but about half the book is taken up by the long extracts from the three full-length books, which most people likely to pick this up will have read already, and which are probably rather frustrating if you don't know the rest of the story. The other half is either unpublished material or less well-known pieces, and it's probably worth getting the book for those. I particularly enjoyed the short story "Zwei Schüler sind verschwunden," featuring Matz and Uli from Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, which I hadn't seen before.

Those sound very interesting, any chance for an English translation?

"As always, Kästner treats his young readers as responsible, intelligent people, with a clear, sane gaze capable of puncturing the stupidities and hypocrisies of the adult world. He doesn't shelter them from "difficult" topics: whis reaction to returning to the destroyed city after the 1945 bombing."

I generally agree with this treatment of young readers, except I was one of those kids who could not handle scary stories or violence, (parents banned me for watching outer limits, coz they were tired of my screeming nightmares) Some topics are not for all children (heck, for all adults either).

People have been arguing for a long time about what topics are ok for children, Whats ironic is that 'Fairy Tales' we consider childrens literature, are very violent with difficult topics (see stories of Grimm (especially early editions Hans Christen Andersoon ), But back in the days these were written, they were for all children and adults. They were considered little adults anyway, and their real life was often just as violent as the stories. he modern notion of childhood with its own autonomy and goals began to emerge during the 18th century Enlightenment and the Romantic period that followed it. Not so long ago really.

>16 cindydavid4:
Yes, there's an English translation of Kästner's autobiography, entitled "When I Was a Little Boy" -- from 1959, and fairly scarce, it seems. There's also apparently a reprint from a British small press which might be easier to acquire.

I doubt the "snow" collection would have been translated, but many of his other novels have, sometimes more than once (there are at least two translations of Emil and the Detectives).

I agree that Kästner's children often don't seem very childlike, in the sense of free from the burdens of the adult world -- just less spoiled by its corruption and hypocracy. Apart from different cultures of childhood, some of this is probably also due to the fact that being sheltered from difficult realities wasn't a luxury that most children growing up in Germany (or Europe more generally) during and between the two World Wars would have had.

>17 spiphany: Yes. And of course “most children” for Kästner means working-class children: a lot of other children’s literature from the first half of the 20th century, especially in Britain, is for and about bourgeois kids who have time to read and whose parents have plenty of money for books.

I loved that Kästner and also all the books of his with the single mums (it's typically mums, no?) and their too-serious kids. I think he consciously shows the class differences. In Pünktchen und Anton, Anton is poor/working class with a sick mother so he does everything around the house, while Pünktchen is a rich kid. In Das doppelte Lottchen, one girl is raised by a well-to-do father but the other is in straitened circumstances with a struggling mother and also has to behave as adult beyond her years. Emil is also from a modest background (and also without a full family, raised by a grandmother).

>18 thorold:

Yeah, I think much of the charm of English children's literature lies in the fact that it's a product of an "enchanted", privileged class itself.

>18 thorold: Yes, exactly. I also suspect access to education and literacy rates would influence what was written and for who.

There are British authors who wrote about working class children of course, esp Dickens. Were those written for children, or for adults to show the conditions those children were often living during that time?

>19 LolaWalser: looking at Emil and the Detectives I happened upon The Flying Classroom which I really must read, looks like great fun! Looking for more info, found this background from Wiki

This was the last Kästner book published before the rise of the Nazis to power. Though Nazis are not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the book, the situation of economic crisis and mass unemployment which made many German voters turn to Hitler is very evident in the book's background.

Shortly after publishing Das fliegende Klassenzimmer he had to witness how the NSDAP turned to power and how his books were burned as well as those from other dissidents.

A short sequel, in which the characters visit the Winter Olympics of 1936 (held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria) was already written under the Nazi regime and was published only many years later, having less success than the original: Zwei Schüler sind verschwunden in Das Schwein beim Friseur (The Pig at the Barbershop). In it, Kästner let his characters have a friendly encounter with visiting English boys, culminating in winning their British Gold Medal, at a time when their soon meeting each other as enemy soldiers on the battlefield was already a very real possibility.

As noted by reviewer Andreas Berg, 5 in retrospect one scene of Kästner's book becomes especially poignant and painful. For the Christmas of 1932 Martin makes for his parents a drawing entitled Ten Years From Now, showing his moustached grown up self driving his parents in a carriage through a warm smiling Mediterranean landscape under orange trees. "As we know all too well, in the actual 1942 Martin would have probably been a soldier trapped in the freezing cold and harsh warfare of the Russian Eastern Front, with the parents huddling at home in fear of the Allied bombers" noted Berg.

>21 cindydavid4: Yes, that Winter Olympics story was one of the unexpected things I found in the snow anthology. Do read The Flying Classroom if you get the chance, it’s got all the classic Kästner elements, frivolous whimsy coupled with tough realism and sensitivity to social problems.

>20 cindydavid4: I don’t think Dickens ever wrote primarily for children, but he certainly expected his stuff to be read in a family situation. He is most often not writing about “real” working-class children, but about children like himself, from a respectable middle-class background, frighteningly plunged into the life of the underclass through some kind of economic disaster or conspiracy outside their control. So there’s always a bit of a question about whether that sort of life would be just as bad if it was only happening to people born into it...
Charles Kingsley is different, he obviously did intend (middle-class) children to read The water-babies and be horrified to hear about what was happening to working-class kids their own age, and persuade their parents to do something about it.

I read Little Night / Nochecita by Mexican / USian author Yuyi Morales, which is a resplendently illustrated bilingual English / Spanish children's book about Mother Sky playing hide and seek with her daughter Little Night while they get Little Night bathed, dressed, fed, and ready to go. 4*

>22 thorold: re Charles Kingsley, I have a lovely early edition illustrated by Jessica Wilcox Smith. I have to admit I purchased it for that very reason, not actually having read the book, just thought it a sweet book for children. Ok, I need to read this now. Apparently it was written as part satire in support of Charles Darwin, as well as depicting the conditions of child labor at the time. Unfortunately it seems like most children did not get the message they were supposed to tell, because most people see it as a fairy tale, forgetting that those were often satires as well, having a moral tale to tell. Its certainly related to the satire of Gullivers Travels, as well as Jonathan Swift.

>23 spiralsheep: Lovely! and thanks for getting me back on track! Lots of other children books to read.

Looking for Flying Classroom and found it on Pushkins Press. Not heard of this but they have a large children's lit catalogue

Chike and the River by China Achebe isn't at all up to the quality of the The African Trilogy, but it's worth taking a look at just for the sake of its author.

I read The African Child, aka The Dark Child, by Camara Laye, first published in French in 1954, which is an autobiographical recollection of the author's childhood in a Malinke family in Guinea (then French Guinea), and is considered a classic of Malinke and Guinean literature. The English translation is by poet James Kirkup. Clearly written and informative. 3.5*

(As this was originally published in 1954 I couldn't stop myself imagining Barbara Pym's less than angelic 1955 anthropologists reading this and getting upset because it renders their job of cultural anthropology superfluous without being sensationalist enough to elicit a grant for further research, lol.)

>23 spiralsheep:

Lovely picture.

>28 LolaWalser: Isn't it glorious? Sunset in mythic anthropomorphic form! And I love the way Mother Sky's braids as she looks down the rabbit hole echo the long jackrabbit's ears, while Little Night's hair is more like the smaller short-eared rabbits, which are presumably subtle references to the rabbit in the moon in Mexican folklore.

I read Code Name: Butterfly by Ahlam Bsharat, 2009 (English translation 2016 by Nancy N Roberts), which is a painfully honest YA story told by a young teenage Palestinian girl living in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories near Nablus. She has many questions about life which she daren't ask for cultural or political reasons so she locks them away inside herself and begins to wonder if adult humans emerge from their cocoon of childhood questions much as butterflies emerge after their own transformations.

While this book is perhaps more serious than many YA novels it's not especially solemn and the teen protagonist manages to have enough of a sense of humour to perceive the absurdities of growing up under military occupation by a foreign power.

On the family cat: "'I didn't get too upset when Wadee died,' she declared. 'After all, he's a martyr, since Abu Mansur ran him over on the way to work for the occupiers.' She tried to act as if she were fully convinced of every word she was saying and wasn't heartbroken. So she looked hilarious and miserable at the same time, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Children in Jordan: "'They don't have to carry their birth certificates with them everywhere they go to prove they're too young to have to show an ID. In Palestine, children have to prove they're children.'"

3.5*

Anyone read Arabic handwriting? The following inscription is in the front of my copy of Code Name : Butterfly. I'm assuming the last line is the date, and the penultimate line is the author's name: " أحلام بشارات "

"'They don't have to carry their birth certificates with them everywhere they go to prove they're too young to have to show an ID. In Palestine, children have to prove they're children.'"

Ohhhhh, that breaks my heart..

Just received The Flying Classroom and am eager to read it (so I have the voices of all the other books sitting unread on the shelves saying wait, its my turn what about me? sigh)

>31 cindydavid4: Sadly "children have to prove they're children" is true in many places, e.g. for Black boys in most Western countries in addition to the many children in war zones, which is as you say heartbreaking. And the irony of needing ID to prove you don't need ID is familiar from many tightly controlled societies. Human types of behaviour don't seem to vary much except in the degree between acceptable and unacceptable.

I have several potential choices on my To Read shelf for my next read: Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, The Girl Who Can, Small Country, Little Boys Come from the Stars, Wherever it is Summer, Neverending Story, or Momo. But I'm planning to read Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands next because it's also by a Palestinian author but it's a fantasy novel with references to traditional stories, which should contrast with the realism of Code Name : Butterfly.

>32 spiralsheep: Re: "In Palestine, children have to prove they're children." And "Human types of behaviour don't seem to vary much except in the degree between acceptable and unacceptable."

And now I'm reading State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang which isn't specifically about children or childhood but a key event is the indefinite detention without trial, by the British Empire in 1956, of a fifteen year old Chinese-Singaporean girl and her associates. While she's imprisoned for three years her teenage Chinese-Singaporean boyfriend is conscripted for two years of National Service in the British military, albeit willingly.

Hmm, I wonder why most of the world doesn't take British protestations about political prisoners and child soldiers seriously....

Quick, somebody post a wholesome children's book!

The Flying Classroom! (reading now)

When I started to think books for this, I did wonder about how to include works that, didn't deal with the difficult issues; even the one above does, certainly but thinking of ones that are less serious, at the same time were well written, engaging for kids, and perhaps left one with a smile, just a little. I know that those kind of books are the norm, which is why authors have become more realistic telling stories about the lives they live. But do stories for children need to be realistic to a fault or can they have some fun, a wink and a nudge? ones I thought of were funny books Phantom Tollbooth, The true story of the 3 Little Pigs Cinder Edna paperbag princess are ones that come to mind.

>32 spiralsheep: Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands sounds very interesting; Just found the English edition and i love that cover!

>35 cindydavid4: I have to say the Arabic edition of Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands does have a cover I find rather off-putting. Fortunately I saw the English translation first, lol. And I'll definitely be reading the book during the next couple of months for this RG quarter as I've saved it for this. :-)

Surprised me that my local had it, plus a few other paperbacks I wanted. So Ill be reading that for this theme as well!

>37 cindydavid4: The retail price from independent bookshops here dropped by about a third a couple of weeks after publication because so many copies sold that the wholesalers could do bulk orders!

I don't really know enough about classic Arab literature or traditional Palestinian stories to understand all the allusions but the title Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands is presumably a nod to Ibn Battuta's travelogue A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, and other works in the Rihla genre. Several of these are works that were lost or partially lost and then rediscovered, which I know will interest you because Sephardic Jewish literature has similar histories.

This theme made me think of an excellent novel I read quite a few years ago, GraceLand by Chris Abani. Here's the review I posted at the time:

GraceLand follows the exploits of a young boy named Elvis as he makes his daily way through the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. The story of his and his family's earlier years in a small town are also told through flashback. The storytelling here is very good, indeed. The scenes of street life and the lives and attitudes of characters we meet are rendered compellingly. There is more than a touch of Huck Finn in this book, although the violence and poverty are more starkly portrayed. If the protagonist is just a touch too clever and erudite to be believed for his age and social station, well, that is a small flaw in the overall scheme of things that is easily forgiven. I highly recommend this book.

One more that comes to mind is Bringing Tony Home, a collection of four novellas by Sri Lankan writer/filmaker/activist Tissa Abeysekara. Again, here is the review I posted immediately after finishing the book, several years back:

I read these four novellas one at a time over a period of a few months. The four stories represent four variations on a single theme: They're all reveries presenting an adult protagonist returning to his childhood home in search of some elusive component of his younger self. Each story is told as a pastiche of floating recollections, moving back and forth in time, often settling on the same spot several times, ultimately creating a wavering thread of longing and regret connecting the realities of adulthood and the unreachable events of the past. In most of the stories, the rural setting of childhood has been paved and built over by an intrusive modern world.

A childhood pet, a man's recollections of a strained relationship with his father, an early, regretted love and a search for the history of a beloved grandmother, long since dead, form the quadrangle of concerns that buttress the collection's recurrent themes. Another repeating theme is the way in which the lies adults tell their children help erode our feelings of trust and security at an early age, and represent to the child a far greater betrayal then most adults ever suspect.

The stories are all good, but I'm glad I didn't read them all straight through, as I believe they would have come to seem repetitive. The title story, about a man's sorrowful memories of the dog he owned as a young boy, is by far the strongest. It's really quite a jewel. But it doesn't help the rest of the collection that this story is presented first.

All in all, I am left with the feeling that there is a lot of insight and beauty here.

>38 spiralsheep: but the title Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands is presumably a nod to Ibn Battuta's travelogue A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling*

that is what I was expecting, and was thinking the letters were of a much older date. But into the story Im not sure who has written the letters and when. It feels much more recent ,not modern, but the letters are called as impt as the Dead Sea Scrolls, soo. (.got to see those at the Israeli Museum and 25 years later years San Fransisco when so much more has been discovered. Fascinating stuff) I probably will discover answers the more I get into it.

I know a bit of Arabic lit just by osmosis reading travelogues of those who visited those places, would like to learn more.

And yes to Sephardic lit; I listen to Sunday Baroque on NPR, and last week they had selections from Sephardic Songs an Anthology by La Rondinella, a DC group that performed early music from Spain, England, Scotland and Italy, but took an interest in Sephardic song. Realized that might be just the music background while reading this book.

*I always was very interested in Marco Polo, and I became very interested in Ibn Battuta, after reading Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah a collection of books where the author explores his journey as a fascinating travelogue Have read some of his writings as well

I'm still reading Wondrous Journeys but needed a smaller book to carry around with me yesterday so....

I read Wherever it is Summer by Tamara Bach, which is a young adult novel about two teenage girls in Germany and What They Did On Their Holidays. I can't judge the original German story or writing because it has been let down by the English translation.

The two languages are close enough that near verbatim translation works fine for most conversation and basic description but as soon as a character has deeper thoughts, especially if expressing those thoughts involves more complex grammar and style, then the result ranges from clunky to indecipherable. There's a note at the end which sounds like the translator keen to tell us something: "She (Tamara Bach) speaks super English and was a huge help to the translator." Hmm.

I feel mean quoting one of less good bits but I want to give an example of the effect I described above and I'm doing the author the favour of assuming it read better than this in the original German:

"HOW IT STARTED maybe can't be said at all after the event, but when - that I do know, because I wondered, because it was just before the holidays."

So, although the nostalgia was fun and the characters of the two non-conforming teens were good company for a few hours, I wanted to like and enjoy this as a novel more than I did.

2.5*

Warning for repeated discussion of suicide (this is not a spoiler as it happened before the book begins).

>42 spiralsheep:: There's a note at the end which sounds like the translator keen to tell us something: "She (Tamara Bach) speaks super English and was a huge help to the translator." Hmm.

Oh, dear. Hard to say exactly what went on behind the scenes, but the comment elicits vivid memories of a few scholars I've worked with who stubbornly insisted on "improving" my translations...
If it's an indirect hint at author-translator tensions, it doesn't really speak to the professionalism of the translator, however. If my name is going to appear on a translation, it's my responsibility to ensure that it reflects the quality of my work. If for whatever reason I'm unhappy with the final version but don't have a say in what gets published, then my name isn't going on the translation.

>43 spiphany: I'm not sure there's enough German lit to English lit translation work in Ireland for an anglophone Irish translator to be picky. Most German to English work is done by Brits and USians. However, in this case the translator is professionally an author and editor who also translates. I haven't seen any of her other work though.

I just thought I should mention the comment about working with the author because it seemed telling.

ETA: the German original doesn't seem to be rated that well on goodreads either at 3.33* :

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13491805-was-vom-sommer-brig-ist

>44 spiralsheep: Being picky is a luxury I imagine few literary translators can afford, regardless of their geopolitical situation. It's hard to make a living doing literary translation, period, and lot of literary translators have other jobs.
But being professional isn't the same as being picky. If an unreadable translation is published with my name on it -- whatever the reason -- I'm not doing myself any favors or improving my chances of getting future work. (This is a general comment: I haven't read the book in question either in German or the translation, so I can't really comment on the case at hand.)

>45 spiphany: "Being picky is a luxury I imagine few literary translators can afford, regardless of their geopolitical situation.

And? You just said you are picky. And I was commenting about a geopolitical situation that can't be disregarded as I pointed out: "I'm not sure there's enough German lit to English lit translation work in Ireland for an anglophone Irish translator to be picky. Most German to English work is done by Brits and USians."

spiphany: "But being professional isn't the same as being picky."

I don't share your highly personal linguistic definitions. Nor do you speak for translators generally, lol.

spiphany: "If an unreadable translation is published with my name on it -- whatever the reason -- I'm not doing myself any favors or improving my chances of getting future work."

Unless its work with a client who values control over readability, which isn't as rare as one might hope.

spiphany: "I haven't read the book in question either in German or the translation, so I can't really comment on the case at hand."

I certainly agree with you on this point.

Another German book that is sort-of related to the topic. This came up in my ongoing random voyage through East-German classics of the sixties:

Pause für Wanzka : oder, Die Reise nach Descansar : Roman (1968) by Alfred Wellm (DDR, 1927-2001)

  

There's a full review over on my CR thread or on the book page, what's relevant for this discussion is that it's a novel about whether schools should be focussed on the needs of society as a whole — efficient, smooth-running skill-factories for producing good citizens — or be more child-centred places where learning can be fun and children can develop their own gifts and interests in an atmosphere free from the tyranny of tests and schedules. The story is about a dedicated teacher, Gustav Wanzka, who discovers a boy who seems to be an extraordinary maths prodigy — a potential "second Einstein" — but is otherwise, as Einstein himself seems to have been, not a very good student. By working with young Norbert to develop his talents, Wanzka gets into conflict with his colleagues and their ideas of how a school should be run.

Obviously a book that came out of the peculiar combination of Prussian authoritarianism and socialist collectivism that marked the DDR education system, but in more general terms it addresses a question that's still quite relevant today.

>42 spiralsheep: - >46 spiralsheep: You can see the opening pages of the German text on Amazon's "look inside" thing — it seems to be written in short, jerky idiomatic phrases, more like notes than continuous prose, so I can imagine that it would be difficult to capture the same tone in translation without making it seem unnatural.

I'm not a translator, but I have plenty of experience of trying to edit texts written by people who "speak super English and are a huge help". They are the worst! Much better to work with people who know what they wanted to say, but realise that they don't know the best way to express it in English.

>46 spiralsheep: Picky would be saying, I will only agree to take on jobs that I like, or authors I agree with, or businesses whose ethics I approve of. That is very different than professionalism -- for example, not taking on jobs I am not qualified to do, or refusing rates of only a few cents per page, or pointing out problems during translation or when reviewing the translation after it's been edited.

Ensuring that my name is not attached to a published text that doesn't meet my standards for reasons beyond my control is also professionalism. I may not always have control over what happens to a text after I translate it -- this is common in technical translation, and in a lot of the work I do -- but I do at a very minimum have control over how or whether my name is used in connection with that text. This matters professionally because others might use it to decide whether I am a suitable translator for their project, and a text that is unreadable or otherwise unrepresentative of my work isn't going to give them an accurate idea of my skill.

My point was: if the translator's comment was meant as an indirect way of hinting that "I wouldn't have translated it this way, but the author had other ideas" (perhaps this wasn't her intended meaning, who knows), it doesn't strike me as a particularly professional or productive way of handling the problem. (Edit: I mean, even with stubborn authors I've generally found that it is possible to negotiate some kind of mutually acceptable solution, and it's also in the interest of publishers to avoid situations where their readers criticize translations as sounding unnatural, so there are also a lot of things that would have to go wrong before reaching a point of such irreconcilable differences between author and translator that would motivate a snarky comment of this type. And at such a point I personally would choose a different response -- such as remaining anonymous -- rather than calling attention to the conflict.)

(Edit 2: My impression is that getting literary translation work is often very heavily dependent on having the right contacts. In that respect I don't see that an Irish translator would necessarily be at substantially more of a disadvantage than anyone else merely on the basis of their nationality, except insofar as location may correlate with access to important networks -- a translator in, say, Anchorage isn't automatically going to be at an advantage compared to one in Dublin. I'm happy to be corrected about any of this if I'm mistaken or if my experiences are atypical, but I would appreciate some explanation of the reasoning behind that claim rather than simply being told that my comments are surely not representative.)

And regarding credit for translators, in literary and academic translation the opposite scenario is actually reasonably likely: not getting credited appropriately in the first place. I think this is changing a bit and it's becoming more common to at least include the translator on the title page if not on the cover, but I've read plenty of books where the translator was only credited at most on the copyright page.

...and now that I'm not supposed to be doing actual work and can take the time to look at the Amazon previews for both the German book and the translation, I wouldn't say the translation is terrible, though I also don't think it entirely does justice to the book. It also doesn't read like a text that has been "disimproved" by a German speaker who thinks their English is much better than it is.

There are some bits which don't sound totally natural to my American ear and a few places where I don't think the sentence structure captures the right emphasis. There are some uneven bits ("meanwhile" isn't a great translation for "inzwischen", and I don't know why "hard skin" was preferred to "callus" for "Hornhaut", and "aufschrecken" is "startle" but never "shock", at least in my dialect). But the main issue may be that it's a style that works well in German but is difficult to capture in English.

Also, the Kindle version sometimes departs from the paragraphing and the punctuation of the German in ways that don't make sense in terms of translation decisions.

>48 thorold: I never use Look Inside and had forgotten it exists so thank you for that suggestion. It's going to be very useful for comparisons.

The style of Wherever it is Summer seems intended to be more like thought than speech, with broken idiomatic sentences ("who is going to ask if you have or haven't got a driving licence? Not! A! Soul!") and much repetition ("and then there's all this thanks-thanks-thanks"), and in one chapter the two girls are sharing the same point of view and their thoughts are mixed together, and I believe this would have worked better in the English translation with a little more effort because our teens do express themselves in similar ways and the above two examples work for me.

>1 thorold: I've just seen the following two young adult novels from Brazil in English translation, although I haven't read them, but I'll mention them on Reading Globally because they'd fit the current theme of books for or about children, the next quarterly theme of Portuguese literature, AND the translation prizewinners theme at the end of the year, and they both have good ratings on goodreads where they have more reviews.

Here the Whole Time by Vitor Martins

Where We Go From Here by Lucas Rocha

I read Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, by Sonia Nimr, which is a novel aimed at young adult readers that was originally written in Arabic then translated into English. It was billed to me as a fantasy but it's more a travel themed (historical) adventure novel.

The title is presumably a nod to Ibn Battuta's travelogue A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, and other works in the Rihla genre, although the protagonist of this story appears to be nominally Christian.

The book begins with a framing story about some rediscovered documents, which tell a story, in which people read books and tell stories... oh, and the narrator is a self-confessed liar... all by page 43, but none of this is difficult to read or keep track of because the stories are all interesting and held my attention.

The loudest theme of this book is dislocation, whether external dis-location by choice through travel or by being forced to move on (e.g. towards enslavement or away from an insoluble problem) or internal dislocation caused by loss and grief.

The quieter theme is subtle feminism, not only woman rescues herself, but also woman is befriended by woman, and woman is rescued by woman, and woman rescues man, and woman has foolish first love (crush actually as nothing comes of it, thank goodness!) but then has second love with man who respects her, woman marries man who respects her and their daughter, woman raises daughter as a whole person (valued as an individual, and educated as a member of her class unrestricted by gender), and woman had a good relationship with her own mother and father, and woman rescues other people using the doctoring skills taught to her by her mother, and woman also sometimes has to deal with the ill-will of fellow women. And woman can pretend to be a man in the eyes of her society and do everything a man could do (not every man, of course, but any one man). And all this is woman-centred but not man-excluding.

But I don't want to pick the themes apart any further and lose the subtlety woven into the storytelling. This isn't my preferred type of novel but it is a well constructed and dramatic traveller's tale within the historical adventure genre. 4*

I think I would have liked it much better if there was not the whole bit about the letters, since they are never brought up again, or explained. But otherwise it was a good book and enjoyed her travels.

>53 cindydavid4: I think there was supposed to a running theme of lost and found. So the documents in the jar at the beginning were a message in a bottle from the past: either the story Qamar/Ajeeba wrote towards the end while she was in the Maldives or a copy of that text. Also the reoccurrence of a book within a book: the fictitious Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands of which there were supposedly only five copies and Qamar read/owned at least ?three? of them at different times (did her husband own another copy? I can't remember). The repeated telling of stories within the main story was intentional. I don't think the layers were intended to resolve into a diagrammatic plan; I think they were supposed to be more dreamlike and haunting: memories remain with us when their substance has gone and memoirs last even longer. It's part of the major theme of dislocation and loss, and what remains and can be recovered.

Thanks for that; I think I had im mind a tale finding stories from the lost letters and actually was more interested how they were found(thats the archaeologist in me)! I was surprised that the narrator from the beginning doesn't return to those/ Your post adjusts my expectations Thinking of the layers more dreamlike ;

It's part of the major theme of dislocation and loss, and what remains and can be recovered. Very well put

>55 cindydavid4: Maybe Sonia Nimr will write an Indiana Jones style sequel? We can only hope! :D

There you go!!

Happened upon a review of the book in World Literature Today (which looks like something I should look into reading) https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/strange-and-wondrous-jour...

Id forgotten to comment on The Flying Classroom Funny, and rather moving; loved the friendship and comraderie between the students, loved that each boy had a unique personality and situation, that the issues of hunger, abandonment, and poverty were not glossed over, and that the conversations and situations very natural. I loved the little boy who felt the need to show that he was couragous with a deathly stunt, and the boy who cant go home for christmas and keeps telling himself 'it is forbidden to cry', even in his sleep. Esp loved the staff at the school; so different from stories I read about English boarding schools, these teachers cared about their kids. I can see kids today reading it and recognizing the world very well. Was very moved by the book, and would like to try the detective books as well.

>57 cindydavid4: Haha, I think almost completely the opposite of that reviewer. My copy of Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands has 245 pages of text and definitely isn't a "novella". It spends substantial time away from the Mediterranean. It didn't read like a collection of short stories to me but a long and very interlinked series of adventures in which, yes, the protagonist's character develops over 30+ years, and so do the supporting characters such as Anfara/Abdullah. For example, her attitude to slavery changed when she thought her family might have been enslaved (this was an important change to me because her earlier attitude made me look askance at the book!). And I especially disagree with "The descriptions of the various settings were rich," because one of my few criticisms of the novel was I thought the descriptions of places tended to be underwritten and too similar and some of them blended into each other. >:-)

I do wholeheartedly agree with the pull quote though: "Wondrous Journeys will satisfy readers with an appetite for folktales and travel, particularly younger readers who are more interested in excitement than exposition."

Still, the review as a whole is no more awry than the early review I read that confidently claimed it's a fantasy genre novel, lol. I should stick to reading amateur reviewers who're reviewing books they've chosen because they think they'll like them, which is one of the joys of LT and GR. :D

>58 cindydavid4: I'm not generally a fan of school stories but The Flying Classroom sounds very satisfying.

>60 spiralsheep: My upper grade and hs years were not pretty, and I cringe and some of those school stories. But I didn't this time. Try it out.

Now reading Fireweed reading about the blitz always reminds me how very very spoiled we are here in America (well, except we don't have universal health care but still) anyway anotherYA book by Walsh, with her brand of writing - very good as always

from Fireweed

"I wanted the houses I knew to be back up again, I wanted grown ups to be there. I wanted to be told what to do. I wanted to be worried about; I didn't want to have anyone else to care forI didnt want anyone to need me at all. I wanted to be back in wales being yattered at, and given hot buns for tea; I wanted to be safe, I wanted my own father I wanted my Dad"

The cry of displaced children everywhere

Tua and the Elephant
by R.P. Harris

Teachers pick on Amazon for 8-11 year olds.

After quick scan, I think this would be great book for English-speaking kids headed for a Thai vacation!
Common themes sprinkle with local detail and dialect that sounds accurate to me.

A diversion for "Children's Book Week, 3-9 May 2021" in the form of an LT egg hunt.

Hunt clues here:

https://www.librarything.com/hunt.php?y=2021&m=05

Discussion thread here (beware spoilers if you scroll down):

https://www.librarything.com/topic/331926

>65 spiralsheep: oh what fun!! great idea!

>66 cindydavid4: I found all the eggs, but I needed an extra hint for 11 because I wrongly assumed the clue was referring to Wimmelbilderbuchs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimmelbilderbuch

/on topic but tangential >;-)

if its the one Im thinking about, the book was made into an animated film - lots of boxes involved.

>67 spiralsheep: I used my little eye to search out a series page for that one.

Just popping on here to say that my wife just read The Girl With the Louding Voice, which she raced through and very much admired. (The book appears on the list linked to >3 cindydavid4:.)

oh cool,glad someone is using that list!

I haven't posted my most recent find, and it was one that I was surprised by. I usually hate books with talking animals, esp cute bunnies, cringe at anything that was too smarmy and sweet, and don't like figuring out the ending before it happens. But this one was different The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane Read it last summer, after many of my fave YA readers urged me to do so. They have yet to steer me wrong. Yes its predictable but its so well written, I couldn't help but fall for it. The talking is really like Toy Story; they can aonly talk with others like you. And I actually had tears in my eyes by the end, which means I did not need to reach for extra insulin (or maybe Ive just become a softy as Ive gotten older)

I obtained a copy of this French book thanks to the thoughtfulness of Dilara86.

Mouton by Zeina Abirached, is a short illustrated children's book about a curly haired child achieving a more positive self-image. I like Abirached's art style but have minor reservations about the storyline. 3.5*



I had escapologist medusan snakes for hair when I was a child so my mother would've been overjoyed if she'd only had to deal with curls!

Sanjay Patel, The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow 3***. A convenient introduction to some deities, demons, and other aspects of Hinduism with colorful (but for my taste a bit too "cutesy") illustrations. Personally, I found it a bit trivializing, hence only 3***, by YMMV.

I'm glad to see the love for Erich Kästner, one of my childhood favourites.
I have read Tage der Kindheit where Waldemar Bonsels recalls his childhood in Kiel. He must have been an obnoxious child, always fighting with his sister, stealing from his parents, playing pranks and getting into dangerous scrapes, that in one case resulted in a schoolmate getting killed. Too much from his life is omitted, and not very much about Kiel.
I only knew the author's name before (because of that book about Maya the Bee), but on looking him up found him to be an rabid antisemite. Not recommended.

I didn't plan to read something like this (European, for children) but I came across it as I was looking for other stuff, didn't even know I had it, and it's by Rodari, who we talked about, so I got curious/nostalgic... it's one of his last books, from 1980: La freccia azzurra (Blue Arrow). I think I would have liked it better as a kid but not sure it would compare to my faves by him even then. Still.

Rodari's trademark concern with the poor is there. It's winter and la Befana (sort of Italian Santa Claus) is busy preparing to bring kids the toys from her toyshop, except some poor kids will lose out because their parents are out of credit. Yep, the Befana is a capitalist shopkeeper. Fatherless Francesco is pining for the train, the "Blue arrow", but must leave empty-handed. The toys organise to take themselves to the poor kids, board the train and go out into the snow. One doll chooses to stay with an old woman sleeping in a doorway--actually she's dead. Francesco runs into trouble when two thieves force him to break into a shop and is jailed. I wonder if the Anglo translation kept these things...

There's sexism and the Indian chief doll, while the wisest and respected by all, speaks broken Italian.

So someone suggested reading Edith Nesbittt's Psammead Trilogy which looks really interesting. Think I might read that for this theme.

My first book read for this group: The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman, its year's winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award for diversity in the Young Readers Category. Set in Chennai (formerly Madras) India, it tells the story of two young girls (one of them developmentally disabled) who have run away from an abusive home and confront homelessness in the big city while scraping out survival as trash pickers in the city dumps.

5*****

Bob Haberfield's appropriately surrealist influenced cover for Momo by Michael Ende.



I read Momo, by Michael Ende, which is a 1973 children's fantasy novel by the author of Neverending Story. I read the 1984 English translation by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. I'm not sure how children today would react to this fable as their social conditions have changed somewhat since 1973. However I can say that this is a perfect story for GenXers and I suspect middle age is as good a time to read it as childhood. 5*

No quote, but I might have had a small moment of feminist rage at the idea that doing all the housework, including shopping, takes 7hrs a week!

Hahahaha! yeah right. And then taking care of the kids and driving everyone everwhere? Piece of cake...

>79 cindydavid4: It was only a passing comment but it did halt me in my reading tracks.

The rest of the books is good though: grey men stealing people's time by means of efficiency savings, boo! Still relevant, alas.

by the way did you end up reading Antigone Rising? Ive tried a couple of times and I dunno if its the tone or what, but Im not getting in to it. I really wanted to like this book. Any comments to perhaps get me on track?

>81 cindydavid4: I was considering reading Antigone Rising for RTT's June theme, but my library hasn't processed their new copies yet and I found some books on my To Read shelf that fit the theme, including Samarkand, by Amin Maalouf.

My only general reading advice is that not every book is suitable for every reader at a particular time, and prolific readers should be prepared to dnf books or at least put them aside for a while. :-)

I've just finished the fourth book in Daniel Pennac's Malaussène saga — it struck me that that is of some interest for this theme, because of its slightly unusual combination of elements from children's books and "grown-up" crime fiction.

Pennac is a schoolteacher and has written mostly for children. This crime series, which starts with Au bonheur des ogres (The scapegoat in English translations) centres around a large and chaotic family of siblings, the Malaussènes, who live in the kind of anarchic, adult-free setting that writers of children's books really enjoy, in a former ironmonger's shop in the decaying, working-class, multi-culti surroundings of the Belleville district of Paris. Their mother appears briefly every year or two to add another infant to the horde (father unspecified), and the rest of the time it is Benjamin (who is rather counter-intuitively the eldest) who acts as token responsible adult, supported by long-time friends like the old couple who run the local kebab and couscous restaurant.

In another very typical child-lit touch, each of the siblings has one particular attribute that features in the story. Jeremy is the precociously clever one, Thérèse has the gift of prophecy, Clara is the oasis of kindness, Le Petit presents a false image of guileless innocence, baby Verdun is so-called because her crying matches World War I decibel levels, Julius the dog has epileptic fits at awkward moments, ... and so on. Benjamin's attribute is being there to be blamed for things he didn't do: in the first book this is also his job, he is professional scapegoat in a big department store, kept on hand to be shouted at and fired in front of complaining customers.

But all this jovial eccentricity is set against a lot of very real-world nastiness: Belleville is swarming with drug-dealers, prostitutes and pimps, corrupt police, racist thugs, serial-killers, and all the rest, people who have the ability to create very tangible pain, fear and grief. Central characters in the stories are killed or seriously injured, and happy-endings are only ever very local and temporary. There is also a lot of historical nastiness playing its part in the backgrounds of the characters, whether it's World War II and the Holocaust or the less salubrious bits of France's colonial history. These aren't escapist books, however much they might look like it, and they aren't really meant for children to read.

Pennac obviously isn't just putting all those kids into his story because he knows he's good at writing children, he's convinced that children have important things to tell us, and maybe also that it's only the presence of children in our lives that gives adults a proper framework for living morally and responsibly (crudely: why should we care what sort of world we leave behind if we don't have a personal stake in the next generation?).

     

(The artwork on these French covers is by Jacques Tardi, who has also worked with Pennac on other projects)

Interesting; love those covers!

>82 spiralsheep: oh I know; just keep fighting beccause I so wanted to like this book, ah well :)

I just got Samarkand and cant wait to read it (looking at the book stack I 'need' to read for May and June, I might have to wait awhile!)

>84 cindydavid4: I added Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh, as recced by you and Jackie_K, to my To Reads this morning but I probably won't get around to it for a while.

>83 thorold: Oh, I've got the first in the series in my TBR...

I read Mission to Kala, by Mongo Beti, which is a 1957 Cameroonian comic novel about a young failed college student sent on a mission from his home village to find someone else's runaway wife. Our educated westernised city-dwelling protagonist quickly finds himself out of his depth when faced with the wiles of his country village cousins and their traditional ways of getting things done. As you can probably imagine from that description the primary form of humour is satire and no character is spared. The author side-eyes tradition and those who cling to the worst of it, he mocks colonialism and those who co-operate with it, he is quizzical about his contemporaries and their impotent hopes for the future, he even manages to tease his (presumed) French/westernised readers with subtle digs such as the implication that postcolonial Africa will turn to the USSR because the peasant farmers have more empathy with their Russian counterparts and their drive for modernisation than cities paved with illusory capitalist gold in the Western alliance. The protagonist claims this is a sentimental novel rather than picaresque one but the author does tend to want it both ways which results in twice as much fun for the reader. The story is well written and smoothly translated into English by Peter Green but, as in most bildungsroman novels revolving around a young male protagonist and his inner journey, characterisation is mostly through interaction with the (anti-)hero protagonist and the road trip plot is merely a vehicle, albeit in this case a satisfyingly structured vehicle. The protagonist's attitudes towards women are coloured here and there with feminist ideas about fairer division of labour, but the sexual attitudes might upset some 21st century readers although the protagonist's immature behaviour is self-acknowledged and doesn't go unexamined. If I had to describe this by comparison I suppose it would be Catcher in the Rye goes to Cameroon. I'm wavering on my rating but I can't recall any major flaws so let's say 5*.

Quote

I especially enjoyed the chapter headings: "Chapter Three : In the course of which the reader will become convinced that the final climax of this story is at last in sight - a conviction which is, most unfortunately, mistaken."

Yesterday both Eric Carl and Lois Erhart passed away. Their books were beloved by a few generation of readers, and beloved by teachers who used the books for lessons.

https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=Eric-Carle-and-Lois-Ehlert-Have-Died...

I assume their books have been translated - hopefully kids around the world have the chance to enjoy these classic artists and writers. Tho I have always wondered - what do translators do for rhyming books like Chika Boom; do they try to rhyme the translation, and what do they do with silly titles like that.

>88 cindydavid4: Any language can have nonsense or onomatopoeic words. :-)

I've translated poetry, and structure or form is often less of a problem than imagery. Although some grammatical or poetic forms preclude ideal translations between specific languages in various ways. Translating, like life in general, is full of choices. As long as the translation pleases readers, and preferably also the author, then it works.

>89 spiralsheep: Any language can have nonsense or onomatopoeic words

Oh I know; remember having a list of what other languages use for animal sounds like moo woof etc. So it stands to reason have others as well. And I agree if the translation pleases readers and writers, it works!

>90 cindydavid4: I nearly put in some examples of animal noises from different languages: bêê! :D

Ha! Speaking of, this is a cool article, scroll down to the examples

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/onomatopoeia-world-lan...

aaaand from the NYT

Globe Trotting i

International books coming in 2021. I am already eager for Aquarium by Yaara Shehori, for two reasons: its been a while since Ive read a novel by an Isreali that was not about conflict, and two deaf sisters raised by two deaf parents feeds my love of the deaf world, esp as a teacher. Came out this last April, I'll see if I can find it

note Touchstone is wrong

There are other books here for this theme, Including

The Children’s Train
With thousands of other children, a 7-year-old takes a train across Italy to start a new life after World War II.

My indie store happened to have both books, but I was really taken by Children's Train, so now have it and plan to read it soon (looking at the stack I currently promised to read by the end of june.......well a girl can dream)

I've just finished another book that turned out to be relevant:

Die Prinzessinnen im Krautgarten: eine Dorfkindheit (2000) by Wulf Kirsten (DDR, Germany, 1934- )

 

Wulf Kirsten grew up in the small farming village of Klipphausen in Saxony — he writes about his childhood experiences there between about 1943 and 1949. There's a lot about the realities of rural life in a backward, not very prosperous area, and about the effects of the war and its aftermath on the community as seen from the viewpoint of a small child (and with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, of course). It feels like a very honest account, not shielding himself or other people who didn't always act in the best possible way. A bit like a German Cider with Rosie, perhaps.

>95 thorold: ok, loved Cider with Rosie along with his other books, looks like I'll have to give it a try

Really angry to have read a review that started out with a spoiler, and its a big one, for Aquarium. I usually don't mind but this particular spoiler will color everything I read in the book. All I was doing was just browing some reviews and that one popped up. I will probably read it any way, and see how they get through the mess. But I wanted to see a before, and later and after. Ah well. Interested in it to want to try it.

oh and the Childrens Train is very well written so far as I can tell (I am juggling several books at the same time for June) A lot I knew about but finding its worth reading.

The Children's Train at first was excellent - the end of WWII left many in Italy in great poverty. Told through the eyes of a 7 year old boy, he tells of his life there, and with his new family in the much richer north. I think the author does a very good job portraying children's emotional states during both the journey to their new homes and their journeys back; I like how believable the dialogue was both between children, and between children and their elders.
When its time to go back home, and he finds out how his mother has lied, he has to make a choice. Then suddenly we are in 1994 and there is a huge gap that is untold; while we find out what happened to him as an adult, I missed his journey back. 3/5 for me

ETA I reread the last section and wasn't in a hurry. The time changes made sense, and I feel better about it, like Amerigo came full circle and redeemed himself. But I wanted to know what happened when he got north. Thats not explainee at all. But its good enough on its own 4/5

Just found the moon shines down by the same author of goodnight moon, not one of my fav books. This one, that apparently was found unfinished, and completed in her style. and one that fits the theme!

Anyone else have books they are still reading for this theme?

>98 cindydavid4: I'm planning to read another Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, before the end of June but that will probably be my last for this theme, which would be nine children's books from outside anglophone mainstream publishing read in three months.

Oh gosh I remember seeing that movie. I remember liking it, but wanted to read the book,never got around to it. Maybe I'll give it more of a chance

Lets see I think in three months I managed to read 4 books for this theme, no where near your numbers! but I was reading other books, and what pleased me was that the four books were about kids from all over, and they were all books I never would have known about without this wonderful group!! And whats more, I have at least a dozen more i want to read, and links to places where I can find others! Love you guys!

>99 spiralsheep: If you can find it in multicolor text, you should read that! Not sure why the multicolor text tickled me so much when I read it that way; but it did.

>98 cindydavid4: I’ve been reading a couple more that turned out to be relevant:

First, I finished the first part of Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale tetralogy, which of course is all about two girls growing up in a working-class suburb of Naples in the fifties, a lot of interesting stuff about class and poverty and education. It made me think a little bit about the French writer Annie Ernaux, who writes about the way education created a gulf of class-difference between her and her parents. (But not about friendship, which is the really big thing in Ferrante.)

Then today I read a little Dutch book from the 1930s, Pieter Bas by Godfried Bomans. This is a charming comic account of middle-class childhood and adolescence in a Dutch provincial town in the 1850s and 60s, written as a sort of Dickens pastiche but obviously using a lot of the author’s actual experiences of a similar sort of childhood sixty years later. Rather like Kästner, there’s an element of seriousness under the jokey style. He thinks adults forget how vivid and important their experiences of childhood were, and don’t take children’s experiences seriously enough.

Two non-fiction books by Daniel Pennac (cf. >83 thorold: above)

Comme un roman (1992; The rights of the reader) by Daniel Pennac‬ (France, 1944- )
Chagrin d'école (2007; School blues) by Daniel Pennac‬ (France, 1944- )

   

Comme un roman is a short book — an extended essay, really — about the pleasure of reading and the risk we run of losing that pleasure as adolescents in the hands of the school system. As a parent, a teacher, a writer and a former adolescent, Pennac is able to put himself in turn into all the different roles involved in the epic struggle between the teenager and Madame Bovary (which refuses to advance beyond page 48, whilst the book-report is due to be handed in tomorrow morning), and as a novelist he can't resist dramatising those scenes for us, so it's fun to read, but there's a real message there as well.

Pennac insists that what kills the desire to read for pleasure is not parental apathy or video games, television or the Walkman, but the way school turns reading into a task that is scored and evaluated, with production quotas and the expectation that we should be able to make the correct sort of intelligent comments about what we have read, and the corresponding fear of being labelled ignorant or lazy if we don't accomplish the task in the right way. He describes his strategy — borrowed from the actor/poet Georges Perros — for overcoming that hurdle by reading aloud ("gratuitously and unconditionally") to his teenage students to reintroduce them to the idea that books contain stories written to entertain the reader. He waits until they have been bitten by the bug and started to read again on their own account before moving on to the books he's supposed to be teaching. And the book concludes with his charter of "basic rights of the reader", which starts, significantly, with the right not to read.

Chagrin d'école is a more substantial book that builds up from the ideas of Comme un roman into a wider discussion of how the education system deals with students who can't or won't learn. Pennac tells us that he himself was bottom of the class for most of his school days, and as a teacher he spent his career in schools with a large proportion of "problem students".

There's a lot of material — autobiography, anecdote, descriptions of visits to schools as a writer, problems shared by friends who are parents, and a lot more — and it isn't always very clear where he's going: this was obviously a book that took a long time to write and changed course a few times in the process. All the same, it's clearly heartfelt, and Pennac has a lot of sympathy for kids who have fallen out of the boat in one way or another and feel that they have been written off.

The most important thing he wants to get across seems to be that we should avoid generalising, especially the fashionable French demonisation of young people from certain notorious mostly-immigrant neighbourhoods. Also, he reminds us that social exclusion and violence are nothing new in the education system, what has changed is the way we perceive them. In the fifties no-one seemed to be over-worried about the number of young people leaving school early without qualifications: there were plenty of jobs where they were needed.

Another point Pennac makes a number of times is that lack of academic progress is often mostly a matter of self-confidence in the student: if you go through a bad patch for some reason, and parents and teachers keep telling you that you are wasting your life and will never amount to anything, there's a point at which it becomes easier to identify yourself as a "hopeless case", rather than to keep trying and failing. Kids in that kind of situation can often get back on track if they have the luck to find a motivated teacher who isn't prepared to let them give up on themselves. He credits his own recovery from dunce-status to four very determined teachers who taught him during his numerous attempts to pass his baccalaureate. But of course he accepts that there are some kids who have serious social or medical problems that need to be solved first before they can be made to appreciate Flaubert and Corneille, and some who are so difficult to help that the system is always going to let them down in the end.

>103 thorold: Sounds deeply sensible.

Some years after my mother died I bumped into one of the kids she taught to read by helping them find their enthusiasm. He told me he was the first man in his family in living memory, and the only one of his several brothers, who had never been in prison. He said being able to read and write had changed the course of his life.

C. L. R. James's The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults turned out to be more intricate and difficult than I expected given the tender age of their recipient (about five years old at the time), with James unhesitatingly borrowing from Melville and the Bible, describing Michelangelo's masterworks, all the while promoting a Marxist worldview. A recurrent character, called Nicholas-the-worker, might be seen as the "Eloise" of the working class, although his putative adventures at The Plaza would be rather different to hers.

>105 LolaWalser: I can’t imagine that it would have been easy having CLR James as a father: compulsory Marxism alternating with compulsory cricket practice…

Marxism makes beautiful sense! Cricket... not sure about that. :)

>104 spiralsheep: Getting kids to love reading starts at the cradle. The baby wont understand all the words, but they will love being close to whoever is reading, and enjoy the intonation and rhymes. As they grow let them pick one or two books for you to read them. Take time to talk about the book, esp as they get older and deal with difficult issues. Also if they see the adults around them reading, they see it is imporant and hopefully want to themselves. Even if its a recipe book, comic book, magazine, cereal box, read the words and point out letters. show that reading matters, and entertains (/ teacher soapbox)

Last book for this theme Little Night Its ust darling, and fun. Its bilingual, and Im thinking of a couple of kids this would be perfect for (definitly geared to the youngest kids)

Just picked up Wild Girl, certainly won't finish in time but eager to read it

I know nothing about recent books for children, but some worthwhile non-fiction about childhood that I've read during lockdown are:

Mamaskatch by Darrel J. McLeod: a memoir about growing up as the child of a residential school survivor. Given what's currently going on in Canada, it might be considered compulsory reading here.

En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule/The end of Eddy by Édouard Louis: a slightly fictionalized memoir about growing up impoverished and gay in France's north-western rust belt. I would add that Louis is an author to keep an eye on.

Jamais je n'aurai quatorze ans by François Lecomte: also a memoir about surviving as a Jewish child in Vichy France.

>109 librorumamans: great, we have been reading nonfiction for this theme so your titles are very welcomed!most interested in the Lecomte and McLeod; are they available in Englis?

Mamaskatch is a Cree word that is not glossed in the book, which is written in English.

I'm reading the Lecomte book in French; I don't know if it's been translated. He was hidden in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, so there are other books that cover that community. One that is intended for children is Hidden on the Mountain.

excellent thank you!

I notice that Victoria Pride in the Word is hosting an event on Saturday, July 3 at which Darrel McLeod, among others, will read from their works. Unless it's recorded, Victoria's time zone may make it inconvenient to catch.

Anúncio! I've agreed to lead the third quarter theme, The Lusophone World, and I plan to have the thread up and running on July 1st. Obrigado!

Not a book, but I'm moved to mention Claude Berri's 1967 film Le vieil homme et l'enfant (The two of Us), a semi-autobiographical film about Berri's experience of being hidden as a child during World War II, starring the magnificent Michel Simon. Rotten Tomatoes rates it 100% fresh.

>114 kidzdoc: While looking for something else, I chanced upon a book that bridges the Q2 and Q3 themes! It also gave me a chance to dip a toe into a language I haven't practiced much:

O gato malhado e a andorinha Sinhá: uma história de amor (1976; The swallow and the tom-cat) by Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1912-2001), illustrated by Carybé (Argentina, Brazil, 1911-1997)

  

Jorge Amado wrote this story in 1948 as a gift for his young son, João Jorge, but without any idea of publishing it. When João Jorge chanced upon the manuscript in 1976, he had the idea of making at least one proper copy, and asked his father's friend, the artist Carybé, to add some pictures — and before they knew what was happening the book had been published and was a big success.

It's an innocent-looking little fable about a doomed love affair between the stripy tom-cat and the swallow Sinhá, against the background of the changing seasons in a park, but it turns out to be a story that refuses to resolve itself into any neat moral, and which has some modernist leaps of narrative logic that must have been quite challenging for a one-year-old to follow, not to mention a frame-story that seems to be a parody of Vergil, whilst the animals in the park include a parrot-priest (with at least one illegitimate child) and a toad-literary-critic. Quite a bit for grown-ups to laugh at!

>116 thorold: Sounds good! The last book I finished, The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto, also fits in this theme and the coming one, as the main character is a boy who is 11 years of age for most of the story. Since it's the end of the month I'll review it in the new theme.

Wow thanks for participating in this theme! I think we found many titles of interested thanks for contributing

And btwm remember that this thread remains open, so keep reading and posting about them

I finished reading a novel set in rural South India the 1950s a few days into July. It was written by a Danish teacher, who spent time in girls' schools in India. I read it English translation. It was written for children and tells the story of one girl's twelvth year.

Shanta by Marie Thøger

All of these are excellent reads:

Funny Boy and then Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai
Angry Queer Somali Boy by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

I finally finished the review for the book I read for this challenge:

Legends of Micronesia (Book Two)– Eve Grey - 1951

Online description: ”Originally published in 1951 by the Department of Education of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, for use in local schools. Among several versions of some legends, preference was given to forms known to young people of the day. Since there are different languages and customs in Micronesia, the legends have been checked for local detail and spelling with experts in each location.”

According to Wikipedia, the area formerly called Micronesia has six sovereign nations as well as islands claimed by other nations. This book has legends from three of the sovereigns: Republic of Palau, The Federated States of Micronesia, and Republic of the Marshall Islands. There are also legends from other areas of the islands and the islands more generally as a whole.

It’s a nice mix of legends –there are themes that must be common across all cultures such as wicked stepmothers, gods and competitive brothers. There are also legends that explain geological oddities on the various islands, and which, according to the introduction, could help inhabitants identify particular islands as they navigated the area. There are also legends that are unique to the seas, the islands and their animal life, especially the frigate bird.

I particularly liked the first legend – where the first map of the islands was a fishing net with shells inserted for the atolls.

Two more childhood memoirs I recently came across:

Kleine herinneringen (2006; As pequenas memórias / Small memories) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) translated from Portuguese to Dutch by Harrie Lemmens

  

Discovery of the world : a political awakening in the shadow of Mussolini (2011; La scoperta del mondo) by Luciana Castellina (Italy, 1929- ), translated from Italian to English by Patrick Camiller

  

These are both memoirs of childhood written by authors in their eighties, but quite different in character: the celebrated Portuguese novelist tries to recapture from memory what it felt like to be a small child in the 1920s, growing up in rural Ribatejo and in the backstreets of Lisbon; the left-wing journalist and long-serving parliamentarian Luciana Castellina gives us an ironic commentary on her teenage diary, watching with exasperation as her younger self slowly moves towards an awakening of political consciousness from her self-centred middle-class existence in Rome in the middle of the dramatic events of 1943-1947.

Both very enjoyable reads, both managing to communicate a quite convincing sense of what it must have felt like to be that age in that place.

Here's another wonderful memoir.

Chance: Escape from the Holocaust: Memories of a Refugee Childhood by Uri Shulevitz, award winning author/illustrator.

Collecting Thai children's titles for my new grandson:

Hush! A Thai Lullaby
by Minfong Ho and Holly Meade
Toddler book similar to "Good Night, Moon", with Thai critters shushed in turn by mama.

Am I small? ฉันตัวเล็กหรือ?: Children's Picture Book English-Thai (Bilingual Edition) (World Children's Book)
Part of: World Children's Book (205 Books) | by Philipp Winterberg , Nadja Wichmann, et al. (2014)
This one didn't do much for me--hope grandson will feel differently!
Also available in German, maybe other languages?

Mela and the Elephant (2018)
by Dow Phumiruk (Author), Ziyue Chen

The Umbrella Queen
by Shirin Bridges and Taeeun Yoo (2008)

"The Battle of Maiyarap: A Story from the Ramakien” : http://www.qsmtthailand.org/shop/
My young sons were quite taken by the Ramakien epic, even dressing as Hanuman at Halloween. Here's one Thai picture book for kids that came out of Queen Sirikit's foundation (haven't ordered it yet, but anime-style cover would have appealed to my guys). Lots of children's books elsewhere on Ramayana, the Indian version of the story.

Also seeing these books at http://www.qsmtthailand.org/shop/:
"Chan in the Land of Silkworms"
"The Story of Little Chan and the Jewel Beetle"
"The Eight Types of Thai Style Dress"

Burmese and Thai fairy tales (World fairy tale collections) 1967
by Eleanor Brockett (1967)

Thai Children's Favorite Stories: Fables, Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales
by Marian D. Toth and Patcharee Meesukhon (2019)

A Tale of Two Rice Birds: A Folktale from Thailand
by Clare Hodgson Meeker
Gorgeous illustrations. Classic love story. Didn't grab MY young sons...maybe a gender thing.

Thai Ways and More Thai Ways
by Denis Segaller
For tweens & teenagers? I enjoyed these informative books. Author was English ex-pat who worked for Bangkok Post.

Sightseeing
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Collection of contemporary short stories for older teens & adults.

Love all of these new to me books! Esp interested in the micronesia ones; I had no idea it has six sovereign nations as well as islands claimed by other nations. How confusing that must be; looking forward to reading those legends. There are so many Thai ones too (and congrats on being a grandma!) Adding them to my tbr eventually list....

VENEZUELA

I enjoyed this picture book, which was one of the free e-books from Amazon's World Book Day event.



The Caiman by by María Eugenia Manrique, illustrated by Ramón París, and translated by Amy Brill
Published 2019, English translation 2021, 32 p.

When the author was a child and visiting family in San Fernando de Apure, Venezuela, she would visit the home of a famous local jeweler named José Faoro, who raised a river caiman from the time it was three days old. He had built it a pool in his backyard, and the children would visit and ride on "Night". This delightful story has bold illustrations and an afterward that includes photos of the author with the caiman, as well as José Faoro.

>126 labfs39: I read that one as well! My husband loves alligators so I 'bought' him a copy and read him a bedtime story.