There’s a great piece in Britain’s Guardian Weekly on children’s books. The whole piece is worth perusing and knee-deep in good recommendations, but what grabbed me most is the piece on children’s lit in translation.
A French publisher apparently once said that, “It’s easier to persuade the Japanese to buy a French car than it is to sell a French novel to the English.” He didn’t comment on US audiences but I’m going to guess that the demand for children’s lit in translation in the US drops below the miniscule. If so, however, it’s a shame, because as the Guardian piece points out, there’s nothing for giving young ones global perspective like handing them a book from another culture.
One of my favorite memories from high school is finally reaching a higher-level French class and being handed a book of the adventures of Arsene Lupin, the fictional gentleman thief. In English I might not have looked twice at such a book but somehow, in a Gallic setting, he was just so French and so cool that I ate that book up. (To this day when I hear the word “quai” I still picture Arsene Lupin standing on one in a dark and dangerous night.) If someone had handed it to me in translation when I was still in first-year French I might have speeded my way through the conjugations far more rapidly!
