 Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a translator of Spanish and French and professor at City University of New York and I'm here with Alison Mark and Powell who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee and has been a driving force co-organizing translating the future, the conference you're now attending. Before getting to today's scheduled conversation, we must say something about the events that are consuming our nation and our city. Tonight there is an 8 p.m. curfew in New York. The last time a curfew was imposed in the city that never sleeps was in 1943 and that was in response to protests over police shooting a Black soldier. However much may have changed since then. Clearly too much has not changed. We say the name of George Floyd and stand with the Black community that has endured unrelenting violence throughout the history of this country. We also stand with those who bravely, peacefully continue to protest that violence and the courageous journalists who continue to do their essential work in the face of attack from those who should be defending freedom of speech. Regina Bernard, my colleague at Baruch College, has written an essay titled Why We Can't Breathe? I urge you to read all of it at 433.org. I'll share just a paragraph here. A paragraph as simple and direct as a story told to a child. George, I didn't know your name when you called out for help. You should have been able to breathe. They should have given you water. You should have had your breath. You should all still be breathing. Your breathing, my breathing, the rising and falling of lungs in black and brown bodies should not come at the discretion of anyone else. It is not a privilege to breathe. Distracted now by the demonization entrenched in mooting and burning, we forget that this is not just today, not just yesterday, but could be tomorrow and the day after. Thank you all for joining us for the fourth installment of our weekly series, Translating for the Future, a conversation between some of the fiercest advocates for children's literature and translation, Lauren Schimel, Daniel Hahn, and Lynn Miller-Lachman. Lawrence, coming in from Madrid, writes in both Spanish and English and translates from both languages as well. Danny in the UK is a writer, editor, and translator from Portuguese, Spanish and French. Lynn here in New York City is an author, editor, and translator from Portuguese and Spanish. You can read about their many achievements and awards on the Center for the Humanities website. We are particularly grateful to World Poetry Books, hailed by Ann Carson as the publishers of excellent new books in unusually excellent translations for generously sponsoring today's conversation. You can find them online at worldpoetrybooks.com. This series of weekly one-hour conversations will be the form that Translating the Future continues to take throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger-scale marquee events will happen and you'll hear more about those soon. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with compelling conversations about the past, present, and future of literary translation and its place in the world where we now find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for a manifesto for our time, a conversation between Elizabeth Lowe, Matthew Harrington, and Larissa Kaiser about an ongoing project to update the 1970 manifesto on translation that accompanied the World of Translation Conference that our conference, Translating the Future, commemorates. And please continue to check the Center for Humanities site for future events in this conference. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by today's moderator Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Lauren Schimmel, Daniel Hahn, and Lynn Miller-Lachman to Translating the Future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you know it in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who's unable to join us for the livestream, our recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and the Center for the Humanities site. Before we turn it over to Lynn, Lauren, and Danny, we'd like to offer our sincere gratitude, as ever, to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America. And now over to you, Lynn, Danny, and Lawrence. All right. Thank you very much for that introduction. Allison and Esther, and thank you Esther for sharing those remarks about our current situation. And thank you to all of you for tuning in. We have an interesting conversation on tap, so I will get started. Two weeks ago, in their conversation, Translating the Uncertained Present, Madukaza and Lena Moonser talked about the tension between reflecting the original language and culture, and making the translated work accessible to those who are reading the book in translation. How does this balance change when the readers are children and teenagers who have fewer cultural references, yet we hope a greater openness to the world? So Danny, you look ready to start. Good morning to you. Yeah, I took a breath, which obviously suggested that I was going to exhale an answer, and I'm not sure I was going to. I mean, the answer to that question is it depends, which is the answer to all interesting questions, I guess. It depends on the book for children in the same way it depends on the book for adults. There are certain things which are certainly true about child readers. Lynn, you talked about the kind of cultural, I suppose the cultural knowledge they have. It's hard to generalize about children, but the only thing we can say absolutely categorically about children is they have not been around as long as grown-ups have been around. The one thing that defines children is they are newer to this place than we are. And so the amount of cultural, kind of international cultural stuff they will have accumulated is less. And so we may sometimes have to make allowances for the fact that they won't know as much about the world as a grown-up reader. But while we make allowances differently, perhaps, and while the constraints of working for children are very different in lots of ways, I don't think the principle is different. I think mostly when you're translating for children, you're trying to do the same thing as translating for grown-ups, which is to decide what it is that's important about this thing and work out how to keep whatever it is you think that is important. I think also, I mean, just touching back to what Lynn and Madi were talking about, among other things they talked about that we make a lot of assumptions about the readers of translations and that very often translations have, we demand of a translation more explication than we would demand of a book that is written in the original language. That is, we have very often in books for adults, we may have vocabulary we don't know that we have to look up or that we understand from inference or things like that. And but we expect that all of the cultural references in a translation, especially translations into English, are going to be glossed or explained or fully dominated. And that's not something that necessarily needs to be the case. I think also that so many, so I mean, there's a lot of different, I mean, we haven't yet mentioned for it with children's books, but you have everything from word books through teenagers. So I mean, there's a huge range of books that are out there, especially for the younger ages, you have a double audience. So you have an adult reading with a child. So very often, there can be things that can be explained by the person who is reading the book with the younger reader, if there are things that they don't understand. But also, I don't think that we can take for granted, or I don't know, I think that it's a fallacy that the teens don't necessarily have all of the, you know, the cultural information. I think a lot of times, especially teenagers connected to the internet are much more aware and, you know, in touch with what is going on on the global setting, and that it's the gatekeepers who think that they're not prepared or they're not ready to deal with some of these things. I think the thing you said about that the dual readership is incredibly important for the younger end, that there is always going to be some kind of mediating happening, because it's not the three-year-old who's going to go to the bookstore and give their credit card and buy the book, and they're not going to be the ones who on the whole are going to be consuming the book on their own without someone else mediating the language for them. They can read the pictures, but not the text. And so there are challenges to that dual readership or that dual, those kind of double consumption, if you like. But as you suggest, Lawrence, there's also that opportunity that we don't necessarily have to rely on what a three-year-old will know, we just need to rely on what the other person is prepared to, is in a position to explain to them, to gloss for them. It's also reading, especially the younger one, it's a much more interactive, it's a much less, you know, if you're reading a picture book to a very small child, it's a much less kind of, you know, transmit only reading experience, and it's a much more interactive and back-and-forth conversational experience. I also think, I mean, what you were just talking about, Denny, about the difference that the three-year-old isn't going to be able to go and buy their own book. I think that very often the children's books that get translated, there's a big difference between the illustrated books and then the middle grade and older fiction, whereas the younger books often sell on the artwork, rather than necessarily the story that's not the only case, but that I think there's a little more leeway in terms of picture books and the kinds of picture books that are, I mean, especially in mostly translating into English ideologies from Spanish, so a lot of the, for the U.S., a lot of the titles are Latin American titles, and I think that a lot of the pushback I get from editors is that they want the middle grader or young adult fiction to perform its latinidad in a way, so that a book in translation has extra demands on it than a translated picture book. I mean, a lot of times you can have just a translated picture book about friendship that doesn't have to necessarily be about, it could be a book from Argentina without being full of Argentine-ness, whereas for the older ages, I think that most editors, if they're going to publish something that is a latin book, they want it to, a book from Latin America, they want it to be performing its Latin American identity in some way. It's much harder, or at least I find that there's a lot more pushback that if I say this is just a great rom-com that happens to be set in Montevideo, or this is a fun science fiction novel written by a Colombian writer, if it's not about Latin American-ness, that there isn't much, I find that there isn't interest to publish that sort of work. I agree, I agree up to a point. I mean, I think my experience is the same up to a point, and that I think certainly fiction is expected to do different things to a picture book. Fiction is expected to, you know, we're always saying, you know, you read this because it's a different culture and a different world and so forth, and the picture book is performing something slightly different. But my experience is often that it's the picture books that are harder to sell to publishers in translation precisely because of the thing you mentioned, which is that they will buy it on the artwork, that in a sense a picture book, I think that the visual style, the kind of aesthetic of a lot of picture book artists outside the English-speaking world is very, very different, instantly recognizably different to what we publish in the US and the UK in a way that a novel often isn't. And so these very different visual styles, from in my experience, tend to be a really, really easy way of publishers saying no to things, that you show them a picture book and they don't really need to know anything about the text of the story. They immediately look at it and go, well, this color palette is weird and the shape of it is a little bit weird. And I don't really like the way they do faces, because it's not the same way that, you know, John Classon does, you know, whoever. And so the fact that the pictures are, should be a kind of shortcut and it should be much easier to get picture books translated and, you know, the translation is obviously cheaper because there are 300 words instead of 100,000 words. But actually... But the printing is more expensive. Yes. Four-peller printing is massively expensive. We can talk about that as well. But there's something about the pictures that, you know, when I'm, so Lawrence and I both go to book fairs like Bologna, which is the big children's book, international children's book fair, and often the conversation that I have with publishers when I show them things, they'll make a very quick decision based on the illustrations. But the decision is almost always no. I mean, this is also, it's obviously the default conversation in publishing book fairs. But the pictures, rather than being a shortcut, making it easier for people to decide this is something I can see selling to a, you know, the parent of a three-year-old in New York, they immediately go, this doesn't look familiar. At first glance, this looks weird. But I think also that a lot of Anglo phone editors, especially UK and US, looking at picture books from abroad, the English language market tends to like a single or at most two lines per page. And a lot of other territories have much text heavier picture books. And that's something that can also be a big detriment. I did just want to explain, especially if there are people who don't know how picture books are done, that, you know, the four-color printing was generally called YMK, cyan, magenta, yellow, and the black. And a lot of times what happens with picture books is that they're printed simultaneously in different languages for the different territories all at the same time. So if you have, let's say, 10,000 copies in English for the US market and you have another 5,000 in French and 3,000 in Spanish for Mexico and another 3,000 in Spanish for Spain, I think we're up to 21,000. So if you print 21,000 copies of the yellow, the blue, and the red together and only change the black plate and then all of the binding happens simultaneously, it's a way of bringing costs down. As a result of that, though, one, the, especially the American, the British and the French tend to export a lot of books and to do a lot of these co-editions, as a result, and also because of the way that hierarchies work of power and what is considered universal. I mean, like, I'm from New York City, so to me a taxi is yellow and black. Here in Spain, the taxis are white, but we have so many picture books that have yellow and black taxis because Spanish publishers will just add on to a print run from an American publishing house. The same thing happens. I mean, I'm a word person, I write and I translate, I do not draw, but I am drawing something which we will see if this is recognizable. What is that? It's, to me, what it looks like is a letterbox in America. It's an American letterbox. We don't have those here. We don't have them here. And they would recognize that it's a mailbox. And that's a result of what comes out of New York is considered universal in a way that what comes out of Madrid is considered provincial. That is a mailbox to people who either were brought up in the US or who watch Stand By Me quite a lot and imagined driving down the highway with a baseball bat and swinging at the letterboxes. Right. Usually not at the age of the picture books, but still. So I mean, these are questions, though, that happen of or that influence what gets published and where things get published. And, you know, if publishers are used to printing their books in English and then being able to sell rights and other territories to bring down their own costs, as well as the rights income, a lot of publishers don't want to buy in a book, which has, you know, the translation cost. Usually there's not an author or an illustrator available to do promotion. You know, there's a lot of easy excuses for publishers to sing note to doing translated books. Yeah. If I think you describe that the co-editions is the basic business model for picture book publishing for big publishers in London and I imagine in New York as well, you can't do that for a book for which you're only going to buy a single language territory. And the business model goes goes all to hell at that point. Sorry, Lynn, we've taken this we've taken this question. I don't know where we are anymore. All right. Well, on to another question. You've actually answered two of the ones I've written down, but you're also focusing a lot on the role of gatekeepers. And I know you also translate for adults. And I'd like you to talk a little bit about, well, two things. One is the relative importance of gatekeepers in children's books versus adult books. And the second related to that is how you approach cultural taboos or sensitivities in one culture that may not exist in another. Madhu and Lena talked about the refusal to translate. Have you ever refused to translate for that reason? And if so, why? Lauren, you can go first this time. So jumping in, I guess, on the first thing, one of the easiest gatekeeper issues in terms of translated literature is editors, especially Anglophone editors who do not speak a lot of other languages. I mean, that's something that happens to be fairly widespread. That's one reason also why we were talking about the difference between picture books versus older fiction. Even an editor who is monolingual in English can fall in love with the art and say, we'll work with the translator to do something, or even just rewrite the text. Danny, you had to do that with a happiness as a watermelon on the head. And you were credited as the author of the text, not as the translator in that case of fleshing it out to make a picture book that worked in the English language market. So one of the biggest problems with among the many gatekeeper problems is in order for things to sell into the English language market, there needs to be a sample translation done in English and then presented to readers. And so that's a huge obstacle that translated fiction has different than original language fiction. But that applies for fiction, for grownups or children. The difference in the gatekeepers between grownups and children is sort of at the next stage, the point at which who is it that's deciding what is going to be stocked? Well, it's not going to be the children. Who is it going to be decided that what's going to be bought and it's not going to be the children? It's not going to be the children themselves who are on the judging panels. It's not the children who are deciding what goes into libraries and so forth. The problems are also slightly different. I mean, as far as their problems, they're slightly different in the UK and the US because there are slightly different bottlenecks. There is things like the public library service is a huge driver of children's reading in the US and the public library service in the UK is very beleaguered at the moment and is not a huge buyer of books. And so there's much less influence in that sense at that kind of decision making point. I think probably for quite a long time, it's also probably fair to say that we decided that it was easy to blame librarians or teachers or parents or someone else being stupid somehow. And this is why we weren't able to make get the books published that we wanted to or we weren't able to make successes of books. And actually, at their best, the people who we talk about as gatekeepers are the enablers. They're not the ones who stop books getting through. They're the ones who put the books in the children's hands. And so the best allies we have are the librarians and the independent bookstores and very much like for grown-up fiction. The taboos is an interesting question and a different one, I guess. It's certainly true that taboos are different culture to culture and I discovered this quite sharply a few years ago. I was editing an anthology, a two-volume anthology, for children and one for teenagers. And these two volumes were being published simultaneously in English and in Danish, a Danish publisher and a British publisher. And I was talking publisher in Denmark about which of the stories we had 35 stories to start with and which of them would go into the children's volume and which would go into the grown-up volume. And the Danish editor had what seemed to me entirely arbitrary rules about what constituted acceptable children's and young adult fiction. And I had what I'm certain seemed to them entirely arbitrary rules about what constituted acceptable things to go into children's and young adult fiction. There are sometimes possibilities simply to make alterations as a way of mitigating things that are taboo in the receiving culture, which I've had to do particularly when I've translated a book that may be 50 years old. But this is something that applies just as much to books for adults. I have anxieties about what certain kinds of review we're going to say about certain kinds of work because I know that the receiving culture feels differently about a kind of language or a kind of representation or a kind of issue to wherever the book is, wherever the book is coming from. But this is something that I think keeps translators up at night whether they're working for children or not. It may just be me, I don't know. Yeah, one thing Danny mentioned was the library system. Definitely the US library system is very strong and has strong Latin American collections. And so that's actually a plus that, you know, books written by Latino authors whether in English or in translation. And so that that's one of the few plus things of it's a negative though, for instance, if I'm trying to pitch titles from Spain, which don't count as Latina. So that's one thing. I've also had to, I don't think that I've ever refused to translate something based on objectionable content. I mean, hopefully that sort of stuff doesn't, you know, I mean, they didn't do a children's version of Woody Allen's memoirs or something like that. I mean, that sort of content is generally not happening. I think that a lot of times there are things that can be published, especially in Europe, not just the art style, but for instance, questions of nudity. You know, you can have a beach scene and people can be topless on the beach scene and it's completely normal. And Americans will be scandalized by that. I've had actually one of my own picture books as an author was once rejected by an American publisher who liked everything, but it had a Christmas tree in a background illustration. And they said, it's not a Christmas book, we can't have religion at that. You know, and that was just something that the artist who is Spanish in Spain is such an uber-catholic culture, there are a lot of things of, you know, like the inherent machismo in the Spanish language. And a lot of times these are things, especially in kids books, where I'll flag them for the editor and say we should discuss this or soften this or things like that. So, but, you know, I mean, as Danny was saying, also language changes and our expectations of language change. I mean, this is something that happens, you know, for instance, gender neutral language. I just translated to board books by First Nations Canadian writers for Orca books. And one of them is a lovely board book called Little U. One of the problems with Spanish is that it's a highly infected language. So everything, all nouns have genders. And all of the diminutives have genders. And so there's no pequeño, pequeña. There's no gender neutral way that is accepted. There are now one trend in adult languages to replace the OA with an X. The current trend in Spain is to use an E, so pequeñe, and basically pequeño, pequeña. Obviously, you can't do that with a kid who's learning language at the same time as they're, you know, getting these books. So in this case, I changed the title to tu eres tú. Because the book is very careful. It presents a lot of different models of families, sometimes with only one parent, sometimes with two parents. The child is never gendered in the book. And so I did a rhyming version that was gender neutral. So sometimes if it said you are perfect, instead of saying it is perfect, but it's perfect, I changed it to it is not perfect young, you are perfection as a way of getting around that. But I had to take a lot of liberties. The French translator just translated everything in the masculine singular, which is the heteronormative way that the French works. So the Spanish works the same way. But to me, I felt that both for the translator that I am and for the kind of book it was, it was more faithful to the book to try and do as much as possible to preserve that gender neutral. You know, I mean, it was written very carefully in today's world. So that to me. But I mean, this is also something we haven't talked about yet that I think the most important thing is to recreate the reading experience in a translation. And so very often, especially for kids books or illustrated books, we have to take a lot more liberties in order to recreate that experience. But it's also true for the question of taboos or difficult words. I mean, if a book has things that are not easily explained, or that you have to look up in the original, we shouldn't have to gloss that in the translation. It should be as you know, the reader should get to do as much work in the translation as they do in the original, if that makes sense. When you were talking, I wanted to go Lawrence about some of the, for example, you know, much more something in the in the original text and the ways you might be able to soften that and the ways you might be able to produce an English text that somehow mitigates the things that are most problematic in the original. This is something which you can, with very few exceptions, can only do in the words. And you can't do if the problem is in the pictures. So you were talking about nudity, for example, and there is this famous example of the send-up in the night kitchen. Right. In which the boy, the toddlers of age boy is naked. And there are these stories about, you know, Prudish librarians drawing little diapers on this child. I translated a French picture book a couple of years ago where there was nothing, objectionable really in the text, there was nothing problematic in the text, but it was pointed out by the first American editor who looked at it, that there is not one person of colour among any of the characters in this book. And this was not a conversation that anyone had had about this book when it was published in France and became an issue when we published in English for reasons we understand. But that's not something which you can simply, you know, fiddle around a little bit with the words and disguise the problem. There is a lovely French picture book, I now can't remember the name, came out a year or two ago, which plays with this idea of what you're allowed to write in children's books. And the text basically says on the Verso side, the left-hand page, the text says this is a story about a cowboy. He likes to shoot guns and he likes to drink bourbon or whatever, and he likes to smoke cigarettes and he likes to swear. And on the opposite page there is a picture of a monkey, and underneath the monkey it says we're not allowed to show you a cowboy, so here's a picture of a monkey. And then the next page it says we're not, of course we can't possibly show you a gun, so here he's holding a banana. And then the next page, of course, we can't possibly show you him swearing and so here he is singing a song. And I've had various conversations with publishers in the UK and the US about this book because I feel it's such a lovely way of talking about what we can encompass in children's books. But the problem is the fact that these things are there, even if they're there in order that we say we're not allowed to talk about them, means the publisher will have to be comfortable with a book in which someone has talked about smoking even if they're not smoking. And there is at least one publisher who said if we can take out the bits about the smoking and the drinking and the guns from the text, then we can certainly publish it, which suggests maybe they hadn't understood the point of the book. Yeah. They really weren't interested in publishing it. Maybe they just weren't. And that was their euphemistic way of telling you that. I think so. But I think there are also different attitudes, you know, I mean, like what you were mentioning, the picture book that had no people of color depicted anywhere, which may be a reflection of the society, probably not, but a lot of times there are these blind spots that that happen. And I think this is also one of the biggest dangers of us not having enough translated books from all around the world that we normalize those absences. So, you know, not just not having people of color, but not having books from a wide, diverse, global community. I mean, we are over connected all around the world these days through things like Zoom and all of our social media and things like that. So we're aware of what's going on to a greater or lesser extent from very young ages, I think. And so, you know, being able to have access to as well stories and different kinds of stories and culture from these places and not just, I mean, just especially given the terrible things that are happening right now in the U.S., the American poet Patricia Smith tweeted the other day that the last time she remembered a televised assassination of a white person was JFK's assassination 57 years ago. And so she was just appalled at how it's become so common to show the murder of black people. And, you know, and so, I mean, a lot of people have also been very rightly saying these days, yes, you know, there's a lot of important work that needs to be happening, a lot of reading that needs to be happening about race and destructuring everything, but there's also we can't overlook black joy and black celebration and things like that. And I think that's something that's very important for all of us to do. I mean, you know, I know that certainly as a translator or as someone who has a certain amount of privilege, one of the ways that I deal with that is that I translate a writer of color every year in one direction or the other. That's a personal commitment that I've made that I do. Both of the cultures that I work in, both translating it to English all around the world and translating it to Spanish, especially for Spain, need to have more writers of color translated. It's something that's if it's very little books get translated in general, very few writers of color get translated into English as well. So, you know, these are a lot of issues that have come up. I don't want to talk too long. You know, I mean, I can come back to this if you want to jump in, Daniel. Well, we have a question that is related to this. We have a type of question. So, I'm going to actually start with this one because it relates to what you just said. Are children's books in other languages taking on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in their countries? If so, would English language publishers of children's books have any interest in translating these books or do they prefer safer subjects? It depends. That's all I've got. It depends. There are certainly publishers all over the world who are doing interesting things, who are asking difficult questions in books, including books for quite young children, just as there are publishers in the English speaking world who are doing that. And there are certainly some things to be found that we aren't producing ourselves and we can import if we find someone else doing better than us. But I also think that one of the benefits is Lawrence used that word, joy. I think one of the things that we also get is this celebration of lives all over the place that are not necessarily things that come to us because they embody problems that we somehow have failed to deal with ourselves. I don't know, Lawrence, whether there are particular examples of books or publishers you can think of, but certainly there are small publishers that are doing books that are, you know, interestingly, I guess, political. You can call them that. And in the Portuguese speaking world and the Spanish speaking world, just as there are in English. My sense is that it's mostly small publishers and it's mostly publishers that are not easily scared. And this is probably the same about Anglophone publishing to some extent. Lawrence, does that sound right? You know, I would say that I do think that there are certain subjects that publishers in other languages do more easily or I think maybe one of the things that happens is that there's a less paternalistic parochial attitude towards the kids than what happens in English very often. So I think that, for instance, picture books about death, I think that many other cultures do them better. And a lot of the books that the picture books that are published in English about the subject tend to be translations that come in like the Wolfberg book about Tulip in my arms. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of books that treat the subject intelligently and treat the child readers intelligently without necessarily trying to soften it or avoid talking about it or avoid you know, hiding the reality of the world. You know what I mean? I would say it's true. It's true with particular cultures though as well. But if you were to find, you know, the really interesting books about what would be considered difficult or taboo subjects in English from other countries, you will mostly find them coming from the Nordic countries from Germany, from the Netherlands. And you'll also find them in a lot of cases, one of the things that's also different is the speed of which the taboos change. So you will find books that deal with sexuality, with sex, with all manner of things that are finding their way into picture books in the English-speaking world now. And you'll find them in picture books from Denmark or Sweden that are 20 years old, 40 years old, where this problem was dealt with a long time ago and this is simply something which is a perfectly possible conversation to have without having to draw little diapers on all the pictures. Yeah, I mean, I would say that, I mean, just to give a few more examples, you know, especially if it's homophobia was one of the ones that was answered. I think that one of the very first picture books about a gay couple with a child was a photo-illustrated book translated, I think, from Danish or Swedish. I can look, it's behind me, but I'm blagging on it. But another really good example is King and King, which is a Dutch import. That was a book that happened, that was brought in in translation into English long before and it sort of paved the way for other English-language books to then come and be published much more openly because that sort of broke the dam. To give an example of some non-the Scandinavian or Northern European books, though, that also dealt with, you know, our translations that dealt with things would be Tarogomi. So like the gas we pass and, you know, there's a all of the books that he had done, you know, that dealt with bodily functions in a way that hadn't been as easily child-friendly internal. Have you ever... In waves within cultures, the taboos become strengthened and weakened with kind of political waves as well. And it's not hard to think about even in the English-speaking world books that were published 20 or 30 years ago that now would be seen as much harder taboo to break. A very famous one Lawrence will know is something like Bobette Cole's Mummy-Late-Neg, which is a book about where babies come from. And there is an entire double-paid spread, which is just pictures of different sexual positions. And it's incredibly funny. And it's a book for quite young children. It's done with immense charm and human is really, really a very brilliant thing. But in a way, it felt like that came out at the time when there was a kind of relaxing of some anxieties that probably we've probably been pulling back in the other direction since then in the English-speaking publishing world. I mean, I think like there was also Jessica Kingley published a translation of an Icelandic book about body positivity, which was something that again, it has a lot of naked bodies. And so that's the kind of thing that generally happens coming in. I mean, I think you have a few people in the English-speaking world who are doing this sort of thing and finding publishers for them. But I mean, I think that a lot of times that there are less taboos for these issues in many other territories. Just to mention a good, I mean, because there were a lot of issues. I mean, just one book that you translated, Danny, of Don't Cross the Lime, is another good political book that we didn't mention yet. And also, Lynn, yours, the one that you translated of King of the Jungle. You know, both of those are good examples of political books that are very awkward, that are coming in from, in this case from Portuguese-speaking, but it's not only the Scandinavian Nordic countries that are doing hard-hitting work that we need to have in English. Yeah, it's also true that there are different different cultures, certainly in different bits of Europe, have had different attitudes towards politics as something that is part of your day-to-day life. And there are lots of really interesting, Lawrence and I were talking on Twitter the other day about another Iberian, I think it was Iberian dictatorship picture book. Right, and there's something about using the dictatorship, if you're in a country where the dictatorship was very recent and very present and very kind of obvious, that actually allows us to have conversations about authoritarianism in a country where the authoritarianism has been more subtle in some ways, has been, in some cases, under the surface, but has certainly been more devious and less sort of obvious, which is why a book like Don't Cross the Line, but also there are books, there's a British illustrator, David McKee with books like The Conquerors, which are finding ways of using these really big, what feel like big political things that happen over there, so those countries that have dictatorships and things. Those ones, those Latin countries that do these eccentric things and actually saying, well, this is not an alien thing to us, even if we haven't been talking about our politics with this kind of seriousness that it probably has, well, that it certainly has required until now. Yeah. Okay, we have another question related to that. I've been trying to get in. Question by Mohini Gupta, who is a writer and translator from New Delhi. What happens when we are reverse translating into our languages, say an Indian language, and when we lack vocabulary in combating racism, homophobia, sexism, etc., things we want to address with kids in these languages, it becomes even more important to talk to young kids in other languages about these issues and bring some of this awareness back into our cultures through our languages as well. How do you suggest translators navigate this limitation? I was actually just going to respond to what Danny had said though about, and this is going to tie in because I was going to use Mohini as an example. So the whole question of colonialism and colonialism in translation, I mean with the David McKee book saying, you know, that stuff over there, you know, I mean, and it's something that sort of, we did mention briefly, you know, I mean, maybe I guess the easiest thing. One of the books that I've translated is Lavastarada. So this is the first novel by a woman writer from Ecuador, Ghanaia to be published in English. It was published by the Feminist Press in the US and by Majati Books in South Africa. It was published as an adult book. It won an award for young adult literature as a 16-year protagonist. One of the things I found as a white male American translating an African woman of color was, for instance, in the book it uses the word curandero. So if I translate which doctor, that's a very loaded colonialist term. So I mean, one of the things we did in the translation was the book was written in Spanish, but includes a lot of fang vocabulary. And so in the original Spanish it has a gloss at the end. What I did was I contextualized or added definitions in the text rather than having the glossary so that it was more readable. But I didn't want people to think I translated the book from the fang. So we left in the dialogues, we left a lot of the individual terms of endearment. So it would say the grandmother, but it would say abuela in the actual dialogue. So it had the same texture of the Spanish. And one of the things I said was, you know, we should leave curandero in the original glossing it, you know, so that it's understandable what this figure is. But, you know, to me it was not appropriate for me as a white American to be using which doctor, even though that could be a valid term for that. One fascinating example was one of a translation Mohini has done herself of translating Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales into Hindi. So in this case, Mohini is translating an Indian writer writing in English. And one of the things that she did was for instance, in one of the poems he talks about the BBC, the Beastly Broadcasting Corporation. And what Mohini did because of the colonial situation of the British and India, she adapted all of the British references to local Indian references. So she made new puns of different animal related, but using Indian radio stations. This is something she did because of the colonial political situation, which would be very different than if she was translating a Hindi writer into English, especially into English, not for an Indian publisher, but for a publisher outside of India. In that case, you would want to preserve as much as possible of the cultural nuances and the details. One of the things I mean Mohini is also in charge of coordinating a very interesting series of interviews with translators called Mother Tongue Twisters. And one of them was by a translator named Rita Kotari who is talking about hybridity. And this was something that I wanted to touch on and we haven't yet. Because we often use a lot of languages and we're not, you know, there's not always a purity of the people, even people who read a translation don't necessarily have an unfamiliarity, a full unfamiliarity with the other language. So an example would be English, you know, Hindi and English or Spanglish. I mean, it's very different to read something in Spanglish or translate it something in Spanglish if you're in Texas than if you're in the UK, for instance. And so there's a lot of geopolitical things that work as well. So I may have gotten too far from her question. Danny, do you want to be more faithful in answering? The only thing I'll add is that one of the things Mohini was talking about in the question was if we don't have the language to talk about the things. And this is one of the places where children's books have that benefit because of the thing we were talking about earlier with this dual leadership that for the younger children there is a kind of potential mediation or at the very least there is a potential conversation that happens around every book, every reading experience because there is up to a certain age, there is always an adult involved if not reading the book to you, finding the book for you, allowing you to read a book, not allowing you to read a book. There is some kind of potential conversation with a parent, with a teacher, with whoever it is, an older sibling, which does, and that conversation allows you to explore a lot of the things that might be challenging for a reader, for whom this is a new thing to think about. I mean I think the most recent book that you've translated that just came out is The Refuge and even from the title I think that's something where some readers might not or might need help understanding what refuge means. Aside from a lot of the other concepts that are in the book. Yeah so that one I'm delighted and impressed you have a copy it's only been out for about 20 minutes that book. It's very lovely though and thank you for the advertisement. It's something which we talked a little bit about with the editor and again editing isn't another issue which is completely different with children's books and especially with picture books but there are lots of words in that book certainly in my English translation which I wouldn't expect a four or five-year-old to know. But I fully expect the grown-up or the older person of the four or five-year-old to be able to talk about. So things that are not completely explained in the context or that are not explained because the pictures do most of the work. Those are the things that are part of the conversation which is which kind of shores up every reception that a child has at the reading that experience. I mean even the themes of the book are also very directly addressed themes of war escaping coming to another country. I've actually translated a book that's the friendship is very similar but the background is very different so it's about coming out later this fall from blue.kidsprespe called The Day Said Alive which is a friendship between a Malacca and a Spanish girl who learn one another's language and have adventures together but it's missing it's a much sweeter story if that makes sense you know I mean there are you know the reasons behind the going from one country to the other or being a refugee in another country are still there but they're much more off stage than they were in this book which I think deals with them well but I think again going back to the question of you know stories that deal with this for very young age I think tend to come or tend to be more common in some other languages than in English necessarily. So what's interesting about that particular book what you're describing it the way it the way it deals is kind of quite on the nose about this is actually a story about a girl who came over on a boat and had a difficult experience that almost all of the the the more difficult side of that story is in the words rather than in the pictures the pictures the pictures are not frightening the pictures of the boat there's there it's kind of impressionistic and it's a little bit odd and it's very beautiful and the colours are generally very light right and so the pictures which are the thing that the child is getting the most direct access to because the child if you have a child on your knee and you're reading them the book they are reading the pictures they've got the text coming in their ears and the pictures coming in their eyes and the text is being mediated by this person who's being reassuring and telling them whatever they want to tell them the thing which the children are getting directly is the pictures and the pictures actually are are quite young in a way they're younger than the story the pictures are are much safer and much less alarming than than as you say the kind of on the nose story about this difficult situation would suggest yeah I'd like to just talk if I can just finish on this about translation and pictures this is just a picture book of mine that was published in Brazil it's set in in Sao Paulo one of the things that happened is no parking is no estacionar so when it was published in English in Singapore they had to actually change the illustrations to make it no parking so I mean one of the things we don't often think about or a lot of people I think don't think about is that you sometimes need to have translation in the illustration not just in the words I have on one occasion had to there was a page in a book which had the french book which had lots of pictures of vegetables I'm not going to go into too much detail because it's very odd but lots of pictures of vegetables which were captioned with what they sound like if you have a blocked nose so in the way that you know orange in English because it has an N orage it sounds like it has a D rather than N and one of the problems we had translating it is there are certain words which sound funny if you have a blocked nose if you're speaking french but don't in English because they have the wrong letters and I did have to write an illustrator once and say there is a picture of a carrot on page 14 could we possibly change it just change the color so it looks like a parsnip because if it has a parsnip it has an N in it and then I can make the same joke okay one more question real quick do you um because people are pretty insistent do you usually pitch books you found and love to publishers are you known to those publishers usually or do you also approach new to you publishers if so how do you approach them emails book fairs snail mail phone calls I think we have a lot of practical questions here and maybe we can try to address a little bit at least one of them well like my answer is quite quick that I tend to pitch things very rarely I tend to get approached and I and I say yes or no I'm also there are certain publishers I work with quite a lot and with whom I have a kind of ongoing conversation so it's not just they buy a book and send it to me and ask me if I want to publish it they'll also send me things they're thinking about and there's a kind of ongoing conversation about things they might publish um which happens in person happens a book fair that happens by email and so forth I relatively rarely um pitch things uh but that's that's not just that's not to do with thinking this is publishers are unreceptive so much as the fact that I'm not nearly compared say to Lawrence I'm not nearly as well read in the books that have been that are coming out in my in the other languages um I don't often come across books that are really exciting new books in Portuguese or Spanish or French um often the first I hear about them is when a publisher is thinking about acquiring them okay um I definitely do pitch quite a lot um I read widely um I do go to a lot of book fairs I love going to the book fairs I'm also um the Jewish mother and me loves matchmaking and so if I you know I love you know finding the right publisher for a book even if it's not languages that I do and I'm not going to translate it myself so um because I also write especially picture books um you know I mean of the 120 books that I published at least more than 60 of them are parks books so um there's a lot of publishers that I work with as an author a lot of times I'm very familiar with their catalogs um there's lots of publishers that I know and meet um from or have met from the catalog you know from the the book fairs and things like that and I'll follow up with the book and either try and pitch it or um you know do a sample I am also asked very often by publishers here in Spain or Latin America to do samples of books um for them uh sometimes those books sell sometimes those books sell and I'm not asked to do the translation um sometimes I am these things happen um so. And is there a quick piece of advice you'd give to somebody who wants to become a translator of children's books? I think it's important to read and to read in both the target language and the original language so I mean it's as important to be reading if you're translating into English to be reading current contemporary English language uh children's books in the same age range that you're looking for age ranges is also something we didn't quite talk about but one of the things with taboos especially from Spanish to English um the ages tend to swing um you know something that might be juvenil or young adult in Spain would actually be middle grade uh or the the publishing categories don't map out as easily and so there's there's a lot of leeway I think in that so so I mean this is one of the reasons why it's important to read not just you know a book you want to translate from Spanish let's say you need to know then uh is this book with a 14 year old is it actually young adult based on you know that they're smoking or having sex or things like that because in that culture that's okay you know whereas you know kids tend to read older than they are so a book for uh eight to 12 year olds might feature a 13 or 14 year old child because kids want to read what's coming up not things that are too babyish. I think the thing about reading the books in your target language is is more important for children's books than it is even for adult books and I think it's certainly um more important with picture books than it is with fiction if only because the picture book is a is a form in a way that young adult fiction is not a form you know picture is not a genre picture books are a very particular form um and I think a lot of us the only reason I'm if I'm any good at translating picture books it's it's not because my my language skills as it were my other language skills are particularly good because I have in other capacities work with children's books and I have some understanding of how picture books work to do with pace and to do with architecture and to do with structure and to do with the way the words and the pictures work together and so understanding the form of a picture book if you're going to be trying to translate them you're trying to write them what trying to pitch them is as important as feeling comfortable about I mean I think not doing that is like trying to translate um trying to translate poetry without reading poetry it's very it's very different from having continuous prose of a novel say. I think also one thing which we hadn't yet talked about is that the difficulties or the extra difficulty in translating uh picture books are illustrated works is that you can't contradict what's on the page so um you know very often you need to take things apart and rewrite them and put them back together again knowing how a picture book works um to make it work as a picture book in the target language um which is a very different kind of thing that if you're just translating pure text when you have a lot more freedom to take everything or different kinds of what happened is you end up you end up trying to be faithful that you're being faithful to the pictures rather than the original text so you'll often find just very briefly if there's a picture of you know a little boy in a blue coat and a green hat and the text describes him as a little boy in a blue coat I might for some reason in my translation want to call him the little boy in the green hat because that because I needed to rhyme with something what I can do is call him the little boy in the orange coat because he quite clearly is not wearing an orange coat so I can use the pictures I can write to the pictures so long as that that relationship is maintained if there's attention that tension is maintained um but the pictures are almost always the thing that I'm trying to be faithful to and the text is much less is much less fixed it's much less interesting somehow but I mean there are ways also of being faithful I think we're running out of time so what last thing just um we're over time we're over time I'll stop and no surprise that you guys all had a lot to say to each other it was fascinating thank you so much it was really wonderful really wonderful and thank you all for all of your contributions to the conversation and once again we'd like to thank our partners Penn America the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center with special gratitude to World Poetry Books which sponsored today's conversation thank you all thank you and we look forward to seeing you next week