Investing in Culture for a Great Society in the United States of

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joined the staff of the New York Public Library in 1943, “part of its great collection of books for children was in foreign languages and also in translations of these books into English.” (1994: 371). Despite this positive attitude towards the circulation of translated books, the paper shortage in the aftermath of World War II brought this literature exchange to a halt. It is still McElderry who recalls the dull situation that surrounded literature at that time: “The war had totally closed off exchanges between countries, and I thought it was important to re-establish them. One way that I could do that was through children’s books.” (quoted in Marcus, 1993: 697) Similarly to Mildred L. Batchelder, McElderry travelled to Europe looking for books to be published in the US, and defined the most active countries in the field of children’s literature as potential repositories for prospective translations into English:

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Germany and Switzerland were all actively publishing books for children in the 1950s […]. A bit later, Holland and then France proved fruitful, too. Still later, Japan became an important part of the children’s book scene (McElderry, 1994: 374)

As an experienced publisher, McElderry commented in an interview with Lisa Persson (1962) on the difficulties that publishers in general encountered whenever they wanted to promote and disseminate translated books on the US market. First of all, she mentioned quality: the books had to be the best a specific country had to offer.

Secondly, publishers had to rely on reader’s reports³⁴ to confirm the level of quality

own imprint that survived the numerous mergers that followed through the years. Among her success stories there are Pitschi book series by the Swiss writer Hans Fischer, and Michio Mado’s poetry book translated from Japanese.

34 Also called ‘editorial review’, a reader’s report is requested by a publisher on a specific manuscript to decide whether the book is worth publishing or not. Sometimes several reports on the same manuscript are called for, and the objective of the report is to “identify the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, determine what editorial work needs to be done, and suggest how the book could be marketed.”

(Mackenzie, 2011: 56)

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expected by that author. The third step was the choice of the translator³⁵, who “must be sufficiently an artist with words in his own right to find the exact English phrase or word to catch the spirit as well as the letter of the author’s meaning, to give the whole flow an authority and style” (Persson, 1962: 98). According to McElderry, this step is particularly delicate, since if the translation does not meet these requirements, the impact on the revision process could delay publication. Figure 1 represents McElderry’s vision of the key role of editors/publishers, which can also be applied to the UK market of translation in children’s literature.

Figure 1. Visual representation of translation publishing

On top of the figure, the first step of the process shows the reader’s report superimposed to the figure of the translator because the latter – being a cultured reader – also provided reports on books in foreign languages for the publisher who could not read the original

35 In some cases it can also be the same person who produced the reader’s report, and can impact on the choice of texts to be translated and eventually published (see Lathey, 2010: 6).

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book him/herself³⁶. Central to the whole process, the publisher is responsible for taking care of the book production starting from the selection of the text to be translated, the choice of translator and illustrator, the revision of draft copies, and finally market sale strategies, ultimately relying on his/her instinct and background knowledge of the receiving market³⁷. In the case of texts to be evaluated for translation into English, the first step is mediated by the reader/translator, highlighting the importance of the reader’s report as actual initiator for the translation process, summarised by Mildred Batchelder as a “handicap” that she felt was typical of publishers:

My lack of languages other than my own was a serious limitation. It prevented my comparing original books and translations. It lessened my ability to understand fully. (Batchelder, 1966: 34)

Long-standing relationships between publishers from different countries also marked the choice of which books to translate, and trips from one side of the world to the other (namely from the US to Europe) were particularly frequent. In the wake of this growing exchange of books, Virginia Haviland produced in 1972 Children’s Books of International Interest³⁸ following the institution in the same year of the UNESCO

36 In the English-speaking community of publishing houses for children, publishers have a pool of trusted translators at their disposal to discuss about prospective translations. Lathey suggests that this relationship is unbalanced, where the “lack of control” on the selection and translation process of foreign works “is unnerving for experienced editors used to working only with English texts and a limited pool of translators.” (Lathey, 2010: 159) Especially in the second half of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st in the US and the UK the pool of translators was limited to a few names who specialised on one or two languages. This is the case of, for example, Anthea Bell and Patricia Crampton in the UK for Swedish/Finnish and German/Dutch respectively; or Cathy Hirano in the US for Japanese. Bell and Crampton both provided reader’s reports for different publishing houses who relied on their experience and knowledge of the source culture and language to provide an exhaustive evaluation of prospective books to be translated.

37 A colloquial way to define the instinct of a publisher is ‘gut feeling’ (Sarah Davies cited in Lathey, 2010: 159), a key factor in the decision of publishing books apart from the ability to anticipate successful literary trends.

38 This book contains a selection of the best books from the lists compiled by the Children’s Services Division of the American Library Association. These lists were used to promote American books in Europe and made available over the years at IBBY international congresses.

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International Book Year. Despite the title, the list is actually US-centred and the declared purpose is in line with the optimistic impetus of children’s literature professionals in this period. The list should help UNESCO and “[…] developing countries recognise the power of the book as an essential for education, cultural, enlightenment, and international understanding.” (Haviland, 1972: x)

The list provided by Haviland shows the great variety available in children’s American literature, an array of topics that is also reflected in the choice of books in translation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The manual archival analysis carried out specifically for the present research helped to support this picture of a varied selection of translated literature for children in the US, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Languages translated into English in the US (from The Horn Book 1964-1976)

The trend in Figure 2 is based on a total of 90 translated books from German, French, Swedish, Russian, Norwegia, and Italian, the most translated source languages in the period between 1964 and 1976. The survey detected 34 publishing houses, and the numerical axis on the left shows the number of translated books per language.

0 5 10 15 20 25 30

German French Swedish Russian Norwegian Italian

No. of books in translation

Source Languages

1964-1976

1964-1976

US

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Thanks to the impetus given to book publishing in this period in the US, many publishing houses included foreign authors in their lists. Among the most productive publishing houses were Harcourt Brace & World, Viking, Macmillan (the children’s book branch called Books for Boys and Girls), Abelard-Schuman, and Coward.

Figure 3 below shows the results related only to these five publishing houses with an indication of the preferred languages they translated from.

Figure 3. Most active publishing houses in the US and their preferred source languages

German, French and Swedish remain on top of the list for the most translated source languages, with French present in four lists out of five of the most active publishing houses, German in three out of five, and Swedish in four out of five.

A wide array of source languages characterised Harcourt Brace & World, which found its best selling authors in Germany with Margot Benary-Isbert³⁹, and especially Jorg Steiner with Rabbit Island translated by Ann Conrad Lammers in 1978, winner of the Batchelder Award in 1979. Harcourt Brace invested in the promotion of several

39 Benary-Isbert was the first author published by Margaret McElderry after World War II with the book The Ark.

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

HBW Viking MacM Ab-Sch Cow

No. of books in translation

Publishing houses

German French Swedish Russian Norwegian Italian

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Swedish writers such as Karin Anckarsvärd⁴⁰, Gunnel Linde, and Anna Lisa Wärnlöf who had a successful career in the US throughout the second half of the 20^th century. For Swedish, the most productive translator at Harcourt Brace was Annabelle MacMillan;

for Norwegian there was Evelyn Ramsden who is one of the few translators who worked also for publishing houses in the UK⁴¹.

Viking promoted mainly the best-selling Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Between 1964 and 1975 it advertised a series of back issues of her novels translated by Florence Lamborn, but in 1975 all translations from Swedish were passed on to Joan Tate who translated The Brothers Lionheart by Lindgren.

Lindgren is the writer for children shared between Viking and the Macmillan branch Books for Boys and Girls. The translator for the latter is Gerry Bothmer⁴², the specialised translator from Swedish for this publishing house. Macmillan’s leading foreign authors were the Germans James Krüss⁴³ and Otfried Preussler, with several translators at work at the same time: Geoffrey Stracham, Anthea Bell⁴⁴, and Elizabeth Shub. The large number of translators for German may suggest a particular interest in the literature from this country, with a large number of releases over a short period of time. Macmillan did not limit its activity to European languages. It also promoted a

40 This writer scored three different books in translation in three years (1964-66).

41 Ramsden worked for the groundbreaking series of “Foreign Children’s Stories” for the University of London Press, with successful translations of Leif Hamre’s series of Norwegian flying stories in the 1960s (also discussed in Lathey, 2010: 146).

42 This translator worked mainly on Swedish, and his works were advertised in 1975 by Delacorte-Seymour Lawrence for Julia’s House by Maria Gripe, but also by Viking-Puffin in 1985 with another book by Lindgren, Mischievous Meg.

43 Gianni Rodari and James Krüss knew each other. In a letter to Giuseppe Ponchiroli (editor at Einaudi publishing house in Italy) of 1967, Rodari explicitly asked to send to Mr. James Krüss the books Libro delle filastrocche and La torta in cielo for translation in German (Rodari, 2008: 73).

44 Bell is one of the most influential translators from German and French in children’s books. Her experience as reviewer and translator paved the way for the acknowledgement of the processes underlying the rewriting of foreign books in the English language, and of the status of the translator in the field of children’s literature.

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number of Russian writers and the genre of the folklore fable through Krylov, Leo Tolstoj, and Afanasjev⁴⁵ translated by Guy Daniels and Thomas P. Whitney.

Abelard-Schuman advertised mainly in 1964 and 1965 (no records were found in The Horn Book for 1966) with translated books from German and French. This publishing house can be considered one of the convergence points between the US and the UK, since it employed translators active in both countries, and advertised in key magazines for both the lay public and for those interested in children’s literature. In the US in 1964 it published Otfried Preussler’s Thomas Scarecrow, a year before his best-selling book The Robber Hotzenplotz, both translated from German by Anthea Bell and distributed in the UK and the US⁴⁶. So far, Preussler was a much sought-after writer from the German children’s book area given that he was published by both Macmillan and Abelard-Schuman in the same country. The only point in common between these two publishing houses was Anthea Bell, who given her status as prolific and competent translator from German, could afford to work as a free-lancer for different houses.

In Figure 3 Coward is the only publishing house that included Italian writers for children in its catalogue. In 1965 there was Renée Reggiani⁴⁷ with Five Children and a

45 Aleksandr Afanasjev was one of the most important folklorists of the 20th century, and his stories were also translated into Italian, in 1953 with Einaudi publishing house, the one with which Gianni Rodari was to publish the majority of his books in Italy.

46 The Robber Hotzenplotz was published in 1964 in the UK, marking a resurgence of “the Romantic fairy-tale tradition in German fiction” (Lathey, 2010: 148) that eventually reached the English-speaking audience overseas.

47 Reggiani exploration of children’s literature lasted only few years (until the end of the 1960s), and three of her books for a young public were successful in the Italian market at the time of publishing. The most interesting aspect of her writing is the clash of culture between the north and south of Italy, with particular emphasis on the consequences of industrialization in Italy. She won the European Prize “Città di Caorle – Università di Padova” in 1968 (also Rodari was shortlisted for this prize, as mentioned on one of the book jackets of the English translation of Telephone Tales in 1965), and other prizes for her adult writing. Her impact on the Italian market for children is summed up in a brief paragraph by Boero and De Luca (2012:

268). The book for Coward had already been printed for Collins in 1963 with the title The Adventures of Five Children and a Dog, translated by Antonia Neville. This makes Reggiani one of the few Italian authors for children who had a single book translated twice. Reggiani is linked to Rodari in translation because her book The Sun Train was translated by Patrick Creagh (who translated the majority of Rodari’s books) and published with Harrap in 1967.

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Dog, translated by Mary Lambert and Anne Chisholm. This translation came only two years after the British English translation by Antonia Nevill for Collins, thus providing another example of convergence between US and UK in terms of choice of successful authors for translation.

The survey from The Horn Book highlighted the presence of other publishing houses that promoted Italian authors in this period. Giuseppe Fanciulli⁴⁸ with his The Little Blue Man published by Houghton Mifflin in 1964 (a re-edition of the 1926 version translated by May McDaniel Sweet) and Bruno Munari with A Flower with Love in 1975 translated by Patricia Tracy Lowe for Crowell publishing house. Munari⁴⁹ was an important designer and illustrator in Italy who also worked side by side with Gianni Rodari throughout his entire narrative production, illustrating his stories and novels.

Their fame in the 1960s in Italy was beginning to get a foothold as they won local awards, necessary to spread their name abroad and be selected for translation in the US and the UK.

The production context presented for the period between 1960 and 1980 in the US shows an active market where several publishing houses took their chance in

48 Giuseppe Fanciulli (1881-1951) is a key writer and critic in the field of Italian children’s literature. He began his career in 1906 with “Giornalino della Domenica”, a magazine for children, to become its director in 1920. He was also a translator of classics from all over the world, such as Gargantua by Rabelais but also Gulliver’s Travels by Swift. He adhered to Fascism and supported its propaganda over the twenty years of domination in Italy, publishing books openly inspired by the Fascist ideology.

Fanciulli’s works for children remain nonetheless an interesting document of Italy between the two wars, and a critical appraisal of his writings is in Boero and De Luca (2012: 183-187).

49 Bruno Munari (1907-1998) worked in the field of children’s literature with stories and innovative illustrations. With Einaudi publishing house, apart from collaborating with Gianni Rodari with whom he shared a “playful sense of humor, both in text and illustration” (Children’s Literature Review, 1985: 121), he also founded the book collection “Tantibambini”, which involved some of the most groundbreaking talents in the field of children’s literature such as Toti Scialoja and Francesco Testa. This collection is hinted at by Ann K. Beneduce, who defines Munari’s books as “innovative works of art, yet done so simply and boldly that children are instantly attracted to them.” (quoted in Marcus, 1983-84: 51). In recent times the website of Bruno Munari Association http://www.brunomunari.it/ is dedicated to the promotion of the creative thinking process at the basis of Munari’s work around Italian schools. Munari was particularly famous in the US as his books went out of print in Italy but were reissued in six American editions in 1970 and 1980. In 1960 Munari designed an alphabet book specifically for American children.

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translating books for children, sometimes targeting single well-known writers to ensure a profit from sales. For example, some houses specialised in Swedish and Norwegian authors (Lothrop, Delacorte-Seymour Lawrence) or made use of the everlasting success of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to propose selected stories through different translations (e.g. Scribner). The five most active publishing houses listed above dictated the trend in the choice of source languages (especially German, French and Swedish), with authors and translators that crossed the Atlantic to link British readers with the American public.

1.1.3 Building a Specialised Market for Children’s Literature in the UK after World