Isolating the American Society

The article by Connie C. Epstein Children’s Book Publishing in the USA (1996) highlighted from the point of view of the publisher the main developments in this literary field that were to be confirmed by other sources dealing with the same topic and period. The long wave of the dissemination of books for children in the US after 1945, followed by another positive trend in 1963 with 2,300 titles on the market began to retire. Epstein reported that “the money to support the legislation had begun to dry up and in the decade of the 1970s the boom of the Great Society turned into a bust.”

(Epstein, 1996:475) The aftermath of this lack of funds did not spare translated literature for children, “a specific casualty” in Epstein’s words. The drop in sales recorded by

72 The prize is supported by the Astrid Lindgren Fund created by a donation of the author herself, and is awarded by the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs.

73 Official website: http://www.fit-ift.org/?p=224 (last access 28/02/2015).

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some editors from 1973 onwards invested mainly translated novels that had a clear foreign culture setting. The growing isolationism of the US followed the political turmoil that led to the Vietnam War and its aftermath: “[…] Americans were now more interested in erasing the cultural differences found within the country than learning about them” (Epstein, 1996: 475). The general overview by Epstein points to a specific phenomenon of this historical period: the rise of specialised bookstores for children. If it is true that budgets to support libraries were cut, and publishers could not risk investments in innovative foreign books, then the only channel left open to the public was the chain of bookstores. Eventually, in 1985 the Association of Booksellers for Children was formed, thus expanding the circle of initiators in the field of children’s literature to include the bookseller together with the editor of juvenile fiction and the children’s librarian. Among the publishing houses that consolidated their businesses over this decade were Penguin, William Morrow, Harcourt and Putnam. Other houses grouped under the control of British, German, and French corporations which expanded their sales overseas.

The upsurge of bookstores in the US brought about a new trend in children’s literature that transformed books in commodities. Betsy Hearne in an article for Signal journal in 1982 stated that “the lack of federal funds for school programmes and the drop in the number of school-age children […] has meant the closing of schools and school libraries” (1982: 38), resulting in a shift in the public of potential purchasers from libraries and librarians to bookstores and parents. In order to lure this new public into purchase, a “different product with a very different kind of appeal” was introduced, for example toy books and gadgets. The commodification of children’s literature that began in this period was to develop into the so called kiddie lite, exemplified by abridged texts and cinematic adaptations from the end of the 20^th century onwards. The term was used by Jan Susina (1993) with a negative connotation. He reported that independent bookstores almost doubled from 1985 to 1992 on the basis of data provided by Book Industry Trends: this source reported a “76 percent growth of children’s book stores”

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(Susina, 1993: vii), with the tendency to transform children’s literature in a commodity lacking in quality and long-term sales.

Lisa Rowe Fraustino (2004) took on from Epstein’s paper to update the information on children’s book publishing in the US. From the data she presents, the US lead the group of the most productive countries in children’s literature in the period between 1970 to 1990, followed in Europe by the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, with Italy in 13^th position after Austria. This list does not indicate the volume of translated books produced in this period, and to fill the gap it is necessary to turn to the longitudinal study carried out by White and Cox in 2004. Their study reported on translations published in the US between 1990 and 2000, confirming the tendency of publishers in this period to invest in picture books (54 per cent of the whole production of translated books for children). Their study provided a list of the most translated languages: German, French, Swedish, Japanese, and Italian in 6^th position after Dutch.

Margaret McElderry and Anne Beneduce were among the most influential people who worked in the US to promote the dissemination of translated children’s literature. On the one hand McElderry was particularly active in publishing multilingual books that included French, Italian, and Spanish, as the US was going through “a resurgence of dual language, or multiple language, books” (quoted in Marcus, 1994: 37).

On the other hand Beneduce moved from one important publishing house to another⁷⁴, making her way in children’s literature department when these were not yet part of the routine of publishing houses. In 1984, she discussed the difficulties of producing translations in the US with particular emphasis on the economic factor, with the problem of backlists for publishing houses. Given the economic crunch in the 1980s, Beneduce said that “a book has to make it in the first eighteen months or else go out of print”

(quoted in Marcus, 1983-1984: 62). In a similar vein, William C. Morris interviewed by

74 Among these, there are Philomel, World Publishing, Crowell, and Collins & World. Her first job in the field of children’s literature came with Lippincott publishing, under Eunice Blake. While working there, she recalls they discovered the work of the Italian Nicola Simbari, and published a picture book called Gennarino.

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Marcus (1995) complained about a change in the market for children that led to investments on established authors that ensure a profit. According to his experience as editor, very few publishers were willing to take risks on new writers and the tendency was to concentrate sales on reprints of famous authors. In 1982, the inventory turnover time proved deadly for books that did not sell well, and in order to revamp the interest in backlists some publishing houses launched series of books with a new jacket design.

The sharp drop in the production of translated books for children in the US is evident in the magazine analysis carried out on THB in 1984-85-86 and 1994-95 issues (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Most translated languages as advertised in The Horn Book (1964-1976; 1984-1995)

The statistics seem to confirm the conclusions by White and Cox (2004) previously mentioned, with German as the most translated language for this period. Figure 6 is based on a total of 31 books advertised in THB (compared to the 90 of the previous period), divided among 28 publishing houses. This means that an average of one book per house was advertised, showing once again a dispersive market for translations which included small publishing houses destined to disappear in the following years.

0 5 10 15 20 25 30

German French Swedish Russian Norwegian Italian

No. of books in translation

Source Languages

1964-1995

1964-1976 1984-1995

US

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Compared to the previous period, only one novel was translated from Russian and Norwegian authors practically disappeared in the years covered by this survey, whereas for Italian the graph suggests that it remained on the same number of translations of the period 1964-1976. The books advertised between 1984 and 1995 were not new authors, but a series of retranslations or reprints of Collodi’s Pinocchio in various editions⁷⁵, and a reprint of Giuseppe Fanciulli’s The Little Blue Man. This result supports the comment by Morris about the focus on renowned authors that ensured a profit, possibly through retranslations or reissues of past editions.

The limited number of books advertised, combined with almost the same number of publishing houses, is reflected in the number of books advertised by the most productive publishing houses detected in the survey. These are fewer than in the previous period: Harper, Viking/Puffin, and Farrar. Figure 7 shows their preferred source languages on a total of eight books in translation overall.

Figure 7. Most active publishing houses in the US and their preferred source languages

75 In 1983 The Adventures of Pinocchio: Tale of a Puppet translated by M.L.Rosenthal published by Lothrop; in 1985 Schocken published The Pinocchio of C. Collodi translated by James T. Teahan (with extensive annotations by the translators); in 1986 Holt published The Adventures of Pinocchio translated by Francis Wainwright, and the University of California Press published Le avventure di Pinocchio/The Adventures of Pinocchio translated with an introduction and notes by Nicolas J. Perrella (bilingual volume).

0 1 2 3 4

Harper Vik/Puf Farrar

No. of books in translation

Publishing Houses

German Swedish

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Harper focused its production on German, with the new author Irina Korschunow translated by James Skofield. In 1984 it advertised The Foundling Fox and in 1986 Adam Draws Himself a Dragon. The only other book in German is Dear Mili by Wilhelm Grimm in 1995, translated by Ralph Manheim and illustrated by the famous American illustrator Maurice Sendak, probably a marketing strategy to sell the best-selling couple Grimm-Sendak to the lay public.

The tendency to concentrate publishing efforts on best-selling authors is evident with Viking/Puffin⁷⁶, which advertised two books by Astrid Lindgren. In 1984 the first edition of Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (no translator mentioned), and in 1985 Mischievous Meg translated from Swedish by Gerry Bothmer.

Like Viking/Puffin, Farrar advertised mainly Swedish authors, especially between 1994 and 1995. Olof and Lena Landström invented the stories of Will, translated by Elisabeth Dyssegaard (Will gets a haircut; Will goes to the post office), the only new Swedish authors advertised by this house. In 1994 a backlist title was reissued, another classic: Tove Jansson and Moominpappa at Sea translated by Kingsley Hart first published under Walck in 1967.

From the results of the survey for the period between 1986 and 1995 the array of publishing houses that advertised translated novels is very limited, but general market trends can be outlined. First of all, publishing houses were more dependent on the requests of the public of parents and teachers, the real driving force in the field at the time (Hearne, 1982). Publishers’ efforts also concentrated more on bestselling authors, a tendency that led to an even more restricted group of source languages with the usual German and Swedish as leaders. Minor languages included Italian, Russian, Polish and Hebrew, often with only one book advertised per language and a preference for new translations of the same book or reissues of backlist books to eliminate remainders from their inventory.

76 The Penguin Group took over Viking company in 1975, therefore Puffin is a parent company of Viking as they are both owned by the same umbrella corporation.

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