Aldous Huxley's Children's Tale “The Crows of Pearblossom”
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Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9 ALDOUS HUXLEY’S CHILDREN’S TALE “THE CROWS OF PEARBLOSSOM” Daniela Hăisan Lecturer, PhD, ”Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava Abstract: Aldous Huxleyřs Childrenřs Tale ŖThe Crows of Pearblossomŗ / ŖCiorile din Pearblossomŗ offers a comparative glimpse at Aldous Huxleyřs only childrenřs tale, written Christmas of 1944 specifically for his niece, Olivia de Haulleville, and its 2016 Romanian edition. Based on some recent works on childrenřs literature in translation (OřSullivan, 2005; Lathey, 2010; Nikolajeva, 2011; Hunt, 2014 etc.), the analysis carried out on the Romanian version of Huxleyřs text follows several key aspects in the field (e.g. varying degrees of adaptation, intensification, translatorřs voice, colloquialism etc.). Keywords: childrenřs literature, translation, adaptation, intensification, colloquialism. Childrenřs literature, as a (marginal as yet) segment of literature at large, is intrinsically hybrid as it comprises works from highly heterogeneous sources. Many books for children are actually crossover books, i.e. adaptations of works from adult literature (see Robinson Crusoe, Gulliverřs Travels, Don Quixote etc.); others recycle traditional narratives often originating in oral stories (see Perraultřs, Grimmřs or Andersenřs celebrated collections of fairy-tales); others, still, areworks of literature written specifically for children, or for children as well as adults (hence the genreřs intrinsic duality). The common denominator of all sources, no matter how far apart, is obviously the audience: The true defining feature of childrenřs literature is [...] its audience: childrenřs literature is indeed literature for children. (OřSullivan, 2010: 4) I see childrenřs literature as literatureread silently by children and aloud to children. (Oittinen, 2000: 4) However, if the addressee is a more or less stable vector in this model of interpersonal communication, the nature of the addresser varies according to different factors: a Swift or a Defoe never meant to address children but ended up being their classics; an Enid Blyton wrote extensively for children (only), whereas a third category of authors (making up yet another trichotomic classification), already enjoying or awaiting their prestige as established writers for grown-ups, occasionally wrote pieces for their own (grand)children or (grand)niblings. One such case, in British literature, is Virginia Woolf, who collaborated with her two teenage nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, on a small but witty family newspaper they called The Charleston Bulletin. It was in this paper that Woolf published as Bulletin Supplements her two little-known childrenřs stories, The Widow and the Parrot (1923) and Nurse Lugtonřs Curtain (1924). The former, a rather conventional, (mock-)Victorian story with a moral, is about Mrs. Gage, a widow who travels to her deceased brotherřs home to claim the inheritance, only to find a house in disuse, no sign of the 3000 pounds she had been told about, and a parrot called James. After a sudden fire in her brotherřs old 183 Section: Literature Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9 house, the widow desperately searches for the parrot, deeply concerned for his well-being; the parrot, who had been sheltered by some neighbours, finally comes to the window and directs her to the riches. The story only entered the world posthumously, in 1965. As for the latter, Nurse Lugtonřs Curtain (that depicts a whimsical animal world contained in the pattern of the drawing-room curtain sewn by Nurse Lugton, which comes alive as soon as she falls asleep), it was not published until 1991, with watercolour pictures by one of Australiařs foremost illustrators, Julie Vivas. Other such long-lost gems recently uncovered by publishing houses are James Joyceřs The Cat and the Devil (a charming 1981 picture-book based on a letter Joyce wrote to his grandson, Stephen James Joyce, on August 10, 1936, and illustrated by celebrated French artist Blachon) and The Cats of Copenhagen, written a few weeks later, equally addressed to a four-year-old Stephen living in France while Joyce himself was in Denmark. As with Woolf, these extraordinary tales reflect the authorřs lighter side, a somewhat diluted style due to a keen concern for didacticism. Finally, our case in point serves as a last example. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the English writer most commonly associated with his dystopian novel Brave New World (1931) which continues to outshine his other fifty books (novels, travel writing, film stories, scripts, essays etc.), also authored a childrenřs tale, The Crows of Pearblossom. He wrote it in 1944 as a Christmas gift for his niece, Olivia de Haulleville, who actually lived in Pearblossom (in northern Los Angeles County, California), having Mr. and Mrs. Yost (who are mentioned in the story) as neighbours. The Crows of Pearblossom was first published (thanks to the Yosts, who had fortunately kept a copy) in 1967 by Random House, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney. More recently, in 2011, it appeared in the Abrams Books for Young Readers series, illustrated by Australian-born artist Sophie Blackall. A funny story about the triumph of ingenuity over gluttony1, Huxleyřs only tale for children is allegedly more redolent of A. A. Milne than it is of his own mainstream literature. Every now and then, however, any Huxley aficionado will take note of his humorous, ironic (at times pedantic) style which, though not as highly wrought and as allusive as in his major works, still makes a point about both the authorřs satirist side and his concern for Ŗproper living.ŗ (Attarian, in Bloom, 2003: 9) In 2016, Huxleyřs childrenřs tale was translated into Romanian and published with Sophie Blackallřs illustrations (from cover to cover). In the present paper, which offers a comparative glimpse at the English text and its Romanian translation, we will therefore use as a corpus the 2011 Abrams Books edition and its only (so far) Romanian version (Ciorile din Pearblossom, translation by Laura Albulescu, Arthur, 2016). If we take into account the fact that translation studies within childrenřs literature scholarship have actually grown from two (opposite) schools (i.e. on the one hand, Göte Klingbergřs 1986 book, ChildrenřsLiterature in the Hands of the Translator,which vehemently denounces all deviations from source text, especially if made under the assumption that young readers lack the ability to fully understandculturalphenomena; on the other hand, Riitta Oittinenřs 1993 and 2000 books whose dialogical approach encourages liberties in translation ofchildrenřs books), then Laura Albulescuřs version, 1In short, the tale is about a family of crows living in a cotton tree at Pearblossom, whose eggs are constantly eaten by a rattlesnake living at the bottom of the tree. After she catches the snake red-handed (eating her 297th egg that year), Mrs. Crow asks her husband to kill the snake, but Mr. Crow prefers going to a friend (Mr. Owl) and asking for his help. Mr. Owl comes with a very ingenious solution: he bakes mud into two stone eggs, paints them to make them look like Mrs. Crowřs eggs, then places them in the nest to trick the snake. Unawares, the snake eats the dummy eggs the next day and, in great pain, ends up tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes on to hatch four families of seventeen children each and Ŗuses the snake as a clothesline on which to hang the little crowsř diapers.ŗ 184 Section: Literature Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9 although adhering to the foreign text, is closer to Oittinenřs view of dialogical translation, in that it allows a number of insertions and a slight change of tenor which cannot pass unnoticed. Even to a slightly-trained eye, this is not to be understood as a strict attachment to Ŗdomesticationŗ (in Lawrence Venutiřs terminology) but rather as a succession of domesticating choices along a cline of translation seen as a continuum with an infinite number of gradations from one extreme (the source text / culture) to the other (the target text / culture). A(ny) textual manipulation made by translators is more easily accounted for in the field of childrenřs literature, given the peripheral status of childrenřs literature in the literary system. Within the ambit of functionalist theories of translation, cutting, omitting, adjusting language, adding information or any such procedures are even more defensible, depending on the required purpose. Surely, these minor or major adjustments are not usually made indiscriminately. According to Zohar Shavit, translators must resort to adaptation only on two conditions: first, that they make it appropriate and useful to the target audience, in compliance with the social relations that determine what it is good for children; and second, that the adjustment of the story, characterization and language refer to the perceptions of society on the target audiencesřs ability to read and understand text. (Shavit, 2006: 26) According to Alvstad (2010), the text can be manipulated by the translator in basically two ways: either by simplifying it, in order to make it more accessible to the reader, or by complicating it (i.e. increasing its lexical density, as a way to enrich the vocabulary of its readers). For many a translation theorist all textual adjustments can be subsumed under the all-encompassing (though sometimes rather vague) term adaptation. Of all the possible types of adaptation (matter-choosing, form-choosing, style-choosing, medium-choosing), in keeping with Klingbergřs classification (2008: 13-14), we are here mainly interested in a set of translational interventions applied stylewise to parts of the text only and not globally, to the whole text, and which include paraphrasing, omission, addition and the like.