Nachtverhaal : Translating the Narrative Situation, Intertextuality

Nachtverhaal : Translating the narrative situation, intertextuality and Paul Biegel’s style of writing Ploon Rademaker, 3168611 Master Translation (English) MA Thesis Supervisor: Cees Koster Second reader: Simon Cook July 2011 2 Acknowledgement I would like to take this opportunity to thank my family and friends for supporting me during the Master Translation Studies. It was quite a big step to take after having completed a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Culture. I experienced a rough start, but I am glad I kept going to have finally made it here to this point in time. At the end of the second year, I took on an internship at Taalcentrum-VU and learned a whole lot about working in the translation sector. After completing this internship, I took on a temporary job in the cultural sector. The important difference between the internship and the job was the fact that during my internship, I was surrounded by people with a sincere interest in language. Language is where my heart is, and it is the area in which I want to continue developing myself. These past two years have been difficult at times, but the most important lesson is that through these difficulties, I have realised what I want to do. After this ‘small’ break from my studies, I had a difficult time putting my mind back on my thesis subject and writing it again. Many thanks to my parents, close friends and boyfriend who made me remember why I wanted to write my thesis about Paul Biegel’s Nachtverhaal , and encouraged me to pick it up again and go for it. A special thanks to fellow students and friends Anouk and Hilda for revising my thesis during my progress and in the final end. As a result, after almost half a year, I am glad to say: I’ve made it! I would also like to take this opportunity to thank to Cees Koster for supervising me and for allowing me to translate a novel from Dutch into English and go against the principle of translating into your mother tongue. It was a great experience to get to know Biegel and myself even better. I learned many new things about translation studies and language, which makes me even more eager to learn or maybe study other translation-related subjects in the future. 3 Table of Content Introduction 4 1. About Nachtverhaal en Paul Biegel 6 1.1 About Paul Biegel and his oeuvre 6 1.2 Nachtverhaal in Paul Biegel’s oeuvre 10 1.3 Summary of Nachtverhaal and the genre 12 1.4 Genre 16 2. Translation for Children 18 3. Textual Analysis 29 3.1 Narrative situation 29 3.2 Intertextuality 38 3.3 Style 44 4. Concluding remarks 68 5. Translation 69 6. Works cited 86 7. Appendix 93 7.1 Source text 93 7.2 Bibliography of Biegel's work 106 7.3 Email correspondence 124 4 Introduction This thesis studies the challenges posed by translating Paul Biegel’s Nachtverhaal from Dutch into English. Biegel wrote children’s literature. He was primarily interested in writing fairy tales, tales about fairies and tales about adventures. During his career, Biegel had a large impact on the development and the canon of children’s literature in the Netherlands. He has inspired fellow writers of children’s literature, and children, too, to read his books. Biegel set an example of what highly appreciated children’s literature was, and still is today. He raised the bar. Biegel had been writing successfully for more than twenty years when Nachtverhaal was published in 1992, and continued to do so for more than twenty years after that. Biegel’s complete oeuvre consists of more than fifty novels written for children. A full overview of his work is given at the end of this thesis, in the form of a bibliography. The bibliography also includes English translations of his work and novels translated into Dutch by Biegel. I constructed this bibliography using the website www.paulbiegel.nl and an existing bibliography constructed by Wilma van der Pennen and published in Literatuur zonder leeftijd . During Biegel’s life, twenty-one of his novels were translated into English. The first one, Het sleutelkruid , was translated by Biegel and Gillian Hume, and received the title The King of the Copper Mountains . Together with Gillian Hume, he translated two more novels into English. A few years later, Patricia Crampton took over the noble task and translated eighteen other novels into English. She came in contact with Biegel though her editor at publishing house J.M. Dent who asked her to have a look at a first-draft translation of De kleine kapitein to “tweak the verbs” (Crampton, 82). Crampton notes that “she immediately fell in love with the dramatic immediacy of [Biegel’s] scene-setting from the first few lines” of the novel (82). She had translated Godfried Bomans’ fairy tales from Dutch into English in 1970, introducing her to the genre of Dutch fairy tales. After she had translated De kleine kapitein into The Little Captain , she was surprised 5 Biegel “never suggested a single correction in the fifteen books to come” (83). She managed to transfer Biegel’s unique voice and narrative style into English. My first encounter with Biegel was when I was only four years old. My parents used to read me Biegel’s novels as bedtime stories, as well as novels by Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren. After a trip down memory lane, I remembered how much I loved Nachtverhaal as a child. I received Nachtverhaal for my 7 th birthday in 1993 and by then my collection of Biegel novels had already grown considerably. Before writing this thesis, I had reread Nachtverhaal a couple of times and was overwhelmed by Biegel’s choice of and play on words and how he allows readers to become familiar with his created worlds. This thesis studies the translation problems that occur in Nachtverhaal . This process consists of finding possible solutions for the possible translation problems. To do so the narrative situation, the detectable intertextual references and Biegel’s style of writing in Nachtverhaal have been thoroughly analysed. This research allowed me to find multiple translation solutions, from which I was able to create the final translation. The final solutions were chosen in light of the novel written by Biegel and the translation norms applied. Before getting to the final translation, an introduction to Biegel’s life, his complete oeuvre and a summary of Nachtverhaal’s position in that oeuvre, followed by a summary of the novel and an analysis of the genre is given. This is followed by research conducted to see if translating children’s literature from Dutch into English in general creates translation problems, as well as what the norms of translating children’s literature into English are. At the end of this thesis, the translation of a passage from Nachtverhaal can be found, to which my translation strategy is applied. 6 1. About Paul Biegel, his oeuvre and Nachtverhaal 1.1 About Paul Biegel Biegel was born as Paulus Johannes Biegel on 25 March 1925 in Bussum, the Netherlands. He was the youngest of nine children; he had six sisters, Maria (1903), Annetje (1905), Cecilia (1908), Elisabeth (1910), Marguerite (1912) and Helena (1922), and two brothers, Herman (1913) and Rein (1918) (Boonstra,1996: 8). His father Hermann Biegel (1876-1947) was of German descent and worked at Biegel & Bollentin merchant’s office. He married the French Catholic Madeleine Marie Michèle Eugenie Povel (1879-1957) in 1902 (84). Biegel lived in Bussum during his youth and moved to Amsterdam when he left his parents’ house. Biegel married Marijke Sträter (1929) on 10 September in 1960, after having been engaged for three years, and had two children: Leonie (1963) and Arthur (1964) (Boonstra, 1996: 85, 86). Their marriage ultimately failed. His son Arthur ended his life when he was twenty-eight years old and Biegel had a hard time accepting this. In 1999, Biegel was knighted in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (L. Biegel: 2011). By the time the Second World War had broken out, Biegel was only fifteen and still in secondary school. At that same age, he experienced his debut with De ontevreden kabouter , a short story which was published in the Catholic newspaper De Tijd , where his sister Anne worked (Boonstra, 1996: 13). Biegel completed his secondary school with a bit of difficulty, which can be seen on a report card with disappointing marks and a note from one of his teachers saying that she was displeased with his performance. This report card was published in Paul Biegel: Een meesterverteller met een rovershart , a book made for a museum exhibition about Biegel (Meinderts, 25). Nonetheless, he continued his studies. Biegel had had the ambition of becoming a pianist ever since he was a young boy, but he had lacked the talent (13). After the war ended, Biegel went to the United States for five years to stay with his sister Cecilia, where he 7 travelled around and published a few stories for expats living there in the Knickerbocker Weekly (ibid.). When Biegel came back, he worked for the Radiobode at the AVRO, where he wrote and completed multiple journalistic tasks and wrote the comic “Eddy the television-monkey” (ibid.). He also attempted to study Law at the University of Amsterdam, but did not manage to pass his Bar Exam. As a result, in 1959, Biegel became a text-writer at Toonder Studio’s , a comic book studio well known for Tom Poes and Olivier B.

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