Translating the Vanderbeeker Family

Università degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e Corso di Laurea MagistraleCooperazione in Lingue Internazionale Moderne (Classe per LMla -Comunicazione38) e Cooperazione InternazionaleUniversitàTesi deglidi Laurea Studi di Padova Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e CooperazioneDipartimento Internazionale diTesi Studi di Laurea Linguistici e Letterari Translating the Vanderbeeker Family How to be a vender of a beaker of familiarities adapting communication Relatore Laureanda Prof. Fiona Dalziel Serena Andorlini Translating the Vanderbeekern° Familymart. 1176830 / LMLCC Relatore Anno Accademico 2019 / 2020 n° matr. 1176830 / LT How to be a vender of a beaker of familiarities adapting Prof. Fiona Dalziel communication Anno Accademico 2019 / 2020 Laureanda Serena Andorlini n° matr. 1176830 / LT To my family, my grandmother Roberta, and Luis Sepúlveda. 2 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 1 What is Children’s Literature: the Five Ws and H Questions applied to Children’s Literature ................................................................................................. 9 CHAPTER 2 The Vanderbeeker family: content analysis ....................................... 25 2.1 Gender issues ........................................................................................................ 33 CHAPTER 3 The Vanderbeeker family: the translating process ............................ 43 3.1. Translating strategies and choices ....................................................................... 49 CHAPTER 4 To adapt, or not to adapt, that is the question ................................... 65 4.4 First Names ........................................................................................................... 80 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 91 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 95 APPENDIX 1: ST-TT ................................................................................................. 101 APPENDIX 2 .............................................................................................................. 191 3 4 INTRODUCTION Children’s literature has often been underestimated, considered as a collection of books written in “simple” words and with the sole aim of teaching its readers how to speak, write and behave. Therefore, when its scope was entertaining readers, children’s literature was likely to be considered as “poor” in content. In 2014, B.J. Epstein, published an article entitled “Don't Underestimate Children” where she stated that: Literature does much more than teach basic facts or social rules. Children, like adults, have the right to see books that reflect the world around them, and the broader world, too. That means, yes, featuring different races, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, religions, abilities, classes, ages, and so on, and also exploring political, moral, physical, and emotional issues.1 In 2017, Janice Bland (2017: Introduction) a British teacher educator in English Language and Literature Teaching, offered a distinction between poorly-crafted texts, badly simplified and over-abbreviated, and well-crafted texts, lexically dense and creatively enriching, basing her analysis on different choices of language and content and obviously considering only the second type as “authentic” literature. Both the researchers reveal how many complex elements interweave when dealing with a book written for children: they refer to the wide content which can be covered, and to a style far from being “simple”. As concerns vocabulary, for instance, it needs to be rich, challenging and regulated according to the background experience of the target readers in order not to be restricted to a limited number of essential words. Otherwise, the readers’ cognitive abilities might be undervalued and repressed. As writing children’s books has often been considered a second-status occupation, translating them has also been misjudged as a simple and recreational activity. However, more and more researchers are bringing to light the multifaceted and complex nature of the translating process, which even makes difficult to present an exhaustive definition. Translated tales have enriched children’s reading since the medieval period … Who could imagine the history of children’s books without Aesop’s fables, the Arabian Nights, the tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, The Swiss 1 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bj-epstein/children-dont-underestimate-them_b_5576802.html 5 Family Robinson, Pinocchio, Hide, Babar the elephant, Emil and his detectives, or Pippi Longstocking? (Lathey 2010: Introduction) Given the fact that translating is always a matter of choice, dealing with a book written for children consists in facing numerous choices which concern with both the form and the content of a text. Children are demanding readers: they do not like useless complexities or disrespectful simplifications. Translating for children is surely no less demanding than translating for adults. Despite given limitations due to reasons of sales, it is a thrillingly creative process which hides a multitude of complexities being open to dynamic stylistic features, from word play to colourful expressions, and to every possible issue, from gender to death and difference. The adaptation of cultural markers could provide an excellent example in this regard: names, for instance, may be “foreignized” or “domesticated”. This is a thorny dilemma shared by most translators who cannot benefit from a given set of rules, ready to be applied. Therefore, they are asked to make choices based on their own image of the child, the readers’ age, the editors’ directors, and the specific characteristics of a text, such as the setting and the proximity between the source and target culture. The translator of texts for children has traditionally remained silent on the specific challenges of the translating or the young. In the last forty years, thanks to an increased academic interest in translation for young readers […] translators’ of children’s literature have begun to establish a separate voice, so that it is now possible to gain much cleared idea of the strategies and publishing transaction of these professionals from interviews, commentaries, and articles […] At the same time there has been an increase in the number of instances where translators directly address child readers. (Lathey 2010: ch. 11 para. 1) The present dissertation attempts to unravel the tangled world of translating for children, discussing the various complexities it might involve, in form and content, through the analysis of the challenges I encountered while translating The Vanderbeekers of 141st street, a book written for children (7 to 11 years old) by Karina Yan Glaser, released in America in 2017 and not available in Italian up to now. In Chapter 1, I offer an analysis of children’s literature, not through its history and its chronological development, either in the American or Italian context, but by focusing on the issues which have been central in helping me to approach the numerous challenges of the translation process. Trying to find the most suitable way to approach a subject which risks being so vast as to result unnecessarily chaotic, I apply the Five Ws and How questions to my topic. I discuss What “children’s literature” could possibly mean, Who 6 the main actors involved are, Why pleasure and teaching have been considered opposite reasons to write for a young audience over the centuries, and When and Where, that is to say the contextual features, which inevitably influence all literary products. In Chapter 2, I present the novel I translated, The Vanderbeeker Family of 141st street, and I offer an in-depth analysis focusing on gender issues. It was extremely interesting to consider it through a feminist lens because, despite not being officially a “feminist” book, it deals with characters and situations which might challenge some gender stereotypes. According to Loredana Lipperini (2007: 30), after all the debates about equal rights and opportunities, gender roles are still deeply present in our society through the images and references spread by means of communication such as the Internet, television, advertisements and even books, which often present “super-males” and “hyper-females”, silently influencing the imagination of readers. In this regard, I propose a comparative analysis between three of the five Vanderbeeker children, Isa, Jessie and Hyacinth, with Meg, Jo and Beth, three of the main characters of Little Women, one of the most widely discussed books for young readers in feminist terms, written by the American author Louisa May Alcott. Finally, in Chapters 3 and 4, I examine the translating process. I highlight the major translating strategies I adopted and I look specifically at adaptation and the risks and implications in choosing whether or not to adapt linguistic and cultural elements, examining in greater depth the translation of names. On the whole I struggled between adapting the text to the Italian system from a linguistic point of view while preserving as many original elements as possible,

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