Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 6

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A children's book should be a joy forever^*
Imme Dros

Words are paid for with time. We start our lives without them, but necessity soon makes us reach out for these most effective tools to get whatever we want. Food, attention, love, in short: life.

It would seem that the skill in language comes quickly to most individuals, that children learn to understand and speak words as if it was play to them, but of course that is not so. One has in general ears from the very first day, one hears sounds, among others sounds made by human voices, but it takes time to select the useful sounds, it takes time to use them. Sounds become names and eventually words functioning in clusters of words.

When we try to get the feeling of how many of the words a child hears every day are just sounds to him, we have to travel to foreign countries without a dictionary. It is impossible for children to ask the meaning of every word they hear, so they don't. They try to find out for themselves and sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover that a word or a group of words (in nursery rhymes or prayers) has a different meaning than one always thought it had.

In learning to speak, very small children are forced to use and train their imagination, but their goal is essentially a practical one: they need to comprehend and use words in their fight for a place under the sun, they are fascinated by reality, and love stories about every-day life. They just want to be able to call a

* Lezing gehouden in Oxford, 1992.

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spade a spade, and think that very rewarding in itself. Pleasure in fantasies and make-believe stories comes much later. It's grown-ups, hankering after these wondrous days when a spade was not yet a simple down-to-earth spade at all but an alien object, that are searching for a different reward from words. They look back at the wild, unreclaimed world of their early years, remember the thrills, and forget the hard work. Their longing for once upon a time is the stuff that fairy-tales are made of.

As children love attention from adults, they listen to their stories, mostly because of the sense of solidarity. Getting used to the ins and outs of the world of make-believe, however, they grow to love it for its own merit. Fiction can be exciting but all fiction needs a grain of truth to become more than just divertissement.

When I was a teenager, I read the novel Tarzan of the apes by Edgar Burroughs; I liked the book but thought it rather silly too, a kind of fairy-tale but nothing like the tales of Grimm or Andersen that always contained an echo of reality. Teenagers fighting for their place in society, slaving to obtain an education, longing to be special, are interested in life itself, even if they dram up a life much larger than life can ever be, and I accepted the fact that Tarzan was king of the jungle but I could not believe that he learned to read and speak all by himself.

I lost the book and do not know whether I remember the story correctly: a baby boy is raised by apes and finds - when he is about six years old - a trunkful of children's books including an illustrated abc-book. The bright child first learns to interpret the drawings: he compares the painted tree with one of the trees in his jungle - a miracle in itself - and ends by working out that the little black ‘ants’ next to every drawing form the names of the objects in the picture.

This is already unbelievingly ingenious, but not only does Tarzan learn how to read all by himself, he even knows without being told how to pronounce English and when the time comes he speaks the famous words: Me Tarzan, you Jane.

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Compare this improbable tale to the true story of the famous Wolfman, the man who grew up in the woods without any help from people. He was still quite young when found, but could never learn to speak in spite of much care and special teachers. The ability, the flexibility, the incredible curiosity and patience of the very young to learn anything at all, had in this case been aimed at staying alive in the only world he know.

Children are incessantly striving to function in their environment and children surrounded by people are driven to speech. With words, they might control their memory, recollect the past, plan the future, manage the present, so they reach out to them. They make the most of the few words they know but are used to the fact that as a rule they simply don't understand what is told.

In The journeys of the clever man the little boy Niels has a babysitter Mr Frank, who reads to him besides his cradle, later cot, still later bed, until he falls asleep.

... It was always about the journeys of the clever man, as Mr Frank used to call him. ‘Now I'm going to tell you about the journeys of the clever man.’
He had a thick book in a leather cover that he carried under his arm whenever he came to see us. The stories were in that book.
I didn't understand what he read to me, first of all because I was too young and later on because I couldn't understand him. The stories were in a strange language. That didn't trouble be in the least. I was used to it. I thought that reading aloud was always like that ...

In Niels' case the sounds never become words. They belong to a never ending lullaby, they serve to sleep and to dream.

... Before he began, Mr Frank used to say a little bit first about where we had got to and what was going to happen next. For example: ‘The clever man has landed with his ships on a new, strange island. The wind has died down. The land is green and sheep are roaming on the hills. Smoke is curling upwards behind the trees so the land must be inhabited but by whom?

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Are they friends, are they enemies?’
Then he would open the book and read aloud, or he would shut his eyes and recite, for he knew whole pages by heart. I lay and listened. I could tell from his voice what was happening. I could hear the roaring of the sea, the water splashing and swishing round the bows of the ships, the rushing of grass and leaves, the gentle bleating of sheep in the distance and the whispering of the men ...

Niels invents his own adventures about the clever man and when he grows older he wants to recapture the stories he made up. Assuming that he will find them in the books of Homer he decides to learn Greek although he has great difficulty in learning anything by heart.

In his patience and endurance he may best be compared to Odysseus himself, who has to wait seven years before he can sail from the remote isle of Ogygia.

It stands to reason that Niels is very much disappointed when he hears the contents of some verses by Homer. He listens at the door of the fifth grade and hears pupils read and translate Homer.

Like any grown-up that tries to read the favourite book from his long lost childhood and finds nothing left of the greatest tale that ever was, Niels looks for what is not there.

... The lines had sounded so mysterious when Mr Frank read them and now it seemed that they were just about the Great Bear or the Wain. I had been able to pick out the Great Bear from among all the other stars ever since I was six years old and my father had shown it to me above the roof of our house.
And then a shudder ran through me. Odysseus had looked at the Great Bear from his raft! That was really creepy. The stars were so far away, if you worked out how long the light took to reach Odysseus and how much longer it took before I myself saw it, there was very little difference between then and now.
It was somebody else's turn now. He read the verses in the right metre, the headmaster said, but the translation was too free.

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‘You must not improvise, I want to hear exactly what is written’.
There's a lot in that, I thought, words mean something, after all. That's what is so good about words. With music you could think whatever you liked (my mother thinks up stupid stories to suit the music, my father just listens to the way it's all been put together - to the structure, as he says), but words already mean something. Whether you read them a thousand years before Christ or now. They may not mean exactly the same but the Great Bear is still the Great Bear.

Still, every time Niels talks or hears about Odysseus, his thoughts wander and he comes up with his own interpretation. In his mind he sees the ship with the blue prow, the rowing men, he hears their voices.

The printed words seem too final and he is afraid of losing his own imaginings. But as somebody says to him: ‘You can never lose something that you imagined yourself. Whatever you imagine is you, yourself’.

Niels gradually tries to write down what is in his head to keep it safe forever and ever.

... I heard stories from my first weeks, stories that I hadn't understood because I didn't know any words. But I had ears, I heard everything. I knew the sound Odysseus before I realized that it was a name.

He discovers that it is hard to find words for a dream, it is hard to start from scrap like a small child and fight for tools you thought you already possessed. Again patience, endurance, courage are required. After many mishaps, Niels finds in the end the first sentence of his first story when he is looking at his parents dancing to the melody of a very old song that merges with the melody of an even older song: Long ago when I was small my parents loved dancing and going to town.

Any story can be told in many different ways, and an author cuts it down to the words he happens to choose. A reader gets

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only this visible part to recreate the whole. As everyone has his own history and his own memory, the stories of both author and reader will have only the words in common. Sometimes a fine story is told badly, and sometimes a trivial story is well- written. Harmony between content and form is what all literature is about.

In Holland, children's books are still considered to be means of education and entertainment only. The Dutch authors who dedicate themselves to the writing of children's books are not expected to produce literature, and there is no literary tradition in children's books in Holland. We have no Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh, books that not only show the pleasure of playing with reality but also the joy of playing with language, with the very words.

Yet, more and more novelists and poets in Holland see children's books as a literary phenomenon with its own possibilities, its own laws and its own beauty. Their books first met with some reluctance - especially by adults - but are gaining ground. Only yesterday the big prize of the Dutch critics for children's books 1992 went to the poet Toon Tellegen for his wonderful story ‘Miss Stove’. It is the diary of a schoolboy who has a monstrous teacher, who bullies all children without exception. His fantasies how to punish Miss Stove are pure magic and beautifully written. For me, a book like Miss Stove can hold its own with the best Dutch novels of the year.

But literary critics in Holland, the critics that review novels and poems for adults, do not believe children's books to be of any literary importance, nor do they believe in the possibility that children could appreciate literary aspects in their reading matter. This opinion is shared by most adults in Holland.

Of course, children must read or become illiterates. A few hours of reading at school are not sufficient to become a more or less experienced reader. Even in the higher grades, children that read little have great difficulty in understanding what they read. When asked to read aloud, they need all their attention for

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spelling and pronouncing the words, and don't have a clue of the contents. That's why it is of great importance that there are attractive books for all children of all ages in order to get familiar with printed language. For printed words are also bought with time and nobody can master reading without due exercise. This seems logical enough but is by no means common knowledge. Parents are often more interested in the sporting gear of their children than in their reading matter, they leave that to the school.

Children with a literary aptitude are not so easily recognized and supported as children with a talent for music or science, but they do exist and they have a need for books that show them the way to literature.

Everything we experience will be part of our own world. Amongst other things, we remember fragments of poems and books we love. We quote bits and pieces in conversation, and writers sometimes use quotations in their books. Thus, literature is integrated in life as life is integrated in literature.

In the book Annelie in the depths of the night I introduced a clay soldier amidst a bunch of tin ones. He complains that his hundred clay friends all perished in a bathtub and that he is the only one left. The Mouseking, friend and companion of Annelie, sings a ballad about the clay soldier who looks so very lonely, so very ‘without his ninety nine friends’, and this ballad has in Dutch the exact metre of Keats' Ballad of La belle Dame sans merci.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Although I explained that to the English translator, he changed the metre all the same and he translated ‘very without’ - which

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is no more standard Dutch than standard English - as ‘quite lost without’. I could have written that in Dutch if I had wanted to, of course, but I did not because as I pointed out, I wanted to see the ghosts of these lost soldiers marching along with their friend, like I see the ghosts no-birds singing like hell in deadly silence.

The name of Annelie is in the Dutch book: Annetje Lie, and I chose this name because of the poem by Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee. My request to name the girl Annabel Lee was met with refusal, the reason being that Annabel Lee was the name of a well-known Southern Belle. I doubt if this Southern lady has made the name more famous than Poe did.

A song in the book about Annelie that had the exact metre of the poem by Poe is in English not in the least like it. I think that's a pity, because literature belongs to life and should have roots in children's books. Now the Dutch and German version are more related to English literature than is the English version itself.

Both the English and the German translators of The Journeys of the Clever Man had some difficulty in looking up the ‘quotes from the Odyssey’. I told them that there was really only one quote, the other bits are thought up by Niels himself, those are his dreams about the clever man. My Dutch publisher was so charmed by what she thought the Odyssey was like after reading The Journeys of the Clever Man, that she asked me to write an adaption of Homer's Odyssey for children. I have tried very hard but could not change the real thing, I had to translate literally and in the metre of the original. For it is not only understanding of human character, entering different worlds in different times, learning about all possible societies and individuals, in short: the contents of a book that make reading rewarding, it is also the sheer beauty of language well-used. In translating Homer and comparing seven different translations to check every verse, I learned that all those translators in English, Dutch, French and German have tried to recreate the contents in their own language and that some of them took great efforts to reshape the form as well.

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But the original is unique because of the harmony between form and content. In literature form is essential. And only the very best authors make form and contents a unity not to be divided. We have many Dutch translations of Shakespeare, but it still is: to be or not to be that is the question. We cannot change these words, we cannot change the syntax, we cannot paraphrase, alter, improve: the very words are the very content. That is why literature gives a sense of truth as well as beauty.

Words are tools for communication as shoes are made for walking, but when the shoe fits, Cinderella will go to the ball, and when the word fits, language will be literature. And in its literature even a dead language stays very much alive.

Odysseus looks at the Great Bear or Wain, like sailors do in our time, his dog Argos, dying at the moment when his master is back after twenty years, pricking his ears but too weak to creep nearer this beloved man, moves us as he moved the public long ago. Words may sleep not one hundred but three thousand years, they wake up when an adventurous reader takes arms against a sea of thornbushes to kiss the sleeping beauty. May it be the first endeavour of the authors of children's books to make their work a thing of beauty.

At the end of The house at Pooh corner the little boy asks his beloved bear: Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred’.

Children should be able to ask of their favourite books: promise not to bore me ever, not even when I live to be a literary critic. The children's book is an authentic literary phenomenon and if it is still young, so was the novel not long ago.

It would be an achievement if adults read books from their childhood not only for sentimental reasons but because the books thrill them by their literary accomplishments.