Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 32

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Pathways
Bill Nagelkerke

There is a wonderful line in Joke van Leeuwen's book Iep! which reads: ‘... als er maar genoeg mensen ergens willen lopen, dan ontstaat daar vanzelf een pad.’ A pathway is a good metaphor for both writers and translators. Through excellent books, such as Iep!, writers create new, original pathways for readers to follow and on which to make journeys of discovery. Translators, too, must lay down a traversable path between an original text and its translation into a different language.

In July 2009 Gecko Press (in Wellington, New Zealand) sent me a book to review for possible translation. It was none other than Iep! Joke's name was familiar to me. As a former children's librarian, I was aware of an earlier title of hers that had been published in English in the early 1990s called The Story of Bobble Who Wanted to be Rich (translated by Lance Salway) but it was not a book I had ever read. This is what I wrote to the publisher about Iep! at the time:

Iep! is certainly another potential ‘Gecko’ title. Warm, witty, wise and just a little bit different. A couple discovers a bird child, brings her up, learns to love her, until she eventually flies away; leaving the nest in a way that is both more literal and metaphorical than usual. Before the inevitable and very poignant ending, the bird child tests her wings and her ‘parents’ go in search of her. During their search they spend a little time resting in a kind of hotel for lost souls - a place for people who ‘can't stop thinking about things they'd be better off not thinking about, such as flying girls who don't exist’ - but realise in time that they don't belong there and that ‘their’ child is indeed real, not illusory, and that they have to continue their search for her, which they do, successfully. Careful readers will find much in this short section to ponder over. Iep! works successfully on many levels. The character of the bird child will resonate with and fascinate children. Van

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Leeuwen paints a picture of her that is three-dimensional and quite believable. The concerns of the adult characters (also well-rounded individuals) are childlike enough to be meaningful to younger readers, but are also relevant for older readers including adults. The language used is deceptively simple. Deceptive, because embedded in it are complex themes and ideas, especially notions of identity, difference, acceptance, finding and letting go. These notions, though complex, speak clearly to the reader through the intriguing and appealing character of the bird child and how individuals respond to her. Iep! lets readers see the world differently.

I was pleased to read recently that Joke thinks this last comment holds true for all of her books. She noted in an article written for the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair: ‘Ik heb nu de leeftijd dat jongvolwassenen me zeggen wat mijn boeken in hun jeugd voor hen hebben betekend. Dat die hen anders hebben doen kijken en denken, hoor ik.’¹

The illustrations in the book - done by Joke herself - add another, equally important, layer to the narrative. The synthesis of line and text in the prologue work harmoniously together and the repetition and subtle variation of the graphics at the book's end help to frame the story perfectly.

At this point I should perhaps explain that I have worked as a translator for a relatively short time, a little over a decade. My parents emigrated to New Zealand from the Netherlands in 1955 and Dutch was my first language until English inevitably took over. I spent twenty-five years working as a children's librarian in New Zealand and am also a writer of stories and books for children. The rekindling of the Dutch language happened for me through my participation as a member of IBBY Hans Christian Andersen Award juries in 2006 and 2008, when I had the unparalleled opportunity to read a great deal of Dutch. I was delighted when Gecko Press commissioned me to translate Iep! yet I also felt some trepidation, as this was going to be the longest text I had worked on so far. When Gecko Press was first established, I had offered to try my hand at translating a picture book if one happened to come along. One did, in 2006: Wie rijdt? by Belgian author and illustrator Leo Timmers.

1 Joke van Leeuwen, Change, written for the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2016.

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This book, seemingly a simple story involving a range of vehicular noises, was a perfect induction to the often complex craft of translation requiring, as it did, a visit to a fire station to listen to the different sounds made by fire engines, based on the realisation, after reading the Dutch text, that the sound of a European siren - at least a literary one - was different from a New Zealand one! And although I had recently completed the delightful and sophisticated Schaap met laarsjes by Maritgen Matter, the challenges of Iep! were going to be even more complex and challenging.

One of the first things I did was to change the title to Eep!, as Iep! might in English have been pronounced incorrectly. The linguistic somersaults performed by Tine and Warre as they try to teach Viegeltje to talk had likewise to be adapted. A student completing a master's degree in translation, focusing on the creative and expressive use of language, wrote to me about the choice I'd made with regard to the ‘translation’ of the rhyme beginning: Beps, de Beps van Bob en Baps... This rhyme could not easily be translated (at least, not by me) so I substituted an old English rhyme that also featured buttons, an important aspect of the subsequent plot. It was also not too far away from Joke's description of the Dutch rhyme, ‘een oud liedje, sommige woorden waren al kromgetrokken.’

Buttons, a farthing a pair!
Come, who will buy them of me?
They're round and sound and pretty,
And fit for girls of the city.
Come, who will buy them of me?
Buttons, a farthing a pair!²

The student also noticed that some of the bird species listed randomly by Warre in Chapter 3 had been replaced rather than translated. This decision

2 Opie, I. & P. Opie, The Oxford nursery rhyme book. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1955.

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was in part akin to conveying the relevant sound of the siren in Wie rijdt? Because Eep! was going to be published in New Zealand first, and because it made no difference to the narrative arc, I took the liberty of including the names of some indigenous birds. The alteration also allowed me to match the humorous play on words that Tine makes in reply to Warre's list.

‘Birds can have much easier names as well. Like chaffinch or sparrow or blackbird or fantail or magpie or bellbird or dotterel or quail or grebe or swallow or linnet.’
‘I'd go dotty if I was called Dotterel,’ said Tina.³

Although I was not in direct contact with Joke about the translation of Iep! she was sent a copy of the text before it went to print and kindly took time to make several helpful suggestions and point out some small errors. She also mentioned that in the film version of Iep! the characters retained the names she had given them - Tine and Warre - but that they'd been changed in the English translation. This was a very reasonable concern, and an issue that I had spent some time pondering, but in the end we chose to stick to the variants - Tina and Warren - as the correct pronunciation of the Dutch names was liable to trip readers up and we wanted the text to read as smoothly as possible. I was very happy indeed to note Joke's comment that she found it ‘fijn om de tekst in het Engels te kunnen lezen’ and that ‘er zaten goede vondsten in.’

Toen mijn vader een struik werd was the next book of Joke that I worked on. Once again, I provided Gecko Press with a report on this title and, at the same time, another of Joke's novels, Deesje. Of course, I wanted to translate both books but that was not a possibility. I wrote:

I enjoyed both of these very much - they are more grounded than Eep! (literally) but either would be worth translating. Curiously, despite their distance in publishing time, they have in common the main plot of a young girl having to fend for herself in the wider world. Toen myn vader een

3 ‘... vogels kunnen toch ook namen hebben die je heel makkelijk uitspreekt? Bijvoorbeeld mees of mus of merel of paapje of sijsje of putter of ral of kwak of fuut of kluut of kneu.’ ‘Kneu,’ zei Tine, ‘ik vind het sneu als je kneu heet.’

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struik werd is an anti-war fable. It is not set in a specific time or place but this gives the story broad relevance and resonance. The bulk of the story follows Toda on her journey to find her mother. Some of the events are scary (manageable for the intended audience aged about 8-10 years), some comedic, some lightly satirical. The authorities interrogate Toda but finally allow her to stay in an orphanage. Not long afterwards, Toda does find her mother. However, the book ends with the war still separating Toda from the rest of her family. This is really a story about what it is like for a child to be a victim of war - a refugee, unfamiliar with the language and customs of a new country, treated like an outsider, owing a debt of gratitude to strangers for a situation not of her own making and out of her control. Toda is feisty and persistent, her growing knowledge of the reality of what war means tempered with a naive innocence that carries her through. Timely and timeless, it sticks in the memory.

Once again, Joke van Leeuwen, in her article for the Frankfurt Book Fair, makes an indirect comment on the underlying drivers of Toen mijn vader een struik werd. She writes: ‘... laten we de ander - wie uit het buitenland komt, wie beginnend is - nimmer minachten.’

Language - its potential for myriad complications and misunderstandings, as well as its capacity for humour and undercutting pomposity - is at the heart of this wonderful book and naturally for a translator some aspects of it needed careful consideration. In particular, how to deal with the invented, ‘foreign’ language with which Toda is confronted once she crosses the border. I toyed with the possibility of creating a new version for the translation but, ultimately, left the text as it was, not because it would have been a difficult and timeconsuming thing to change, but because it was actually unnecessary. Interestingly, the makers of the movie version of the book, dealing with the same issue, wrote to me asking for some assistance with the subtitles: ‘specifically the fantasy language of the neighbouring country [which] seems quite a challenge to translate.’

I replied with my reasoning for retaining the text as Joke wrote it: ‘The made-up, or fantasy, language is quite difficult as you say. In the book I was able to leave the words as they were originally written, because they are explained in the context of the story, or else Toda explains them to the reader.’

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I did suggest a number of options to the film makers, which included transposing letters, taking a phonetic approach, replacing certain vowels with diphthongs, but none of these really seemed to work. They wrote back telling me what they had decided to do, and why: ‘... as you told [us], you used the actual/original fantasy language in the English book, [because] we will understand as a reader what the message of the foreign people is. It made us realize that in the film we don't need to comprehend the fantasy language to still understand what is going on. So we took a look at it once more and decided that the best solution seems to keep the fantasy language intact ... you [made] us realise that keeping the fantasy language intact could be a possibility as well.’

I communicated with Joke directly about a couple of things in the text that for some reason I found difficult to visualize, for example a line on page 41 of the book, which read: ‘Aan de ene kant hield de muur met cijfers op. Aan de andere kant was een hek dat van speren leek’ and ‘opgezet schaap’ on page 73. She replied quickly and cleared up the problems I had, adding: ‘Don't hesitate to mail me with any questions (I just had a nice correspondence with the Slovenian translator about the new invented language at the end of the book).’ Looking back, I wish I had asked her how that correspondence had gone, as I had at that point not yet resolved the matter of the invented language. I recall - although I no longer have a copy of the Dutch novel to check this - that the humorous yet satirical interactions between Toda and the General were also a little problematic at times, particularly in regard to the General's name and Toda's reinterpretation of it in the context of botanical definitions:

‘By rights you ought to know who I am. Come on, who am I? General See ... See ... Have a guess!’
I'd never learned about a general whose name started with See.
‘I've heard of seedlings,’ I offered. ‘We were taught about the two sorts of seedlings once.’ In fact I could still remember their interesting names: monocotyledons and dicotyledons.
He looked disappointed.

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Joke's illustrations of the General's decorations following this conversation provided helpful visual clues for the translation.

Pleasingly, both Eep! and The day my father became a bush received good reviews. The latter title was included in a list of ‘Ten of the best books about refugees’ in which the reviewer says: ‘From the title right through until the end statement - I'll stay here until my father no longer needs to be a bush - this narrative is a perfect example of how humour can be used in the most searing and devastating of ways. When civil war breaks out in her (unnamed) country, Toda has to flee to safety. Her flight is told through her sharp wit and an almost brutal clearsightedness which, in turn, exposes the adult world of borders, checks and bureaucrats as arbitrary, sometimes cruel, often ridiculous, always baffling. A precise and thoughtful narrative, wrapped up in a philosophy which inspects our humanity with great scrutiny and makes a nonsense of our world.’⁴

What better praise could a writer (and translator) wish for? ‘Als er maar genoeg mensen ergens willen lopen, dan ontstaat daar vanzelf een pad.’

4 http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/221/childrens-books/articles/ten-of-the-best/ten-of-the-best-books-about-refugees