In “Where the Wild Things Are,” the boy Max finds himself sailing off, in a private boat, “through night and day / and in and out of weeks / and almost over a year,” to the eponymous land. There are about a thousand little components that combine to make “Where the Wild Things Are,” for me, one of the greatest of American books, and among them is that brief phrase “in and out of weeks.” It is entirely new, yet comprehensible, positioning the reader right in the middle of that experience of time passing.
Another writer might express a roughly similar idea in more predictable terms, of course. But Maurice Sendak was a genius, and any paraphrase will always diminish him.
Over its 60 years, “Where the Wild Things Are” has been translated into several dozen languages. I’ve looked at many of the translations, and I have yet to find one that makes that line as interesting as Sendak’s. The translators seem to assume that dull simplicity is good enough (it’s only a children’s book, after all), that “in and out of weeks” is essentially no different than “for several weeks” and that, in short, blunt meaning trumps everything.
The inadequacy of the world’s “Where the Wild Things Are” translations is one of my pet peeves. (We translators can be demanding.) Sendak’s book is marvelous across so many dimensions, and I feel the losses keenly — more keenly than is perhaps reasonable. But I believe my job as a translator is to preserve all the dimensions of a book, not just one of them. When I find complexity, my job is to keep complexity, or more accurately to reconstruct it. And some of the most complex books I’ve reconstructed have been children’s picture books.
But with so few words, most of them kid-friendly, how could that be?
In a good picture book, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the words and the images. But this doesn’t mean an illustrator’s job is merely to produce decorative pictures that “match” a text. (Text says “Once there was a blue turtle.” Insert picture of blue turtle.) Words and pictures can operate in tension, or reveal slightly different things, cleverly talking to one another. A picture book should feel organic, as though words and pictures were born in the same moment — a single, crystalline, utterly unified hybrid.
Imagine trying to translate song lyrics without hearing a melody, without knowing the tempo or whether it’s supposed to sound choppy and syncopated or ballady and soaring. Pictures can soar, too. Translate the text in isolation and you’re missing a dimension — sometimes even vital clues to a book’s meaning.
Let’s say we have a story in which Alice is teaching her brother Jesse how to make a cake. She wants to show him how to use a whisk. “Así!” she says. I might translate that as “Like this!” or as “Like that!” Knowing which option to choose doesn’t depend on my facility with Spanish, nor with English. It depends on my being able to see a picture that tells me who’s holding the whisk at the moment of speech. Without that image, I’m missing vital data; the functioning of the text depends on the two dimensions working together.
I’ve done some books where I’ve ended up translating the pictures more than the text, where the pictures have been the main source dictating what I’ve written. How my new text integrates with these pictures matters to me much more than how it relates, on its own, to prior text in another language.
Maybe I’ve got a picture of a smiling grandmother standing in the rain and I need to caption it pithily (there’s not much space on the page), with humor and in rhyme. The relation to the French words doesn’t concern me; what concerns me is the effect.
Yes, sometimes conveying specific information from the source material is important. But sometimes preserving a sense of sheer untethered silliness matters more.
The Brazilian picture-book maker Roger Mello is responsible for some of the most gorgeous pages I know. In our most recent collaboration, “João by a Thread,” young João makes a dreamscape out of his blanket’s patterns. (As with Max in “Where the Wild Things Are,” imagination helps João to process his dark emotions.) When translating the book, therefore, dreaminess was high on my list of tonal priorities.
My first-draft opening line looked like this:
Before falling asleep, the boy pulls up his blanket. “So, it’s just me now, alone.”
In fact, my Brazilian source text has João saying something closer to “alone with myself.” Could I get away with that? It’s what Mello wrote, and he’s not a sloppy writer. Odd phrasing, no doubt, but “alone with myself” and just plain “alone” are a little different, to my mind and ear. Sure, there’s an apparent redundancy of meaning, but I don’t care. Snappy concision is not on my list today. And sounding strange is a plus, not a minus.
“Before falling” doesn’t work for me, though. I’m from London, so London is the voice I use to test things for sound. I don’t pronounce the “r” in “before” (try it in an English accent — you’ll see), which means that before falling contains a disagreeable echo.
So this is where I end up:
Before he falls asleep, the boy pulls up his blanket: “So it’s just me now,” he thinks, “alone with myself?”
The words must appear, quite small, at the bottom of an otherwise empty double-page spread. Night is drawing in for João. The text must sound quiet. The words are being thought — or, as I imagine it, being said in a whisper.
Because here’s the other thing: The most common mode of picture-book consumption is reading aloud. As the pages are turned, young children might be reading the pictures with their eyes, but they’re receiving the words, via another reader, into their ears.
I can’t think of any other kind of writing that’s created specifically to be spoken by people who aren’t necessarily in the habit of reading aloud. So I should make it as easy as possible for them to animate this reading. (And I don’t know where in the world they will be, so I have to allow for the possibility that they’re, say, people who don’t pronounce the “r” in “before.”)
That’s why the “he thinks” is there, by the way. It’s not in my source text, and was added only later, once the publishers had set the words on the page. It helps to guide the reading.
Occasionally, my language skills fail me; either that or the English language itself fails me. And then I need to go back to an illustrator and ask them to retrofit some pictures for the new language. “Hey, Eric, could you swap out that potato for a pineapple?” (I needed a fruit with an “n” in it. Don’t ask.)
For our edition of “João,” Mello returned to the hero’s blanket and rewove his illustration multilingually. The words of my translation became a part of those pictures — the most delightful words-and-pictures hybrid a translator could wish for.
The multidimensional nature of great picture books is endlessly fascinating for translators. It’s our challenge and our joy. I’m currently writing a book about Shakespeare in translation, about the demands he makes on a translator who wants to preserve the myriad features crammed into each 10-syllable line. His work is so mind-bogglingly intricate. Shakespeare really knows how to put pressure on a language. Sometimes I think he’s almost as tricky as Sendak.
Daniel Hahn is a literary translator, and the author of “Catching Fire: A Translation Diary.”
