Tag: translation

Poetry Analysis

I’m busy trying to decide what to do with very old blogposts as I was an avid blogger from 2003 to 2011 before I became a librarian. I literally have 1000s of posts that I’m not sure what to do with, so I’m going to selectively add posts that have to do with literature, language, librarianship, reading etc.

From November 2014

夜梦上嵩山，独携藜杖出。
千岩与万壑，游览皆周毕。
梦中足不病，健似少年日。
既悟神返初，依然旧形质。
始知形神内，形病神无疾。
形神两是幻，梦寤俱非实。
昼行虽蹇涩，夜步颇安逸。
昼夜既平分，其间何得失？

A DREAM OF MOUNTAINEERING
At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys–
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body–both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking–both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts– Between the two, I get as much as I  lose.
Bai Juyi (772-846) Tr. Arthur Waley

As my daughter gets older our conversations are becoming more interesting. This evening we were discussing the interpretation and analysis of poetry. She’s been looking at Emily Bronte, Rossetti and Bai Juyi. The latter in translation.  But they used the old Wade-Giles transliteration: Po Chü-i so initially she didn’t associate it as being Chinese, once she’d worked that out, of course she went to the original. And then our discussion was about how when you’re analysing something in translation and thinking of word choice, does one consider the choice of the translator or of the original. Naturally in an English class that is filled with English mono-linguals at Grade 7 level, the answer is yes, but how does that work out in a multi-lingual / cultural class where at least some of the students would be able to read the poem in the original?
I was telling her how so many of the poets used homonyms to convey a hidden meaning in their poetry and prose, for example if they were criticising the emperor or local war lord or officials, and then one would have to know what stood for what.  And in fact, if one reads the introduction and background here, it gives some very interesting context.

Meting out diversity

The whole diversity thing bothers me. Has for some time. We seem to love the optics of diversity, but not so much the reality.  And so we mete out our diversity in acceptable chunks at acceptable moments. And in doing so we can fool ourselves – most of the time. We also mete out our encounters with diversity such that they don’t necessarily have to touch us in ways that are meaningful. We thereby send clear messages to all our students, diverse and – well what is the word not for diverse – dominant? Oh, begin to define dominant in an international school and don’t bother looking at the nationalities of the students, or pictures of them. You

meteprobably need only to look at a handful of people. Those in leadership. And chances are they’ll all be white male of a certain age, background and education, with a judicious sprinkling of women.

 

Before anyone gets excited about that, think about the following reported encounter by prospective parents in an ethnically mixed marriage. The primary school I’m at is wonderfully diverse in the composition of the teacher body. On entering a classroom with a caucasian teacher, one of the parents exclaimed “at last, a proper English teacher” (for the record, she wasn’t English, but obviously appearance counts). When at the Neev festival in Bangalore, I remarked to my friend how gorgeous and natural she looked in her salwar kameez and asked her why I hadn’t seen her wearing one at school in Singapore while working for a big name, self-proclaimed “diverse” school. She looked at me aghast and said there was no way it would have been possible outside of the UN celebrations and that all staff was expected to dress professionally and adopt the school values and world view irrespective of their personal beliefs or experience. Now this is a school that prides itself on the fact that they have a uniform but don’t police the interpretation of its manifestation. Where I attended a lecture today, and saw every possible variation in student “teen dress expression” but not so in the teaching body.

DiversityInChildrensBooks2015_f

So we get to the mundane part of throwing some books in the library that reflect the culture, language and backgrounds of our students. Can we even do that without breaking through the cultural myopia? I still have to keep thinking back to this experience when I realised that truly we are up against so much, and putting books in the library is a bandaid on the wound of an amputee. If we struggle even conceptually with putting textbooks from different countries whose educational philosophy we “disagree” with (how dare we?), what happens with literature, that is so much more subversive?

 

 

I recently purchased around 100 books written and/or illustrated by Indian authors. It was hard work “selling them” to my students. Even the Indian students. Especially the Indian students. I used the above infographic to explain to students how skewed their world view is.  And the worst of it all, is this in itself is a North American view. Let’s not even talk about the fact that most of the 73.3% white characters and 12.5% animal, truck etc. characters are male. By the end of the week, after discussions about being open-minded and balanced and being a risk-taker, most of my books were borrowed.

A few of my students exclaimed they “loved” one or another of the authors. Some parents expressed surprise that I had so many books, and amazement that I’d used my 30kg luggage allowance to lug back books. Now Indian books are possibly one of the lowest barrier “diverse” books an international school could add to their collection. Quite simply because English is a common language. No translation is required. There is a thriving publishing industry. A huge diaspora. Many schools have 25-30% of their student body from the Indian subcontinent. And yet, until a month ago I probably had fewer than 10 “Indian” books in my collection. Most of them picture books from Tara Books.  Little to nothing in Junior fiction and a few Ash Mistry books in fiction. And now? I have the books. Students have borrowed them once. Will they go back into the shelves along with the Diwali books only to make a reappearance next year this time when it’s acceptable to celebrate and embrace Indian culture?

Any literature on language and culture will quickly point to dominant / aspirational and socio-economic preferred language and culture. As a South African who spent most of her life mired in shame, unable and unwilling to admit to my heritage, I truly “get” the ambivalence (while remaining astounded by continued British bluster – particularly here in Asia).

And that is the problem with every article ever written about diversity. We lament the absence of the optic. We gloss over some of the “hardware” issues (authors, illustrators, translators), we may even get to structural problems (publishing houses, editors, market sizes). But we neglect to think about how the structure of our education and schools will support those tender shoots, will allow our communities to claim not just their heritage, but current philosophies. We close down libraries, we limit budgets, we operate in echo chambers, we fail to make library education affordable and accessible to local staff. We concentrate our online efforts to gadgets and gizmos instead of access, community and understanding.

What do I do in our library / school?

Of course the five f’s: food, fashion, famous people, festivals, and flags. Mea culpa here. I have books about (just about) every nation in our school, and scramble each year to make sure there’s at least one book by the time Uniting Nations comes around.

I buy all the books suitable for my elementary school from the USBBY list – cognisant of the fact that it is the US – i.e. pre-digested for USA sensibilities.

I follow blogs of avid supporters of diverse literature such as Dr. Myra Bacsal’s “Gathering Books” and Rachel Hildebrandt ‘s Global Literature in Libraries (seriously, I’m one of only 200 odd people following this AWESOME Blog??  – they also have a facebook page btw if that’s more your thing).  Who give exposure to people like Avery Fischer Udagawa with her new list for 2017 of 100 more works translated for kids, following Marcia Lynx Qualey’s 2016 100 Great Translated Children’s Books from Around the World.

Following what’s being published via the Bologna book fair. Reading reports such as those created by Wischenbart.

And then I devote part of my budget to buy the books, and make sure they’re slotted into resource lists for our units of inquiry, and read them aloud, and “sell” them to teachers and my PYP coordinators.

Put out google alerts for diverse books, join FB groups of librarians around the world. Ask, ask, ask, in the community, parents, librarians, teachers, students.

Write about it. Write about it again, and again.

What more can we do?

Hard stuff. Advocacy. Fostering a sense of national / cultural pride in all our students – not just those from the dominant / desirable communities. Conversations with teachers and administrators. Looking at what our students are writing about – who are the characters in their writing? Ignoring the deluge of books from BANA countries. Being tireless. Fighting even with institutions doing brilliant work like “Global Readaloud” about the choice of their books that are NOT global. Even when all of this is very very tiring and makes you seem like a harpy.

Beyond “delight and inform”

I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Dr. Myra Bacsal of the NIE at Tanglin Trust School last night about how picture books can be used to promote SEL (social and emotional learning) and the work she is doing to bring both the “hardware” and “software” into the Singaporean school system. I’m totally in awe of the scale of this project, and suspect the slick presentation she and her co-researchers gave is but a tip of the iceberg of what it must have taken to get to this point.

First there is the creation of a framework – as any librarian, or tech person or well, anyone who is capable of hierarchical thinking knows, it really helps to be able to have large conceptual boxes to throw things into. And making it up in an adhoc fashion as you go along (looking at my resource lists I have a distinct sinking feeling that’s what I’ve been engaged in) actually just doesn’t really cut it.

Then there is the curation.  Yes I have lists. I have lots of kindness books. And friendship lists, and bullying and emotion books. But “a lot of” is sometimes too much of. Instead of 100 books, one perhaps needs multiple copies of the two or three books that really make a difference and that really touch kids (and their adults).

And the dissemination. Not just presenting to groups of librarians who know some or most of the books you’re introducing, but actually integrating it into the practice of teachers who may or may not be readers, may or may not have a library / teacher librarian on hand! That I think is harder than it seems.  Like most things in education (and life), a lot depends on the goodwill of the people around you. On their openness and receptiveness.  This morning I was lucky enough to bump into our school counsellor and mention to him that I’d been to the presentation. He got it immediately and we quickly went into my office to discuss how best we could create resource lists together, pool our budgets to ensure that copies of the most relevant books were both in his counselling room and in the library and then, once the infrastructure was in place, start rolling out the reading and introduction of the books in a pre-emptive manner.

I’ve had an ongoing challenge to find and introduce books outside of the BANA (British, Australian, North American) realm, and have been delighted with the books that I ordered from the USBBY 2016 list – as gratifyingly have my students (double win). Dr. Bacsal pointed out that the White Raven list was also worth looking at – particularly for International schools that could justify having excellent picture books in different languages. The European selections usually push the envelope (and a lot of buttons along the way) and as this article on the translation of Elena Ferrante’s Beach at Night  show. Of course a sub-optimal translation is a by-product of a generally mono-lingual (mass) reading market needing a translation in the first place. She showed a short extract of an animated movie of the book Sinna Mann (Norway) that left us gasping.

Another special book was “Migrant” by José Manuel Mateo and Javier Martínez Pedro a concertina style bilingual “codex”

Another very special thing was the interview Dr. Bacsal did with the author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sàenz – (see the details of it on her blog) – I’m so glad she’s said she wants to publish a transcript – it was one of those things where you kept thinking “what a wonderful quote” but I was too entranced watching and listening to actually take notes.

Well, my work is cut out for the next few weeks! Checking what I have, what will work in our context, what I need to put on my next book shopping list.