It happens in translation

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A few days ago I was doing a literary translation workshop with French teenagers in London, using as my English text a slice of Elizabeth Acevedo’s splendid, National-Book-Award-Winning The Poet X, which I’ve had the pleasure (/honour/ insane luck) of translating into French.

Image result for elizabeth acevedo the poet x

Elizabeth Acevedo, in case you haven’t heard of her, is this remarkable spoken word poet and writer:

The Poet X is the Künstlerroman of a young Dominican-American woman who discovers spoken word poetry, rebels (selectively) against her family, loves her brother, and loves, too, a sensitive young man in her Biology class. She writes in a notebook, and she writes things about her everyday life, such as church, food, masturbation, and street harassment:
(Transcr:
It happens when I’m at bodegas.
It happens when I’m at school.
It happens when I’m on the train.
It happens when I’m standing on the platform.
It happens when I’m sitting on the stoop.
It happens when I’m turning the corner.
It happens when I forget to be on guard.
It happens all the time.)
This is the poem I asked the French teenagers to translate (well, only the first stanza – we only had an hour). As you can guess, there’s plenty of fascinating challenges for a translator there, and we always begin by reading the poem out loud, testing out different stresses, different rhythms, feeling the beats and letting the sounds fill our mouths, before we start making decisions about translation. I won’t focus on all the aspects in this blog post, but I want to talk about one particularly interesting thing that came out of the exercise.

The first stanza, obviously, makes striking use of the anaphora ‘It happens’. What is ‘it’ that happens? It’s alluded to in the next stanza – touching, allusions, compliments. The usual catcalling and groping sort of business.

How do you translate that into French? Well, there’s at least one absolutely literal translation: ‘Ca arrive’ (it happens). The problem is the hiatus (a hiatus is what happens when you have to force a break between two similar-sounding vowels): Ca-arrive. That a-a sounds fairly unpleasant to the ear – this is what I think secretly, but of course I say nothing to the teenagers ; it’s my opinion. But among the six groups that day, no one opted for ‘Ca arrive’.

Two groups opted for the next most literal option, ‘Ca m’arrive’ (It happens to me), which has the advantage of getting rid of the hiatus. Interestingly, this option makes the victim explicitly central in the French text – no way of avoiding this ‘m’ which explodes from the front of the mouth and provides a nice labial echo to the ‘haPpens’ in the English version. Full disclosure, this is the one I picked for my own translation, too.

Another table chose, interestingly, not to translate ‘It happens’ at all. Instead, they started every single line directly with ‘Quand’ (when). The effect was funny: the stanza becomes a bit of a riddle, to be solved in the very last line. ‘When I’m there, when I’m there, when I’m there, when I’m there… It happens’. More suspense, but less emphasis on the relentlessness of the harassment.

Another group opted for the hugely alliterative ‘Ca se passe’ (pronounced ‘Sasspass’), which more or less means ‘It happens’. I like this solution, which sounds like hissing, and preserves the plosive ‘P’ of ‘haPPens’. It is perhaps the closest to the source text in both meaning and effect. I had considered it (and am still considering it) for my translation.

Another group, finally, had an idea I hadn’t considered at all, and which I find especially interesting. It is to begin each line with ‘Ils le font’, namely, ‘They do it’ (with the ‘ils’ explicitly male in French). Complete change of focus all of a sudden: the perpetrators are at the very beginning of the line, of each line. The impersonal ‘it happens’, which makes it sound like it’s some kind of unavoidable meteorological phenomenon, suddenly acquires a body (even several bodies: a threatening army of bodies); it acquires malevolent agency, and it acquires a gender. 


A radical solution, which arguably lacks elegance in its sounds, but strongly signals the translator’s commitment to naming and blaming the perpetrators. Before you ask, the table who came up with this solution was composed exclusively of boys.

What a world of connotations separates ‘Ca m’arrive’, which focuses Acevedo’s text onto the victim, ‘Ca se passe’, which renders the impersonal inevitability of the original, and ‘Ils le font’, which foregrounds the harassers.

All three solutions are acceptable, and all commit the translator differently. Those little decisional acts we perform on a text we translate are what makes a translation a literary practice, and a practice through which words have an effect on the world. Each of those three poems would have a different effect on the world, because they each focalise our attention differently.

Three ways of looking at street harassment. And I was of three minds.

Literary Translationese

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First published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

Last Wednesday, my latest YA book came out in France :

It’s the culmination of 12 years of observing the British, and gradually sort-of-becoming one myself, a process of transformation not as painful as it sounds. It’s the very first time one of my French books is set in Britain, and, as its almost-500 pages testify, maybe it was long overdue.

Here’s my pitch, elevator-ready : in post-referendum Britain, a canny entrepreneur, 21-year-old Justine Dodgson, sets up a start-up – the eponymous Brexit Romance – to match young Europhilic Brits to generous-minded French people, for the purpose of entering into arranged marriages. Five years later, in theory, the former would gain the nationality of the latter, and thus get back their European citizenship. The only condition, however, is to Not Fall In Love. In practice, this is difficult.

Aside from Justine, the main characters include an innocent and romantic French girl, her grumpy Marxist-Leninist singing teacher, a young lord – and son of the leader of UKIP – and a beautiful British-American lawyer. As you may have guessed, it’s a rom-com of sorts, often verging on screwball comedy, and it’s also, as the title indicates, not too far from social and political satire. But it’s also, eminently, about cultural and linguistic tensions, often endearing, sometimes exasperating, between France and Britain, and French and English.

Form matching content, it’s written in a kind of Frenglish, or rather what I’d call ‘literary translationese’. ‘Translationese’ is generally used derogatorily, to refer to sentences that ‘feel translated’ – think, for instance, of Facebook translating your international friends’ statuses. But I mean it here positively, creatively: literary translationese, as I use it in Brexit Romance, is a way of writing in French that deliberately uses lexical calque and syntactic mimicry of English, as if to imitate the feel of a translation. It allows for a lot of fun things, from basic wordplay to painstaking rendering, in French, of the convoluted sentence structures of British politeness – je ne suppose pas que vous soyez libre dans trois semaines ?

Literary translationese occurs, famously, in Asterix in Britain, where all the ‘Bretons’ in the French version preface every sentence by ‘Je dis’, answer every statement with ‘Plutôt !’ and reinforce their assertions with an ungainly ‘n’est-il pas ?’, all of which baffled and delighted my 10-year-old self.

 Image result for astérix chez les bretons

available in English translation by A. Bell and D. Hockridge

More recently, francophone Swiss writer Joël Dicker wrote The Truth in the Harry Quebert Affair, which reads, in French, ‘like a bad translation’ of an American crime novel – quite in keeping with the story, which is about an American writer writing about a crime involving another American writer (available in English translation by Sam Taylor). Another favourite of mine in the literary translationese category is Marie-Aude Murail’s sprawling teenage novel Miss Charity, a fictionalised biography of a Beatrix Potter figure, which audaciously espouses, in French, the phrases and lexicon of 19th-century British novels and of their classic translations into French.

Image result for la vérité sur l'affaire harry quebert

Literary translationese pushes to its comical and beautiful extremes the daily involuntary instances of translationese that texts all around the world occasionally slip into. It aestheticises Globish, glorifies lazy Englishisms. Few people are more guillotine-worthy, in French, than those who use the verbs ‘réaliser’ or ‘supporter’ to mean ‘become aware of’ and ‘support’ (a team) – but use them in the right literary context, and suddenly the repulsive statement ‘Il supporte l’équipe de France’ can take on a new texture, turning football devotion into some kind of existential burden.

I particularly love literary translationese when it elevates to the rank of the finest surrealistic devices two things which we learn at school to be ultimate crimes against literature : the calque, and the cliché. He stormed out of the kitchen, says the English author who’s completely run out of energy to find non-banal ways of expressing the character’s anger. But nothing cliché in the outrageous French calque il s’oragea de la cuisine, halfway between orage (very much not a verb) and s’arracher (a familiar way of saying ‘to get out of here’). That sentence is intolerable in any literary context that doesn’t firmly invite a reader to delight in its being written in literary translationese. Once it’s there, though, it speaks its own quirky, playful language.

Image result for miss charity marie aude murail

Learning other languages, one dreams sometimes of multilingual adventures in literary translationese ; women who would ‘give light’ to babies, as they do in Spanish, or bold experiments in the acrobatic word orders of declension languages, in languages that aren’t graced with the same toolbox of suffixes. The point of literary translationese, however, is not to turn readers into supersleuths, working out which expressions in which language have been borrowed and exploited. It’s to create a literature that joyfully, weirdly and, sometimes, nonsensically, celebrates the impossibility of maintaining watertight boundaries between literary languages in the first place.

In doing so, it also celebrates, indirectly, translation and its literary influence. The texture of translations has profound consequences on the literature of any country ; translations and their conventions condition our reading, and they also modify our writing.

We catch ourselves writing, in French, a million times per page, ‘Il haussa les épaules’, or ‘Elle cligna des yeux’, because English is a real spendthrift when it comes to telling us about people’s body language – even though French handles much more clumsily those innocuous He shrugged, she blinked. We are contaminated by the inbuilt English precision as to whether someone is currently standing or sitting, and we end up writing ‘elle était debout dans le couloir’, because we’ve read countless translated books where people are ‘debout dans le couloir’, instead of simply ‘dans le couloir’ – because in conventional French we can safely assume, unless otherwise stated, that a person in a corridor probably isn’t sitting, crouching or doing a headstand.

One interesting phenomenon of this ‘contamination’, as far as YA is concerned, has been the rise of the use in popular French YA of the term ‘marmoréen’ to refer to skin. ‘Marmoréen’ is an extremely literary, high-register way of saying ‘marble-like’ (‘marmoreal’ in English), and its incongruous use in contemporary popular YA otherwise written in low to mid register can probably be traced back to Luc Rigoureau’s French translation of Twilight, which used the word repeatedly to refer to Edward’s skin, translating Meyer’s more neutral ‘marble’. The word has become its own meme, and I can’t imagine, as a French YA author, ever using the term ‘marmoréen’ today in any way other than humorously. But with the right crowd – one attuned to precisely those connotations of ‘marmoréen’ in French YA today – that humorous use could be very powerful indeed.

Image result for twilight luc rigoureau

From accidental translationese to literary translationese, the difference can be subtle – it’s about self-reflectiveness, artistic playfulness, and, to an extent, low-key political activism in literary form. It is indeed a political statement of sorts, especially when literary translationese is used with English as its point of reference, to calque English, and thus by definition make its influence visible, and thus makes its domination visible. It calls into question the ‘accidental translationese’ that happens all the time in countries where translations from English are ubiquitous (i.e., most countries), and suspends the transparency of that process for a moment.

I suspect it is exactly the same for other languages that might use literary translationese with French, or other locally hegemonic languages. It’s an act of linguistic love, but also of linguistic teasing, or even linguistic nagging.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any novels in other languages than French that use literary translationese with English. For a good reason, doubtlessly : those novels don’t get translated into French, because literary translationese is horribly difficult to translate. It’s possible, of course – no such thing as untranslatability ! – but you can sort of understand why publishers are wary of it. And it’s also tricky because literary translationese is a linguistic love affair between two languages, so it would be quite difficult to get the gist of, say, a translation into French of a German novel that mimicks English turns of phrase. It’s the kind of in-joke that doesn’t travel very easily.

Long post, sorry. Let me know in the comments of your favourite instances of literary translationese in English or other languages…

Moose and Caribous: Translating Meg Rosoff’s Moose Baby

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This post previously appeared on the Awfully Big Blog Adventure website.

I’m currently translating Meg Rosoff’s uncategorisable little gem Moose Baby into French.

Image result for moose baby rosoff

For those of you who haven’t read this delightful tiny novel, it’s the story of a teenage couple who give birth to a baby moose. Lucas Imogen Rudolph, or Moosie as he is affectionately known, is a charming little fur ball but also relatively maladjusted to the world around; at the age of eight months he already weighs one hundred kilos and not much of the furniture survives his toddlerish antics. It is not just funny but also clever, with biting satire of middle-class parenting, deft commentary on special education and on the world’s perception of teenage parents, and also extremely moving at times. A perfect little novel, really, somewhere between Kafka and Louise Rennison (I know, not names you often see together in the same sentence).

Anyway, this novel is tricky to translate in part because you laugh so much the whole time, but also because of a central difficulty at its core. This is a moose:

Image result for moose

In French, it’s called un élan, or un orignal.

Moose is a funny word in English, which is lucky because the animal is also, well, fairly ridiculous-looking (sorry, moose fans). Unfortunately, in French, élan and orignal are not funny words. They are perfectly bland and boring. Worse, élan also means an impulse or build-up and it’s most often used in that sense, so there’s some potentially problematic semantic confusion there.

For Moose Baby to work in French, I had to turn Moosie into another animal:

Image result for caribou

Those of you who know their cervidae will have spotted straightaway that this is a reindeer, like Rudolph (and Olive, the other reindeer), and not a moose, which is bigger.

Reindeer, alas, look less ridiculous than moose (sorry again, moose fans). However, what comical potential it loses in appearance it makes for in denomination, because switching species meant I could use the word Caribou, which is astronomically funnier than élan or orignal. The word Caribou is so weird that it somehow conjures up a more grotesque creature than the word élan, which sounds loftier and more serious. Caribou is clearly clunky and clownish, while élan ambles gracefully, towering above the steppes.

Of course, this wouldn’t happen if this was about, say, a film adaptation. Visually, a moose would be more impressive and funnier. But in a novel, you need to pay close attention to the shape and sound of words – sometimes even more so than to what they refer to in the world.

So in the French novel, Moosie the Moose becomes Boubou le Caribou. It will require some adjustments regarding size and weight indications, but it will, I think, be faithful to the comical power of the source text.

When we’re translating, of course, we’re constantly confronted to those strategies of compensation. Sometimes a pun just won’t translate, so you delete it there and add another one, that didn’t exist in the source text, somewhere else.

But sometimes, like here, it’s a more radical move than just microscopic compensations. It’s happened to me several times to have to make such a move. Stylistically, for instance: I wrote elsewhere about translating Sarah Crossan’s One, which required thinking strategically about where to locate ‘the poetic’ in that verse novel, which led me to opt for a much more rhyme-heavy French version.

Image result for inséparables sarah crossan

I’ve also written about my own self-translation of Les petites reines into Piglettes, which required entirely changing the central pun (‘boudin’, black pudding, a funny word for ‘ugly girl’, didn’t work in English) and therefore adjusting a lot of the story.

Image result for piglettes

Moose Baby is therefore just another one of those choices, but it still makes you bite your nails in anguish. What if the baby actually needs to be, fundamentally, a moose ? What if, as a caribou, it just loses all power? 

In my case, I could just message Meg Rosoff to ask if it’s OK (and in fact I have done so), but the problem is that, notwithstanding the fact that she is, of course, a pretty exceptional person, she’s not better placed than anyone else to judge, just like I’m not a good person to judge whether ‘black pudding’ should become, in the translation of my Petites reines, sausages (as in the German version) or paté (as in the Polish version). Even after 11 years of living in Britain I had trouble figuring out how to translate it into English myself. Probing authorial intention in the case of translation is a dangerous game.

Translation choices are endlessly puzzling to writers, but I think it’s important to trust that the other country does in fact, most of the time, know best. I was a bit taken aback when it was suggested that my Songe a la douceur (an untranslatable par excellence, since it’s a line of poetry by Baudelaire) be translated into English as In Paris With You.

proofs!

To a French person, even one strongly Britannicised like me, there’s nothing particularly romantic about being ‘in Paris with you’; I’m often ‘in Paris with’ random people, and it generally doesn’t mean I spend my time eating croissants with them, gazing into their eyes and listening to an accordion piece while the Eiffel Tower sparkles in the background. But when I started hearing the enthusiastic reactions of my British acquaintances to this title, I understood that I had, in fact, clearly no legitimacy whatsoever to assess the power of that title.

I had a similar conversation with Sarah Crossan regarding the title of her Weight of Water, which I also translated into French. After many weeks of painful brainstorming, my editor came up with the perfect title for our French version: Swimming Pool. Now, I can’t quite explain to you why it’s the perfect title, but it just is. Swimming Pool. It’s mysterious, it’s attractive, it’s sexy, it’s melancholy, it’s blue-green and it’s perfect. End of story.

Sarah, however, was a little underwhelmed, because of course ‘Swimming Pool’ in English is a banal word that evokes not much more than rubbery swimming caps, eyes red from goggles, and the smell of chlorine. But see, that is what French people think, too, when they hear the word Piscine, while Swimming Pool is endlessly mystical.

I’ll never tire of exploring that ‘can’t quite explain why, but trust me, it is the best option’ area of translation. It’s important to talk about it, too, because every time you’re reading in translation you’re doing a kind of leap of faith and you need to understand that it’s OK. Better than OK: wonderful. You have to trust the translator and their editor because they’re the one in charge and chances are, they know better than – well, than you, for a start, and also than the author, doubtlessly – how to carry that story across to you.

So it’s caribous and swimming-pools, not élans and poids de l’eau.

Just because.

Trust me.

Come Study With Me

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This year, 3 departmental PhD studentships are being made available in my department, the Department of Education at the University of York. They will be extremely competitive, but of course not impossible, to get. If you have any interest at all in doing a PhD on the topic of translation and children’s literature in Britain today, please do take a look at my named proposal here, and apply!

There are many other proposals on offer, too.

See you there? the deadline for applying is March 1st.

 

 

A Child’s View of the Woods

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Originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure

Recently I read, one after the other, the two debut novels on the Booker shortlist:

 

Both Fiona Mozley’s Elmet and Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves are (#imho), absolutely stunning novels and especially impressive for debuts – preciseness, delicateness and evocative power of the style, impeccable characterisation, a fabulous eye for detail, lively dialogues, etc. I won’t go into that too much as most reviews concur on the matter.
What fascinated me and is more relevant to our purposes here is just how similar these two books are and how much they hover in an uncertain zone between ‘adult’ and ‘young adult’. One is American, the other British – Yorkshire, to be precise; did I mention Fiona Mozley is a PhD student at my university? – but both are focused through a young person – no older than 14.
They show us a child’s view of the woods, and of traumatic events therein. We hear of grooming, sexual assault, psychological manipulation, health problems, fights, physical and mental decay, cults, the occult, nature versus industry, and pharmaceuticals lost and found among plants. I wouldn’t be able to attribute any of those things to one or the other book – they strangely overlap in that way.
And the whole time, reading them, I was wondering – what is it that makes them ‘for adults’? Why are they not ‘young adult’? We can have endless debates on the matter – and at the end of the day everything is decided by publishers anyway.
 But I think it might be down, narratively speaking, to the size and shape of what I’d call an ‘air bubble’ between narrator and events. 
The events are focalised through a young person, and none of the themes are out of the reach of contemporary YA fiction. But there is constantly time, space, and lots of other little things, pushing apart the narrative voice from the events. A slightly different, more distant voice, sometimes, commenting on the events from the perspective of the narrator become adult (or older). A more categorical judgment on the self that was then, and is no longer the same.
 
In other words, moments where the first-person narrator considers her/himself as a character. I don’t mean at all that YA fiction doesn’t do this – nor, in fact, am I arguing that it’s qualitatively superior to do so. There are of course narrative voices in YA with a lot of ‘air bubbles’ between narrator and events. Unreliable narrators are common. But I would argue that perhaps that tenuous line with something that ‘feels like a YA book’ and something that ‘feels like an adult novel’ might be set somewhere on that sliding scale of narrative detachment from the events.

Again, this is not at all (of course!) a value judgment. What they might gain in perspectival ‘distance’, adult novels might lose in intensity, sincerity, or even beauty. There is a kind of rawness, of honesty, in a perfectly crafted YA voice – a seriousness, one could say – which is pretty much unrivalled in literature for adults. ‘Adult narrators’ , even when they are children, tend to be apologetic about their feelings or about the gravity of what they are experiencing. Irony opens spaces in-between, but any such ‘air bubble’ is always also a cushioning: it protects and insulates the reader. In that view, perhaps adult novels, paradoxically, are more protective of their readers; less skin-to-skin in their contact.

This is of course an ongoing discussion, with very many parameters. But reading and analysing books like Mozley’s or Fridlund’s is particularly useful for working out those little nuances in our readerly and writerly experiences. I really recommend both, if you haven’t tried them yet. And if you have, tell me what you think…

Two award nominations for Piglettes

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piglettes

I’m delighted to be able to report that Mireille, Astrid and Hakima’s improbable cycle trip has seduced a number of people into nominating their adventure for two very brilliant awards indeed:

  • The Books Are My Bag award – alongside an unbelievably high quality set of novels… Please do vote if you enjoyed Piglettes! it’s a reader’s voice awards, so get yours heard – with or without a comedy French accent.

bamb

  • And the Carnegie Medal, for which it is on the nominations list, alongside many other books by Pushkin Press – congrats Pushkin! – and, I’m super pleased to see, five translations.

Bourg-en-Bresse power!!! Good luck to all the nominees and thanks so much to the readers who’ve already read the book, reviewed it, recommended it to friends, etc.

And those who thought it was a good idea for it to be on those lists: merci times a million.

Clem

‘Piglettes’ is out!

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(… and I somehow managed to forget its date of birth, which is a bit careless and doesn’t bode well for the future if I ever have kids…)

So, erm, while I was in Spain for some work-and-holiday time, Piglettes, written by me and translated by me but published by the great people at Pushkin Press (thank you Daniel and Mollie in particular!), came out into the world!

And here it is!

piglettes

It’s lovely and pink (but not too pink) and LIGHT, which means you can tuck it into your cycling shorts to take it around on a bike ride. Sorry, what? Why would you do that? Well, because that’s what it’s about. Cycling. And sausages. And ugliness competitions… also about gate-crashing the July 14th Presidential garden party at the palace of the Elysée in Paris.

It all makes sense, somehow, in the book. I think… Here’s the official summary:

Awarded the Gold, Silver and Bronze trotters after a vote by their classmates on Facebook, Mireille, Astrid and Hakima are officially the three ugliest girls in their school, but does that mean they’re going to sit around crying about it?

Well… yes, a bit, but not for long! Climbing aboard their bikes, the trio set off on a summer roadtrip to Paris, their goal: a garden party with the French president. As news of their trip spreads they become stars of social media and television. With the eyes of the nation upon them the girls find fame, friendship and happiness, and still have time to consume an enormous amount of food along the way.

Piglettes is strange for me because it’s new news and old news at the same time. It came out in French as Les petites reines in 2015.

It's about bikes, black pudding, rural France, and friendship.

bikes, black pudding, rural France, and friendship.

By then, I’d published a few books already, which had had modest echo (very very modest).

And then Les petites reines came out and within a year, my life (at least, the side of my life that’s French and writerly) had changed quite a bit. This is the part where I say that it was a bestseller in France and sold rights to the stage, the cinema and many translations, and also won tons of awards, including some of the most major national ones, and was on the IBBY International Honour list the next year. I also starting getting many more invitations to come speak to schools and in book fairs. It was the beginning for me of a much stronger involvement with the French children’s literature community, its debates, its questions, its politics, and its people. 

And more importantly perhaps, I started receiving many, many emails from young readers, and from their parents (and even grandparents) sometimes. And I still do, often. And I know it’s being borrowed hugely from school libraries, which makes me very happy.

Right, I have now said those things which are kind of required of anyone self-promoting I think. Ah no, wait, there’s more. There are already some really nice early reviews of the book in English – thank you SO much to the bloggers and journalists who have already read it – in France, word-of-mouth was absolutely crucial to the success of the book and I’m indebted for absolutely ever to the bloggers and vloggers who pushed it so much from the beginning. So here are some early comments here:

  • Did you ever stop to think and forget to start again?: There is a special place in my heart for young adult books that dance with joy over sausage recipes. What an utter treat this book is. I want to wrap my arms around it and never let it go.
  • Blogger’s Bookshelf:  This is an uplifting story, guaranteed to make you giggle. Beauvais handles the issues in this book with a light hand and an excellent sense of humour and I would definitely recommend it to all teenage girls and anyone else who wants a truly fun and funny read about friendship, growing up, and selling sausages in the French countryside.
  • The cosy reader: I absolutely adored this book. It was fun and sweet and heart warming, but it also tackled some pretty big issues-cyber bullying, disability and war to name a few, in its stride, dealing with them in a sensitive and refreshing way.
  • The book bag: I found this a rich and intelligent read, able to get away from the straightforward diary-of-the-journey format, willing to surprise us, and at least able to make us all (even me) fall in love with Mireille.
  • YS Book Reviews: This beautiful and funny book explores the troubles and triumphs of being a teen through the eyes of a witty, philosophical, and slightly awkward teen. … Mireille’s voice and character are wonderfully authentic with unflappable confidence and inelegant missteps mixed together for a potent storyteller on a journey of self-discovery.
  • On The Copper Boom‘s Summer Reading List! Alongside my friend Robin Stevens’ amazing Murder Most Unladylike, which I can only approve of…

I hope you like the book as much as the French readers seem to have done. I hope it’s a bit different to things you might have read before.

And more importantly I really hope it makes you laugh, because it was the whole point of the endeavour to begin with.

Happy reading!

Summer posts

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As usual, this blog is half-asleep, even though I’d planned a grand blog post to celebrate what is, today, my 10-year anniversary of arriving in the UK. Funnily enough, after Brexit, my anniversary enthusiasm declined a bit, and I never got round to it.

However, as the new academic year is just starting, let me  – literally in-between two supervisions – post a tiny update with some blog posts I’ve written over the summer on other platforms, mostly about (surprise!) children’s literature, some academic, some not so much:

As always, I’m much more active on my French blog. And as always, a lot has been happening on the French side. I can now announce, however, that my French YA book Les petites reines, which I’m apparently allowed to call a bestseller, and which has sold to the cinema, the theatre, and won a good bunch of major national awards in France (yeah, yeah, bragging is bad, don’t do it, etc.) – that novel, then, will come out in Britain in summer next year thanks to Pushkin Press; carefully, perhaps clumsily, and to no small degree creatively, translated by me.

It's about bikes, black pudding, rural France, and friendship.

It’s about bikes, sausages, rural France, and friendship. It won’t have that cover in the UK.

More on that, including title and cover, closer to the date.

The Sesame Seade series, meanwhile, has crossed the Channel in the other direction: it will come out in French next year with publisher Rageot. I still don’t know what they’ll call Sesame! (not translating that one)

Next supervision about to start! Till next time…

 

A Different Conference Bingo (The 2016 CSCY conference)

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I’ve just come back from Sheffield, where the 2016 Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth conference was taking place from Tuesday to Thursday. It was a Childhood Studies conference, focusing on the ‘social, biological and material dimensions of childhood and children’s everyday lives’.

This was my first Childhood Studies conference – I generally go to Children’s Literature conferences, but in the past three and a half years, save for a couple of articles, my research has reoriented itself towards neighbouring fields, such as the cultural sociology of childhood and of education, and the history of childhood. While I’m not an empirical researcher, I’m tending towards questions and topics close to Childhood Studies, and I read their journals; so I thought it was high time I went to one of their conferences.

This isn’t going to be a detailed report, but rather some thoughts on the interesting differences between Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies, as far as I can tell from my admittedly limited experience of the latter. Mostly, it was fascinating to see how different those two neighbouring fields are.

This can be visualised in a very scholarly way by looking at the completely different Conference Bingos. Here’s my Children’s Literature conference bingo:

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At the Childhood Studies conference, however, I had no Conference Bingo in mind. I had to make it up as I went along, noting resonances, repetitions, funny little tics of language and turns of phrase that were new to me but extremely familiar to CSCY veterans. And there was interestingly very little overlap with current concerns in Children’s Literature studies. Here’s what struck me in particular.

  • Concerns with method

There was a lot of thinking about method going on, almost as a matter of course, both within presentations and in the Q&As. This is probably in part because so much of Childhood Studies is empirical, and so much of that empirical work ethnographic; method and methodologies, ethical considerations and the place of the researcher were constantly probed. This may seem simply like good practice, but it was clear that presenters weren’t just going through the motions; their reflections on method were indissociable from their conceptualisations and theoretical commitments, and practice, theory and method mingled fluidly, in a way that I haven’t really seen happening in Children’s Literature. Method, to put it simply, wasn’t a tool; it was always already thought.

This isn’t to pit Childhood Studies against Children’s Literature – it’s just an observation. If we need a ‘conversely,’ then I observed that at CSCY there was little to no engagement with the aesthetic aspects of the cultural objects studied. When children’s TV, books, films, etc. were observed, literary criticism, aesthetic visual analysis, film criticism, etc. were (at least in the talks I saw) not at all mobilised.

  •  Latourian frameworks, and ‘assemblages’

Granted, this was a conference focusing on the material and biological child, so, as one of the professors there rightly pointed out to me, it had Latour written all over it; and the Frenchman has been a reference for some major Childhood Studies thinkers for quite some time. But there are other theorisations of materiality; so it was interesting to see how much Latour and Actor-Network Theory specifically resonated in the field. It’s easy to see why; ‘the child’ is a textbook example of a Latourian (quasi)object, involved at the same time with many different types of other actants, objects, knowledges, etc. and irreducible to any in particular. Entanglement was one of the recurring keywords.

Another keyword was ‘assemblage’, pulled from a rather different tradition but used almost interchangeably, as far as I could tell, with ‘entanglement’, ‘networks’ or similar expressions.

  • Some unease with both traditional and emergent social categorisations

I didn’t see a lot of criticism of Latour, but in a brilliant presentation on children’s engagement with TV, Fiona Scott of Sheffield University highlighted the necessity to buttonhole Bourdieu once in a while, too, so as not to risk leaving class aside. That’s the problem with Latourian or equivalent approaches: fearing reductionism, it’s hard not to spend all your time describing relations, and shying away from explanations – especially from social causes.

I had a feeling that presenters were tiptoeing around explanations involving traditional social categories; they didn’t mention class, gender nor race as much as I would have thought. It was nothing like Children’s Literature, where such categories are hugely mobilised in analyses of texts. Similarly, I didn’t hear much about emergent categories. There was a little bit of disability studies. Strikingly, I heard the word ‘intersectionality’ uttered only once (obviously, I didn’t go to all the talks – I don’t have a Time-Turner); a major difference here from Children’s Literature.

Yet at the same time, almost inevitably the Q&As triggered reflection on gender, race, class, etc. I’m not sure if it’s because the conference theme kept those categories at bay, only for them to be reintroduced after the talks; or if it reflects some wider discomfort, or incompatibilities, within the apparently current ‘turn’ of Childhood Studies towards materiality.

  • No consensus on ‘agency’ and ‘voice’

Relatedly, the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ of the child were in a paradoxical position. Routinely there were calls to transcend them or move beyond them; at the same time, I observed that those concepts were much-used in presentations by researchers who were also educators or teachers. In other words, there seemed to me to be an interesting discrepancy between the apparent theoretical obsolescence of these concepts, and their continued usefulness in pedagogical practice.

From a Children’s Literature perspective, that discussion maps nicely onto the question of child and adult ‘powers’ within and around the children’s text, which is of course one of my obsessive concerns. That’s where I saw, perhaps, the most resonances between the two fields.

  • Reflections on the constructedness of childhood are still important

I was expecting to find that ‘constructions of childhood’ was now a taboo expression in Childhood Studies, but I was happy to see that it was not the case, with the appropriate caveats in place. I think it was clear and uncontroversial that childhood remains a social construct – and one that is structuring for ‘people currently occupying the space socially defined as childhood’, in the words of Nigel Thomas in his keynote on the matter. Those meandering ways of saying ‘children’ are awkward, of course, but they show that the (important) work on reclaiming (as per above) the child’s ‘voice’ and ‘agency’, and the current work on the interconnectedness of children with everything, still allow for space to reflect on what effectively does construct childhood.

  • A lot of political and ethical commitment

Like Children’s Literature, I found Childhood Studies to be an intensely moral and political arena (in the good sense of the word). There was a lot of preoccupation for the future not just of the discipline but, quite literally, of humanity – a remarkable amount of comments and reflections on climate change, for instance – and of the role of children and researchers in this space. All the keynote speakers exhorted other researchers to be politically and ethically committed; they didn’t necessarily phrase it in that way, but it was very clear.

Perhaps the most inspiring bit of the conference for me was Spyros Spyrou‘s keynote, in which he highlighted the power of method to ‘create alternate realities’ – by which he meant, not alternate representations, but truly alternate realities; an effecting shaping of the world. Faced with that, we must resist relativism; we have an obligation to make ethical choices as to which realities we want to come into being.

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So what’s my Conference Bingo for Childhood Studies? It can’t be complete nor representative, of course, from a sample of just one, but here’s a try, from my semi-outsider perspective:

confbingochildhood

(You will note that ‘As a parent’ is present in both.) With that in mind, I look forward to next year’s IRSCL conference at York University, Toronto (not to be confused with the far nicer superlatively better University of York, UK), whose theme is, appropriately, ‘Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies’.

An unearthly amount of voices, whispering: Creative Writing with Young and Even Younger Students

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Last week, thirteen young teenagers and their English teacher took a coach from Hull to the University of York. What happened next will amaze you.

(How am I doing for buzzfeed-like academic blogging?)

What happened next for the students of Kelvin Hall was an afternoon of creative writing in the company of 2nd-year undergraduates, all enrolled in the Children and Literature module of the Education degree.

The group was composed of the most enthusiastic young storytellers and writers from Years 7-9 in the school – and the point was to get them to write, with the help of undergraduates who’d been taught for two terms about children’s literature in theory. This was an opportunity to interact in practice with actual young readers and producers of texts.

Each undergraduate was paired with one of the Kelvin Hall students (by some favourable twist of fate, they were in equal numbers) and the writing started…

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They looked optimistic at first. Maybe it sounded like it was going to be easy.

Close Encounters with the Third Years

It wasn’t. (They looked happier at the end, though, I promise. This is their concentration face.)

The event had been organised by Amanda Naylor, who lectures that module at York, and by Ryan Eskrett, who teaches the children at Kelvin Hall. Two other English in Education lecturers, Nick McGuinn and me (Clementine) were there to help set up some of the writing activities.

Me, clearly trying to compensate with my long necklace for the lack of dangling card necklacey thing

Me, Amanda and Ryan. Nick isn’t on the picture because he was taking it, but as I realise now, clearly the true reason was that he wasn’t wearing a long-necklacey-thing likethe rest of the gang.

We got them to write flash fiction, which, in case you don’t know, is like short stories, but shorter. Like, really much shorter, we’re talking a story that’s as long as… No, no, not that long. No, really, even shorter. Almost there… Yep. Exactly.

Flash fiction is a really interesting kind of text to write because it forces you to condense into a very small space all the central ingredients of an actual story: characterisation, narrative arc, atmosphere, distinctive style. It’s hard. Anyone can be a novelist, but you have to a pretty good writer to write flash fiction.

To get into the mood, we started with the famous 6-word-memoir: your life, in six words or less.

Before you start accusing me of PowerPoint nepotism, I should specify that I have no idea who Sylvie Beauvais is, but she happens to write flash fiction.

Before you start accusing me of PowerPoint nepotism, I should specify that I have no idea who Sylvie Beauvais is, but she happens to write flash fiction.

Now, to be fair, one would expect that the younger you are, the easier it is to pack your life into six words. Presumably, a two-second-old child could just write ‘Born,’ and that would be about it (though it would doubtlessly trigger some media interest). But the undergraduates and high school students had apparently got much more to say than Ryan (‘Marking. Eat. Sleep. More marking’, was, I think, his memoir) or than myself (‘Still not writing real literature, sorry’):

A cocktail of strange and boring.

Maturely developed peculiar sample of youth.

I love coffee, coffee is life

(Bit concerned that a young teen should be drinking so much coffee already, but at least it’s not whiskey, I guess.)

Then, for the remaining hour and a bit, the Kelvin Hall students and our second-years worked on an actual flash fiction story – less than a page, for some less than half a page.

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This picture is so picturesque I’m kind of worried about putting it online as it will doubtlessly be used by every university in the world in every single undergraduate handbook forever.

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Thinking of things to write about (with a photographer on your right and an undergraduate on your left; but no pressure)

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Pretty much what I’d like my life to be like: reclining on a comfortable chair while a nice young person types up my stories into a Word document.

At the end of the afternoon, each Kelvin Hall student had their own flash fiction story printed, and both groups seemed delighted with the experience. Amanda and Ryan’s idea of bringing high school and higher education students together was brilliant: original, fruitful, fun, and remarkably easy for the three of us as we just sat in the back of the class and talked about academisation while they worked.

Here’s a particularly spooky and atmospheric example of flash fiction, by Axel:

Thursday, 5th 1901.

Dear journal,

After investigating the manor in which my young brother, Marcus, vanished I found myself close to death (or worse). The manor which housed my loving sibling which is upon the Quaking Mountain that, I have uncovered, houses an insidious force. This hideous goliath resides within the terrain of the mountain which explains why it constantly shakes. This horrendously coloured colossus has a disturbing amount of extremities and an unearthly amount of voices, whispering.

I’ve learnt from the remains of my dearest brother and thousands of other small remains that this beast expels acidic vomit upon it’s hostages to devour its prey. The manifestation of pure malevolence calls itself ‘Eloth’. This crustacean-like being rasps horrific yet interesting conversations which echo through the cave, bouncing of the rocky walls. It’s dark in here but overtime my eyes have adjusted to this darkness. I can see the waxy remains of my brother staring back at me.

The creature is currently singing me a lullaby in its unknown language, in a way it is ethereal, I’m feeling the need to rest…

Disturbing amounts of extremities, horrific yet interesting conversations, acidic vomit: sounds uncannily like those parties after academic conference dinners. Interestingly, the students chose very many different genres to tell their stories, from diary entries to letters to tales to prose poetry. Flash fiction is very modulable, and the groups were extremely imaginative and open-minded in their choices.

This is just a little window on the kind of thing that goes on in universities, alongside all the life-saving, paradigm-shifting, Ted-talk-worthy things you hear about on the news. In-between all the big, muscular, über-funded customised random trolls – sorry – randomised controlled trials – there’s daily, small-scale, zero-budget events, involving local communities and real people – enthusiastic teachers and academics, motivated undergrads, keen children.

And while they won’t feature on The Conversation, they stick in individual memories and bring a little bit more good to the world. That afternoon in the computer lab of Alcuin College, University of York, thirteen new stories were born.

Thank you Amanda and Ryan for setting up the event, and Nick for the pictures! Thank you also to the children and their parents who have given their permission to be featured on the pictures in this blog post, and to Axel for the stories.