A Traveller and Time - Catherine Butler

My day job is a lot of fun, sometimes. Recently I was delighted to hear that a PhD student of mine had passed her viva, having written on the subject of Spanish translations of Captain Underpants. This July, she’ll be formally given her doctorate in the echoing environs of Bristol Cathedral, where an abstract of her findings will be read aloud to the assembled congregation. I’m very proud of her.

Now, one or two of you may be thinking, “They give degrees for that?” Perhaps you are already searching for the address of the Telegraph letters page and setting your green fountain pen to caps lock. But hold on a moment! The subject isn’t as straightforward as it may first appear. Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants books were written by an American, and owe a lot to such distinctively American features as their elementary school setting, comic book format, celebration of gross-out comedy, and so on. Translating them into Spanish isn’t just a matter of changing the individual words, it’s a complex negotiation between cultures. What makes perfect sense in the USA may make very little in Spain. For example, in the Captain Underpants books there are plenty of jokes about how awful the school cafeteria lunches are (something that transfers well to the UK, where comics like The Beano mined a similar vein for many decades); but in Spain, where they take food seriously from a young age, the school lunches are excellent, and jokes at their expense are likely to fall flat.

What should translators do in such a situation? Should they attempt to change the text to make it more understandable to its readership – for example by changing specifically American references to equivalent Spanish ones? Or is it better to preserve the original’s American-ness, which may indeed be part of its attraction in the first place? What about puns and wordplay that don’t transfer easily to the new language? And illustrations, which may be too expensive to change? What if the Spanish simply don’t find fart jokes intrinsically hilarious? Perhaps their attitude to what children’s books are for is different, too. It’s not a simple matter.

I’ve just returned from Japan, where amongst many other pleasures I was able (through a mutual friend) to have supper with Mihoko Tanaka, the author of a book on the way that the Japanese adopted and adapted British children’s fantasy after the Second World War. I’d long since been intrigued by the presence of British children’s books in Japanese culture, from Alice on. They crop up regularly in the films of Studio Ghibli, which adapted not only Mary Norton’s classic The Borrowers (1952) as Arrietty (2010), but Joan Robinson’s rather more obscure When Marnie Was There (1967) for the studio's final film in 2014. Being an admirer of Robinson’s book I was delighted by that choice, but having encountered few people who’d even heard of it in the UK was surprised by it, too.

Tanaka’s book unravelled that mystery for me, and told me a lot more besides about the importation of the British timeslip fantasy into Japan from the 1960s onwards. The charge was led by Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), a book that had a huge influence in the country. Tanaka traces both the way that it established a cultural niche for time slip fantasy in Japan, and how it was inevitably changed in the process of negotiating the culture, mental categories and of course the language of that country.

There were numerous problems. Despite being an ancient culture Japan has relatively few old buildings, and this is especially true of those in domestic use. Their habitual construction in temporary materials such as wood, along with the depredations of earthquakes and war, meant that they tended not to last as long as the stone and brick constructions of the West. The idea of slipping back through the centuries to the same old house, as so often happens in British time slips, was therefore less easy to put into practice. Besides, after the War the past was for many in Japan a painful place rather than one ripe for nostalgic exploration. The drive to modernise was at least as strong there as it was in the era of brutalist concrete architecture in the UK. Not only that, but the very different tense system of Japanese made some of the temporal transitions in the British originals hard to render effectively, while the language's tendency to shy away from congregations of abstract nouns made discussion of time theory relatively difficult to effect in a readable and elegant way.

I could go on: I find this kind of thing fascinating, personally. But for those of you who are bilingual (or even polyglottal), or who have been involved in the translation of children's books - your own or other people's - I'd be interested to hear your stories and perspectives on the difficulties that can arise when one tries to take a story out of one culture and implant it in another.