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So I’m having lunch with author Jeff Baron (I REPRESENT SEAN ROSEN) the other day and we’re talking about his play VISITING MR. GREEN.  It’s a remarkably popular work, and has had debuts all over the world.  The topic naturally turned to translation and Jeff mentioned that he takes an active role in reading and critiquing the various translations of his work.  This got me to thinking about translated children’s books.  Not the foreign titles that are translated into English, but the American books that are translated into other languages around the world.

The fact of the matter is that the time and care and attention that Jeff has pored into the translations of his staged productions do not have much of a children’s book correlation.  American authors, by and large, don’t tend to care what the translated versions of their stories sound like.  And even if they do, I don’t think there’s a publisher contract out there that gives the author creative control over translation (you may feel free to correct me on this).

Authors care about the translations of the titles of their books, of course.  Jeff Kinney, for example, has gotten a lot of laughs from the fact that DIARY OF A WIMPY KID couldn’t be directly translated into German because there is no German equivalent for the word “wimpy”.  Many authors, as it happens, enjoy seeing the different covers and titles of their books worldwide.  How many, I wonder, take it a step further and translate back their own books so that they can see how their words have been changed?  After all, if you’re going to be known to a foreign nation solely through your writing, wouldn’t you want that writing to be as pitch perfect and accurate as possible?

For a time I had some fun collecting various editions of Harry Potter from around the world.  Indeed, I have quite the little collection.  My favorite of all these were the various editions of HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS.  Why?  The anagram.  At one point in the story the words “I AM TOM RIDDLE” turn into “LORD VOLDEMORT” (should I have said “spoiler alert”?).  In enjoying the various iterations of that anagram my husband and I noticed that in many cases the very names of the characters had changed.  Two of my favorites -

Italian: “Tom Orvoloson Riddle” becomes “Son io Lord Voldemort”.

Czech: “Tom Rojvol Raddle” becomes “Ja Lord Voldemort”.

I’ve searched and searched for a website where someone comments on the changes in a foreign edition of one of the HP books but so far no go.

So I’m going to throw this one out to the authors out there, and not just those of the American persuasion.  I want to know if in other countries writers care more about their English translations than we do about our foreign ones.  Perhaps they don’t.  Maybe no one cares.  Maybe everyone does on some level.  And are there authors here that have offered to personally oversee the translations of their books?  Likely, but is it allowed?  Will it ever be?

Much to chew on.

Where the Streets Had a Name
By Randa Abdel-Fattah
Scholastic
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-545-17292-9
Ages 9 and up
On shelves November 1, 2010

When I was a child I had a very vague sense of global conflicts in other countries. Because of my Bloom County comics I knew a bit about apartheid in South Africa. Later as a teen I heard The Cranberries sing “Zombie” and eventually learned a bit about the troubles in Northern Ireland. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict, however, had a lousy pop culture PR department. Nowhere in the whole of my childhood did I encounter anything that even remotely explained the problems there. Heck it wasn’t until college that I got an inkling of what the deal was. Even then, it was difficult for me to comprehend. Kids today don’t have it much easier (and can I tell you how depressing it is to know that the troubles that existed when I was a child remain in place for children today?). They do, however, have a little more literature at their disposal. For younger kids there are shockingly few books. For older kids and teens, there are at least memoirs like Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood by Ibtisam Barakat or Palestine by Joe Sacco. What about the middle grade options? Historically there have been a couple chapter books covering the topic, but nothing particularly memorable comes to mind. Enter Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Abdel-Fattah. Written by the acclaimed author of the YA novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, Abdel-Fattah wades into waters that children’s book publishers generally shy away from. Hers is the hottest of hot topics, but she handles her subject matter with dignity and great storytelling.

Hayaat was beautiful once. That’s what her family would tell you. But since an accident involving the death of her best friend, she’s remained scarred and, to be blunt, scared. Hayaat lives in Bethlehem in the West Bank in 2004. Her family occupies a too small apartment and is preparing for the wedding of Hayaat’s sister Jihan. Unfortunately there are curfews to obey and constant checkpoints to pass. When Hayaat’s beloved Sitti Zeynab grows ill, Hayaat decides to put away the past and do the impossible. She will travel to her grandmother’s old home across the wall that divides the West Bank to bring some soil from in front of her old house. With her partner-in-crime Samy by her side, Hayaat reasons that the trip is attainable as it’s just a few miles. What she doesn’t count on, however, is the fact that for a Palestinian kid to make that trip, it may as well be halfway across the world. Hayaat, however, is determined and along the way she’s able to confront some of the demons from her past.

In a lot of ways this book is a good old-fashioned quest novel. You have your heroine, battle scarred, sending herself into a cold cruel world to gain the impossible. That the impossible would be a simple sample of soil doesn’t take anything away from the poignancy of he