La Retraduction en littérature de jeunesse. Retranslating Children’s Literature ed. by Virginie Douglas et Florence Cabaret (review)

This volume brings together nineteen case studies to illustrate the myriad factors behind and implications of retranslation (repeated translation) within the context of children’s literature. Written in French or English, all essays deal with these as source or target languages, but many also cast a satisfyingly wide net to incorporate significant examples of retranslation practice into or out of Romanian, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Brazilian, and Afrikaans. Also welcome is the input from professional translators, which results in an insightful blend of theory and practice, alongside an often refreshingly subjective assessment of the relative merits or shortcomings of a given (re)translation. One of the main theoretical touchstones of the collection is the Retranslation Hypothesis that initial translations are appropriative, while subsequent retranslations orient themselves towards the source text. However, the hypothesis is frequently mistakenly cited as originating from Antoine Berman (rather than from Goethe) and the not insubstantial body of work on retranslation in other contexts tends to be overlooked. A notable exception in the volume is Jan Van Coillie’s rigorous study of fairy tales by Grimm, Perrault, and Andersen in Dutch retranslation, which draws usefully on the important contributions made to retranslation theory by Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen, Anthony Pym, Siobhan Brownlie, and Lawrence Venuti. The findings in the volume further corroborate the now widely held view that the Retranslation Hypothesis is realized in only a limited number of cases. Similarly, essays exploring the external influences on the phenomenon show that retranslations of children’s literature respond to the aesthetic, economic, and ideological agendas of the receiving culture, as well as to the idiosyncratic agendas of individual translators, in a manner that is consistent with the responses observed elsewhere and in respect of other genres. Especially salient, then, are the contributions that draw attention to factors that have a unique or underexplored bearing on the retranslation of this particular form of literature. The idea of nostalgia as an obstacle to retranslation emerges in two studies. Françoise Thau argues that the initial translation of The Jungle Bookin French has endured by being passed down through four generations, while Monika Woźniak details the acerbic rejection of a retranslation of Winnie-the-Poohby the Polish reading public given their affective relationship to and familiarity with the initial translation. Approaching nostalgia from another original and fascinating perspective, graphic designer Loïc Boyer discusses the current French trend of ‘rétrographisme’ whereby retranslations are packaged to evoke a visual and material return to the original. Fruitful lines of retranslation enquiry also open up in the work of Chiara Galletti who foregrounds the act of co-retranslation in the second English version of The Moomins, while the essay by Anne Schneider and Thérèse Willer engages with the phonetic, lexical, and narratological changes effected by Tom Ungerer in instances of self-retranslation. While many of the contributions cover established retranslation ground, the volume still offers much in the way of diverse and stimulating material for those interested in the specific intersections between children’s literature and retranslation.