“We Are Translated Men”: Mobility in Children’s Literature

Home (nation), away (migration), and everything in between (transnationalism) as topics in literary texts produced in Europe for young readers and as a feature of their production, distribution, and reception are the areas engaged with in the collection Children’s Literature on the Move, which was named a 2013 Honor Book by the Children’s Literature Association. Since the volume was published, the topic of migration has acquired a dramatic relevance and actuality in Europe, making the publication all the more timely. More than a million migrants and refugees entered the continent in 2015, driven by war in Syria, violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and poverty and political repression in North Africa, while another four thousand were drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean. The resettlement of migrants is creating division in the European Union accompanied by ugly demonstrations of right-wing, xenophobic groups and by the increasing popularity of anti-immigration right-wing parties in many countries.

Although these acute developments succeeded publication of this collection, in their introduction to the volume, editors Nora Maguire and Beth Rodgers rightly justify their engagement with the topic of nationalism by referring to Benedict Anderson’s observation that ideas of the nation and nationalism “command … profound emotional legitimacy,” adding that it has “lost none of its relevance in the wake of the seismic social, cultural and geopolitical transformations” (9) that have taken place since the now canonical Imagined Communities was published in 1983. They also point out that current collective fears about economic crisis, social justice, democracy, and globalization have given “an increased significance to notions of national sovereignty and identity” (9).

The editors invoke the intertwined nature of Western ideals of nationhood and childhood rather than teasing it out. They cite Mary S. Thompson, who, in her lucid reflections on childhood and the nation in the introduction to Young Irelands, observes that the “tropes of nineteenth-century European nationhood—seen as elemental, natural and untainted by Enlightenment ideology”—are also those of the evolving Romantic concept of childhood (13). If they had expanded on how childhood is a powerful signifier that represents “both the origin and future of the state” (Kelen and Sundmark 263), however, it would have lent more weight to their statement about “the acute collective anxieties that gravitate towards both the child and the nation” (11).¹

As a site of intergenerational communication about what it means to be a member of any given community, children’s literature is a privileged domain for constructing and challenging notions of collective identity. Discourses of identity and belonging can be positioned at the different ideological poles of children’s literature: they can be texts that have the potential to be radical forces for change (Reynolds 3) or their reactionary counterparts, which seek to condition young readers in line with contemporary and culture-bound norms. This volume fittingly presents a range of different critical stances toward and instances of nations constructed and deconstructed in writings for children “acknowledging their potential for cohesion and empowerment as well as for oppression and violence” (11). It addresses the role that literature can play in probing and creating identity for readers as well as the topic of migration, and how it impinges on personal, cultural, and national identity. By implementing the metaphor of movement in the title of their collection, the editors align themselves with cultural translation studies, which has expanded the range of its focus beyond addressing the translation of texts from one language and cultural context to another in order to include people, travel, and migration. As Salmon Rushdie famously claimed, when writing about the British Indian writer, “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been borne across the world, we are translated men” (16).² The combination of the two dynamic terms “translations, migrations” in the subtitle of the collection fits well into this discursive context, and it is the response to these issues that often...