Today I have been focussing on more bilingual books in the White Raven
Catalogue published by the language specialists at the Internationale
Jugendbibliotek (IJB). Some of you will know about this prestigious catalogue
of ‘extraordinary and innovative books for children and adolescents’ which has
been going since 1993, and includes oner three and a half thousand books from
84 countries in 60 different languages. As part of my work here I have been
looking at seven bilingual picturebooks in this collection- one of them is the
Poems of the Night book I wrote about yesterday.
Another bilingual picturebook in the White Raven catalogue is our very
own Mōtītī Blue and the Oil Spill, a
narrative non-fiction picturebook self published by Debbie McCauley in Tauranga
which focuses on a little blue penguin affected by the oil spill from the Rina
disaster. The narrative text is presented in English and Māori, and it is a
beautiful book. I have heard Debbie McCauley speak about her personal
commitment to te reo Māori as one of New Zealand’s official languages which
influenced her decision to include both languages in her book (and a previous
book Taratoa and the Code of Conduct: A Story from the Battle of Gate
Pa).
Another bilingual book in my survey was published in Brazil. A história de Akykysia, o dono da caça Akykysia (Carelli, 2014) is one of a six
book series called ‘A Day in a Village’ based on a film project where Brazilian
film crews went into remote villages and recorded village stories and myths. This story is from the Wayampi people who number approximately 1,000 and live
in the North of Brazil. It is about a monster or akykysia who eats people in
revenge for their killing of wild animals. The retelling by Rita Carelli is
given in Portuguese and Wayampi. Not knowing any Portuguese or Wayampi I have been making a lot of use of google translate. Portuguese is the national language of Brazil,
spoken by approximately 90% of the population, but apparently there
are 216 languages spoken in Brazil today. Two hundred of these are indigenous,
and one of these is the Wayampi language included in this book.
I then read Water Rolls, Water Rises.
El agua rueda, el agua sube (More & So, 2014) which is a celebration of
the place of water in a range of environments around the world written in Spanish and
English, and published in the United States. Paidika
oneira /Children’s dreams (Michaēlidu-Kadē & Stamatiadē,
2015) is a Greek/English bilingual picturebook which tells stories about
children and their dreams and how their dreams are realised when they are
adults. After my time in Nepal earlier this year I was also keen to read the
very recently published Phuccē Tibbatī goṭhālo / The little Tibetan
shepherd (Yangsdom, Sironi, Diemberger & Diemberger, 2017) which
is a story based on a traditional Himalayan tale of a small boy shepherd who
travels through the Himalayas to help a queen who is ill. He is invited to stay
in the palace but prefers to return to the fresh air of the mountains where he
works.
There is one more book for me
to look at called Tarik Ibn Ziyad
(Daoud & Bravo, 2015), another French and Arabic bilingual book but it is out on a travelling exhibition, so I will
have to try and interloan it once I get back to New Zealand.
There is no doubt these White Raven
Books are quite outstanding in their text, illustration and design. It is
really interesting for me to learn about the different sociolinguistic contexts
in which they are produced and to examine the ways the different languages are
treated.
I’m back into the multilingual
books tomorrow.
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