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Day 11: The Triplets and the Dragon of the Apple Tree

I took a train to Salzburg in the weekend and went on a hop-on-hop-off bus around the city where I saw several locations where the Sound of Music was filmed. We even had a bit of sun. And on Sunday I went into Munich City Museum which was very interesting, including a full floor of puppets. The weather is getting quite cold now, but the buildings are all very warmly heated.

Today I’ve been finishing off the pile of 23 multilingual picturebooks I’ve found so far at the International Jugendbibliothek. This has included what is essentially a vocabulary book with a word a page in thirteen (yes 13) languages: English, Korean, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Japanese, Portuguese, Lao, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Cambodian, and Navajo. This book was published in the United States, and the author, Mary Feder, explicitly states it is a ‘playful introduction to languages’. English is privileged in space, size and order throughout the book. Other languages have been chosen to represent the multitude of languages spoken by communities throughout the United States, including Navajo as the most spoken native American language.

Probably the most interesting book of the day was The Triplets and the Dragon of the Apple Tree (Polykarpou & Tsangaris, 2015)  which is a quadri-lingual re-told traditional tale from Cyprus. The story is of triplets born to a king who plants an apple tree to celebrate their birth. It is part of the prestigious White Raven’s Catalogue 2016. On the three boys’ seventeenth birthday the tree bears three apples which are stolen by a dragon to entice three young women. The youngest brother kills the dragon and a triple marriage follows. While many books I have examined in my studies of bi- and multilingual books have put the different languages on the same page, this book has four difference sections, one for each of the four languages. The first section in Greek is on glossy paper with full colour pictures, whereas the subsequent three sections for English, Russian and French (some of the main foreign languages used in Cyprus) are on non glossy paper with black and white illustrations, and in this way Greek is clearly privileged.

I am now starting to go back through all of the books in this database so far, checking I have the data I need, and deciding what images to scan to use for later analysis. One of the librarians, Nadine, who has been helping me has asked for my list so she can go back into the catalogue recording for each book the languages used and a tag for multilingual. This will help future searching.

I’m moving on to reading some of the secondary material about children’s books over the next few days which will feed into a book my colleague Libby Limbrick and I hope to edit together. A few more books on my order list will probably trickle in soon.

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