Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 2: The Research begins

Today was another warm autumn day, a pleasure to walk to work in. I arrived at 9.30 and started looking through the box of books I ordered through the IJB catalogue before I arrived. It is very difficult searching for books which are multilingual as this is not a tag in the search criteria. The books found were a mixture of quite a few bilingual Japanese/English books, and a selection of books featuring English and a minority language such as Cree, Spanish, Inuktituk and Greenlandic. There were also three picturebooks featuring characters discussing issues relating to being bilingual, for example in Yoko Writes her Name  (Rosemary Wells, 2008),   Yoko can write her name in Japanese and English. Her classmates respond with jealousy and in the process draw on several common prejudices around bilingualism. The search also did   manage to identify 5 picturebooks with between 3 and 5 languages in them, and I spent most of the day really enjoying analysing the linguistic ...
1 comment
Read more

Day 1 at Schloss Blutenberg

After the long (but comfortable- I can recommend Qatar Airways) flight here, today has seemed rather surreal. I arrived at my accommodation by about 3pm yesterday (Sunday) after a very straightforward train ride and then short taxi drive from Munich Airport. It was a stunning and warm autumn day, and the place I am staying at is right beside a very fast flowing little river called the Wurm (with an umlaut over the ‘u’). There are lots of established autumn coloured trees and many people from the very young to the very old out on the bike path beside the river. My landlady is currently out of the country, but another of her tenants met me and gave me some lunch and dinner as no shops are open on a Sunday in this part of town. I stayed awake as long as I could before falling into a heavy sleep around 8pm, and then woke at a not too indecent hour today. I got up quite early and popped into a local bakery and vege shop to stock up on some food, and then headed into Schloss Blutenberg...
1 comment
Read more

Day 30: Last day

This will be my last entry for my time at the International Jugenbibliothek. I feel very sad to be leaving. It has been such a wonderful experience in so many ways: the books, the people, and experiencing living in Munich. I have cleared my piles of books off my desk and found a few beautiful almost coffee table books entitled ‘The Best Children’s Books in the World’ and 100 Great Children’s Picturebooks’ to look at for my last day. I have also just had the pleasure of meeting Junko from USBBY who has just arrived from the US to work here for a month. I last met Junko at the IBBY conference in NZ, and we have a lot to discuss, so I am going to have lunch with her today, and dinner with her when I return next Friday. A final treasure! Working at IJB has provided focus and resources for my research concerning multilingual picturebooks, and given me time to really think and develop a book proposal. It is such a privilege, and a time I will always treasure. ...
Post a Comment
Read more