I am Sam. Sam I am. You can already see where this is going. There will be fox. There will be socks. Ultimately, of course, there will be green eggs and ham. It’s a story of a pushy little fellow named Sam and his obsessive desire to force a more laconic other dude to try some green eggs and ham. Incidentally, the ham seems not to be green. Just the eggs. In any case, Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham has been an almost universally loved classic of children’s literature since it was first published in 1960.
I hate it. In fact, these days I hate almost all Dr. Seuss books. I do not simply hate the silly words or the difficult, repeated rhymes and concepts. I do not merely hate the careful rhythm and the tight integration of pictures and words. I hate the density, the care with which they are constructed. They build on sounds, references and structure. It is because Dr Seuss books are so tightly well written that they utterly resist translation.
Black People Speak French
Kids associate languages with people (and types of people). This is just the way our brains work. I was born in French-speaking Africa and so was my older brother, Adam. When my family moved back to the US when Adam was 2 and a half years old, he spent a bit of time trying to speak French to all of the Black people he encountered. This caused some amusing confusion during a plane-change in Chicago, but it made perfect sense, at least to Adam. Until that trip, every brown-skinned person he had ever met spoke French, and most of the lighter-skinned people he had met spoke English (or English plus some other European language). Our brains are adapted to associate languages with individuals and classes of people, rather than situations. This is at least part of why it is extremely difficult, even for bilingual people, to maintain a communication relationship that is sometimes in one language and sometimes in another. My family’s history in French-speaking Africa left me with an obvious lesson and a choice: I only speak Spanish to my children, of course.
Borinquén
In the end, I grew up mostly in Puerto Rico, in a little town called Humacao on the South Eastern side of the island. My father married an Argentinian woman and they started a Montessori school together in Puerto Rico. At first, Adam and I were just along for the ride. But for me the timing was just right. I was old enough to be a real human being but young enough to go with the flow. And the spirit and character and history of Puerto Rico ended up in me. I went to school in that clipped, hurried, beautiful Puerto Rican Spanish that the rest of the Spanish-speaking world loves to hate. I made my first real friends in Spanish. I went to my first school dances in Spanish. When I met my partner, I made it clear that speaking (and more importantly, understanding) Spanish was not optional—it was a part of who I am and it would be required to relate to me and to my family And when I had kids, I couldn’t imagine them not speaking Spanish.
Children’s Books Kick My Ass
When my daughter Agatha was born, I knew I would have to read every single book to her in Spanish, regardless of what the letters on the page actually said. I had done some written and spoken simultaneous translation so this didn’t worry me. I also knew that all of my favorite books as a kid had been in English. So I knew that I would be shouldering the majority of the translation burden in my household. “This is not my puppy: his paws are too rough” == “Éste no es mi perro: sus patas estan demasiadas ásperas”. Easy stuff. I got lulled into a false sense of security. And then we got the Lorax. “And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say if you look deep enough you can still see, today…” “The old Once-ler still lives here. …” How the hell do you translate “Grickle-grass” or “Onceler”. (I did Grama-Grica and ViejoUnaVez but those were spur-of-the-moment choices, not carefully considered terms that built the rhythm of the story). Not only does Dr Seuss uses lots of non-words, but the non-words tend to resonate with each other and imply, without directly signifying, meanings in English. As I tried simultaneous translation of the Lorax, every off-the-cuff choice led me to more difficult choices on future pages. By the end of the story, even I was confused and I can guarantee that Agatha had no idea what the hell was going on. Clearly Dr. Seuss was graduate-school-level translation. Not to be attempted off the top of one’s head while reading a bedtime story. Translating truly hard texts requires more than skill. It requires imagination and bold choices. Any vaguely poetic use of language is fundamentally untranslatable—it violates the separation of signifier and signified. Onomatopoeia, connotation, meter and rhyme all disappear in obvious, literal translation. The only way to bring them back is to layer on your own thick slathering of poetry. I knew I needed help.
Teresa Mlawer, Aida Marcuse and Dr Seuss the Second Time Around
“En la gran habitación verde, hay un globo rojo…” Goodnight Moon, thanks to Teresa Mlawer. Mlawer is a giant of Spanish-language kids books. She has personally translated over 250 children’s books, including many of the great ones. If your kids have books in Spanish in the US, her name is on your bookshelf at least twice. Her translations are smooth, idiomatic, and they try to preserve rhythm and context. But it was Aida Marcuse’s translation
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Family Circus parody by cutup
