Bookworm Literary Festival 2016: Diego Arboleda
The 2016 Literary Festival at the Bookworm is now over, but our Beijing March was much improved by it. I always say it is what makes the third month of the year bearable. An early Easter this year helped, too, but outside of church, March in North China can be a chilly, smoggy drag.
Our first event of the Festival was with Spanish children's book author Diego Arboleda, whose book Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll has recently been translated into Chinese.
The book, unfortunately, is not available in English. Arboleda also wasn't comfortable giving his presentation in English, so one of the Festival volunteers, Rachel, translated from Spanish for him.
Still, it was a wonderful introduction to Arboleda's book and his perspective on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
More after the jump
I was disappointed that the only people in attendance for Arboleda's session were my two kids, me, and another mother who attended the events on behalf of her own child who was in school. I had to wonder if the fact that Arboleda was not from an Anglophone country prevented the English-speaking schools from sending students to the Bookworm. And while Beijing has quite a number of residents from Spanish-speaking countries, there is not a singular school where their children go. There are schools in Beijing that operate in German, French, Russian and even Swedish. With the Spanish-speakers spread out, there probably wasn't one particular school that would have favored sending even a small group.
It was too bad. Arboleda's talk was absorbing and funny. Since he had already prepared to speak on children's level, I followed along in Spanish with only occasional difficulty. He also paused often enough for Rachel to translate, which was especially helpful when I was laughing and Myles and Brigid had to wait to hear what the joke was. Arboleda was such a trooper, too, giving our small audience his full presentation.
His book, he described, was truly an international production, and his writing it is something fitting to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland world. He himself had been born in Sweden when his parents lived there, but he does not speak Swedish. Currently residing in Madrid, he wrote a book in Spanish that begins in France (and he didn't speak much French) and then moved setting to New York City (and he claimed he could only speak a little English) about a little girl who is obsessed with a British book, and tended to by a French governess. His book was recently published in China, and he was here now in Beijing, unable to speak Mandarin, to talk with children about his book.
Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll is about a little girl named Alice, who lives in New York in the early 1930s and is obsessed with Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Her governess and parents do not want her to find out that the real Alice, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, is visiting Columbia University to mark the centennial of Lewis Carroll's birth. There are many characters, some of whom bear uncanny resemblance to Wonderland characters, and some who actually are from Wonderland. By following this link to the book and choosing the "Look inside" option, you can see the introductory illustrations and read the first few pages.
What compelled Arboleda to write a story related to Wonderland was the universal appeal of Alice herself. Lewis Carroll's Alice is curious and polite, and unfailingly so even when confronted by Wonderland's unique rules. The inhabitants of Wonderland are exaggerated, comical, and ridiculous (exagerados, comícos, y ridiculos), and yet the irony is that they are completely serious. Of the cast in Wonderland, Arboleda said his favorite was the Cheshire Cat. He liked how the Cat would come and go, fade in and out, and, especially, the Cheshire Cat's telling Alice "we’re all mad here....you must be...or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The madness of Wonderland, Arboleda said, was contagious (locura es contagiosa) beyond the book. To support this, he made three completely true but mad points.
The second game was something that would have been popular during Alice's life, taumatropo. Myles and Brigid could select from a number of thaumatropes Arboleda had with him. Brigid picked a young couple with an umbrella, and Myles chose a scene from Aesop's fable of the fox and the crow. The author showed them how to spin them. Even in this age of iThingies, the simplest things can amuse kids for quite some time.
Afterwards was the workshop component. Arboleda asked the kids to choose a favorite Wonderland character and draw them. Then they were to write a few Wonderland-like lines inspired by their thaumatrope. Myles simply had to draw the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, both of whom had funny things to say about the Fox and the Crow. Brigid first sketched Humpty Dumpty and then the King of Hearts. When we were reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she really liked how the King of Hearts went around pardoning everyone, so I think her King was in response to her brother's Queen.
While the kids were finishing, I asked Arboleda if there were any plans for an English version of Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll. He said there hadn't been much interest yet, and he wasn't sure if that might be because there were already similar books in English. He added that he wasn't sure how successful an English translation would be because he used a lot of Spanish idioms and puns as part of his humor. Of course, that led me to ask about reading Wonderland's Spanish translation. I reminded him that a lot of Carroll's book also played on English words. Some, like the Mock Turtle's story about his school master, were so specific to British English that these do not make sense in American English. He nodded at this. He was familiar with the English of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, having read a Spanish academic version that explained all of that in footnotes. But this annotated book he had read as an adult. He said that the humor and entertainment of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Spanish, that which he read all his young life, is all from the absurdities.
We all really enjoyed Diego Arboleda's talk. It really was a shame that more people couldn't make it to his Bookworm session. Since Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll is not in English, I went ahead and ordered the original Spanish from Amazon. It will be one of our summer projects, reading this book together in Spanish with my own attempts to translate it myself.
Our first event of the Festival was with Spanish children's book author Diego Arboleda, whose book Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll has recently been translated into Chinese.
The book, unfortunately, is not available in English. Arboleda also wasn't comfortable giving his presentation in English, so one of the Festival volunteers, Rachel, translated from Spanish for him.
Still, it was a wonderful introduction to Arboleda's book and his perspective on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
More after the jump
I was disappointed that the only people in attendance for Arboleda's session were my two kids, me, and another mother who attended the events on behalf of her own child who was in school. I had to wonder if the fact that Arboleda was not from an Anglophone country prevented the English-speaking schools from sending students to the Bookworm. And while Beijing has quite a number of residents from Spanish-speaking countries, there is not a singular school where their children go. There are schools in Beijing that operate in German, French, Russian and even Swedish. With the Spanish-speakers spread out, there probably wasn't one particular school that would have favored sending even a small group.
It was too bad. Arboleda's talk was absorbing and funny. Since he had already prepared to speak on children's level, I followed along in Spanish with only occasional difficulty. He also paused often enough for Rachel to translate, which was especially helpful when I was laughing and Myles and Brigid had to wait to hear what the joke was. Arboleda was such a trooper, too, giving our small audience his full presentation.
His book, he described, was truly an international production, and his writing it is something fitting to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland world. He himself had been born in Sweden when his parents lived there, but he does not speak Swedish. Currently residing in Madrid, he wrote a book in Spanish that begins in France (and he didn't speak much French) and then moved setting to New York City (and he claimed he could only speak a little English) about a little girl who is obsessed with a British book, and tended to by a French governess. His book was recently published in China, and he was here now in Beijing, unable to speak Mandarin, to talk with children about his book.
Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll is about a little girl named Alice, who lives in New York in the early 1930s and is obsessed with Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Her governess and parents do not want her to find out that the real Alice, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, is visiting Columbia University to mark the centennial of Lewis Carroll's birth. There are many characters, some of whom bear uncanny resemblance to Wonderland characters, and some who actually are from Wonderland. By following this link to the book and choosing the "Look inside" option, you can see the introductory illustrations and read the first few pages.
What compelled Arboleda to write a story related to Wonderland was the universal appeal of Alice herself. Lewis Carroll's Alice is curious and polite, and unfailingly so even when confronted by Wonderland's unique rules. The inhabitants of Wonderland are exaggerated, comical, and ridiculous (exagerados, comícos, y ridiculos), and yet the irony is that they are completely serious. Of the cast in Wonderland, Arboleda said his favorite was the Cheshire Cat. He liked how the Cat would come and go, fade in and out, and, especially, the Cheshire Cat's telling Alice "we’re all mad here....you must be...or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The madness of Wonderland, Arboleda said, was contagious (locura es contagiosa) beyond the book. To support this, he made three completely true but mad points.
- At one time, some literary critics performed a computer analysis of Alice in Wonderland, comparing it to many other writings from the period. This computational interpretation concluded that Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) could not possibly be the author of the Alice books. The analysis proved that the actual writer was the Queen of England. While I was writing this post, I found this link to two archived articles about this.
- Alice in Wonderland has often been called un libro intraducible, an untranslatable book. Anyone with even passing familiarity with Wonderland would agree; the book is full of puns and double-speak. However, it is one of the most translated books in history.
- The book has also been frequently banned, often because of the talking animals (and including at least one known incident in China in the 1930s). Of course, some of the oldest stories we have, like Aesop's fables, have talking animals.
The second game was something that would have been popular during Alice's life, taumatropo. Myles and Brigid could select from a number of thaumatropes Arboleda had with him. Brigid picked a young couple with an umbrella, and Myles chose a scene from Aesop's fable of the fox and the crow. The author showed them how to spin them. Even in this age of iThingies, the simplest things can amuse kids for quite some time.
Afterwards was the workshop component. Arboleda asked the kids to choose a favorite Wonderland character and draw them. Then they were to write a few Wonderland-like lines inspired by their thaumatrope. Myles simply had to draw the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, both of whom had funny things to say about the Fox and the Crow. Brigid first sketched Humpty Dumpty and then the King of Hearts. When we were reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she really liked how the King of Hearts went around pardoning everyone, so I think her King was in response to her brother's Queen.
While the kids were finishing, I asked Arboleda if there were any plans for an English version of Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll. He said there hadn't been much interest yet, and he wasn't sure if that might be because there were already similar books in English. He added that he wasn't sure how successful an English translation would be because he used a lot of Spanish idioms and puns as part of his humor. Of course, that led me to ask about reading Wonderland's Spanish translation. I reminded him that a lot of Carroll's book also played on English words. Some, like the Mock Turtle's story about his school master, were so specific to British English that these do not make sense in American English. He nodded at this. He was familiar with the English of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, having read a Spanish academic version that explained all of that in footnotes. But this annotated book he had read as an adult. He said that the humor and entertainment of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Spanish, that which he read all his young life, is all from the absurdities.
We all really enjoyed Diego Arboleda's talk. It really was a shame that more people couldn't make it to his Bookworm session. Since Prohibido Leer a Lewis Carroll is not in English, I went ahead and ordered the original Spanish from Amazon. It will be one of our summer projects, reading this book together in Spanish with my own attempts to translate it myself.
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