Patricia Anne Odber de BAUBETA (University of Birmingham, UK)

Treachery and double crossings: when adult fiction is translated for children

This paper will consider the intersection of translation, frequently viewed as a form of betrayal, with crossover literature or works originally written for one set of readers and read by another. The treachery lies in the way the translations are often made, resulting in a version that is ‘faulty, unfaithful and mutilated’, in the words of Carmen Bravo Villasante (1978: 46). The terms ‘cross-writing’ and ‘crossover’ are now taken for granted by theorists of children’s literature:

Cross-writing includes authors who write sometimes for children and sometimes for adults, as well as writers (or intra-textually, narrators) who address more than one age of reader/viewer in the same text (Falconer, 2004: 558)

Cross-writing or dual-audience authors address adults and children in the same work. Daniel Defoe is sometimes offered as an example (because of his Robinson Crusoe, though, not Moll Flanders), while crossover is normally used to describes a book that crosses age boundaries – in either direction.
In the context of the present study, I would argue for the existence of a further category, a kind of double crossing, namely the translation of novels or short stories that belong to an adult canon in one language, for inclusion in children’s anthologies in another. As Sandra Beckett has pointed out:

Novels published for one audience quite often are released later for the other in another context, either another time period or in another country and/or cultural setting. N ovels published for adults in one country are sometimes marketed for a juvenile audience in another, or occasionally, the reverse. (Beckett, 1999: xv)

Here I am thinking particularly of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, both of whom appear in volumes of Verbo’s Série 15, published between 1970 and 1985, as well as the respective French, Spanish and French 15s. This paper will examine the way these authors and their works fare, in translation and in collections destined for a juvenile readership.