"Palle" in New Clothes: The Translation of a Danish Picture Book

Abstract

"PALLE" IN NEW CLOTHES: THE TRANSLATION OF A DANISH PICTURE BOOK One hundred seventy- five Danish children's books, excluding those by Hans Christian Andersen, have been available to children who read English. Through 1974, twentythree books have been published first in Danish and then translated to English and published in both the United States of America and Great Britain. One book in particular -- Palle Aleñe i. Verden -- serves as an example of the variations in translation. One might assume naively that the translated edition is an accurate rendering of the original. At least the author, illustrator, and translator should be identified, and a notation, giving credit to the original title and publisher, should appear somewhere in the book. The reader should rightly expect that the text is an accurate retelling of the original story and that the illustrations are the same. Names of characters and places should presumably be the same, and the only difference between the British and American editions would be the spelling. The text should retain the integrity of the original, with no expansion, change, or deletion of episodes. The illustrations should be the same size and in the same juxtaposition with the text. The translations of Palle Aleñe i. Verden, however, prove that these assumptions are fallible. Palle Aleñe i Verden is the title of a children's picture book publisEeH originally in Copenhagen by Gyldendal in 1942. In Denmark, the book has been published in three editions, one with slight changes in text and illustration and one with major alterations. In addition, the story has been available to American children in two forms, Nils All Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and Paul is Alone in the World (St. Louis: McGraw Hill, 1964), and to BritisTT children, Paul Alone in the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947T^ Jens Sigsgaard; author, psychologist, and educator; based his book on a study of interviews with 1,000 Danish youngsters to ascertain what they would like the most. The majority wanted to eradicate Hitler, but the more child-like responses were to have money, to fly to the moon, and to get chocolate from a candy shop. As a result of this survey , Sigsgaard designed the plot. The children's book is about a boy awakening to find that his father and mother are gone and discovering that he has access to anything he wants in the city. He drives a streetcar and causes an accident. He takes money from a bank but discovers he doesn't need it. He flies an airplane to the moon. There are no people in his dream world, however, and when he awakens, he realizes that his experiences were just that -a dream. The Danish book has gone through eight printings. The first edition was printed in 1942 and reprinted in 1946 and 1949, for a total of 75,000 copies. Another edition with a new illustration opposite the last page of text was printed in 1954, 1964, 1966, and 1969; but the edition with significant revisions appeared in 1974. The two later Danish editions in 1954 and 1974 were revised in response to changing times. Some Danish psychologists criticized the final picture of a child crying in his bed, so the author and illustrator made slight changes: the boy plays with other children on a playground in the conclusion of the 1954 printing. By 1974 the text and illustrations were outdated, so the author and illustrator changed certain aspects to modernize it. In the 1974 edition, oatmeal is converted to hot-dogs, the boy wears blue jeans instead of short pants, and he drives a bus instead of a streetcar. No English translation of this later edition has been published, but more than 165,000 copies have been printed in Denmark alone, and the book has been translated into thirty languages. While the first American and British editions are based on the first printing of the Danish first edition, the second American edition is based on the Swedish translation. The first Swedish translation was published by Albert Bonniers in 1946, and a later one on which the second American edition is based was published in Sweden in...