Children’s Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations ed. by Nora Maguire, Beth Rodgers (review)

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations ed. by Nora Maguire, Beth Rodgers Dennis Butts (bio) Children’s Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations. Edited by Nora Maguire and Beth Rodgers . Dublin : Four Courts Press , 2013 . While I am reading this book, the nation-states of Iraq and Syria are being violently wrenched into a new Arabian Caliphate, refugees from North Africa are being found drowned on their way to Sicily, the USA worries about immigrants from Central America, and the UK prepares for a referendum on Scottish independence. One could say, then, that with so much discussion about immigration and national identity in the air, a book with the subtitle Nations, Translations, Migrations is a timely production. Children’s Literature on the Move is the sixth publication of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature, and aims to continue the work “of promoting and progressing children’s literature in Ireland, by looking beyond the Anglophone neighbors to our east and west and identifying points of contact with literatures from other European peripheries.” “The scholars contributing to this collection,” its introduction continues, “seek to explore the various roles played by children’s literature within the processes of creating and contesting notions of collective identity and belonging” (9). They hope to trace some of the “circuitous routes by which writing for the young travels in and out of discourses of nation and belonging” (10–11). The ambition may sound rather daunting, but the practice proves to be more engaging. [End Page 574] The volume is divided into three parts: (1) Constructing nations and nationhood; (2) Irish childhoods past and present, at home and abroad; and (3) Contemporary children’s literature: challenging discourses of nation. Part 1 consists of chapters on literary works from Estonia, Turkey, and Great Britain; Part 2 of essays on the Irish poem “Pangur Bán,” on some Irish translations of children’s books, and on the novels of Siobhan Dowd and two Irish-Canadian writers, Caroline Pignat and James Henegan. Part 3 contains chapters on the French works of Faïza Guène, on recent books from Poland, and on the problems of publishing translated foreign books in Ireland. There is much that is fresh and original here, and one is grateful for the opportunity to learn about what is going on outside the Anglophone east and west, particularly when so many of the essays are attractively written and informative. Of course, the character and quality of the essays vary. Many of them are fairly straightforward exposition. There is a lucid account by Deniz Arzuk of the magazine Çocuk as it sought to promote the new secular state of Turkey in the 1930s; of the Parisian banlieues novels of Faìza Guène, by Ruth Scales; and of the way recent Polish books have tried to deal with that country’s period of martial law, by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubzak. Particularly noteworthy is Celia Keenan’s account of the exquisite early Irish poem “Pangur Bän,” sometimes translated as “The Scholar and the Cat.” Other essays are more argumentative and analytical as they try to press a thesis: these include Kate Harvey’s chapter on the way Shakespeare’s history plays have been used to teach history and nationhood; and Caoimhe Nic Lochlainn’s exposure of the dangers of translations of Alice and Enid Blyton’s The Secret Mountain, which only succeed in “domesticating” them. Only one essay disappoints, Mari Nutri’s “Shared songs, secret codes and Estonian national identity,” where, perhaps for reasons of space, the texts being discussed lacked much-needed translations or fuller summaries. Perhaps more important than the quality of the individual essays, however, are the ways in which, collectively and thematically, they persuade us to consider the treatment of history, ideology, and national identity in children’s books. They invite us to consider the effects on the child of migration and the loss of the native land. They help us to reflect on such issues as how literature produced in one country can be interpreted or misinterpreted in another. Yet they achieve all this through concrete literary examples in a variety of forms: poems and...

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