From: Bowen, Brenda <BBowen>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 11:14:36 -0500

Just a parenthetical response to Ginny Moore Kruse's comments about taking on books in translation: When we were putting together HOSTAGE TO WAR about a year and a half ago, the jacket was considered far "too quiet" by some of our colleagues here at Scholastic. Anne Dunn (the book's editor) and I, along with the art director, very much wanted to keep the jacket image of Tatjana (the author of this autobiographical book), and not gussy her up by "reinterpreting" her image in a more contemporary, accessible style. We also felt that the geometrical,
"constuctivist" design evoked the period successfully. We feel quite vindicated that the Batchelder committee recognized the book!

It's interesting that both HOSTAGE TO WAR and THE ROBBER AND ME were published in Germany by Beltz und Gelberg, a small, independent publisher in the south of Germany. Beltz is known for its outstanding literary quality. HOSTAGE was first published in Russian; then picked up by Beltz in Germany, translated for a UK edition, and then edited for the US edition. With the permission of the author, we replaced the historical notes that interrupted the narrative in the original edition with a general historical note in the backmatter of the US edition. However, re Marc's observation, we did not "smooth out" her writing; we tried to retain the sound of her own voice. (Since we had no Russian edition to work from, we used an in-house German speaker to compare the translation to the German edition. We trusted that that Beltz's translation was true to the original because of the high standards of Beltz's editorial program.)

Brenda Bowen Scholastic Press
Received on Fri 06 Mar 1998 10:14:36 AM CST