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Secret Letters from 0 to 10: editor's comments
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From: Davis, Jill <JIDAVIS>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:42:28 -0500
A brief history of how I found Susie Morgenstern . . . this is not a short story . . .
Way back in 1987 when I spent my junior year abroad in Paris I found out that I had a distant cousin who was a popular children's book writer who lived in Nice. I met her, adored her, spent a week in Nice, and never forgot her. Her name was Susie Morgenstern. At the time I was a French major at UMASS Amherst and being an editor was as foreign an idea to me as was being a French chef. Fast forward to the mid nineties when I found myself at Crown Books at Random House, and Susie and I re-connected. I had read and loved one of her books FIRST LOVE LAST LOVE (not published in English) about her junior year abroad in Israel and how she met and fell in love with a French math professor from Nice. I wanted to bring this book to Crown, but when I showed it to my colleagues there, they felt it didn't have enough kid appeal. So I waited for something else. Susie sent more, telling me how successful the books had been in France, and still I couldn't see any of them for an American audience. Until one day, after I had come to Viking, Susie told me that a book of hers had won LE PRIX TOTEM in France--the equivalent of the Newbery. She sent a copy in French along with two chapters translated by her friend Gill Rosner. It was called LETTRES D'AMOUR DE 0 A 10. "Love Letters from 0 to 10". I couldn't ask anyone here to try and read it in French, so I wrote out a ten page summary detailing every single thing that happened in the book (the French finally came in handy) and handed it to Regina Hayes. The rest is history. She loved it and we got Gill Rosner to complete the translation. We knew that LOVE LETTERS wouldn't appeal to kids, so we changed it to SECRET LETTERS.
The translation:
Since Gill Rosner is British, many of the expressions she used in her translation had a British tone. The challenge was to neutralize some of these expressions--so they'd be not too British-sounding, but not too American, either. As for the text in general, Susie was open to making minor changes if something needed to make more sense. One example: When Ernest finds out about his "step sisters" the original manuscript mentions five sisters. But when I thought about the fact that his dad had been away for years, then met a women, and then had five girls, and Ernest was only ten! it didn't seem possible that five sisters could have been born in that time. So we changed it to four. What was interesting was that many of the queries I had for Susie were things she had never even had to think about, and when she told her editor in Paris about how thorough these American editors were, his reponse was "Ils sont serieuses la bas . . " meaning, "Well, they sure are serious over there."
The biggest chanllenge was not so big--it was probably just finding expressions that really fit in and made the characters work. The last line of the book, originally "Vers l'ouest!" was first translated as something like "To the west!" until someone realized it had to be "Westward ho!" Each time something like this came up, we just hoped that the right expression would occur to one of us--me, Susie, Gill, or the copyeditor.
One insightful change Susie suggested at the end was to use the words Madame, Monsieur & Mademoiselle in place of all of the Mrs. , Mr.'s, and Miss's. Originally, Ernest's grandmother was Mrs. Morlaisse. Susie noticed it fell flat and suggested she become Madame Morlaisse, and everyone agreed that using those words across the board added a flavor of authenticity.
I could go on and on . . . but I hope this is interesting for those of you who've read the book. And for those who haven't--it's just good fun.
Jill Davis
Received on Wed 17 Mar 1999 12:42:28 PM CST
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:42:28 -0500
A brief history of how I found Susie Morgenstern . . . this is not a short story . . .
Way back in 1987 when I spent my junior year abroad in Paris I found out that I had a distant cousin who was a popular children's book writer who lived in Nice. I met her, adored her, spent a week in Nice, and never forgot her. Her name was Susie Morgenstern. At the time I was a French major at UMASS Amherst and being an editor was as foreign an idea to me as was being a French chef. Fast forward to the mid nineties when I found myself at Crown Books at Random House, and Susie and I re-connected. I had read and loved one of her books FIRST LOVE LAST LOVE (not published in English) about her junior year abroad in Israel and how she met and fell in love with a French math professor from Nice. I wanted to bring this book to Crown, but when I showed it to my colleagues there, they felt it didn't have enough kid appeal. So I waited for something else. Susie sent more, telling me how successful the books had been in France, and still I couldn't see any of them for an American audience. Until one day, after I had come to Viking, Susie told me that a book of hers had won LE PRIX TOTEM in France--the equivalent of the Newbery. She sent a copy in French along with two chapters translated by her friend Gill Rosner. It was called LETTRES D'AMOUR DE 0 A 10. "Love Letters from 0 to 10". I couldn't ask anyone here to try and read it in French, so I wrote out a ten page summary detailing every single thing that happened in the book (the French finally came in handy) and handed it to Regina Hayes. The rest is history. She loved it and we got Gill Rosner to complete the translation. We knew that LOVE LETTERS wouldn't appeal to kids, so we changed it to SECRET LETTERS.
The translation:
Since Gill Rosner is British, many of the expressions she used in her translation had a British tone. The challenge was to neutralize some of these expressions--so they'd be not too British-sounding, but not too American, either. As for the text in general, Susie was open to making minor changes if something needed to make more sense. One example: When Ernest finds out about his "step sisters" the original manuscript mentions five sisters. But when I thought about the fact that his dad had been away for years, then met a women, and then had five girls, and Ernest was only ten! it didn't seem possible that five sisters could have been born in that time. So we changed it to four. What was interesting was that many of the queries I had for Susie were things she had never even had to think about, and when she told her editor in Paris about how thorough these American editors were, his reponse was "Ils sont serieuses la bas . . " meaning, "Well, they sure are serious over there."
The biggest chanllenge was not so big--it was probably just finding expressions that really fit in and made the characters work. The last line of the book, originally "Vers l'ouest!" was first translated as something like "To the west!" until someone realized it had to be "Westward ho!" Each time something like this came up, we just hoped that the right expression would occur to one of us--me, Susie, Gill, or the copyeditor.
One insightful change Susie suggested at the end was to use the words Madame, Monsieur & Mademoiselle in place of all of the Mrs. , Mr.'s, and Miss's. Originally, Ernest's grandmother was Mrs. Morlaisse. Susie noticed it fell flat and suggested she become Madame Morlaisse, and everyone agreed that using those words across the board added a flavor of authenticity.
I could go on and on . . . but I hope this is interesting for those of you who've read the book. And for those who haven't--it's just good fun.
Jill Davis
Received on Wed 17 Mar 1999 12:42:28 PM CST
