My fairy goddaughter (currently 4 years old) has a fantastic sense of humour! When she was 1.5 years old, she glommed right onto Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, and it's only gotten better from there.
She recently announced that she wants to learn French, so I was looking for age-appropriate French reading material, ideally with some element of humour. However, what kept falling into my hands most readily was French translations of Dr. Seuss or Robert Munsch - French translations of humorous stories originally written in English. Surely comparable humorous children's stories have been written in French, but the arrangement of brick-and-mortar and online bookstores is such that it's not as easy for me to find them. (I think I found one, but after further googling I'm beginning to suspect that the French name featured prominently on the cover of the book was that of the illustrator, and the book was really written originally in English.)
During previous book shopping trips for my fairy goddaughter and my baby cousins, I've noticed displays featuring stories from other cultures. (I didn't bother to check if they were translations of existing stories from other cultures, or stories written in English that are set in other cultures.) I gravitated towards these displays because I like the idea of introducing other cultures and to the notion that there's an unimaginably massive range of people and ways of life in the world, but I was disappointed to find that all the multicultural stories were serious. They were stories with A Moral, or they were so focused on portraying the beauty and dignity of the culture that they were verging on the Noble Savage archetype. Serious stories have their place, of course, but the current combination of personalities, relationships and developmental stages puts us more in the market for fun and humour at the moment, and I don't see why that should be incompatible with exposing the younglings to the fact of other cultures.
Other languages and other cultures must have their own humorous children's stories. I wish the curation of bookstores made these fall into my hands as easily as humorous English-language children's stories.
2 comments:
Hmm, and I was thinking, gee I was practically raised on French kidlit, but then I do a little research and find out Eve Titus was American, Ludwig Bemelmans was Austrian, etc. Looks like Antoine de St. Exupery was the real deal at least.
I tried "children's literature" on Wikipedia, then clicked "Français" under "other languages." I was not disappointed. The sub-sub-heading "Principaux prix littéraires français" is practically an anthology in itself, if one follows the links.
Oh, and it seems there's a "portail" (portal). Magnifique!!
Post a Comment