Pratham Books' One Day, One Story is back with story reading sessions for children across India! On September 8, Pratham Books Champions all over India will use one book to conduct reading sessions for children in their communities. All sessions are conducted free of cost, and focus on children from under-served communities. You can read more about this event here.

This year, Season 7 of One Day, One Story will feature A Cloud of Trash, written by Karanjeet Kaur, and illustrated by Bhavana Vyas Vipparthi. It’s a story about a little girl called Cheekoo, who has a cloud of trash hanging over her head. This makes her very, very unhappy, and as we follow her story, we learn a little more about trash, and about keeping our surroundings clean.

Last year, 5700+ Champions took the story of Kottavi Raja and his Sleepy Kingdom to thousands of children – conducting 6300+ storytelling sessions in 26 languages, in 25 states and 3 union territories in India. As well as 13 other countries.

We need your help to help children discover the joy of stories, and fall in love with reading. The more languages a story is translated in, the more it will travel to be read and enjoyed by children.

A Cloud of Trash, a reading level 2 story, is already available in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Konkani, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Maithili and also, in Surjapuri and International languages like Portuguese, Basa Sunda, French, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia, Czech, Italian, Norwegian,and Chinese too. Join in as a Translation Volunteer to translate this story to a new language. Your contribution to add a language version of this story on StoryWeaver will go a long way in multiplying the number of PB Champs' reading sessions and in turn, help reach more and more kids. We have also created a level 1 version of this story for sessions with a younger audience. You can weave a translation of this version too if you like. 

Wouldn’t that be lovely?  

We need all the translations to be on the site before 30th August.

If you have any queries please write to us at [email protected]

Here's a quick and easy video tutorial on how to translate stories on StoryWeaver. Once you've seen it, you can head over to the site to start translating A Cloud of Trash.

P.s: If you're interested in joining us as a PB Champ this year, click here to enrol.

 

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Vinayak Varma, writes and draws things. He has written, guest edited and art directed STEM picture books for Pratham Books. Visit him at www.instagram.com/mixtape.in

Give nine people the exact same brief, and there’s a good chance that you’ll end up with nine different kinds of output. I’ve always been curious to know what happens on that journey between idea and execution, and what makes similar stories live out such different lives in the minds of different artists and writers. This is perhaps the only thing that motivates me to collaborate with others, speaking as a cranky hermit type who prefers working alone.

I write and illustrate for a living (a large part of which has lately been in aid of PB StoryWeaver). Every new project I take on is invariably a triathlon event that begins with a plunge into the Bottomless Pool of Procrastination, followed by a deathly plod across the Minefield of Migraines and a bicycle race through the No-Man’s-Land of Forgotten Deadlines. Somewhere along this crazy path, the odd conceptual tangents that inform the best parts of my work tend to sneak up on me like little ninjas. I'm usually too annoyed or preoccupied while I’m working to make note of precisely how any of it happened, and once the moment has passed and the job is done -- provided that job has any depth, truth or beauty to it -- it's easy enough to shrug and pretend like I'd been hit by some Joycean haiku moment.

But mastery of one’s art comes from understanding the mechanics of these creative accidents. If you can unpack it, you can duplicate it. However, the trouble with writing stories or making art is that they require you to exist in an isolated, meditative bubble where you're engaging deeply with the problem at hand, whereas the route to this bubble is through much distraction and muddled thinking. In order to parse the finer workings of this process, you need to be able to slip outside of your bubble at will (while maintaining an accessible distance), catch yourself in the act of being creative, and then be detached enough to pause and document what's happening. It’s a dilemma akin to that of Schrodinger’s cat -- the creative moment exists in a sort of delicate half-alive, half-dead state, where the very act of observing it risks killing it.

Of course, there are other, loftier parts to publishing, from where one can gain an interesting new vantage of some these abstract areas of book-making: hello and welcome to the Highlands, where clowders of editors scour the hillsides for errant adverbs like goats looking for tasty trash. These are cold, dry places where many authors and illustrators don’t dare venture for fear of losing their precious senses of self. Well, I do go there every so often, because I’m foolhardy like that. Here’s what I discovered up there: nothing returns your inner moggie to its quantum state like stage-managing the creation of picture books (as opposed to being one of the actors out in front). Editing and art directing let you view and gently influence the many moving parts of a project, watching creativity in action, without the blinding pressure of being the primary authorial voice. You get to observe the zombie cat but, also, you ARE the zombie cat. I recommend this exercise to all writers and illustrators at least once in their careers: not only does it let you see how other people make things, thereby enriching your own work, but it also acquaints you with the terrible power and omnipotence that commissioning editors have to live with daily. This can build empathy, if nothing else.

I got my most recent taste of this awesome power last year when I was hired to commission a set of nine STEM picture books for Pratham Books' StoryWeaver. I planned, ideated, edited and art directed four of these, which were on science. I got to art direct another four, from editor Bijal Vachharajani’s set of environment-themed stories. And I wrote and illustrated the ninth, themed on emotional intelligence, which meant that I too got to make, even as I guided and observed others in the act of making. In sum, I got to pull back the curtain and see all the wheels turn at once, to catch the decaying particle as it sped towards the poison vial, to expose the regular dude masquerading as… as…. a wizard… no, a dead cat… no, a living cat… no, a mountain goat... Look, the point is: this scarecrow has a fresh, insight-filled brain now. Chew on that, zombies.

I’m going to try and share some of that insight (or at least a bit more about the merits to following my particular path to such insight) in part 2 of this post, next week. Meanwhile, let’s look at some of the books that I just mentioned:

The Science Books

For the set of science books that I had to both edit and art direct, I was asked to come up with a few interesting themes and story ideas, and, once they'd been approved in-house, to farm them out to freelance writers and illustrators who were best suited to each idea. Four stories were then shortlisted from the seven or eight ideas that I suggested to my commissioning editors at Pratham Books (yes, even commissioning editors like me have commissioning editors, who in turn have other, bigger, older commissioning editors, who answer to still larger, greyer commissioning editors, etcetera, etcetera, all the way down, like the proverbial Jenga-stack of cosmic turtles).

I'm going to show you exactly how rudimentary these four early ideas were, so that you can gasp and grow silent with awe when you see what they ultimately became in the hands of my talented gang of writers and illustrators. Hold onto your seats.

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"Dear Commissioning Space-Turtle #X,

Here are some ideas:

1. A kid has a cold. S/he then gives it to everyone else in his/her class via sneezes and things. Because epidemiology, boss.

2. An old lady heads out with a walking stick and her grandkid in tow. She uses her stick in various fun ways during the walk, pushing, pulling, propping up, etc., thereby demonstrating how simple machines work. Because physics and stuff, boss.

3. On birds devolving into dinosaurs, a la the chickenosaurus conjecture. Cluck, roar, repeat. Because why the hell not.

4. Crocodiles? Reptiles? Rom Whitaker? Because conservation biology, kids.

+ a few more that probably aren't worth going into given space(!)-constraints in this fake-email-within-an-already-interminable-blog-post.

Sincerely,

Commissioning Space-Turtle #Y"

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As you can see, the whole scheme began with a pith of one-liners that bore a 50-50 potential to go either way: to turn into something halfway-decent, or utter trash. What emerged at the end of their gritty evolution into book-hood, though, would you believe it, were these beauties:

Sniffles: in which Sunando C used bold, striking illustrations and crisp storytelling to turn a sad and lonely germ of an idea into a full-blown epidemic of football and high-fives and cool hats and general cuteness (plus, in a more literal sense, a sustained spray of sneezes, sickness and snot, so keep your antiseptic soaps handy). And those colours! Those characters! Those compositions! Those Norman-Jewison-esque split-screens! Killer stuff!

 

Ammachi's Amazing Machines: It’s like that original walking stick idea has been sliced up and Frankensteined by a mad surgical team consisting of Rube Goldberg, Professor Branestawm, Mr. Bean and Sathyan Anthikkad. Here’s what I’m interested in knowing: is there anything Rajiv Eipe can't do? Seriously, is there? I've asked everyone, and no one seems to have the answer. I'm willing to pay good money for this information. (Also: simple-machine barfi, FTW.)

 

Kaakasaurus: Terrifying, scaly, toothy, large, angry, feathery, strange, destructive, and hungry are all adjectives that one could apply to Shalini Srinivasan and Prabha Mallya (but I’m told it would be impolite to do so). Their picture book, however, is all of those words, but also happy, shiny, funny, smart, and crunchy like a hot bajji. There’s a Jurassic Park spin-off script in there somewhere, by the way, and Spielberg (or Robot Shankar) would be well advised to quickly option it while this crow is still a crow.

 

Ghum-Ghum Gharial’s Glorious Adventure: Now here is a story you can lose yourself in; a deeply affecting bildungsroman about the meaning of family, about love, loss and self-actualisation. The story and art by Aparna Kapur and Roshan, respectively, are so rich with truth, heart and lyricism. It ticks all the right literary / artistic boxes, I tell you. What makes this book truly stand apart, though, is that it’s also filled with an incredible polyphony of nose-wart-blasted fart-noises. Beat that, Odysseus!

You should go read these books, and share them with your kids, if you haven’t already. Did I mention that they’re all free? No? Well, they are too. The links are in the book titles (above). This is your cue to leave this page. GO!

Next week, in part 2 of this post: Four more picture books, more monstrously mixed metaphors (and other atrocious alliterations), an angry, angry, angry kid, and the Final Fate of Quantum Limbo Cat!

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K. Suresh likes to be known as a translator and has several books published for adults as well as children. He is one of the founders of Manchi Pustakam, a Trust for publishing and distributing children's books in Telugu. The organisation has more than 200 titles published by it and distributes an equal number of select books by other publishers. His emphasis is on books that create interest in and love for books among children. He feels that there is a great need for graded books that help children to increase their reading capacities. He has translated many stories to Telugu for Pratham Books including 'The Cat in the Ghat!' and 'What If?'. You can read his stories Mouse in the House and Lost and Found on StoryWeaver.  

Q:  What type of person do you think makes the best translator for children’s stories?

A person who loves books, likes children and respects them.

Q: Do you have any advice for anyone interested in becoming a translator?

A: The person should have good command over both the languages and should know the nuances. S/he should also know the cultural context and usage of idioms and phrases in both the languages. One should also read a lot.

The language for children should be simple. While translating one should use available vocabulary, though English words are commonly used. After completing the translation, give some gap and read it again without the source language text. Read it objectively, as if it was done by others and your job is to find errors in it.

Q: A book you'd like to recommend to other translators?

I suggest that the translators start with what they like and should feel that the children in the other language would miss a lot if that book isn’t translated. Obviously, I would suggest a book that I love very much.

Q: What is your personal relationship to language and/or translation?

I love to read books. I have started my work as a sub-editor in a Telugu newspaper, which involved translation and cultivated it over the years. I am not a creative writer, so I take pride in translation!

Q: When you’ve been given a story to translate, what’s your process, and how long does it generally take?

Sometimes I jump into translation. Sometimes, I read the entire story and sleep over it. While reading and in the free time, I think about the appropriate words and how it will be in Telugu.

Q: What do stories in translation bring to young readers?

It opens up their world! It introduces a new culture.

Q: You’ve translated stories for us. Which has been your favourite to work on?

I had the fortune of translating, reviewing and being a Guest Editor for Pratham Books. I liked translating The Cat in the Ghat!

Q: What is the hardest thing about translating from English into Telugu? How do you navigate words or phrases that are tricky to translate?

The structure of English sentence is complex; it can take several adjectives and be very long. Breaking the sentences while translating sometimes results in losing the emphasis. The rhyming and punning with English words is difficult to translate. After the first translation, I explore simpler expressions and choice of vocabulary.

Q: How do you feel when your story reaches the child?

When we get to know that a child has enjoyed a story/ book we are very happy.

Q: Translating stories must have required research when it came to STEM related terms and concepts. How did you explore new objects and concepts?

For some words, I look up the dictionary. Sometimes re-writing helps. Constant reading will add to one’s vocabulary.

Q: How else do you think we can join hands to take more stories to more children in more languages?

Pratham Books and Tulika are doing excellent job in multi-language publications. StoryWeaver is providing a platform for exchange of books in various languages. Arvind Gupta is encouraging multi-language translations of children’s books and posting them on internet archive. Earlier there was considerable direct translation in regional languages, now English has become the connecting language. A publishers’ consortium for exchange of rights would be beneficial.

Q: As a publisher and translator what do you think is the best way to approach a child?

The general tendency is to preach to children, which I do not subscribe to. We expect lot from children without practising/ following them. The best way is to make a range of books available to children from which they can choose. We should not be overly worried about what they learn from a book. They will definitely learn from books and the society at large.

 

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