The eight Stone Soup titles now available in China! A note from William Rubel Dear Friends, Although initially delayed by COVID-19, the eight Stone Soup anthologies we sold to a Chinese publisher have finally been released! We are hopeful that other titles will follow. The English editions are available at our Amazon storefront, which you can access by clicking the button below. For those of you who don’t already have copies of these anthologies, we encourage you to browse our titles and choose your favorite subject or genre. Our wonderful book agent for Asia, John Moore, who lives in Japan, tells us that now that the books have been released in China, it’s time for us to begin offering the titles to publishing houses in other East and Southeast Asian countries. We are preparing a presentation for a publisher in South Korea and Thailand and are looking forward to making proposals to others in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Stone Soup is going global! You can browse our anthologies on our Amazon storefront. Until next week, William’s Weekly Project The publication of the Chinese anthologies required a translator to render the English text into clear prose or poetry that maintains the beauty and nuance of the original stories. That is no easy task! Translation is as much an art as writing. It is so much more than just swapping out the original words for ones with equivalent or similar meaning in the new language. While translation algorithms like Google Translate have become much smarter and more capable, they rarely possess the nuanced, artful eye of a human translator. This week, your challenge is to review a text translated by an algorithm and make it better, more human. “Der Fuchs und die Katze” is a German fable collected by the Brothers Grimm, a pair of siblings who compiled a very famous anthology: Grimms’ Fairy Tales. You can download a pdf of the story by clicking the purple button below. Then copy the text (and title!) of “Der Fuchs und die Katze” into Google Translate. Does the result make sense? Where does the writing feel stilted, and which words in particular seem out of context or outdated? Are there words that didn’t translate at all? One peculiarity of the German language is its penchant to smoosh words together to make new words. Algorithms often struggle to interpret this. For example, in the original German text, the word “Bartputzer” appears. Google translated this as “beard cleaner”, which seems nonsensical in the context of the story. The intended meaning may be different than Google’s translation. Sometimes it is useful to refer to a dictionary to verify the translation of a word. Try breaking the German word in half, into “Bart” and “putzer”. The entry for “Bart” reads “beard; whiskers.” Aha! Does “whiskers-cleaner” seem more in line with the characters in “Der Fuchs und die Katze”? Work through the translation and see if you can improve its clarity and overall feel. Every language has its own quirks, whether it is a different system of sentence order (this is called syntax) or the absence or addition of certain grammar rules. For this reason, translation is often a lot of detective work! Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Remember the Flowers, Reviewed by Emma, 10
Memories take Enni Harlan back in her first poetry collection, Remember the Flowers, and we are on the journey with her. Over the course of forty-two concise and vividly descriptive poems, the reader is taken through seasons in the United States and South Korea. Each detail embodies a different personality applied to it, like “the face of some unknown celebrity” in a magazine, which Harlan, age five, unceremoniously vomits on as her plane lands in South Korea. No detail is insignificant to the narrator, who turns a simple event into her next important adventure. The series of autobiographical poems tell a story that features no damsels in distress, dragons, or talking fish that happen to live in a lake at the top of a mountain. Harlan has shown that a book does not have to resemble a blockbuster movie to keep a reader interested. The only ghosts in Enni Harlan’s poetry are her everyday haunts: the remembrance of family stories that have been passed down through generations, worries about herself and her family, and her lacking Korean vocabulary (“I don’t get half / The teacher says. / They talk in Korean, I’m only half / And most / Of my vocabulary’s food: / Bulgogi, kimchi, subak.”) Harlan’s poetry is rhythmic and flows naturally. For example, in her poem “In the Evening:” “The sky darkens All around. Still we walk Past the lamp posts, Past the tree I fell from once last summer.” In a conversational tone, Harlan lays out one of her main themes—imagination—and she makes sure that people know who she is. The sentence “I was Mary Lennox’s long-lost twin, / walking into the secret garden” starts Harlan’s poem “My Secret Garden.” In this simple sentence, Harlan shows that imagination is important to her—and so is who she is in her daydreams, because that is one of the places where she feels like herself. Another example of her use of imagination is in the poem “Beneath the Fruit Tree:” “Our teeth crashed down on seeds, not flesh. / The trickle of juice was painfully bitter. / Only we and the parrots ate from that tree, / feasting/ on imagination.” While many of the poems are playful, some poems are more serious. Remember the Flowers questions the “American dream.” This question is not asked and answered bluntly, but it is hinted upon through many poems and descriptions. For example, in her poem “Balcony:” “We journeyed to Anyang, where Umma grew up— Where they’d moved from house to house. The first house, a mere Shadow in her memory, Shared with her cousin’s family. There she played with her cousins till they Went to live ‘The American Dream.’” Here, the “American Dream” is not something happy and inspiring; it inflicts a feeling of separation and gloom. Harlan translates the sadness of family breaking apart. The stanza portrays the feeling of loss. In this case, one is left with a feeling that leaving family for the United States for a hazy vision of the promising future is almost a betrayal. In her poems, Harlan also expresses her empathy for humans and other animals. In “Fumigated,” Harlan’s Appa (father) rushes to get Umma’s (mother) mirror table from their house, which was going to be fumigated because of termites. Coming home, Appa says: “I saw the termites and they said, ‘Hi.’ ‘Get out of here,’ I said. ‘You’re about to die!’” Then, in the following sentences, Enni Harlan continues: “I laugh at him. A ridiculous story but I almost want to believe it.” Harlan finds the story funny, but she also wants the story to be true. This leads the reader to assume that the narrator somehow either feels connected to these termites—she feels sad about them dying because they have become a part of her house—or that she is unhappy about killing other creatures, no matter how small. Here, as in Harlan’s other poems, the events that may seem minuscule and insignificant gain a greater meaning. This is exactly what good poetry is meant to do—zoom in on small details and change the way people look at things. Remember the Flowers is a captivating read, every poem full of hidden pockets leading to a bigger (or smaller) subject. Near the end of the collection, as Harlan begins to speak about the Covid-19 pandemic, the poems are the most relatable (“We walked a while, / six feet apart. / Each time I smiled / I forgot / she couldn’t see it.”), but the rest of the poems are also easy to understand and relate to. All in all, Enni Harlan offers us a touching and thoughtful collection of poems about belonging, family, cultural differences (and similarities), and the world around us. Remember the Flowers by Enni Harlan, winner of the Stone Soup Book Contest 2021. Children’s Art Foundation, Incorporated, 2022. Buy the book via our Amazon storefront.
Weekly Creativity #219 | Flash Contest #47: Write about Two People Who Are Both Lying to Each Other
Write about two people who are both lying to each other.
