TY - JOUR

T1 - Rose Blanche, Rosa Weiss, Rosa Bianca

T2 - A comparative view of a controversial picture book

AU - O'Sullivan, Emer

PY - 2005/4/1

Y1 - 2005/4/1

N2 - Published in Switzerland, the USA, and Britain in 1985, Rose Blanche, Roberto Innocenti's controversial and prize-winning picture book about a young German girl's experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust, has been translated into at least ten different languages. It has remained in print in the United States since publication, and a paperback edition of the British translation was issued by Red Fox in 2004, testifying to the ongoing topicality of Innocenti's story. Its cultural importance was further documented in a recent (2004) article by Susan Stan in Children's Literature in Education about the initial chequered publication of Rose Blanche. Using an English-language translation by a colleague, Stan also explored some of the differences between the texts of the German, American, and British editions of the picture book.This essay, based on a lecture given at CLISS 2003, addresses the international reception of Rose Blanche and asks how it is bound to such factors as the role of the target culture in the Second World War and its engagement with the subject of the Holocaust. After a brief analysis of Roberto Innocenti and Chrisoph Gallaz's original Italian/Swiss visual and verbal text Rose Blanche, I first review its international reception and translation before moving on to examine the French, American, English, German, Spanish, and Italian versions to question how cultural differences are inscribed into these, even though the pictorial narrations are identical. Close textual analysis of the opening page of the different translations is followed by a discussion of the implied readers of the translations which asks how the texts reflect the cultures’ desire or needto tell the story differently.

AB - Published in Switzerland, the USA, and Britain in 1985, Rose Blanche, Roberto Innocenti's controversial and prize-winning picture book about a young German girl's experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust, has been translated into at least ten different languages. It has remained in print in the United States since publication, and a paperback edition of the British translation was issued by Red Fox in 2004, testifying to the ongoing topicality of Innocenti's story. Its cultural importance was further documented in a recent (2004) article by Susan Stan in Children's Literature in Education about the initial chequered publication of Rose Blanche. Using an English-language translation by a colleague, Stan also explored some of the differences between the texts of the German, American, and British editions of the picture book.This essay, based on a lecture given at CLISS 2003, addresses the international reception of Rose Blanche and asks how it is bound to such factors as the role of the target culture in the Second World War and its engagement with the subject of the Holocaust. After a brief analysis of Roberto Innocenti and Chrisoph Gallaz's original Italian/Swiss visual and verbal text Rose Blanche, I first review its international reception and translation before moving on to examine the French, American, English, German, Spanish, and Italian versions to question how cultural differences are inscribed into these, even though the pictorial narrations are identical. Close textual analysis of the opening page of the different translations is followed by a discussion of the implied readers of the translations which asks how the texts reflect the cultures’ desire or needto tell the story differently.

KW - Literature studies

KW - Übersetzungswissenschaft

KW - Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

KW - Bilderbuch

KW - Holocaust

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=67649980173&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1353/uni.2005.0034

DO - 10.1353/uni.2005.0034

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 29

SP - 152

EP - 170

JO - The Lion and the Unicorn

JF - The Lion and the Unicorn

SN - 0147-2593

IS - 2

ER -