A conversation with Emilie Robert Wong on translating ON ALL FOURS

In this Q&A, Enchanted Lion interviews our very own Emilie Robert Wong about translating On All Fours—a delightful picture book by Gaëtan Dorémus following the lively adventures of a curious little bear cub as he sets out to explore the world on his own.

ELB: What is your first language and do you have any other language fluencies?
ERW: I grew up speaking French and English, so I would actually say that I have two “first” languages. My dad is from France and came to the United States for a PhD program, and my mom is from Los Angeles and grew up surrounded by Spanish and later learned French, with a high level of fluency in both. So, I grew up in a very multicultural, multilingual home. From Pre-K through 12th grade, I went to school in the French national education system, where everything was taught in French—from P.E. to math to history. The only classes we took in English were English, U.S. history, and one year of art, in order to also get our California high school diploma. So, in a way, I’ve lived in both French and English my entire life.

ELB: What attracts you to the role of a translator?
ERW: I have always been extremely interested in literature in translation, partly because I grew up bilingual and was always reading across those two languages. Every time we were able to be with my dad’s family in France, I was constantly going to the local library or bookstore and reading everything I could there, and then bringing one or two of those books home with me and sharing them with my friends. I also find there’s something really special about how closely you engage with language as a translator, with both the language of the author’s original text and the target language of the translation. In a way, having grown up speaking two languages has allowed and encouraged me to become very attuned to the different ways that languages and cultures match and don’t match, how they overlap and intersect and diverge, and it is really exciting to be able to create bridges and transcend borders so that readers are able to discover and experience a story that they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.

ELB: How did you come to translate On All Fours?
ERW: I work as Enchanted Lion’s associate editor, so I first encountered On All Fours (well, the French version—Quatre pattes) in that capacity. I love all of the books that we publish here at Enchanted Lion, and our list features countless gorgeously illustrated picture books from around the world that really value children’s intelligence and the power of visual storytelling. But something that I noticed whenever we were tabling, whether it was at the Brooklyn Book Festival or the Tucson Festival of Books or an ALA conference, is that a lot of people were asking for picture books specifically for children under three, or for the three to five year age range, which is a younger audience than most of the books that we tend to publish. So, one of my goals was to try to see if we could expand our list and find the same quality of storytelling, intention, vision, and care in picture books intended specifically for the younger readers.

Enchanted Lion has had the pleasure of publishing Gaëtan Dorémus, the author-illustrator of On All Fours, before, and one of his previous books that we did together, Bear Despair, was selected as a New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year! All of his books evince a great sense of humor, but also have a certain tenderness to them. And his art is incredibly vibrant—you can spend a lot of time just looking at every spread, poring over his mastery of color, shape, and texture, which really makes his art come alive. To me, On All Fours hit a lot of wonderful beats in terms of the beautiful art, the element of humor and playfulness in the story, the theme of a child’s budding independence and a parent’s encouraging love, and I can’t wait for families everywhere to read the book together!

ELB: Were there French phrases or words that you had to change so that they would make sense for English readers?
ERW: There are many instances of onomatopoeia in On All Fours, and a really fun challenge was to take these sounds from the French text and transform them into something that an English audience would not only immediately recognize, but also have a lot of fun reading out loud. There’s a part in the book where the little bear cub slips in a muddy puddle: in the French text, the only word on the right side of the page is “zwouip!” At first, I tried to see if we could keep something closer to the sound in French, like “zwip!” or “zip!”, but ultimately we decided to go with “swoosh! ” so that English-speaking readers around the world would immediately understand what was going on. There’s something undeniably fun and satisfying about reading a book with kids that plays with language and sound. In a way, all the onomatopoeia in On All Fours remind me of Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s excellent We’re Going on a Bear Hunt—the “swoosh, swoosh, swoosh” of going through the wheat field, the “splish, splash” of the river…

ELB: Do you have any other linguistic considerations that you keep in mind as you work on a translation?
ERW: For me, the goal with translation is always to recapture the same experience that a French reader would have, but to relate it in a way that would make sense to a reader whose primary language is English. This is especially challenging when it comes to picture books with minimal text, as every word on the page really counts! All translation is about making choices: there is no such thing as a perfect translation, where you find a perfect, one-to-one match for every single word between the original language and the target language. And with picture books for younger readers, where every word in the original text is already a distillate in many ways, it’s all about balancing the literal meaning with other considerations that greatly contribute to the overall reading experience: the sound, the rhythm, the feeling… even the look of the length of the words on the page!

ELB: How does the book translation process work? For example, do you have direct contact with the author?
ERW: For this book, we did not have direct contact with Dorémus during the translation process, but we did get his blessing on the final English text. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an editorial process: Claudia Bedrick, who is Enchanted Lion’s publisher and editor and who has translated many books herself, edited the text. After I submitted a rough draft of a translation to her, she came back with suggestions, and we did several rounds of that back-and-forth process in house before presenting a final translation to the author for his definitive stamp of approval.

ELB: Why do you think this book is important for young readers today?
ERW: One thing I really love about On All Fours is that you see the little bear cub exploring the world independently and having both delightful and perhaps less delightful experiences, whether it’s the pleasure of feeling the grass tickling its paws or the surprise of slipping and bumping its little head. There’s a tendency for adults to want to control kids and to tell them that there’s one right way and one wrong way to do things, and so I really love that this bear cub is able to strike out on its own and experience all that the world has to offer, even if it means getting into little scrapes along the way. This book doesn’t shy away from that aspect of exploration and discovery, and that’s a really beautiful thing to share with kids—that they can be curious and autonomous and confident, that they can go on adventures and have a variety of experiences, even if they slip or slide or stumble sometimes. And ultimately, as is revealed in the climax of On All Fours, part of what allows children to have that freedom and confidence to engage with the world in that all-embracing way is having their parent stepping back and letting them have those full experiences, while at the same time knowing for sure that their parents are always there to support them, to encourage them, and to pick them up—to give them a hug, as you see in this book.

ELB: What are some children’s books that you particularly enjoyed when you were growing up?
ERW: There are so many really, really great books that I absolutely loved—it’s so hard to choose! My mom is a huge fan of Maurice Sendak and the way his books are so full of mischief and mysteriousness, so Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There were definitely on heavy rotation in our household. When I started reading books by myself as a child, I also remember really loving Claude Ponti’s picture books. He’s translated into English now, but when I was growing up, he wasn’t yet, and I loved going to the libraries and bookstores in France every summer to discover his latest book. Something that really fascinated me as a child about Ponti’s books was that there is often a secondary story unfolding alongside the main story—a story told only through the art: Ponti’s illustrations are so intricate and detailed in their world-building that there is often a whole other narrative happening in the background for those who pay close enough attention!

And that’s actually something that we haven’t touched on yet that I really like about On All Fours: there is a red spider character, Rosie, that the author-illustrator includes in several of his other picture books. In On All Fours, Rosie is never mentioned in the text but is always on the page in the art; she goes about in the world at the same time as the little bear cub, so she’s his constant companion. Kids are always paying attention—and maybe even paying more attention than the grown-ups sometimes!—so it’s little details like Rosie and her reactions to the bear cub’s adventures that I really love, and that I hope that children will love, too. Every child is going to have slightly different things that they choose to focus on, and I think that’s a really beautiful part about reading books out loud together: it can be a different experience every single time, depending on where you are as an adult and where the child is at in that particular moment.

ELB: What are you excited about or working on now?
ERW: I’m very excited for all of Enchanted Lion’s forthcoming books (out this spring, we have the next two books in our Gianni Rodari collection, the next book in the whimsical Sato the Rabbit series from Japan, and a brilliant, playful picture book biography of Edward Lear), and I’m very excited for more readers, especially the little ones, to discover On All Fours. I also translated an absolutely gorgeous picture book called Thank You, Everything that came out last December. The text of Thank You, Everything follows the same pattern throughout the book, beginning with “thank you” and followed by a noun: in the book’s opening, it starts out following a normal, day-to-day routine—“Thank you, shower,” “Thank you, warmth,” “Thank you, bread,” “Thank you, jam”—and then it quickly turns into this dazzling adventure story that is up to the reader to follow through the art, in part because the text is so minimal. I really love books that take full advantage of the picture book as a medium where visual storytelling can come to the fore, where it’s up to the reader to piece things together and bring so much of their own experience into the storytelling process.

ELB: That is so wonderful, Emilie. Thank you so much for your time!