TRANSLATOR INTERVIEW: A Conversation around Language, Hijacking Reality, and Italy with Translator Antony Shugaar

Antony Shugaar, the translator of Telephone Tales, discusses translation, Rodari, and children’s literature on our blog: part one, part two, part three.

AWARDS AND REVIEWS

★ Winner of the 2021 Mildred A. Batchelder Award

★ Winner of the 2020 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s English Translation Prize

“I set about puzzling what it was I liked about Rodari’s stories so much: his use of ‘Once upon a time’ and other folktale signifiers like magicians and kings, are often coupled with modern things like machines and rifles and ice cream. (Is ice cream modern?) The resulting sense is that his tales may, at any moment, flip a hairpin turn at top speed.” —Shawn Harris

★ “At times whimsical, absurd, and subversive, the stories carry readers along roads made of chocolate, under skies that rain Jordan almonds, and into children’s private language. They also speak to today’s urgent concerns—human connection, the injustice of inequality, and the dangers of authoritarianism. At every turn, Rodari remains emphatically on the side of the young, reminding readers that ‘the whole world already belongs to every child that comes into it.... They need only to roll up their sleeves, stretch out their hands, and take it for themselves.’ Numerous gatefold spreads and tipped-in pages add to the rich texture of this beautifully produced volume.” —STARRED REVIEW, Publishers Weekly

In honor of the centenary, this year, of Rodari’s birth, a small, enterprising publisher in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion, has brought out the first full English-language edition of Telephone Tales, in a spirited translation by Antony Shugaar. Now, albeit decades late, Anglophone readers can find out why Italians love this writer…It would be hard for anyone, of any age, not to love the illustrations—mostly in Magic Marker—that Enchanted Lion commissioned for “Telephone Tales,” from the Italian artist Valerio Vidali. The book design itself harbors surprises. Some pages have extra little inner pages glued to them. Others are gatefold pages, where you pull the inner edge and another page folds out. In the drawings, you are shown entire worlds of semi-abstract figures: giant noses, a palace made of ice cream, birds eating cookies, plus, of course, kings and queens and a princess in a tower. The pages are sewn with stitches worthy of a Balenciaga gown. It is astonishing that the book costs only $27.95. Go buy one, right now." —The New Yorker

“67 whimsically surreal tales, most as short as the time one coin allotted — first published together in Italian in 1962 and finally all brought together again in a new English translation — make up this treasure trove of a book. Valerio Vidali’s new illustrations, inspired by the act of doodling on a message pad, match Rodari’s radical playfulness. Vibrant and fanciful, they run the gamut from small inserted flaps of paper to brightly colored foldout drawings. Rodari’s upside-down fairy-tale world, in which the table of contents is at the back, features, among other delights, a stoplight that turns blue; a city bus full of passengers that on a lark heads off its route into a meadow; a country that boasts pencil unsharpeners, clothes unhangers and military uncannons (“good for unwaging war”); and an entirely edible planet that offers this for breakfast: “The alarm clock goes off, you wake up, you grab the alarm clock, and you gobble it down in two bites.” —The New York Times

“The book itself is a thing of beauty, with tantalizing, full-colour illustrations by Valerio Vidali over double-page, fold-out spreads. Antony Shugaar devises parallels to Rodari’s exuberantly inventive language and finds an equivalent to the rhythms of his prose. For readers of all ages, this book is like education on planet Blih, where, we are told, “knowledge is sold in bottles, in drinkable form. History is a red liquid that resembles Grenadine, geography is a minty green drink”, and the sheer delight of storytelling flows in abundance.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Offbeat tales for readers in the mood for something whimsically contemplative.” —Kirkus

"There are a lot of stories to love in this Italian export. Rodari is a master storyteller; his imagination knows no bounds from runaway noses, buildings made of ice cream, magical carousels, and an elevator to the stars. Each story is thoughtful and well constructed as Rodari plays delightfully with different themes." —School Library Journal

"Gianni Rodari is considered the most innovative Italian children's writer of the 20th century. His countless stories and rhymes tend to end well, but in the teeth of evidence. Telephone Tales offers 68 of them ably translated by Antony Shugaar with illustrations by Valerio Vidali... For Rodari, the children's story is always an act of generosity which favors a process of initiation and liberation." —The London Review of Books

“The stories range in tone from the fanciful to the absurd to the philosophical. What they have in common is brevity—Bianchi ‘couldn’t afford to make extended long-distance phone calls’—and a subversive quality that would seem to reflect the author’s communist leanings ... All sorts of imaginative leaps take place in this handsome book.” —Wall Street Journal

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