Jorge Argueta, illustrations by Fernando Vilela,
Arroz con Leche: Un poema para cocinar / Rice Pudding: A Cooking Poem
Groundwood Books, 2010.

Ages 4-7

Rice is an important staple all over the planet, but each cuisine that features rice often makes it seem as if the simple grain belongs to that tradition alone. The young boy at the center of Jorge Argueta’s latest bilingual cooking poem is aware of rice’s versatility, however, and he likes “all kinds of rice”:

I like white rice,
brown rice,
fried rice,
stewed rice,
watery rice,
chicken and rice,
beans and rice.
I guess I like rice with anything.

“But what I like best and love the most” he goes on to say “is rice pudding.” And, just as his counterpart in Argueta’s 2009 poem Sopa de Frijoles/Bean Soup did, this child wastes no time showing the reader how to make this simple yet special Latin dish.

Listing utensils and ingredients as he gathers them together in the playful illustrations by award-winning Brazilian illustrator Fernando Vilela, the boy gets to work while his mother, a silhouette in the background, watches from a distance.

Each step is more joyful and poetic than the last. Filling the pot with water “makes me feel like/ there is a creek flowing through the kitchen.” “The flames heating the pot/ are rainbow hands…hugging the pot.” Boiling water makes “maraca music,” and “Foamy waves and clouds turn the pot into sea and sky.” When he pours the milk, “there is a white waterfall in the kitchen” to which the child adds “salt stars and sugar snow.” The excitement of creating is equaled only by the anticipation of the delicious arroz con leche the boy looks forward to serving his family.

Like Bean Soup, Rice Pudding celebrates traditional foods—and the values they embody: family, warmth, sharing—along with a child’s growing independence. Vilela’s illustrations contrast the cool grey-green-blue of the creative kitchen with the warm comfort of gold and orange in the rest of the home. When the whole family joins hands around the table to “slurp up” this delicious treat, readers will wish they could actually be there. This sweet, joyful poem about a sweet, comforting food will surely inspire new cooks and perhaps some new poets as well.

Abigail Sawyer
April 2011

Just before I left Canada, I had a quick browse through the bookstore at our local airport, thinking it might be a good idea to bring a book about Manitoba to show to kids in Japan.  Winston of Churchill: One Bear’s Battle Against Global Warming by Jean Davies Okimoto, illustrated by Jeremiah Trammell (Scholastic, 2007) was prominently displayed in the kids section.  I’d heard about and read the book before to my daughter based on her teacher’s recommendation, so was happy to pick up a copy. 

Winston of Churchill tells the story of a “fierce, brave bear” to whom everyone listened.  He lived in Churchill, Manitoba — a famed location for polar bear sightings. Winston had a message for all those sightseeing tourists:  If humans didn’t stop their nasty global warming habits, then a feature of the polar bears’ natural habitat — ice, to be specific — would soon disappear.  Winston rallies his polar bear community to make a protest to the tourists.  Everyone thinks this is a good idea, except for Winston’s wife.  She has a little something she would like Winston to consider before making his stand public.  Suffice it to say, the little something has to do with Winston’s own little nasty personal habit.

I thought I would read Winston of Churchill to Japanese school children in English, but lo, to my surprise, the book had already been translated into Japanese and there were three copies of the translation in my daughter’s school library here.  So much for that idea! Currently, for our night time reading, my daughter and I have been concentrating on bilingual books to keep up with her English reading skills and help orient her in basic written Japanese.  We started with the well known classic Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion, pictures by Margaret Bloy Graham (Harper Collins, 1956).  The Japanese translation is titled Doronko Hari and is translated by Watanabe Shigeo (Fukinkan Shoten, 1964).   We will now  definitely be moving on to Winston of Churchill!

Kavita Singh Kale,
Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone
(English-Hindi version) Tulika Publishers, India, 2006.

Ages 3-8

“Miaow! I am Chikki” says the turquoise cat on the first page of Kavita Singh Kale’s Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone. Chikki’s pink tongue laps at a bowl of milk; a red hand tickles her tummy; her whiskers extend from two rosy round cheeks. On the following page, we meet Gagan, a boy dressed in red polka dots and lying on an orange bed, his turquoise hat the color of his cat. By the third page, when Gagan’s grandmother appears in burgundy and pink on a purple carpet, a stairway winding up the orange wall behind her, there is no doubt that we’re in India.

And we’re prepared, a little, for the mad arrival of Avneet aunty, her pink scarf and white braid flying behind her as she rushes past Gagan and Chikki, her mouth open, her teeth showing, her glasses askew almost down to her nose ring. We’re hardly surprised when her curly-toed shoe lands on poor Chikki’s tail.

Avneet aunty is a gregarious sort, a lady who is never without her mobile phone. Good luck on Gagan and Chikki getting to hear the story his grandmother had promised to tell them. Avneet aunty only stops talking when her phone rings, and then only to begin talking again. There’s a scary moment when Chikki sails over Avneet aunty in a game of tag with Gagan, and the phone goes sailing too. Crash! But all is well, of course, in the end, in this delightfully wacky picture book.

Animation film designer Kale’s exuberant illustrations will bring characters and setting vividly alive for young children, Indian or western. The spare text, 149 words in English, the equally terse Hindi below, adds to the exoticness of her remarkable little treasure.

Tulika Publishers, based in Chennai, India, specializes in bilingual books for children, with books in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bangla. Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone is published in five bilingual editions (English with Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Bangla, and Hindi). It’s exciting to have a window into the multi-dimensional cultural world that Indian children experience through Tulika books. And who would have thought a western pre-schooler’s first bilingual English-Hindi book might be about a goofy lady’s cell phone?

Charlotte Richardson
March 2011

A couple of weeks ago Sally wrote a Books at Bedtime post about Mitsumasa Anno‘s Animals, which sent me back to my collection of his books. Among them, I have another book with a very similar title: The Animals – a book of selected poems by Michio Mado, who is perhaps Japan’s best know poet for children. The poems here have been translated by the Empress Michiko of Japan, and are beautifully presented on gold pages, Japanese on the left, English on the right, with a frieze of animals created by Anno running along the bottom.

Each poem breathes from its double-page spread, and gives the reader thinking space. The book was published by Margaret K. McElderry, who died recently – and it is a testimony to the wonderful work she did in unerringly bringing beautiful picture books into being.

My copy of The Animals was once a library book and one of its previous young readers felt passionately enough about one of the poems to draw around its title on the Contents page very carefully with a felt tip pen. So that is the poem I will share with you today.

Butterflies

Butterflies close their wings
When they go to sleep.
They are so small,
In nobody’s way.
Yet they fold themselves
In half
Modestly…

And this lovely one, “A Dog Walks”, about trying to work out how a dog moves its legs when its walking:

How about tying
On each leg a bell,
Each with a different sound?

ChiRin
KoRon
KaRan
PoRon

Then shall I know?

I wonder?

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Sara Lewis Holmes at Read Write Believe – head on over.

At the same time as celebrating 35 years of publishing beautiful books under the banner Many Voices, One World, Children’s Book Press has recently launched an appeal to raise money to sustain the organisation. Children’s Book Press is a non-profit whose Vision is worth quoting at length:

Children’s Book Press is the only nonprofit, independent press in the country [US] focused on publishing first voice literature for children by and about people from the Latino, African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American communities. We promote lived and shared experiences of cultures who have been historically under-represented or misrepresented in children’s literature while also focusing on promoting inter-cultural and cross-cultural awareness for children of all backgrounds. Children’s Book Press literature provide tools that help build healthy children, families, and thriving communities for generations to come.

If you want to find out more, read this, and our interview with Dana Goldberg, Children’s Book Press Executive Editor, in which she said this:

As a nonprofit publisher, we really do need the support of our community not only to publish the kinds of books we do, but also to keep them in print. Buying our books and/or making tax-deductable donations go a long way in helping us achieve our goals, of course, but donations of items from our Wish List, or of volunteer time, also help tremendously.

I have a special fondness for Children’s Book Press because one of the first (of many!) picture books I fell in love with after we started producing our own book reviews was one of theirs: A Place Where Sunflowers Grow by Amy Lee-Tai and illustrated by Felicia Hoshino. Last year, The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos by Lucía González, illustrated by Lulu Delacre, was one of the books selected for our Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 book set. To take a couple of books at random, other recent titles that have garnered praise are Tan to Tamarind: Poems about the Color Brown by Malathi Michelle Iyengar, illustrated by Jamel Akib, and My Papa Diego and Me: Memories of My Father and His Art/ Mi papá Diego y yo: Recuerdos di mi padre y su arte by Guadalupe Rivera Marín and illustrated by Diego Rivera. With writers and illustrators like Toyomi Igus, Francisco X. Alarcón, René Colato Laínez, Maya Christina Gonzalez, and… well, I could go on but really, you should head on over to the Children’s Book Press website and take a look at their fabulous catalogue for yourselves.

And I urge you to read Publisher & Executive Director Lorraine García-Nakata recent letter of appeal, published on the Children’s Book Press blog. $47,000 is a lot of money to have to raise by March but it’s not impossible – take a look at the website and think about buying a book; and if you’re in San Francisco next Wednesday, 23rd February, you have the opportunity to show support and have a great night out with some of their authors and artists. Don’t miss it – and then come here and let us know what a great time you had!

The work of children’s poet Misuzu Kaneko has recently become quite popular in Japan.   Misuzu Kaneko was born in 1903 and died in 1930 at the young age of 26.  She began writing in her early twenties, when she started work at a bookstore in her home prefecture of Yamaguchi.  Her life was short and rather tragic; she, however, wrote the most exquisite and profoundly moving poetry for children.  I found her poems slightly reminiscent of Blake — deceptively simple and yet with cosmic implications.   Take for example, the opening stanza of  “Stars and A Dandelion”

In the deep blue sky,
Like the pebbles at the bottom of the sea,
The daytime stars, sinking until night comes,
Are invisible to our eyes.
But though we can’t see them, they are there.
Things invisible are still there.

The one English translation — a bilingual book — I could find of Misuzu Kaneko’s work is Rainbows on Eyelashes (JULA Publishing Company, 1995) translated by Midori Yoshida, who also provided illustrations for the poems. It’s a great little book and well worth your trouble to hunt down (as I had to using interlibrary loans!)   A number of her most well known poems are published here and I hope someday more of her work will be translated.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Carol at Rasco from RIF.

When PaperTigers’ book reviewer Abigail Sawyer mentioned to me that she is going to be hosting a Blog Carnival about bilingualism over at Speaking in Tongues, she got me thinking. Again. I first started mulling over bilingual children’s books here in relation to Tulika Books, a publisher in India that produces bilingual books in many different Indian languages alongside English, and to former IBBY Preisdent and founder of Groundwood Books Patsy Aldana’s comments in an interview with PaperTigers, and I will quote them again here:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

I was surprised by Aldana’s dislike of bilingual books because I love them and my children love them, and I have found that they can be a joy for inquisitive children seeking to learn independently – but I do realise that our contexts are different. Aldana’s dislike of them seems to stem from their being a substitute for monolingual Spanish books in an English-biased market, and she has found a pragmatic way of providing books in their mother-tongue to the Latino community in North America.

We love reading bilingual books because, although our main vehicle is the English, having another language running alongside, often enhances the reading experience for us, especially where the setting of the story is culturally appropriate to the language. This is true even when we can’t read the script, because even without being able to understand it, we can sometimes pull out certain consistencies. Seeing the writing always provides a glimpse of that different culture.

One of my favorite books of the last few year’s (more…)

Little Brother and I have been having fun recently reading nursery rhymes in Spanish and English, from ¡Pío Peep!, a delightful book of rhymes from Spain and Latin American countries, selected by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy (Harper Collins, 2003). In their introduction they say that they chose rhymes that resonated from their own childhoods, and also ones that were clear favorites with “the numerous children – Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Central American – with whom we have worked.” The rhymes are accompanied by an English Adaptation by Alice Schertle, who provides the key for these rhymes to be enjoyed as nursery rhymes by English-speakers as well, in all their rhythmic, chantable, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes dreamlike glory.

Here’s a taster: “El Barquito” uses repetition of whole phrases to create its narrative tension; the English also repeats but only single words:

There was, was, was
a little boat, boat, boat,
who never, never, never
learned to float, float, float.

[...]

And if this silly story doesn’t
sink, sink, sink,
we’ll have to tell it one more time,
I think, think, think.

Little Brother loves the potential for being very annoying, repeating the rhyme over and over and over; and I love the nonsensical inversion at the end, of the story rather than the boat not sinking. The rhythm is so snappy, I think it’s going to be lurking at the back of my mind for a while to come, even without Little Brother’s assistance!

As in all nursery rhymes across cultures, this selection includes the themes of nature and family; there are short, clapping rhymes, counting rhymes and lullabies; and they encompass everyday routines in a child’s life, and flights of imagination. Add to all this Viví Escrivá’s captivating illustrations and you really do have one special book.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Irene Latham over at Live. Love. Explore! Head on over.

And P.S. Don’t forget to take a look at our 1,000th post, with the chance of winning a Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 book set. Deadline for entries is Wednesday 19th January…

This year the Hindu festival of Diwali is from Nov. 5-9.   Today marks its beginning.  I first heard about the festival from watching a National Film Board film called Lights for Gita in their Talespinners Collection (a series of short films for 5-9 year olds.)  In this story, eight year old Gita, who lives in Montreal is excited about celebrating Diwali in her new country, but something unexpected happens — an ice storm knocks out power in the city.  What will Gita do?  Will this holiday celebrated with lights now be ruined for  her?  Check out the DVD by ordering it, or finding it at your local library!  You can also check out the book on which the film is based written by Rachna Gilmore.  Rachna wrote three Gita titles and you can read an interview with her here.

PaperTigers with its focus on India this issue has a number of book suggestions about Diwali in a revisited Personal Views article by Chad Stephenson.  Pooja Makhijani also refers to Diwali in her Personal Views article entitled “A String of Bright Lights.”  She mentions her Diwali book picks in a post she did for the children’s lit blog Chicken Spaghetti awhile back.  In her post, she mentions how in northern India, Diwali is a celebration of the homecoming of Ram whose story can be found in her suggested picture book title Rama and the Demon King: An Ancient Tale from India by Jessica Souhami.  I found Souhami’s book at my local library; it was a bilingual one in Somali and English!   The story of Rama is found in the Hindu text The Ramayana which is a 24, 000 couplet poem written in Sanskrit by Valmiki around 300 B.C.   My daughter’s view of this ancient story of Rama was rather quaint; she said she liked stories where the good guy (Rama) and a bad guy (Ravanna) fight it out over a woman (Sita)  — although in this case, the bad guy is terrifying ten-headed demon!

Hope you have a happy Diwali this year!  Poetry Friday is hosted by JoAnn at Teaching Authors.

“We celebrate our ancestors on the Day of the Dead / with offerings of flowers, sugar skulls, and bread”, begins El dia de los muertos/ The Day of the Dead, a bilingual picture book written and illustrated by Bob Barner and translated by Teresa Mlawer (Holiday House, 2010).

This book, with its illustrations of smiley and spirited skeletons, makes for a great introduction to the holiday for young children as a day of happy remembrance in honor of loved ones who have passed away. Its simple and well-crafted rhymes will peak kids’ interest and curiosity about the special foods, music, commemorative altars and parade that the celebration encompasses.

For more stories featuring endearing, not-scary-at-all skeletons, check out Yuyi Morales‘ Just a Minute Señor Calavera, a counting book and trickster tale about Señor Calavera’s (Mr. Skull) failed attempts to “take” Grandma Beetle with him.