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A review by saroz162
The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily by Dino Buzzati
3.0
This is an odd one. I want so much to like it, and visually, I do - Buzzati's illustrations are charming, whether they're full page and color, or incidental and black-and-white. One could even use the color illustrations, with their captions, as a deck of cards around which to build an original story. Buzzati's own story isn't bad, but the charm in it is largely expressed in those illustrations (with a few small exceptions).
I suspect this is a flaw in the English translation, my lack of understanding Italian cultural markers, or some combination of both. Buzzati's story is a fable, the sort of thing that's both easy and hard to translate; the distance at which he keeps the reader is shaped by a narrative voice, and that's hard to replicate or recreate. And the poetry that must make up almost half the text is astoundingly poorly rendered in English, usually occupying a broken meter no parent could read out loud as anything other than stiff, uncomfortable text.
There's a good story here, with memorable beats. It's already a little bit off the track of any English-language children's story (it is, for instance, markedly more violent than any American or British kids' book of the period), so I can see why some folks are willing to go full tilt into the weird cadence and accept it for what it is. I, on the other hand, would like a better "set of subtitles," even if it means slightly less authenticity to the Italian text - and in the meantime, I'll be happy to enjoy the pictures.
I suspect this is a flaw in the English translation, my lack of understanding Italian cultural markers, or some combination of both. Buzzati's story is a fable, the sort of thing that's both easy and hard to translate; the distance at which he keeps the reader is shaped by a narrative voice, and that's hard to replicate or recreate. And the poetry that must make up almost half the text is astoundingly poorly rendered in English, usually occupying a broken meter no parent could read out loud as anything other than stiff, uncomfortable text.
There's a good story here, with memorable beats. It's already a little bit off the track of any English-language children's story (it is, for instance, markedly more violent than any American or British kids' book of the period), so I can see why some folks are willing to go full tilt into the weird cadence and accept it for what it is. I, on the other hand, would like a better "set of subtitles," even if it means slightly less authenticity to the Italian text - and in the meantime, I'll be happy to enjoy the pictures.