Children's Literature | Estonia | Estonian
July, 2015On finishing up an “extracurricular” project (I am a Romanticist, currently writing a dissertation on William Wordsworth), a new English translation of Eno Raud’s Sipsik, an enduringly popular Soviet-era Estonian children’s book, and considering its chances for US publication, I found myself anticipating the ambivalent reactions: This lovely story is too quiet and too circumscribed for a contemporary North American audience—too quiet for, say, five- to eight-year-olds who may already have acquired a “thirst after outrageous stimulation” (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads) and too circumscribed for parents who prefer that the narratives offered their children engage, however distantly, with social realities. The story, of a five-year-old girl and her imaginary companion, unfolding against the backdrop of the daily life of a sketchily, if realistically, rendered immediate family, might seem to float in some just slightly exotic and geographically unplaceable but otherwise comfortably familiar world of an idealized postwar, urban, petit-bourgeois domesticity.
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- David Sassian
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