“Dual Readership and Hidden Subtexts in Children’s Literature: The Case of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories”

This paper investigates the translations of Salman Rushdie’s children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories into Italian, French and Norwegian, discussing primarily how censorhip is ‘managed’ by the translators and how successful their translation strategies are. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) was Salman Rushdie’s first book after he went into hiding subsequent to the fatwa pronounced against him by the Ayatollah Khomeni as a response to the publication of The Satanic Verses. Written and marketed as a book for children, it falls squarely within that category described by Zohar Shavit as a text with an ‘ambivalent status’, that is - a text written for (and/or received by) both adults and children, at various textual levels - of both production and reception. The book’s multi-layered structure is richer than even most ‘ambivalent texts’: Presented as an unthreatening ‘children’s book’ (children and children’s literature being at the margins of the establishment and of its polysystem), its politically potent sub-text is easily overlooked – indeed the book passed almost unnoticed on the international publisher’s market, despite the fame (and at that time notoriety) of its author – both as an author and as the victim of the Khomeni’s much-publicized fatwa. Not only in its metaphorical structuring of the attack on censorhip, but precisely for the ambivalent status of its target reader - child/adult – the text seeks to communicate over the heads of the censors by presenting the text in the ‘innocuous’ form of a children’s book. A series of interesting translation issues emerge from this text: the micro-structural coordination of culture-specificties, the macro-structural/political implications of culture-specificties, the macro-structural marketing policies dictating the translating strategies of the political subtext through metaphor, the target reader: child or adult, and the place of translators/translations within the literary polysystem and the social system (the role of a translated text and of its producer in the aftermath of The Satanic Verses).