Curator—Olya Rusina
When we write for kids, do we think that they might not understand us, or might understand us not in the way we intended? Sometimes the memory of our own “physically longer” baggage of experience, as well as our own perception of the world at the age of today’s readers, leaves us with the pleasant illusion that there is little room for misunderstanding. But isn’t children’s literature written by adults an attempt to “translate” our own experience and perception of the world into the kid’s optics—and not the optics of oneself as a kid, but of a kid from another generation?
In this sense, literature for kids and teens is much more diverse than literature for adults. Books for adults are not divided into age categories; instead, texts for children aged 5–7 and, let’s say, children aged 10–12 (although formally they are all for minors) cannot be confused. Meanwhile, many books that we perceive as “adult” ones are read by teenagers already at the age of 15–16.
At the same time, there are so many variables in the growth of today’s kids and teens that we did not have in our time: the war, the development of new technologies and social networks, and long years of not only distance learning, but also distance communication with peers—and all these variables affect literature, how kids translate it into the language of their experience.
Nowadays we often talk about some decline in children’s reading; however, if we change the optics, we can try to talk about changing the ways of approaching literature. What do kids and teens look for in books today? Where do they get what they lack in literature? What new formats are interesting and relevant to them? What would they themselves like to say to writers?
While writing for kids, we still imagine to some extent how these stories will be perceived by readers; even written in the same native language, they do not guarantee that these “imaginations”—of the author and of the reader—will coincide one hundred percent. Let alone literature translated from other languages, socio-cultural and historical realities. I like using “imaginations” in the plural here, because it is a tool that is involved by both each writer, while creating a story, and by each reader, while perceiving it. Imagination is the universal language of a children’s book, that allows us, in the labyrinth of the modern world and its experiences, to grasp the other end of the thread thrown by the author, even if we choose different paths within this labyrinth. Imagination is familiar to everyone, but everyone uses it in their own way.
For the author, imagination is a way to translate their values and perception of the world into the language of a story (through plots, characters, ideas and everything else we writers like experimenting with) so that readers understand it not only on the external level of the text, but also on the internal level of experience and values. For readers of all ages, imagination is also an intellectual work not only of recreating stories “in their heads,” but also of detecting and ultimately finding their own senses in the stories, that may even be unknown to the authors of the stories. But those authors who know how to build such a space in their texts for the co-creation of contents—the plurality of translation of experience—are considered skilled. Similarly, in the end, books for kids and teens written by Ukrainian writers today will become the translation of our time for readers of the future.