How Rebel Can Translation Be? A (Con)textual Study of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and Two Translations into Spanish

Abstract

In just a few months, the publication of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Italian-born authors Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo (2016) resulted in a huge commercial triumph in the USA, becoming a reference in the field of feminist success stories for young children. What started as a modest Kickstarter crowdfunded initiative aiming to produce a different book for children, which could inspire ´alternative´ fairy tales by drawing on the life stories of one hundred great women, soon became the most funded book in the history of fundraising for children´s literature publication. Marketed as a collaborative project of creative non-fiction, the book offers one hundred tales of extraordinary women combining aspects of children´s literature, (feminist) biography and striking illustrations by sixty women artists from across the globe, which certainly add to the configuration of meaning and subjectivity in the stories. A second volume of bedtime stories followed the successful first book and an official website with videos, podcasts, audiobooks and merchandising was launched including posters, tattoo packs, game cards, and recently a Rebel Girl journal, a publication which was also crowdfunded. Confirming its best-seller status, in a span of two years, the first volume of stories was translated into more than fifty languages worldwide. In some receiving contexts, the publication of the book was accompanied by the development of websites offering merchandising in the target language. Consideration of the various reinscriptions of the text in different languages, cultures, editorial and institutional frameworks is significant to attest the extent to which it actually integrates networks of women appealing to build more democratic, plural and collective voices, not only abroad through translation but also in the USA. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is two-fold. Firstly, it seeks to analyse the texts, paratexts, metatexts and contexts relating to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Special attention will be paid to the articulation of an authorial voice, the criteria for selecting those specific stories, the nature of the publishing project and, more significantly, the examination of feminist subjectivities in this explicitly collective, polyphonic and multimodal text, as they are all key to appreciate the type of readerships targeted in the first English edition published in the USA. Secondly, taking this source-text related analysis as a starting point, this chapter attempts to assess the cultural and political implications of the Spanish translation Cuentos de buenas noches para niñas rebeldes (trans. Ariadna Molinari Tato, 2017) both in Argentina and in Spain. In effect, these two contexts merit separate attention not only because they are regulated by different linguistic, editorial and translation policies, but also because they are shaped by distinct feminist traditions and debates. Our focus will be on how the feminist elements analysed in the source text travel in translation and how they are marketed and received in the two target cultures. The study of reception in Argentina and Spain will be based on media commentaries, social media posts and specialised reviews in feminist and literary venues. Trying to determine how rebel these translations may be, i.e., to what extent they subvert or preserve traditional gender ideologies, the study of the English and Spanish editions goes beyond a comparative textual/paratextual analysis of (translation) strategies and techniques, to also examine the wider (con)texts making these collective editorial initiatives and projects possible in Argentina, Spain and the USA.