My wonderful sister, who knows me extremely well, brought me this book from Morocco. It's dual-language in French and Arabic. I don't actually know either, but I can read the characters for both and guess. (Latin and Farsi are beautiful things, even if they are both Indo-European.) She, on the other hand, can read Arabic somewhat. So we comfortably flopped on the floor together and made what we could of it.It was traumatic! It's a picture book, so we assumed it would be nice. It was not. I missed most of the finer plot points, but with words like "sahara" and "jamal" and "loups" and "mort," we were able to pick up the gist. It was about a camel who gets separated from his caravan, and the wolves eat his carcasse.
On that disturbing discovery, we went and petted the cat.
Other countries, it seems, have odd sensibilities when it comes to children's literature. At least it's linguistically fun.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know your sister was in Morocco! Lucky her!
You know, I'm not _really_ up on international children's lit, but I definitely agree with you--linguistic fun and elsewise. :-)
ReplyDeleteYes! I think she had a lovely trip. You should ask her about it sometime.