Leigh Sauerwein
We met at a small Parisian café to discuss the work Leigh has been doing for the last several years--she currently has more than 20 books in French, several of which dealt with Native Americans. Among one of her more interesting projects was a grant to translate African folktales into French (Le Coq Prend la Mouche. Contes Afro-Américains). It did very well and it was a great windfall for her. She noted that she usually does not do translations preferring to write her own material in either French or English. This project, however, was intriguing and offered a challenge-Leigh needed to find a way to translate African oral culture. In France, it is really not an option to use bad grammar because it is considered vulgar. Her goal in these translations was to bring across the culture. Her task was to make the language more colloquial. Having studied French for five years myself, I found her comment on the language to be quite interesting-"French is a mineral language and English is vegetative." One is fairly well set while the other is constantly growing, incorporating and adapting.
Her work also includes children's book reviews-she does the classic section. The publication includes book, movie, comic and serials-pretty much mirroring the literary/cultural world of the adolescents targeted by the publication. The literary section where she works takes famous books such as The Old Man and the Sea and extracts the novel in graphic form. The teaser then invites kids to read the original version. The kids eventually go to the books, but she estimates that the impact is really felt when they reach their mid twenties, because the graphic novelization has stuck with them and they really want to read the entire book.
Her husband is French and her children are French, but Leigh is not, and she really had a strong desire to get back to her native language. She started with a children's book that she sent to Guillmard Jeuness and it was accepted, translated and published-Grump the Grump. She remarked that she was fortunate to have a great illustrator for the book. Leigh had also written several short stories which she sent to her editor (Christine Baker) at Guillmard. Christine loved them and was willing to have them translated. They were published and got good reviews.
Then she had an opportunity to work with Stephen Roxburgh then at Farrar Straus Giroux (now Front Street/Boyds Mills Press). The book was Way Home which had beautiful black and white illustrations done by Miles Hyman. Stephen left Farrar and started Front Street which was located in North Carolina so she had an opportunity to travel to the states and meet with him. Leigh thought that his list probably did not have anything focusing on 12th century France; Leigh loves this time period and its Medieval troubadour poets, and great architecture. While contemplating ideas for the book, Leigh spent time in the center of France among its rocky mountains, rivers and slightly wild county. The sound of the water brought things into focus and the idea of a Song for Eloise would marry itself to the time and all that she loved about it. Her characters and the drama of their lives had to be close to the life and rhythms of the time. Leigh was terrified of the work becoming a Medieval cliché-she wanted to distant it from other works about the period. Happily, she got a contract based on her presentation of the idea and then spent the next two and a half years writing the book. During that time she had not named the poem. It is very musical-the book itself is the song. The final publication was entitled Song for Eloise and it has no chapters, sections of the work start with capitals as if they were music stanzas. Even though the story of Eloise is one that has been told many times--Eloise marries a man twice her age and is not happy. A young troubadour enters the scene and she is captivated. Her husband dies, Eloise filled with guilt and enters a monastery. Around that core story, Leigh has woven a description of daily life and the hours of prayer throughout the day and the year. Leigh told me that she hopes that she will once again have an opportunity to undertake another wonderful project with a great editor like Stephen. She commented that one day the muse will strike again.
In addition to her book for Front Street, Leigh also undertook two translations for the press- Looking for Cinderella and Amazing Animals. At the time we met, she was working on a book about the Vietnam War using eyewitness accounts. J'ai Vécu la Guerre du Vietnam: 1961-1975 is now available on Amazon-France. She had also worked on some of the "My First Discovery Books" in particular a series about music (rap, rock and jazz) and musical instruments. Mes Premierès Découvertes de la Musique was accompanied by a CD, and Leigh feels that the cost of redoing the CD has limited the book's movement to the American market.
As for some of the factual background information about Leigh herself; she was born in Charlotte North Carolina. During WWII her father was a journalist and was later given a job under the Marshall Plan in radio in 1948. Leigh was in Berlin during the blockade and she lived in the glide path for the planes. Eventually her father went to work for the State Department and she ending up living in many famous cities-Frankfurt, Munich, Paris, Vienna, Taiwan and the like. She had attended American schools while abroad and learned that there was an American college in Paris. Eventually, she did study in the states and finished up her degree at Boston University. In the meantime, she met a very handsome Frenchman and they have been together since.
In 1967, they came to France with the intention of retuning to the US. She was pregnant. During this time, there was a student uprising in May of 1968 and the country ground to a halt and DeGaulle was ousted. It was a time of great political and philosophical upheaval, and she and her husband were on the left. Her husband was feeling the pull of his French roots so they stayed in France and her husband joined the Communist Party. He worked as a newspaper correspondent but then the paper dissolved. In 1984 Leigh went to work and was one of the founders of a journal. She has been at the creation of two review journals one Okapi (1972-78) was a news magazine for young readers. Her current job is now more fiction related. In the meantime, her husband went to work for the Parson's School of Design in Paris. They are a multilingual family speaking English, German and French. In addition, they have three children and since two daughters were expecting when I conducted this interview, they are surely now proud grandparents. Two of her children are in the U.S. because of the lack of job opportunities in France (the newspapers of today are filled with that news). One will not be surprised to learn that that two of her children are deeply involved in professions that relate to art and writing-one was at the National Institute of Photography and another went to film school. Her husband, Laurent Sauerwein, is now teaching at the American University in Paris and at Parsons. He had a show recently in Shanghai-he has more than 70 books to his credit--visit youcantouch.com to get a sense of his work.
Leigh and her family are devoted to art. She can't imagine it being any other way-for them "art is something bigger than them."
Contributor: Marilyn Courtot
Reviews
Looking for Cinderella
Charlotte Dematons
Translated and adapted by Leigh Sauerwein
One fine spring Saturday, Hilda notices that the vanes of the old abandoned windmill have begun turning once again, and in a most peculiar way. When she sets off to investigate, she meets up with a succession of notable fairy-tale heroes and villains, and she herself is mistaken for Cinderella. In order to prove her identity, Hilda decides to find Cinderella for herself. Determinedly, she avoids the clutches of the wicked witch, a giant, and it is Cinderella herself who helps Hilda find her way home. Readers will delight in spotting the different fairy tale characters that populate the lush illustrations of the book. 1996, Front Street, $15.95. Ages 7 up. Reviewer: Wendy Keen (Children's Literature).
ISBN: 1-88691-013-8
Song for Eloise
Leigh Sauerwein
The daughter of the powerful Lord Baudoin, Eloise, is to be married. As is so often the way of things, it is a marriage to bind families, to pay a debt of thanks for a life saved. For Eloise it is giving up her happy life in her family home. She has to travel to the colder, windswept mountain fortress of Lord Robert, a man she knows so little, and who shows the world very little of his inner self. Separated from her family and the places she loves, Eloise closes in on herself and ceases to be the cheerful, sunny person she once was. Then someone from her childhood comes to her new home. It is one of the boys who used to work around the house who is now a troubadour, wandering the countryside and singing his beautiful songs. As soon as they see one another, Thomas the singer and Eloise the Baroness have eyes for no one else. Robert is not deceived and he is enraged when he sees the way in which Thomas looks at his wife. Only a fool would dare to fall in love with the wife of such a man as Robert, the Baron of Rochefort. Beautifully evocative and pictorial prose makes this a haunting and thought-proving book. Short descriptive paragraphs throughout the book give us a picture of daily life in the countryside of France at the time of the story, telling us about the doings of various personalities in the village as they go about their work and play. The story is told from the point of view of several characters that often converge and cross paths as the story unfolds. A truly remarkable piece of work. 2003, Front Street, $15.95. Ages 14 up. Marya Jansen-Gruber (Children's Literature).
Best Books:
Senior High School Library Catalog, Sixteenth Edition, 2004 Supplement, 2004 ; H.W. Wilson; United States
ISBN: 1-88691-090-1
The Way Home
Leigh Sauerwein
Pictures by Miles Hyman
Five of the six short stories in this collection for middle-school and junior-high-school readers work wonderfully well. In conjunction with American history, minority studies, or standing alone as poignant vignettes of unfortunate aspects of Americana, these stories are both readable and teachable. Also ideal as read-alouds, they could generate significant classroom discussion. Plots involve a Native-American Vietnam vet and his unacknowledged son; a recently widowed pioneer woman alone in a sod house; runaway slaves escaping via riverboat; a woman, captured as a girl by the Cheyenne and cast off by her family after returning to white civilization; and a cerebral-palsied child who meets an old and denigrated Geronimo. The sixth story, a seemingly autobiographical tag-on, has its merits, but is out of sync thematically with the rest of the selections. 1994, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 118 pp., $15.00. Ages 12 up. Jackie Cronin (The ALAN Review, Spring 1995 (Vol. 22, No. 3))
Best Books:
Books for You: An Annotated Booklist for Senior High, Thirteenth Edition, 1997 ; National Council of Teachers of English; United States
ISBN: 0-374-38247-6
Added 03/30/06
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