December 25, 2010

Tatigaba.



The Christmas present I gave out this year was a children's book I wrote and created - in both French and English, illustrated by my heavily talented sister-in-law, Marie.

This project was inspired by a trip that Marie and I took in May, 2009. Christened "Tatigaba" by Marie - the name of the clown/artist - the main character in this book. It is a children's book, but hopefully its audience will be wider than that. Our trip was to Entrevaux, France - a little mountain village in les Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Gaby lives there. Gaby is Xavier and Marie's aunt and she is magical. I left Entrevaux feeling like I had read some sort of poetry I never knew existed before going there.

And then there is Marie. Marie - the artist. Marie is a wonder and I'm lucky to be related to her through Xavier. Clearly, the shining part of this book is its illustrations.

If you like it enough, you can buy a copy.

1 comment:

Gaby Munoz said...

Emilie, this book is wonderful! I remember reading your entry about that trip and the Gaby from the Alps has always stuck with me, as she is both a fascinating individual and a namesake who shares the exact spelling of 'Gaby' (no extra 'b's or 'i's or 'ie's--a rare find). The story is wonderful and has beautiful illustrations. If I come across some extra cash, I think I'll buy a copy.

I especially love having the side-by-side texts in both English and French. It's wonderful to see an author's choice in translation, something which has fascinated me ever since I took a French to English translation course in college. I would love to send a link to this entry to my old translation professor. I think he'll love sharing this with his future translation students as an example of the choices an author must make when translating a text from English to French in order to tell the same story.

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