Happiness is a Watermelon on Your Head

From the cover of 'Happiness is a Watermelon on Your Head'

Writer, editor and literary translator Daniel Hahn tells us about how he came to be writing his first picture book for children - a 'very silly book about wearing a watermelon on your head'.

Earlier this year, I published my first picture book. It's called Happiness is a Watermelon on Your Head. It is exactly as sensible and reasonable as the title suggests. It was not a book I ever expected, or intended, to write. And indeed, though all the words in it are mine, to call it 'my' picture book is a little misleading.

So here's the story. Last year a Brazilian publisher, Callis Editora, published a book by the amazing Bulgarian illustrator Stella Dreis, which looked exactly the same as Happiness…, with the same pictures, and telling a similar story, only the words in it were in Portuguese. Even the title meant literally the same as mine: A Felicidade é uma Melancia na Cabeça. A really exciting new London publisher called Phoenix Yard Books discovered the book and were eager to publish it in a UK edition, and since I'm a translator from Portuguese, their commissioning editor Emma Langley invited me to produce the English text. So what we've published is a translation? Well, no, to call it that would be misleading, too.

But, well, it certainly started as a translation. I looked at Stella's original text, and line by line rendered something in English that was as close as possible, in meaning and tone, as translators do. 'At the end of the village,' it began, 'in a little house in whose garden grew wildflowers and exotic trees, lived Miss Luminosa and her pet boar, Melvin.' And on it went.

Miss Luminosa is a very happy lady, and the book describes her three neighbours' attempts to discover the secret to her happiness. It's a terrifically lunatic sort of book - all glowing colours and surreal details in Stella's pictures, and a properly silly plot. It was going to be great. I did my job and took my English text in to Phoenix Yard, and sat down to read it with Emma, thrilled to be a part of the project of bringing this wonderful illustrator and wonderful book into the UK and into English.

Except it didn't work. It was just flat. I didn't know why.

Now, a side note. I've been working with children's books for longer than I've been working as a translator, albeit not actually writing them myself; I'm one of the editors of a series of reading guides for children and teens called The Ultimate Book Guides, so over the last ten years I've spent an awful lot of time reading books for children - discussing their merits, judging prizes, writing reviews. Somewhere along the line, I suppose I must have learned some basic things about the workings of a picture-book, though quite unaware of it at the time.

So when Emma suggested I return to my words but this time with more freedom from the original, and I started to work on this as though it were an entirely new picture-book text, I soon discovered that I had, on some level at least, over the years been developing a sense of how these things function - or, at least, how the ones that I like function. So I stripped the original words away altogether, leaving just a series of brilliant and detailed pictures and some white space for me to fill, and immediately found myself quite clear about how the new text should operate. About what sort of things read aloud well in English (this is a book for young children, and so designed for reading aloud), about how the text and the pictures should always be speaking to one another, ideas about where the text sits in relation to the page-turns, and so on.

In the original, a picture spread shows the three neighbours and tells us that they've spotted Miss Luminosa skipping down the street, and that she's wearing a watermelon on her head; she's out of shot, though, and it's only after reading the text that you turn the page and see her in all her glory wearing that peculiar headgear. In the English a small change to where the page-turn falls makes a real difference to the pace with which it's read, while the picture spreads are unchanged.

The very next day, what a sight met their eye!

It's happy Miss Jolly, just frolicking by,

With a smile on her face, and "Good morning!" she said,

With a skip in her step…

[and you turn the page…]

                                                            … and a fruit on her head!

What we have just published, then, isn't a translation. You'll have noticed that it's in rhyming verse now, of course; and unlike a 'proper' translation this is a version of a story that was not simply transferred from the Portuguese words but extracted from the pictures. The new incarnation takes Stella's wonderful artwork, and tries to use words to make that artwork look as good as it can, and work as well as it can, to make you look closely and find things in it, to make you linger in just the right places. And to make you feel, too, as though what you're reading is perfectly unified, that a bouncing rhymed English text is what these pictures should have. The English words and the original pictures should feel like they were born together, and it isn't obvious to a reader which one came first. I hope the text is not merely funny, but funny in just the same way that the pictures are funny; that's important to me, too. Certainly like any retelling (which is what this is), the flavour and the detail are led by my own tastes - the things that make me laugh, the elements I liked so much in Stella's images and wanted to draw out. The original text mentions Melvin, the boar, on the first page and never again, while the new text features him far more prominently; but he's one of my favourite things about the book, and looking at the pictures that feels right to me.

The story ends with an almighty watermelon fight, with bits of fruit being hurled around and everyone making a terrible mess, and the bespattered women surprised to discover that they, too, are happy now after all.

All sticky and slimy and pink - what a sight!

They giggled and hooted and danced with delight.

"We did it! We did it!" Their sadness had passed.
And they laughed, and they laughed, and were happy at last.

While I didn't realise I knew what I was doing at the time, I've come out with a text I'm surprised by, and pretty proud of, and delighted that Stella is happy with her story's new incarnation, too. Happy ending all round.