The South Estonian Touch: Translating JOHN THE SKELETON from Estonian and Võro

By Lucia Brown 

Where does a classroom skeleton go when he retires? John the Skeleton, a kind and curious protagonist, heads to southern Estonia to live in the countryside with two grandparents. Deep in the magical forests of the Võru region, John plays a part in the vivid quotidian of Grams’ and Gramps’ rural life. Through a series of gentle vignettes, he learns about ancient traditions, experiences grief and compassion, and becomes part of the family.

Southern Estonia has its own culture—and its own regional language. The Võro language has between 50,000 to 70,000 speakers and is considered endangered. According to the Võro Instituut, since all speakers are bilingual in Võro and Estonian, the number of native Võro speakers decreases ten percent with each generation as parents speak Estonian with their children.

Author Triinu Laan, who is from the Võru region, knew that the language would be critical to communicate the regional setting of the grandparents’ home. While the original book’s content is written in Estonian, the dialogue is in Võro.

“To keep the atmosphere and to show the real people that the grandma and grandpa are, I need the Võro language,” Laan said. “I know that it is risky, a bit—even in Estonia, because not all Estonians can understand and read Võro. But I hoped that through the context and story they would understand.”

Smoothly incorporated into the English by translator Adam Cullen, south Estonian culture emerges through the objects and customs with which John interacts. In one beautifully illustrated vignette, John experiences his first smoke sauna, a tradition from the region inscribed into one of UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. As is customary, Gramps spends the whole day feeding the stove with firewood and, in the evening, the family enters the wooden structure. They strip down, throw water onto hot stones, and sweat on its wooden benches. To cool off, they run outside and make snow angels.

Laan explains that illustrator Marja-Liisa Plats, also from the Võru region, used her own grandparents as the models for the loveable Grams and Gramps. Her skillful crosshatched pencil illustrations, highlighted with flashes of bright pink, depict the mundane with playfulness.

“They have really the south Estonian touch,” Laan said. “They are like all sorts of Estonian grandmas and grandpas put together.”

Translations of John the Skeleton have also been released or are forthcoming in Croatian, Czech, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Slovenian. In each edition of the book, the tone-shift to the Võro dialogue was communicated differently; while some translators used local dialects, Cullen created a geographic parallel.

“It’s a challenge to translate something that has such a hue, it has such a rural tone,” Cullen said. “With John the Skeleton, I put more of a southern twang on it. I felt it kind of matched up in that way, funnily enough, not only because geographically, ‘rural’ is in southern Estonia, but there’s that slower pace [of life].”

Grams and Gramps care for John and introduce him to the texture of their lives: their grandchildren, the frozen lake, the farm animals, the apple trees. The story also masterfully folds in conversations about death, heartache, and care. In the Võro region, people are buried with something that was significant to them in life; can Gramps be buried with John?

“I hope that children better understand that a happy and a little bit of a wild life is for everyone, in every area, for people at every age,” Laan said. “You can enjoy life and you can have contact with wild nature and with the people who are gone.”

As the book ends, John helps comfort Gramps after Grams passes away. Together, they repeat the Võro word for linden blossoms: pähnähäimetsäi (pah-nah-heights-met-sigh-y). This word will keep them close to Grams, even though she’s no longer with them.

“Something I hope that is taken out of reading it is a theme of continuation,” Cullen said. “Things continue, be it after school or after work, retirement or after life—after your natural contribution to the world has come to its conclusion. But there’s still more. There are the grandchildren, the flowers still blossom, the trees still grow. And practices that are ancient, like the tea and putting things in the coffin, can continue on and will still keep going. It’s a very hopeful and hope-filled view and outlook on life.”

John the Skeleton was published by Restless Books on October 1, 2024. Order from Restless here.

John the Skeleton

$19.95

By Triinu Laan

Illustrated by Marja-Liisa Plats
Translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen

Yonder: Restless Books for Young Readers | Ages 6–12

2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Winner

2025 USBBY Outstanding International Book

★ Starred Kirkus Review

2022 Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition winner

2021 The White Ravens catalog

2021 Tartu Prize for Children’s Literature

Hardcover • ISBN: 9781632063700
Publication date: Oct 1, 2024

Quantity:

Add to cart

Read Julie Orringer's Preface to 'The Boy,' a Novel by Marcus Malte

Marcus Malte’s prize-winning novel The Boy, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge, is a story that forces us to consider what it means to be human. Beginning in 1908, the narrative starts, quite simply, with the boy, a wild child from the forests of Southern France who sets out, voiceless and innocent, to discover civilization. As he travels between cities and towns, the boy encounters the best and the worst of the world, from ogres and earthquakes, to love and the joys of music, and finally, to war. Malte’s prose is at once poetic and mysterious, and sometimes harsh as he weaves this poignant tale of the human nature.

In her preface to The Boy, Julie Orringer, bestselling author of How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, writes: “As we inhabit [the boy] … there is no way to perceive him as other, only as a version of ourselves, at times compassionate, at times violent, always curious, always seeking comfort and love, a balm for what’s been irrevocably lost.” Read Orringer’s full preface below.

The Boy: A Preface by Julie Orringer

Reading The Swiss Family Robinson recently with my eight-year-old son, I came across a passage—amid the ardent shelter-building, tropical-plant identification, animal-shooting, and campfire cookery of the novel’s first chapters—where our narrator, William, expresses the fear that his family’s new home might be inhabited by savages. The author’s (and translator’s) use of the word seemed to require explanation, or context; I asked my son if he knew what it meant.

“I think he means wild animals,” he said.  “Beasts.”

I explained, with some discomfort, that the author was actually referring to people, indigenous to the island, who likely lived as hunters and gatherers, employing technology that had been used for thousands of years, and practicing forms of religion, storytelling, dance, dress, and music-making that would have been unfamiliar, and perhaps even frightening, to Europeans.  I explained that the word originated with the Latin silva, meaning wood, and silvatica, out of the woods; from this came the French sauvage, and finally our English savage, with its attendant fear of the unknown, of what might lurk in forests, fierce and untameable and possibly intending to do us harm.  But why would a person be called a savage, my son still wanted to know; and what made the Swiss family fear them? Underneath his question I sensed another: What is it that makes us recognize one another as human?  And what does it mean to be human in the first place?

This subject was much on my own mind because I’d been reading the book you now hold in your hands: Marcus Malte’s brilliant and disturbing novel The Boy, which poses the same question in a different way. Using a trope familiar to literature, one that has long fascinated and perplexed us—from Romulus and Remus abandoned by their mother and nursed by a she-wolf, to the tale of Victor of Aveyron, the eighteenth-century French boy who was discovered after more than a decade on his own in the wild—Malte envisions a man-child, newly orphaned at fourteen, who has lived all his life in the isolated wilds of southern France, with only his nonverbal mother for company; the story opens in the first decade of the twentieth century, on the verge of one of the greatest upheavals of Western history.  Notably, the point of view belongs not to some curious observer but—as in T. C. Boyle’s “Wild Child,” or Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”—to the feral child himself, nameless and languageless. As we inhabit him, as we experience his journey into the populated world, there is no way to perceive him as other, only as a version of ourselves, at times compassionate, at times violent, always curious, always seeking comfort and love, a balm for what’s been irrevocably lost. Moving from wilderness to village, from village to town, and from town to city, this extraordinary character perceives, and thereby reveals, the strangeness of the twentieth-century world.  

To see every element of our lives (and yes, these are our lives, with only minor differences)—the things we eat, the way we behave towards animals, the way we house and clothe ourselves, the way we worship, speak, make music, treat our children, medicate ourselves, perform the act of love, and wage war—through the eyes of someone to whom all of this is new, constitutes a reevaluation of everything we take for granted.  In what ways are we ridiculous, or compassionate, or divine? In what ways are we beastly? Mona Ozouf, president of the Prix Femina jury that awarded its 2016 honor to The Boy, called it, in my imperfect translation, “a novel about, among other things, the ensavagement of human beings by war, which reminds us that barbarism camps on the borders of the civilized world.”  

Marcus Malte himself, speculating in an interview about his reasons for choosing the book’s historical setting, said this: “Until now, I’d always located my novels in our own time; I’d described the contemporary world exhaustively, especially its faults, so maybe I’d arrived at a time when this world, our world, weighed on me too much—when I needed to get away from it, at least in my fiction.” But isn't the story of human ensavagement the story of every time?  And isn’t the question of what is barbaric or savage in so-called civilization one we have to face in every era? In our own moment, when acts of racial violence and xenophobia have become the stuff of daily news, don’t we need, more than ever, to be reminded of the value of wordless communication, of immersion in nature, of loving touch, of music-making, of empathy, of literature read aloud by one person to another—as well as of the fact that certain wounds, inflicted deeply enough, can never heal?

The book you’re about to read shines a fierce and necessary light on our world.  Read it patiently, if you can—a challenge at times, considering the wild and unexpected turns it takes, and the pleasures that lie around every corner—and discover, or re-discover, what it means to be a member of the human tribe.

Order the Book

About the Introducer

View fullsize

Julie Orringer is the author of the novel The Invisible Bridge and the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.