Enid Blyton and the "non-Blytons"

Have you ever read Enid Blyton?
Blyton was an English writer of children's books which have been wildly popular since the 30s and sold millions of copies worldwide.
A lot of German kids were fans of one or another of her series or maybe still are as grownups.
A while ago, I got a video recommendation on YouTube called "These Enid Blyton novels don't exist - but Germans are obsessed with them anyway" on the channel "Spinster's Library" (I think the title has a touch of click bait, but the video was interesting).

The comment section on that video absolutely blew up with comments by a lot of German women, but also men, about their own experiences with "Hanni und Nanni", "Die fünf Freunde", "Dolly", maybe known to you as "St Clare's", "The Famous Five", and "Malory Towers" if you ever read Blyton, but also with other series of hers and even other authors.
Then there were those who read the original series and were surprised to hear that ... I'm getting ahead of myself. The whole thing is quite confusing.

All three series mentioned can teach us a little about continuation books and also domestication and foreignization.
I had thought about writing a post just about domestication and foreignization, also because it would go quite well with my post about dubbing from a few days ago, after all translations are also a part of dubbing. There are different theories and opinions about these, though, and I don't even know if I would always choose the same one myself depending on what kind of literature it is.
So I'll make this very short, and if you are interested in more, there are some sources at the end of the post.

Domestication = translate a text in a way to make it understandable for the target audience by adapting it to their culture which can/will lead to information loss compared to the original
Foreignization = translate the text in a way that stays true to the original and the culture it comes from even if it may be difficult for the target audience to understand without further research

The books I'm going to talk about come under the header "domestication" which really isn't that surprising for the time (Blyton wrote these mostly in the 40s and 50s, in Germany they were published in the 50s and 60s).
Just as with dubbing, the question is how far can you go with a translation. How far do you want to go? And of course the eternal question - what will probably make more money ... which usually also defines who makes those decisions. Translators in the comment section of the video shared that often they don't decide about changes, but the editors/publishers do.
Of course it's always controversial, especially if the target audience are children. How much can and do you expect from young readers?

I read "Hanni und Nanni" at my friend's house and had only one of the books myself. I was somewhere between 7 and 10 years old when I read them, and I got to volume 15. Then I bought the collection 1 to 19 years later for sentimental reasons which was when I found out that Enid Blyton had actually just written six volumes of the "St Clare's" books.

Illustration for "Hanni und Nanni"
by Nikolaus Moras who illustrated other Blyton books and other
series for the German publisher Schneider-Verlag.
As you can tell, the illustrations have also been adapted to the
time of publication, not just the text!
I liked the shoes because they reminded me so much of 
one kind of the Barbie shoes at the time.

Like others in the comments, I hadn't be aware as a kid that the books were originally English - well, the first six, anyhow - and in the beginning we even happily pronounced the author's name as if it were a German one. As a child, especially in the 70s, you still accepted a lot of things without overthinking them even if some of them sounded a bit strange.
I read a lot of different books, not all of them appropriate for my age, no doubt, but then that probably didn't mean the same as today, anyway.

So maybe I wouldn't have had a problem to read all English names, to hear about Lacrosse (which only came to Germany in the 90s, I wonder if I would have found it in our encyclopedia at all) and school uniforms and would have thought it fascinating, but maybe we kids would also have got bored with something that wasn't relatable to us. Who can say?
I do remember that I did wonder more than once how other children were just allowed to go off somewhere by themselves, in a horse wagon, for example 😂
Part of me longed to do something crazy like this, but in my heart I knew I would never have had the courage - or the necessary skills!

Domestication was one point in the video, another one was that there are a lot more "Hanni and Nanni" books than there are originals.
That's not just a German thing, though. Continuation books are sequels of books or book series written by a different author after the original author's death, authorized or unauthorized. Sometimes even unfinished books were finished by someone else, authorized by the rights holder.
The English "St Clare's" series" consists of six books written by Enid Blyton and three continuation books written by Pamela Cox much later.

In Germany, the series called "Hanni and Nanni" is so popular that there are 39 books at the moment of which 1 to 4, 11, and 13 were based on the original Blyton books, 19 and 20 on two of the Cox books. So they started making up their own stories even before using all originals.
We also have audioplays (remember my post about "Die drei ???"?) and even movies!
Quite a few people mentioned the Japanese anime series from the 90s as well which brought them to the books in the first place.

Interestingly, some of the commenters who know both said they preferred the German books because the English ones were meaner.
If that has to do just with the domestication or also because the German books were published about 20 years later and adapted to that time, I can't tell you.
Anyhow, Blyton has not only been criticized for her work being rather repetitive at times, but also sexist, xenophobic or racist stereotypes, so there have been updates to her work even in English.

What I can say is that Germany didn't have as many boarding schools as the UK at the time and still doesn't as far as I know. The books sold us a kind of romantic idea of them - community, pranks, and midnight feasts - which I think was fun to read about for us, but not necessarily something we would have wanted for ourselves, at least not the girls in my circles.

Of the "Malory Towers" series, there are six books by Blyton and six continuation books, again by Cox (from the 2000s).
I never had "Dolly" books - that was what the series of 18 books was called in Germany - and read them at a different friend's house, but can't really remember anything. I guess I could only handle one boarding school setting.
Again the German publisher changed the text and names heavily, also to adapt the books to the 60s - for example, gramophones became record players. Sometimes they even left out whole chapters.
Since 2020, there's has been a BBC series which follows the original books closely. There is already a dubbed German version for at least part of the series which, believe it or not, refrains from domestication. Don't tell me we can't learn anything 😉

The last series I want to mention is "The Famous Five", in German "Die fünf Freunde" = "The five friends".
Although I tutored a boy who had the whole collection and was willing to lend them to me, I never made it through the whole series, but I have a few 60s/70s editions from fleamarkets in my own children's book collection.
Blyton had planned just a few books in that series, but it was so successful commercially that she wrote 21 volumes in the end (and a few more series following the same pattern of children solving crimes while on holiday or visiting someone - my holidays were usually quite boring compared to theirs 😂).

Eileen Alice Soper illustrated the complete original set of
the "Famous Five" books

There are continuation books for this series as well, the French translator for it wrote 24 of them of which 18 were then translated into English and German (mostly the same ones)!
The Germans also got two books called "Geisterbände" = "ghost volumes". They had been published without permission of the rights holder and had to be withdrawn from the book market. You can still get them second-hand, but they are regarded as rarities and are more expensive.
There is also a whole bunch of German continuation books which have not been translated into English, that series ended in 2014.

If you think that's it, you're wrong.
There is an English series with the famous five having grown up, 15 obviously rather short books which are more satire as you can tell from titles like "Five Go Gluten Free" or "Five Escape Brexit Island". A few of them have been translated into German.
Then there are of course the TV shows, of which I know the one from the 70s myself, and the films and the audioplays (some English ones, a lot of German ones), the musical and gamebooks, comics and ...

Illustration by Eileen Alice Soper

So yeah, I didn't quite get some of the comments (not that I read all of them). Surprise, okay, I was surprised myself when I first found out, but the outrage, no. It's probably because people on the web are outraged at everything quickly these days.

Domestication was not that big a topic back then and not just German publishers were or are guilty of it. Also they had acquired the rights, and while you may well discuss the quality of the books (original and continuation, especially long-running series), audioplays, etc. and of course domestication in general, it didn't mean the Blyton estate was ripped off even if money was quite surely the motivation.
The main point is that the continuation books still have Blyton's name on the cover, but remember the Three Investigators books were never by Alfred Hitchcock and had them as the author, just like other book series were written by a syndicate, so not even that is that unusual.
Anyhow, the controversy goes on.

What really amazed me was how many people engaged speaking about their own memories in connection with the books.
My own memory is lying on the floor in my friend's room with my feet up and reading, and then we thought about adventures we could have.
For lack of boarding schools, smugglers, secret passageways, and horse wagons, however, we just did the usual - riding our bikes, picking flowers, playing in the forest - until we had grown too old for most of the books, anyway.

I read the first St Clare's book in English for this post and there was still that whiff of nostalgia although I cringed at some of the descriptions and I'm aware Blyton was not a very nice person and mother. Actually, her life would easily fill another post that I'm not keen on writing, though.
My guess is that it's probably more nostalgia for the time itself and the memories the books conjure up and not so much the books themselves (after writing this, I found an article about just that - childhood nostalgia in regards to Blyton).

I'm sorry if you are completely confused now, but I warned you.
Had you thought the children's book market used to be simpler in the olden days? I suppose it has always been a jungle out there, and I even talked about just three of the many series Blyton churned out (she wrote so much that people thought it was impossible she did it all by herself).

By the way, guess the recommendation I got when I went to YouTube on my TV after finishing this post - the 2009 TV film "Enid" which has been uploaded around the same time I started the post draft. So creepy!


Selected sources:

On Blyton:
1. These Enid Blyton novels don't exist - but Germans are obsessed with them anyway. On the channel of Spinster's Library on YouTube 
2. Fiona ?: Blyton by others: A guide to prequels, sequels and continuations. On: World of Blyton, January 22, 2020
3. Continuation books. On: The Enid Blyton Society
4. Pranay Somayajula: My Nostalgia for Enid Blyton is Complicated: Reckoning with the racism of my favorite childhood author. On: Electric Lit. November 2, 2022
5. Rowan Morrell: Five Have Adventures Abroad. Website on Enid Blyton continuation novels
6. The Soper Collection - Eileen Alice Soper
7. Jasmin Klein: Hanni und Nanni besuchen eine Ausstellung. On: Meine Südstadt. November 13, 2015 (in German)

On domestication and foreignization:
1. Ao Sun: Domestication and Foreignization in Translation: A Theoretical Exploration. On: J&Y Translation
2. Wenfen Yang: Brief Study on Domestication and Foreignization in Translation. In: Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 1(2010), 1, pp. 77 - 80 (Open Access)
3. Jekatherina Lebedewa: Mit anderen Worten - Die vollkommene Übersetzung bleibt Utopie. In: Ruperto Carola 3(2007) (in German)
4. Anna von Rath: Writing and translating are not neutral: an interview with Kavitha Bhanot. On: poco.lit., March 15, 2023