SAME BOOK, DIFFERENT NAME? ANALYSING THE TRANSLATED TITLES OF BART VAN ES'S MEMOIR THE CUT OUT GIRL

Abstract

The Cut Out Girl, by the Dutch-born Oxford professor Bart van Es, won the Costa Book of the Year Prize in 2018. Written in English, the work deals with van Es delving into his own family history to learn, inter alia, about his grandparents’ role in sheltering a young Jewish girl named Lien during the Second World War in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and who later acted as her foster family. In sharing Lien’s story with the world, van Es’s memoir proved controversial for its frankness, opening up discussions about a difficult time in Dutch history. Though it looks back on real events, creative elements do occur within the book, especially with regard to reenacting situations and conversations that occurred many decades ago. Noting the nexus between memoir, life writing, and biofiction, this contribution zones in on one of the most important aspects of any book: the title. The work’s unusual name refers to a description of Lien that cannot easily be rendered into other languages; consequently, many foreign language editions have opted for different titles. In addition, the volume also has a subtitle, which again provides interesting material for analysis. Hence, after providing an overview of the work, its reception, and its translation into over a dozen languages, this study adopts a text-based approach, seeking to compare and contrast the different translated titles of the book and to examine how they reflect various facets of the book’s subject matter, characters, and setting. KEYWORDS: biofiction and memoir; Lien de Jong; the Holocaust; The Netherlands; translating book titles Introduction The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found is authored by Bart van Es, professor of English at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow and Senior Tutor at St Catherine’s College (University of Oxford, 2024). Originally from the Netherlands, he grew up in several countries before pursuing an academic career in the United Kingdom. Written in English and first published in 2018, The Cut Out Girl is an engaging and enthralling narrative. The reader accompanies the author as van Es delves into his own family history to learn, amongst other many things, about the important role that his grandparents’ played in sheltering a young Jewish girl, Lien, during the horrors of the Second World War, as well as in fostering her after the war had ended. On 10 May 1940, the Nazi forces invaded the Netherlands, occupying the formerly-neutral country until it was liberated by the Allies almost five years later on 5 May 1945 (Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie, 2024). As detailed in perhaps the most globally-renowned work of Holocaust literature, Anne Frank’s Diary (Frank, 2019 [1952]), the German occupation proved devastating for the country’s Jewish population. The overwhelming majority of Dutch Jews were deported to and subsequently murdered in concentration camps located elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe: only a quarter were to survive the war (for more information, see USHMM, 2024). However, unlike the rest of her own family, Lien survived the war by being hidden by Dutch families. She later returned to the van Es family as a foster child (van Es, 2018a) and indeed, she is still alive at the time of writing this article, almost eight decades later. In The Cut Out Girl, van Es therefore weaves together multiple stories into a single work; simultaneously, the book is the story of Lien and it is the story of van Es’s family and his own story in searching for Lien. It is also the story of those people who helped to hide her during the war and, by extension, it is also the story of a whole country, the occupied Netherlands under Nazi rule. As such, the work can be considered as being situated at the nexus between memoir, life writing, and biofiction: in the words of one reviewer, it “defies easy categorization” (Horn, 2019, p. 62). Indeed, though The Cut Out Girl looks back on real-life events, creative elements do occur in the book, especially with regard to reenacting

Keywords

• biofiction and memoir;
• lien de jong;
• the holocaust
• the netherlands
• translating book titles