The story of Ferdinand: from New York to Salamanca

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze two Spanish editions of the picture book The story of Ferdinand (1935) written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson. The comparison of this specific narrative type is made between two translations into Spanish and their illustrations whose release dates are more than 30 years apart and that were published on both shores of the North Atlantic Ocean (one in North America in 1962 and the other in Spain in 1994). Special attention is paid to the multimodal interplay between the visual representations and written language in both Spanish translations in order to elucidate the distinct ideological approach adopted by each edition to address the target audience, mainly children.

The picture book was written just before the onset of the Spanish Civil War, where history has shown that violence reached extreme levels. It is interesting to look into how this picture book updates its significance with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and, a little later, of the Second World War in Europe. Through a metaphorical use of the Spanish traditional spectacle also characterized by its violence and cruelty, the imagery and the text of each Spanish edition satisfies some specific communication needs (Moya y Pinar, 2007, p. 22) that determine the reception of a text in the target culture and reader.