When I do interviews with people, I don’t ask very much as a documentary maker, I like to observe. I love the character of the Little Prince so much. And then I was thinking in my research, How can we make it more vivid? And then we thought, Why don’t we focus on a book that is translated around the world. MB: Well, we wanted to make a film about translating and the difficulties you come across when you transform one language to another. SG: What captured your imagination about The Little Prince? What made you want to make a film about it? SG: Reading it as an adult, it’s sort of strange to me that it’s thought of as children’s literature, because the questions it’s asking are enormous. So this was the first time I met The Little Prince, not in Dutch, not in French but rather in Italian. I went into a book shop in Italy and there was The Little Prince in Italian. So there is no beautiful story of me being a small kid reading the book. ![]() Marjoleine Boonstra (MB): I’ll tell you a secret: before starting with the film, I hadn’t read it at all. Susannah Greenblatt (SG): In the The Miracle of the Little Prince, you ask people all over the world about their first experiences reading The Little Prince. What was your first experience with the book? ![]() The day after the interview, I was standing on line at a grocery store in Brooklyn and saw on the bicep of the woman in front of me a little tattoo: a line drawing of a hat-or was it a boa constrictor eating an elephant? (If this image is difficult to conjure in the imagination, I highly recommend you open Saint-Exupéry’s book to the first page.) And perhaps this is what’s so miraculous about The Little Prince: it has left its mark on people across the entire globe, just as it has left its mark on the people right in front of you. I spoke with Marjoleine Boonstra about language justice, the ways a mother tongue shapes us, and how to ask a question like a Little Prince. They also grapple with more daunting ones-does a book have the power to keep a language alive for future generations? These translators grapple with fascinating questions-like how to translate “rose,” which is not native to El Salvador and not codified in Nawat. These are four of the world’s endangered languages, meaning there’s a high likelihood that there will not be a next generation of fluent speakers. But Boonstra follows Saint-Exupéry’s book around the world-from Morocco to Samiland to El Salvador to France-taking as her subjects the translators who have brought The Little Prince into Tamazight, Sami, Nawat, and Tibetan. In fact, they are more often praised for their invisibility. It is unusual for translators to be the protagonists of a film. But this is part of Boonstra’s genius: she knows how to capture the strangeness in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. Against a bird’s-eye shot of a smoldering volcano, this planet Earth feels strange, empty, even hostile. They also float above the opening shot of Dutch filmmaker Marjoleine Boonstra’s documentary The Miracle of the Little Prince. ![]() The lines above have been translated into 375 different languages. ![]() But planet Earth is a big place,” said the snake.Īntoine De Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is the second most translated book on planet Earth (the Bible is the first). But is there no one living on this planet Earth?” “What planet have I landed on?” asked the prince. There will be a screening of The Miracle of the Little Prince at the Film Forum in New York City on Friday, August 30, followed by a Q&A with Marjoleine Boonstra. By Susannah Greenblatt Marjoleine Boonstra, writer and director of “The Miracle of the Little Prince”
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