Language skills boost prize-winning author
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
On a recent weekday afternoon, James Rumford was trying desperately to nap away jet lag after a trip to New York.
But behind the Manoa writer and artist's tired eyes, a movie was running, replaying events from the journey during which he received a Charlotte Zolotow Honor Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children's Book Center. Zolotow was a force in the publishing world, and this award — which focuses on writing for the very young child — is also gaining force, positioning itself to stand beside the better-known Caldecott and Newbery prizes.
As he tossed restlessly, Rumford (who writes about children's books for this newspaper) reviewed lunch in the New York brownstone of Peter Straub, a University of Wisconsin alumnus, where he chatted to Susan Straub about her work in promoting literacy, promising to put her in touch with former Hawai'i first lady Lynne Waihee, a reading activist.
In his mind's eye, he revisited the awards ceremony May 24 at the storied Algonquin Hotel, during which he gave a short but heartfelt speech about which he remembers very little — just that he used the word "aloha" a lot, and credited his wife, Carol, and librarian-friend Harriett Oberhaus, with helping start his career as a children's book writer and illustrator.
He relived the chance to rub shoulders with folks in the publishing world (including his new editor at Houghton Mifflin, whom he had never met face-to-face) and 2004 Zolotow winner Amy Schwartz, author of "What James Likes Best."
He recalled the bus ride from Manhattan to East Harlem to talk with a group of third-graders about his winning book, "The Calabash Cat and his Amazing Journey." The students were worried about whether Rumford, from far-away Hawai'i, would be able to relate to Harlem, and suggested he take the bus into the housing projects so he could experience their world.
And what, now that it's over, did James (Rumford) like best?
Well, technically, it was the part before New York, where he got to watch his son, Jonathan, graduate from Occidental College in California with a degree in music composition.
But during the New York leg, he liked talking books at Peter Straub's house. "I really felt like I was the farmer in the great city ... But it was fun for that short time to be around people who know a heck of a lot about children's books — issues of about how pictures and words interact, the politics of publishing, everything that's important in literature, really," he said.
Back in Hawai'i, Rumford is back to thinking about his new work, "Dog-of-the-Sea-Waves," a sequel to his classic "The Island-below-the-Star" (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), about the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.
In "Dog-of-the-Sea-Waves," five brothers journey up from the south to Hawai'i and determine to return to their homeland to bring back with them the familiar foods and animals that these Islands lacked. One brother befriends an injured monk seal and is roundly scolded by his siblings for slacking on the work of preparing for their trip. But young Manu's friendship with the seal will prove vital.
Here, Rumford has created a beguilingly layered story. There are both English-language and Hawaiian-language layers (though the Hawaiian story is told on a single, back page), there are both words and watercolors and there is the story of the brothers and also the story of Hawai'i's endangered landscape. This last is told by means of delightful small paintings of various flora and fauna tucked here and there on the pages. Essays at the end of the book tell the story of each.
Rumford said the extra pages raised costs, but he wanted to do more than just the story of the brothers. "As tangential as it may seem, I wanted people to realize that we do have special plants and animals here, and that they're disappearing," he said. "Some of these I haven't even seen. You have to climb Mauna Kea to see a wekiu bug."
Besides his skill as a watercolorist, printer and papermaker, Rumford is an extraordinary linguist, having studied a dozen languages.
In writing "Dog-of-the-Sea-Waves," he tried to tell the Hawaiian language story in a Hawaiian way. For example, in Hawaiian, you speak of things specifically rather than generically. So in a part that talks about birds arriving, the Hawaiian text specifies a k¿lea.
He also offered a little tidbit for Hawaiian speakers in that, in the English text, he uses common Hawaiian words for the brothers, who are symbolic of mythic force: Hoku (star), Na'ale (the waves), 'Opua (clouds), Makani (wind) and Manu (bird). But in the Hawaiian text, the names come from ancient proto-Polynesian words for the same things, giving the Hawaiian-language reader a little extra something to notice and exclaim over.
And he took advantage of the poetic nature of Hawaiian, in which words can be, as it were, embroidered: "Lapa ke kai ... lalapa ka wai ... lapapala ka wao nahele ..." — each sentence built on the root word lapa (meaning, in this instance, to flash, as a bird flashes through the sky).
"You can do so much with language. It's part of what keeps me writing," he said. "I find it interesting to take complex ideas and try to make them manageable even for a young reader."
