“Once Upon a Time” in Translation

A publisher brings world literature to young Anglophones: Harvard Magazine

MOST AMERICAN KIDS have probably never heard of Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King—a fantasy tale of good and evil, feuding kingdoms, and a questing teenage squire named Tiuri—but for millions of Dutch readers the book is a childhood classic, akin to Charlotte’s Web or The Hobbit. First published in 1962, Dragt’s book had never been made available to English-language readers until Adam Freudenheim ’96, the publisher and managing director of the London-based Pushkin Press and its imprint Pushkin Children’s Books, took on that task and published a new edition last year.