The marvelously illustrated story is written in the imagined language of bugs, the meaning of which the reader deduces with delight from the familiar human emotions they experience throughout the story — surprise, exhilaration, fear, despair, pride, joy. We take the title to mean “What is that?”— the exclamation which the ento-protagonists issue upon discovering a swirling shoot of new growth, which becomes the centerpiece of the story as the bugs try to make sense, then make use, of this mysterious addition to their homeland. “Ma nazoot,” answers another —“I don’t know.” As the bugs witness the spider’s doing in dejected disbelief, a bird — a creature even huger and more formidable — swoops in to eat the spider and further devastates the stalk-fort. At its base, we see the bugs grow from disheartened to heartbroken. The discoverers of the shoot enlist the help of a wise and many-legged elder who lives inside a tree stump — a character reminiscent in spirit of Owl in Winnie-the-Pooh. He lends the operation his ladder and the team begins building an elaborate fort onto the speedily growing plant. She submitted a manuscript with text only. “The words were all gibberish and there were no sketches,” she recalled. “Just a lot of illustration notes like, ‘Two damsel flies approach a small plant.’”

the Bugs: Adventures in Translating Carson Ellis’s ‘Du Iz Tak?’ Working Out the Bugs: Adventures in Translating Carson Ellis’s ‘

So Carson wrote out her text for the first time—in English. “We gave them the translation and they completely rewrote their own version,” Ellis said.The fort collapses and the bugs, looking not terribly distraught — perhaps because they know that this is nature’s way, perhaps because they know that they too will soon follow the flower’s fate in this unstoppable cycle of life — say farewell and walk off. The remnants of the wilted flower sink into the forest bed as a nocturnal serenade unfolds overhead before a blanket of snow stills the forest.

Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis | Waterstones Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis | Waterstones

Armistice Day: A Collection of Remembrance - Spark Interest and Educate Children about Historical Moments Hello Yellow - 80 Books to Help Children Nurture Good Mental Health and Support With Anxiety and Wellbeing - But their joyful plan is unceremoniously interrupted by a giant spider, who envelops their new playground in a web — a reminder that in nature, where one creature’s loss is another’s gain and vice versa, gain and loss are always counterbalanced in perfect equilibrium with no ultimate right and ultimate wrong. That’s what illustrator and author Carson Ellis explores with great subtlety and warmth in Du Iz Tak? ( public library) — a lyrical and imaginative tale about the cycle of life and the inexorable interdependence of joy and sorrow, trial and triumph, growth and decay. EDIT: Carson Ellis tweeted @ me (which made my morning) and let me know that this one is actually “kids.” So I missed 1 out of 19. Not bad.But then, nature once again asserts her central dictum of impermanence and constant change: The flower begins to wilt.

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I feel like Du Iz Tak offers a great opportunity to have a conversation with kids about having a growth mindset and about not giving up just because something is hard or unfamiliar.

I thought it would be fun to share how my students and I have translated the bug language in Du Iz Tak over the last two years. I have no confirmation if any of this is accurate, but I feel like most of it is at least close. That’s why it’s an “unofficial” dictionary. I love reading it with my students, (and my own kids) and seeing the blank looks on their faces when it begins, and they realize the dialogue is not in English. I assure them that we’ll figure it out together using the illustrations and context clues, and then we do. I pause as we go along and ask them what they think several of the words or phrases mean, and every time, someone guesses the right word or phrase in English (or at least what I think is right.) It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,” Henry Miller wrote in contemplating art and the human future. The beautiful Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi invites us to find meaning and comfort in impermanence, and yet so much of our suffering stems from our deep resistance to the ruling law of the universe — that of impermanence and constant change. How, then, are we to accept the one orbit we each have along the cycle of life and inhabit it with wholeheartedness rather than despair? It also became clear that many publishers didn’t realize that Ellis’s dialogue was more than nonsense. The first attempt at translating the text into French raised a red flag for the author. “I used ‘ribble’ for ladder and I used it twice to help a reader intuit what it meant,” Ellis recalled. “But in the first French version there was no repeated word. So we asked about that and they were surprised to learn that my gibberish actually meant something.”