Guus Bosman

We were in Barnes and Noble today and bought two books for Nora. One was a Richard Scarry picture book, the other was: "Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes". We gave this as a baby gift a year ago, and really loved the story and the rhyme. When we read books to Nora we want to do that in Bulgarian and Dutch, and I've translated several American books so far.

Translating it into Dutch was not easy. How to do justice to these iconic lines?

And both of these babies,
as everyone knows,
had ten little fingers
and ten little toes.

I ran several translations by Nora, and while the Dutch word "teentjes" is very cute, she seemed to prefer "tenen". There is actually an official translation, and on Bol.com I saw a few pages of it, but the meaning and the rhythm of the book was modified too much for my taste, even introducing names for the babies in the book which is a distraction.