Bilingual Edition
Ode to Billy Buck/Ode til Billy Buck is a bilingual English/Norwegian Bokmal (facing pages of English on the left, Norwegian Bokmal on the right) story about the friendship between two children in Ames, Iowa, USA during the 1950s. The story is inspired by my own childhood, but it is not purely autobiographical. I've cut jigsaw pieces out of reality, jumbled them well, and glued them onto each page of this book in intentional patterns. Although we share nicknames, Mari Bjørk is not quite me, and her family is not quite mine. All the characters in this book are results of my jigsaw-jumbling - except, of course and may be, Billy Buck.
I have described Ames of the 1950s as true to reality as my memory allows me seven decades later, well assisted by Ames History Museum's goldmine of a website and other sources. The buildings, stores, parks, and streets all have their 1950s names and locations. The weather is accurate for any given date in this narrative. I might have exaggerated the cornfields surrounding Ames a bit, since they are seen through the eyes of a child way back in those olden days.
The language in the Norwegian version is the same transitional variant of Bokmål that Mari's parents would have used in the 1950s. All colors in the English version are spelled exactly as they are written in Mari's Crayola box and kept in a matching mode in the Norwegian version. And yes, I've broken some grammatical and orthographic rules in both versions. That's because I've followed Mari's perception of the way things are.
