Twentieth-century author and educator Gianni Rodari is considered by many to be the father of the modern Italian children’s book. Since the lead up to his centennial celebration in 2020, Brooklyn-based independent children’s publisher Enchanted Lion has been at the forefront of introducing Rodari to young readers in the U.S., releasing several English-language translations of his works. Published in March, Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto, translated by Antony Shugaar, and newly illustrated by Roman Muradov, is a satirical tale of a wealthy baron, his nefarious nephew, and a band of bandits. And forthcoming in September is The Adventures of Cipollino (also translated by Shugaar), illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova. Tolstikova and Muradov recently spoke with each other via Zoom about their early memories of encountering Rodari’s stories when they were growing up in Russia, and their approaches to illustrating these new editions of his work.

Dasha Tolstikova: Your book looks so good. This is so dumb, but I looked at your book, and then I looked at my book, and I thought, my book looks like a child made it.

Roman Muradov: Well, it’s a children’s book. But no, I felt the same. I looked at yours, and I was honestly kind of shocked at, first of all, the number of illustrations. Because I thought that I was going over the top there…

I never actually read Cipollino.

Tolstikova: I read it as a kid, many, many times. So, when Claudia [Zoe Bedrick, publisher of Enchanted Lion] she said she was doing the Rodari books, I got really excited. And I said, oh, can I please, please, please do Cipollino? I love it so much.

Muradov: I would have said the same. But I only know the animated film from back in Russia.

Tolstikova: I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it. But when I was a kid, we went to a ballet of it, in Moscow. So it was very prevalent. But I didn’t remember so much of it. And I didn’t realize how long it was. And like the fact that—spoiler alert—he ends up in jail twice in the book. Insane.

Muradov: Yeah, I very much look forward to reading it properly.

Tolstikova: Had you read Lamberto before?

Muradov: No, I had no idea it existed. So you read Cipollino and I think you also said somewhere or in your author bio that [Rodari’s guide to storytelling] The Grammar of Fantasy is one of your interests.

Tolstikova: Yeah. I read The Grammar of Fantasy when I was a kid. I remember the exact edition that we had. And I loved it. Have you read it?

Muradov: No, I hadn’t heard of it until a few years ago when Olesya Shchukina, a great animator and artist, told me about it. But then it turns out that Claudia is putting it out with Matt Forsythe’s beautiful illustrations [in a translation by Jack Zipes]. So I will finally read it.

Tolstikova: I read it in Russian. I’m curious how it will read in English, because I think the Romance languages, like Italian and French, translate into Russian very nicely, because of all the subtleties of words that we can have that aren’t really available in English. The wordplay, I think, is trickier in English.

Rodari talks so much in that book about inspiration and being inspired by everything around you. And I think that I really internalized it. It’s just been my thing always. Even if you think about The Jacket [by Kirsten Hall, illustrated by Tolstikova] and The Bad Chair [written and illustrated by Tolstikova] and how those books are about inanimate objects that are alive and doing stuff, I think that for me is a direct translation from having read The Grammar Fantasy when I was a kid. And then there was also this other book by Rodari called The Blue Arrow about a train and a toy store that was very popular.

Muradov: I wonder if the [Viktor] Pelevin story, The Yellow Arrow, is a reference to that.

Tolstikova: Maybe.

Muradov: Because it also takes place on a train.

Tolstikova: I think it’s also a frequent name of trains to call them “arrows.”

Muradov: That is true. But Rodari was huge in Russia. I guess he was one of the few international authors that was almost on every bookshelf.

Tolstikova: My grandpa is a translator from Italian, so we grew up with a lot of Italian stuff at home. And my dad also remembers Cipollino. It’s the only book he remembers from his childhood, and he has really strong feelings about it. When I started illustrating it, I would send sketches to our family in our WhatsApp group. But I stopped doing this because my dad would call me afterwards and say, “The way that you’re drawing Prince Lemon is not right…. He’s not mean enough, and I have very strong feelings about what Prince Lemon needs to look like.”

Muradov: That’s great.

Tolstikova: Yeah, totally.

And then at some point I had to be like, “OK, I’m not showing you anymore because I can’t…. You’re too in my head about this.” And he’s like, “This book is so important.”

Muradov: Yeah, it’s true. How do they feel about the style? Because I feel like for Russians, with the animated film and all, the story was so present, everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it.

Tolstikova: It’s such a classic. Unfortunately, I don’t have all of them here, but I have a collection of a bunch of Russian editions of it now.

Muradov: Oh, wow.

Tolstikova: And they actually have very different illustrations.

Muradov: Have you seen this Munari one?

Tolstikova: Yes, I love that.

Muradov: That’s the only one that I have, which is a collection of Bruno Munari’s illustrations for Rodari’s books.

Tolstikova: Yeah, but that’s different. Honestly, I should have spent more time looking at it, because it’s great. And is that in Italian?

Muradov: Yeah, but it’s 99% pictures. So this is more of an art book that just collects everything that Munari has done for Rodari. I think some of them are split into parts. So the idea is that you can cut them out of the book and play with them.

Tolstikova: Oh, that seems like a very Munari thing.

Muradov: Who’s going to do that? But anyway…

Tolstikova: That’s funny. So this is one of the Cipollinos I have. It’s from 1981. And it’s so different. So that’s Cipollino. He’s pretty anthropomorphized. And a lot of the Russian versions are like this. And the Italian version, which I also now have from the ’50s—so this is what they look like.

Muradov: Yeah, very realistic. Almost like designs for a theater production.

Tolstikova: There [are] such different variations of it and they’ve done so many versions, so I feel like you can do anything at this point, which is nice. I was really trying not to look at anything while I was working because I was nervous about being influenced by anything.

Muradov: Did you try different styles?

Tolstikova: I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what they would look like and how to build the characters, like whether they would have a body, head, all that stuff. It took me a second to figure it out.

What about you? Did you try different styles?

Muradov: Yeah, I’m pretty sure I went through a few variations. I think I had a pretty strong vision right away, though. I didn’t want it to look like a picture book—I wanted it to look like a novel where someone scribbled around the borders.

Tolstikova: It does look like that, really.

Muradov: And I originally wanted to have texts kind of like constantly overlapping with the drawings. I wanted to have thick lines, so you’d have a page with big messy drawings all over the text.

Tolstikova: Oh, I love that.

Muradov: My process is extremely chaotic. I made the preparatory sketches, but they were very loose and rough. I went back and forth a lot. And there's quite a few sketches that didn't make it.

Tolstikova: It’s beautiful.

I did the opposite. I was very methodical about it. I had an Excel spreadsheet of all the illustrations. . And I made a template of all the characters before I even started working on the book. I made a chart of all the outfits they wear and their little items that they carry around and their scale in relation to each other. And I think you did that too?

Muradov: Yeah, I also made a lineup. It's not as many characters, but it's pretty heavy. The thing that I got obsessed with was making sure that their shapes are very distinct, because the style is so minimalist.

Tolstikova: Now I’m looking at yours and I have to say I think Delfina is so stylish.

Muradov: Oh, thanks. Well, actually, she was a bit of a problem, because after I finished everything, I reread the text and somewhere, maybe around the second chapter or so, I realized that Rodari mentions that she has red hair. So my solution to that was writing an introduction where I say: “If the reader finds some discrepancies or something they dislike, please take a pen and do whatever you want with the illustrations.”

Tolstikova: I love that. It’s such an elegant thing with the way that the book ends, where Rodari says, if you don't like how this ends, I urge you to keep writing and you can give this the ending that you want.

Muradov: When I wrote the emergency introduction, I didn’t actually think about it, but then I did my final rereading, and thought, hmm, it almost looks like I knew what I was doing.

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto, trans. from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, illus. by Roman Muradov. Mar. 18, $29.95 ISBN 978-1-59270-415-6

The Grammar of Fantasy, trans. from the Italian by Jack Zipes, illus. by Matthew Forsythe. Enchanted Lion, May 13, $29.95 ISBN 978-1-59270-305-0

The Adventures of Cipollino, trans. from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, illus. by Dasha Tolstikova. Enchanted Lion, $29.95, Sept. 23, ISBN 978-1-59270-416-3