Tim Burton
Morte malinconica del bambino ostrica (e altre storie)

Misfit children, blessed be your solitude. Blessed be your diversity. Blessed be alienation, indolence, the pure gaze upon the world. And when death arrives, may it rest you from the burdens and cruelty of those who failed to grasp the poetry of a fragile existence.

Despite everything "Oyster Boy", "Mummy Boy", "Roy The Toxic", "Junk Girl", "Anchor Baby", "Melonhead", and the other little characters in this collection of poems fully live their awkward lives with even more strength than Nature itself, not benign, which would discard them as imperfect or failed products. No one among the "healthy" and the "normal" wants or can communicate with them: parents, doctors, and even other children attempt to cure them due to their failure to understand their diversity, sometimes pretending they do not see them, at other times disposing of them out of unsolicited pity or sheer cynicism.

Tim Burton narrates these delicate characters with lightness, accompanying each composition with one or more illustrative references: mostly pastel, but also watercolors, and some simply in black and white line drawing. This collection of illustrated poems for children has the merit of also (and especially) speaking to adults; because everyone can find, according to their level of sensitivity and experience, some points of reflection. Perhaps an opportunity to question lucidly and without hypocrisy about "diversity", experienced or inflicted.

Released by the author in 1997, in Italy this work has been published by Einaudi starting from the following year with translations by Nico Orengo, a journalist and esteemed writer (recently deceased) but, sorry to say, not brilliant in this context. With all the extenuating circumstances, mainly the known difficulty of translating poetry from the original language into another (losing the meter, the rhymes, the measure, practically almost everything), good Orengo literally adds his own touch! Often he distorts Tim Burton's delicacy and nullifies the distance, surely intended, between narrator and characters. But fortunately, in the appendix of the Einaudi edition, we also find the texts in their original language; thus allowing immediate comparison when needed, as well as an additional invitation to read.