Lately, I find myself increasingly leery of metaphors. Odd, for a writer I know. But places of employment are not families, institutions of higher education are not corporations. After all, I’ve never asked a boss for the keys to her car. Nor as a teacher have I ever been paid on a scale even roughly commensurate with a person of equal education and experience working in the corporate world. (Oh well.)

Another of these suspicious metaphors, and one that I often have been guilty of using, is that books are the author’s children, an easy turn of phrase which, now that I think about it, serves to elevate the writer’s work while denigrating his children. (Oh well.)

But there are ways in which a book is like a child (though the stakes cannot be anywhere close to the same in spite of our pretensions otherwise.) One of these is that when a grown-up child goes out into the world, shielded at last from the ever-open eyes of his parents, surprising things can happen. This is also true of a book.

I had one of these surprises last week — a nice surprise this time — when I learned that in June, my picture book, Finn Throws a Fit!, originally published in 2008 by Candlewick Press and illustrated by the irrepressible Timothy Basil Ering, will be released in Germany this September. Finn tobt! Finn rages! Here’s a link to the German publisher, Klett if you’re interested.

This is not the first time one of my books has been translated. (My copy of the Braille edition of Evangeline Mudd and the Golden-haired Apes of the Ikkinasti Jungle, is a prized possession. It’s a beautiful thing. Great white pages fit to hang in a museum of contemporary art.) But it’s no less thrilling. I love to think of parents and their toddlers settling down together in Aachen or Bremen or Cologne to read a book inspired by a toddler right here in Warner, New Hampshire. In it’s own small way, it’s confirmation that the human experience is not as easily defined by language or political boundaries as certain politicians would have us think.

So rage on, Finn! Bring down das Haus!

Soon, I”ll be posting about another surprising and happy development, a little closer to home this time, in Portland, Maine.