Winnie Ille Pu was the first book in Latin ever to make it to the New York Times Best Sellers List. It is one of the few books in any language other than English to make it to that list.
Since then, it has become the book of choice for high school students who are studying Latin. Rather than reading the Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar or the Orations of Cicero, they prefer to read Winnie Ille Pu.
An Internet search will reveal several renditions of Winnie Ille Pu in Latin, most of them having been posted by high school students.
The author of this translation, Alexandro Lenardo, is a pseudonym for Alexander Lenard. Alexander Lenard was not Italian. He was Hungarian. His name in Hungarian was Lénárd Sándor.
Alexander Leonard was born Budapest, Hungary on 9 March 1910. He was fluent in several languages and wrote many books in those languages. He wrote fiction and non-fiction in German, Latin, Hungarian, Italian and English.
Winnie Ille Pu was written in Brazil in 1958. Alexander Leonard wrote it for the daughter of one of his students to help her learn Latin. He apparently never imagined that the book would be published, much less that it would become a best seller. Winnie Ille Pu was originally self-published in Brazil. The book we see here is not the original publication.
Because this book was first written and later published as a way to help students learn Latin, we have included as an appendix the original text in English, and a sentence by sentence translation of the most popular Winnie-the-Pooh story, story number 2 about how Winnie got stuck in a rabbit hole, from English into Latin.
Every student of Latin has soon learned the famous Ditty:
Latin is a Language
Dead as it can be
It killed all the Romans
and now its killing me.
Perhaps this book will help save a few lives.