(urth) BotNS in German
Hmpf MacSlow
hmpf1998 at gmx.net
Fri Dec 3 14:00:09 PST 2004
But first: print-on-demand Lexicon Urthus? Very good news. :-)
Yeah, I know I said I'd go back to lurking, but circumstances drive me to
posting again... circumstances being these: I have this habit of giving my
mom who, fortunately, is really open-minded my favourite book of the year
for Christmas. By this self-imposed 'rule' I should have given her BotNS
last year already, but I was somewhat daunted by the task of finding copies
of the German version. (I usually read books that were written in English
in English, but my mom reads mostly German, and I certainly wouldn't ask
her to read *Wolfe* in English.) But this year, I've found copies of all
the five volumes, and one of them, UotNS, arrived today. I've only had a
quick glance at it so far, but even so it is painfully obvious that the
translation is, well, less than satisfactory. Severian's '... what I've
done *to* Urth." has been turned into a '... what I've done *for* Urth*,
Apheta is addressed as 'woman' instead of 'lady', etc. Unfortunately all
the volumes have been translated by the same translator, so there's little
hope of the other four volumes being any better.
Add to that the fact that the books have been out of print for years, and
you can see why I as a German Wolfe fan feel both vaguely ashamed and
enormously frustrated. I want to recommend this book to people I know, but
it's unavailable! (I'm translating the book myself now, as 'therapy' for
that frustration, but of course there is little chance of me finishing that
work, much less finishing it within any kind of useful timeframe. It
clearly is a mammoth task.)
In my opinion it is a crying shame that The Book of the New Sun is not
currently available in a German edition. I don't know if there is any
chance of us lowly readers influencing the decisions of big publishing
houses, but maybe it's worth a try. Are there any other German Wolfe
readers on this list? Maybe a few well-argued letters to Heyne, the
'current' publisher, and perhaps to Suhrkamp and Klett-Cotta, which IMO
would me much better suited to Wolfe than Heyne is, couldn't hurt... and if
we're asking for a reprint, we can just as well ask for a new translation,
too...
The worst that can happen is that they tell us 'no', in which case we'll be
no worse off than we are now.
Hmpf
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