A Leaning Tower of Babel
in Notting Hill Gate
Evelyn Waugh once complained that a big fat parcel arrived for him one morning, obviously containing books. He fell on it eagerly, thinking some kind friend or admirer was sending him fascinating tomes to bring him an unexpected pleasure. 'But all it contained,' he added, 'was six copies of Put Out More Flags in Finnish.' I know exactly how he felt. I am constantly getting these disappointing packages. I have published more than 40 books. The precise number eludes me because when I try adding them up by titles I always get a different number. Over 40 anyway. Some are ephemera. One or two have sunk without trace. But the bulk are still in print, and when a new edition or paperback comes out, or a work appears in large print for the optically challenged or as a talking book, six copies are duly dispatched to me. Why six? It is a sacred number, going back to the origins of printing in the second half of the 15th century, when all the presses were grouped around St Paul's, so that the Bishop of London, as Ordinary, could award (or not) his Nihil obstat and six copies had to be sent to his examining chaplain to speed things up.
Then there are the translations. Some of my books are put into a dozen languages. Intellectuals has been rendered into a score, Modern Times into more than 30. As a rule, six copies of each, in the local jabber, are duly dispatched to me. Various Arab publishers shamelessly pirate me, but occasionally condescend to send me one copy: odd to think that a virtuously clean volume of mine has come hot from presses recently churning out the latest impression of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I have been printed in Turkey, too, and in those obscure, embattled countries to the south and east of the Caucasus that James Elroy Flecker places on the Golden Road to Samarkand. Sometimes the languages are so exotic that I cannot deduce from the title which book it is. Die Renaissance is clear enough. So is Napoleon. But, with the latter, why does there have to be a quite separate translation and edition for French readers and for French-Canadian ones? Have the mother and daughter tongues bifurcated so far? That is certainly so in Portuguese. Two editions arrived almost simultaneously, one from Rio and one from Lisbon, both called 0 Renascimento but each by a different translator. The Chinese do three separate versions of Modern Times, one in Big Characters, one in Small Characters (both Shanghai) and one in Taiwanese.
I often get things sent to me in weird eastern languages. Thai? Burmese? Nepalese? I have no idea. The Japanese always put the title in English, too, and the author's name in our characters, so that is simple. They take more trouble, in every respect, and (in my opinion) produce more handsomely printed books than any other country in the world (the Albanians are the worst). When they did Modem Times, they assembled a team of 14 women, under a male professor, and they sent me a group photograph that showed the ladies sitting around the Prof like a curious rugby XV. Whether these orientals censor my books I have no idea. The Prof in this case sent me a letter asking my permission to omit 'certain disobliging expressions' referring to the Emperor Hirohito, then still alive I think, as he was a god and blasphemy was offensive to many inhabitants of Nippon. I find the Japanese the most remote and mysterious of all peoples — the men, that is. I have no problems with the women. They are not aggressive cultural hermits but openminded and anxious to learn other ways. I once addressed 250 of them at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane and told them to throw off their shackles. I said that in 50 years women would be running Japan. They liked that, and at the end a diminutive lady called for 'three rousing cheer for Professor Johnson'. The South Koreans do books beautifully also, and as soon as they engulf the North they will become a major nation (one reason the Chinese are working so hard to delay reunification). There seem to be two Korean editions of one book — which, I don't know — and these presumably come from North and South, though it may be that one of them is an obscure Asian script I don't recognise. Cambodian, for instance, is very hard to spot.
With the European languages it's fairly plain sailing. Intellectualii is Romanian. Os intellectuels is Portuguese, Intelletualove Czech. Intelektualisci Polish, Gil Intellettuali Italian. De intellektuella Swedish and so on. The title of the first chapter, about Rousseau, is a quote from a contemporary, 'An interesting madman', and it's fascinating to see how different languages render this insult. In Hungarian it's erdekes On'ilt. A nutcase in Bulgarian appears to be cbrt, except the `r.' is the wrong way round. The Portuguese and Spanish agree: loco. In Italian it's pazzo, in Swedish gaining, in Romanian nebun, and in Czech the phrase is zafima blazen. I am also intrigued by the way my name is rendered. Most translations do it the English way, though often in peculiar characters. The Albanians have Pol Xhonson; the Bulgarians do it in a vaguely similar way but using characters we can't reproduce here.
Recognising my books by titles in languages I don't know varies in difficulty according to the subject. Az Osi egyiptom civilizeiciaja and civilizace starch° egypta are obviously my book on ancient Egyptian civilisation, in Hungarian and Czech respectively, and both are more finely printed and with better illustrations than is the first English edition, going back to 1978, a quarter-century ago. But I puzzled over Azsikok tOrtenete for some time until I deduced it was my History of the Jews. This book, incidentally, is another which has been translated into a score of languages. I was fascinated to hear, in the 1980s. that it was being translated into Japanese, since until the second half of the 20th century there was no Jewish community in Japan (even today it's only a handful) and therefore no interest in Jews or antiSemitism. 'Don't you believe it,' I was told, 'the Japanese can be ferociously antiSemitic.' Amazingly, when the translation finally appeared, it sold 60,000 copies in two months. As my old platoon sergeant, who had served in the East, used to say, 'Mysterious blokes, the Nips.'
These invasions of my house by babels of printed voices pose problems which are fast becoming acute. The stuff from Rio and Lisbon I can handle because there is a teeming Portuguese community in Bayswater (mainly from what they call 'the Islands' — Azores and Madeira) and I give them away through the Catholic clergy. Some Central and Eastern European stuff can likewise be disposed of thanks to that heroine of Iron Curtain days, Jessica Douglas-Home. But the rest, including all the oriental volumes, clutter up countless feet of valuable shelf space, and a crisis looms. I think, come summer, I'm going to have a fair in my garden-studio and give them all away to foreign students, if they can be found. My studio is overcrowded too with my paintings, some framed, some just mounted, some just sheets of paper or canvases. I will sell them dirt cheap at the same time, or give them away too, if need be. Watch this space.
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