LETTERS Only joking
Sir: As regards The City of Light by 'Jacob of Ancona' (`Chinese fake away?', 25 Octo- ber), surely the first question to put to David Selbourne should have been what language the purported manuscript was written in. Mediaeval Latin? Mediaeval Italian? Franco-Italian, the language of Marco Polo's book Ca strange composite tongue fashionable during the 13th and 14th centuries', as the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica calls it)? Hebrew? Whatever the answer, how can Mr Selbourne, a political philosopher, be qualified to decipher, let alone translate a manuscript of this kind?
The International Herald Tribune (1 Octo- ber) has quoted from a telephone conversa- tion with Mr Selbourne where he refers to the possibility of his book being a 'great picaresque, philosophical novel'. The quo- tations from The City of Light in a recent review in the Times surely point in this direction. Like another eminent political philosopher, Montesquieu, who in his Let- tres persanes satirised the French civilisation of his age by portraying it through the eyes of two invented Persian travellers, the author may have chosen his hero to casti- gate some of the cultural (including sexual) peculiarities of our age. 'Jacob of Ancona' may be as authentic as 'Alice von Schlief- fen'. Shouldn't we appreciate the whole affair as a joke rather than viewing it from Mr Honigsbaum's moral high ground?
Leonhard Walentik
Translation Service, Austrian Federal Chancellery, Wallnerstrasse 6A, Vienna
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