What A Wonderful World

 

One of the mixed blessings of having changed countries around the time of adulthood (Look, I was 22. It’s not that far off.) and of having CHANGED countries instead of just emigrating and keeping strong ties back in my original homeland, is that I’m forever separated from my childhood reads.

This is a problem PARTICULARLY when you add in the charming habit of Portuguese publishers of changing the title of books beyond any possible recognition (yes, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is recognizable as Revolution On the Moon, but there are others where you sort of have to guess. I think, though I don’t fully remember, that They Walked Like Men is They Came From The Stars in Portuguese and a lot of others are even more bizarrely titled.)

Now, for most science fiction authors, at least the ones I REALLY liked and read and re-read I just got their entire oeuvre and found my old favorites (and some never published over there) that way. Here I must add the caveat that some old favorites didn’t survive the transition. Apparently it is possible for a translator to MARKEDLY improve a book when translating. Other people, though I still love them in English, are better in Portuguese because their style is better adjusted to the language structure. Simak is one of those. What my linguistics teacher said was that Portuguese has an “unpacking” sort of structure, where the statement unfolds through the sentence. English on the other hand has a structure prone to synthesis – i.e. to packing as much meaning as possible in one sentence. This means, depending on how the writer wrote, sometimes Portuguese works better for telling the story, even if the translator is faithful.

(Interestingly enough, the language itself seems to impart a slower and more descriptive pace to the story telling. I used to be able to tell if a story’s author was Portuguese even writing in another language because of that habit of mind. And it took me something like seven years to rid myself of that impression of languid, descriptive pace in my own writing. [At least mostly rid myself, I think.] There is still a tendency for me to write long [like this] when I’m in a hurry and have no time to edit to more compact posts.)

Weirder is the effect where a writer reads the same to me in English and Portuguese particularly when the way they read to me is weird. Now, please believe me, I’m not saying I write like him – my head is not that swollen – but there is something in Pol Anderson’s writing that triggers the “mine” reaction, so that if I’m reading him when in the middle of editing, the editor comes out and I start editing his books. He did this to me in Portuguese and I have the exact same reaction in English… and did, even back when my English was not nearly idiomatic. No, I have no idea what causes it.

Anyway, the problem with finding old book-friends lies in the books I read before eleven, when I sold my soul to science fiction and gave my heart to Heinlein. In those dimly remembered years, I never paid attention to the names of the authors – unless they took up box of books after box of books, like Dumas or shelf upon shelf, like Enid Blyton. I read books that had been in the family for generations, and I had no reason to assume they wouldn’t be there for me or my kids whenever I wanted to bring them out again.

So I often paid no attention to the authors of the single titles, even when I really liked them.

The problem with this is when something brings a book to mind and I go “oooh, I haven’t read that in forty years. I want to look at it.” And I realize, in shock, that I never knew the name of the author and the title probably has nothing to do with the original.

Well, there was this book that I found in the boxes in the attic, called in Portuguese Um Pequeno Heroi (A little hero) which, btw, was an insane title for it as the main male character was about fourteen and Pequeno is normally used for LITTLE boys. I wonder if it was the pious title that made my brother hate it or that – as I’ve found out over the unfolding of the last few decades – that my brother and I have fundamentally different concepts of life and even of good and evil?

Back then, my brother, being ten years older than I, was, of course, the arbiter of my reading taste. I remembered he hated this book and said it was “trash” which made it very much a guilty pleasure. I read it on the sly, but I must have worn it reading it.

Yet, here I was stuck, with no idea how to find it. I had always assumed the author was either British or (because of certain oddities in the language) perhaps American.

The only scene I remembered VIVIDLY from the book (other than the general impression, of course) was the scene in which the little girl who is the supporting character, is running madly around the fire. She has malarial fever (which is what brought it to mind as a character in a book I read recently suffered malarial attacks) and the young man who was the main character had to find her quinine to save her life. I also remembered her name was Nell, the book took place around the time of the Mahdi rebellion and the characters’ fathers were engineers with the Suez canal building crew.

So… I went to google and looked up Nell, quinine, Mahdi, Suez Canal. I got it immediately, on the third link down: In Desert and Wilderness by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Turns out the author is Polish and that the book has been made into a movie which I’m almost afraid of buying. It is available for free here: http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/i/16367-in-desert-and-wilderness-by-henryk-sienkiewicz

but I chose to get it for a couple of dollars from Amazon.

I also confess that I haven’t read it yet, though the description of the book made me realize why I liked it so much… there is something to the plot that for some reason reminds me of Dave Freer’s work, which I also love. It’s the whole doing what has to be done to protect the innocent and helpless, no matter how unpalatable or difficult the actions.

I haven’t read it yet because its original being polish, another issue intrudes: how is the translation into English? Some Dumas translations render him unreadable, for instance. In fact my older son thought I was nuts for liking the three musketeers until he learned enough French to read it in the original.

So I’m being a bit of a wussy about sampling it, but, meanwhile, I’m also in awe and amazed at how easy it was to find on a scrap of memory.

For those of you younger than thirty or so, in the bad old days, say twenty five years ago, this search would have taken years, if it were possible at all. And I’d never have found the book absent a very knowledgeable antiquarian or book searcher (yes, people used to make a living searching for this sort of thing.)

We often hear about the “challenges” and “issues” of our high tech civilization. (Of course I’ve long thought most of those complaints are bellyaching and the equivalent of “but I don’t wanna learn new stuff!”.) It’s good, now and then, to have graphic proof that this is a wonderful world that most of our – even recent – ancestors would consider a miraculous one.