Turtle Recall Part 36

I can explain all this. Firstly, the Discworld is not a real place. It's scenery for the novels. Anyway, there's no reason why worlds should all develop in the same way. The Greeks had all the necessary theoretical knowledge and technical ability to invent the wind-up gramophone the steam-powered gramophone, come to that. They just never did it. Whereas the Discworld is clearly waiting for steam and electricity and no one's got around to utilising either of them, so all that ingenuity is being channelled in other ways.

In one of the books you call Discworld 'a world, and mirror of worlds'.

Yes. I get amused when people say usually about Granny Weatherwax and co that they're just like people they know. I mean, they're supposed to be. That's one of the things a writer is supposed to achieve. But people seem surprised, as if a witch isn't traditionally meant to be like someone you know.

Tell me about Death.

It's what happens before bits of your body fall off.

The character . . . I think you've said you get more mail about him than anything else?

Hmm . . . Yes. Of course, there's Mort and Reaper Man, and he's the only character that appears in all the books- And in Good Omens and also Johnny and the Dead, I think.

Well, you know how it is when a studio has a big star under contract, they try to put him in all their films . . .

He's really the generic medieval personification, right out of The Seventh Seal, but with a few adjustments. I think people like him because he's got this pathetic lack of any sense of humour and is powerful and innocent and vulnerable all at the same time. It's true that he was a lot nastier in the first few books. By Reaper Man he's clearly going through some sort of mid-life crisis. Or mid-Death crisis.

You've said that you get rather more serious letters from old people and, er, the relatives of the recently deceased.

Yes, but that comes under the heading of private correspondence, I think.

I gather you get a lot of correspondence about the possibility of Discworld films. Will we ever see one?

I don't know. The only people with money to make films these days are in America. Now, I'd be the first to admit that there are plenty of intelligent Americans. But too many of the approaches we've had suggest that they don't really understand what the books are about, and maybe never could, and just want to acquire rights because they've heard it's a property. We get things on the lines of 'Wow, we'd love to do Mort, it's fantastic, it's high concept, but we think Americans will have a problem with Death so we'll leave him out, okay?' We get occasional European interest from nice people who haven't got money, but I've never seen much point in flogging off options to people who haven't much chance of getting something done and are just playing at it. It doesn't much worry me if no films get made.

Because you think of them as books?

Right.

I've seen some of the fan letters. What do you think of them?

The mail is fairly huge, and just about every letter wants me to do something, even if it's only write a reply. I think I manage to answer everything, sooner or later. It's the requests for signed photos that always throw me. Who cares what an author looks like?

It was a breakthrough for me when I suddenly realised, one day, that I could say 'no' to things, that if the diary was really full up I could turn something down politely and needn't feel guilty. I still do feel guilty.

You seem to have become a.s.sociated with computers. Do you see yourself as an 'electronic' author? There seems to be a large overlap with your fans and computers users. I was at a talk you gave when you asked the audience how many worked with computers on a daily basis, and about half the hall raised their hands.

Yes, but I was daft to ask. Almost everyone in a white collar job these days has a computer around the place somewhere certainly if it's a science-based job.

I went the route familiar to lots of people, bought a ZX81 when they came out, and worked my way up to bigger machines over the years. But I used to tinker a lot. Good old Sir Clive produced the sub-100 computer by leaving out the things people had thought computers needed, like a monitor or a disc drive or a decent keyboard. If you wanted to make the ZX81 do anything useful in the real world you had to learn something about it.

I wanted to do word-processing. If you added some memory and a proper keyboard you could do word-processing on a ZX81, provided they weren't very long words. And then you printed them out on a tiny printer that made the air smell like a minor industrial accident and copied it all out on a proper typewriter anyway. But it was Using A Computer, and I'd read too much science fiction when I was a kid not to Use A Computer if there was a chance to use one. So what if it made everything more difficult? You had to Grab the Future.

Electronics always fascinated me, I suppose because it's a kind of magic. When I was about twelve I had a pa.s.sion for making really tiny crystal sets; those were the days when, if you really saved your pocket money, you could afford to buy one transistor. I do remember, one day, looking at the latest postage-stamp-sized thing (which of course was connected to a pair of huge Bakelite headphones I was not perhaps a very logical thinker in this area) and saying to myself: you know, a circuit is only a lot of components all soldered together to do something; you could make it a lot smaller if you sort of built them all in one go. Yep, I independently came up with the idea of the integrated circuit . . .

Um . . . I'm pretty certain there must have been a few around by 1960, weren't there?

Probably. At least in a Texas Instruments lab or something. But I didn't know that. I was just this kid messing around with crystal sets. I was probably hit by a stray inspiration or something. And fat lot of good it did.

You say in your very slim autobiographical bits at least, you used to say that one of your hobbies was making computers do things they weren't intended to do. Such as what?

Work properly, usually. But after I'd worked for a bit at the good ole ZX I bought another one and built speech boards and electronic thermometers and barometer attachments and a real-time clock and wrote huge clunky programmes in BASIC to make it all work. It was a sort of weather forecasting machine.

I learned a lot. I'd never been very good at science at school and I was terrible at maths, but of my own free will I started to mess about with Boolean algebra and machine code. I'd just started working for the Central Electricity Generating Board at the time and I'd track down Serious Scientists in their lunch hour and say 'What's an elegant way to make the machine know that thirty minutes before quarter-past the hour is a quarter to the previous hour?', and they'd sigh and explain some function I'd never heard of. I think I actually got quite good at thinking in terms of hardware and software at the same time.

It all ended up with this huge rat's nest of wire and tons of memory and, in the middle of it all, this little ZX81 sweating like crazy to keep up.

The thing was, at school there'd never been any incentive to understand maths, except that you'd get hit about the head somewhat if you didn't. I really resented that, when I thought about it later on. I remember the Friday evening when I worked out how the machine memory addressing worked and there was this glow in my head as I realised all the things I could now do and I thought, 'Mathematicians must feel like this all the time! Why didn't anyone tell me it could be like this?'

Now my interest is less in the machines but in what they can do. For one thing, they do the filing. I write about two novels' worth of letters a year, and without the computer I'd be buried in filing cabinets.

As for the writing, I treat the machine like a big gla.s.s typewriter. I'm not really interested in going down the 'camera ready' road, and I probably use a fifth of the capabilities of the word-processing program and a hundredth of the capabilities of the actual computer; it's big and very fast and all that speed and power is focused on allowing one guy to work exactly the way he wants to.

But you once said your computer ate the final draft of Mort!

Well, okay. But that was because I was working late and wasn't very experienced and was so tired I kept typing 'Y' to all those little messages like 'Do you REALLY want to do something as b.l.o.o.d.y stupid as format the entire hard disc Y/N?'. It really happened because I was in the state of mental bewilderment I'm always in when a book's finished. Fortunately I'd put a print-out in the post to the publishers, and if the worst came to the worst I did have an early draft on a floppy disc. Anyway, it's not an argument against using computers, it's an argument against operating machinery when tired. And also against not being bright enough to know how to unerase things. I learned quickly after that.

The Discworld must be terribly difficult to translate. Do you have much to do with the translators?

I know the Spanish translator won a prize for The Colour of Magic! And someone attempting to translate The Colour of Magic into Polish read the first page and said he didn't believe it was possible to think like that in Polish. I get on very well with the Dutch translator, who takes a kind of skewed delight in tracking down the 'right' words, and the German translator also contacts me quite regularly someone recently told me they thought Reaper Man was better in German, which is some kind of triumph for the translator. I do get some occasional enquiries from the others, but mostly the translators do their own thing. I don't envy them. A lot of foreign fans are bi-lingual, and its hard to please everyone.

Someone said I should ask you where you get your shirts . . .

Look, all that happened is that when I was on tour in Australia in 1990 I found a shop in Melbourne that sold really good cotton shirts, of a kind I've never been able to find anywhere else. So I bought some. And when I went through again in 1992 I bought some more. And when I went through again in 1993 I bought some more. But I don't buy all my shirts in Australia. Just most of them.

Another aspect of the Discworld fandom that has changed remarkably over the years is the relationship between the author and his readers. In this world of Discworld conventions and online communities, it's fascinating to look back through the years to see that it wasn't always so . . .

READERS AND FAN MAIL.

(originally published in The Discworld Companion, 1994) A survey of the cardboard boxes in which Terry Pratchett stores his fan mail, if that's the proper word for it, turns up one or two constants.

1) A statistically-significant number of readers meet other Discworld fans while on holiday on otherwise unspoilt Greek islands; one went so far as to claim to have met him, which shows pretty good eyesight since his diary reveals that at the time he was in Australia.

2) A large number of GCSE students do projects on him.

Terry: Oh, yes. The less inventive letters go like this: Dear Mr Pratchett, I am one of your greatest fans, I have read all your books, I am doing a project on you for GCSE, can you please send me everything, can I please have it by Friday because it's due in on Monday . . .

A browse in his correspondence files suggests that he tries to oblige rather more than he lets on, even when the letters contain twenty numbered questions on the lines of '7) Is writing a puffish thing to do?' and 'I'd like to be a writer when I leave school. 1) Are you on Flexitime?'

The lengthy ones get the Update, an A4 page in really tiny print which contains answers to most of the frequently-asked questions.

3) A large number of letters from people under sixteen are full of numbered sentences.

Terry: I don't know why. Maybe that's how they're taught to do it: 'Dear Mr Pratchett, Can I ask you some questions, 1) Where do you get your ideas from?' . . .

All letters get answered, except for those he refers to as the terminally weird or unreadable. He lives in constant low-key guilt that he might have missed some.

Terry: You're on tour, and a kid in the queue comes up with his mum and says 'I sent you a letter' and you think, jeez, did I answer it? I've got away with it so far.

I try to reply to everything because I once wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien praising one of his books, and I got a reply. It wasn't a long one, but it was polite and he'd signed it and I've always thought, if he could do it with the kind of postbag HE got, I should too.

Fans send in photos of themselves in 'Discworld' places. Apparently there's a pub called The Shades in or near Skegness. There's certainly a town in France called Oouks. So far no one has found Power Cable, Nebraska, but it is surely only a matter of time. And home-made badges turn up (many versions of 'Librarians Rule Ook'). And suggestions for Discworld games and recipe books. And cakes (these sometimes turn up in signing queues).

And always, there are more letters.

A regular type of letter tends to originate with teachers and parents, and follows an almost standard line.

Observation of a Discworld signing queue at an ordinary, city-centre bookshop (as opposed to one near a university, where the leather jackets creak like a tea clipper beating around Cape Horn) bears out claims that probably half Terry Pratchett's readers are female. The general age of queuers appears to be in the mid-twenties (which may prove nothing; they may just be more likely to have an hour or two to spend in a queue). But there's a lot of evidence that he has a big following among young teenage boys particularly those who, in one librarian's happy phrase, 'don't read'. Regular letters talk about reluctant readers and dyslexic boys who, after a dose of Discworld, are sprinting if not to university then at least to reading as a hobby. One letter put 12 GCSEs down to a ma.s.sive course of Discworld books at the right time (there is no guarantee that this works for everybody.) No one seems to know why this is happening. The vocabulary of the books isn't particularly easy. (Letter from an American reader: 'I asked my mom what "priapic" meant. She said she thought it meant curly-headed. So we looked it up in the dictionary and found out: 1) that it didn't mean curly-headed and 2) wow, what it really meant.') An adult might feel that full enjoyment comes from spotting genuine historical references and hidden jokes, and could wonder whether anyone under eighteen could really understand the wound-up psyche of Granny Weatherwax or the middle-aged gloominess of Captain Vimes of the City Watch. But they seem to.

Reviewers occasionally point out the lack of the basic s.e.x act in the books (this will probably stop now that Corporal Carrot, in Men at Arms, has felt the Disc move for him). In fact there is s.e.x in the Discworld books, but it usually takes place two pages after the ending. There is often, too, a lot of s.e.xual atmosphere and, when Nanny Ogg is around, some fairly explicit coded references. It's a winning formula if you know what she's getting at, well, you know, and if you don't then you probably won't notice.

What some of the young readers like (according to Anne Marley) is that the Discworld is a place to which they can escape but, at the same time, find familiar characters to whom they can relate even if, superficially, that character is a witch, a seven-foot skeleton or an orang-utan. They like the way that everyday things, everyday situations and everyday att.i.tudes are transposed onto the Discworld and given that special spin.

Terry's popularity is spread, as it often is with the older fans, by peer-group word of mouth. A mutual knowledge of the Discworld is something which young people can share; it's a world to which they belong and which belongs to them.

Although Terry's books are literate and, perhaps, complex, he keeps them lively with good use of dialogue to advance the plot and with descriptive pa.s.sages carefully constructed in 'bite-size' chunks and enlivened with humour.

The humour is an important factor, says Anne. Younger readers frequently characterise it as 'anarchic' and they welcome this. The contrasts, too, are appreciated: Death is the traditional tall, black-robed skeleton riding a flying white charger . . . But the horse's name is Binky; the Discworld is charged with raw magic, but a lot of the time it doesn't work properly and much of the real magic is down to 'headology'.

The Discworld novels deal with 'social' issues, too, but his young readers like the way that concerns such as equal opportunities and racial/religious discrimination are dealt with in a way which puts across the issues without ramming a moral down the reader's throat.

What writers traditionally have not had to face is electronic fan mail.

There is no formal Discworld fan club. The mail on the subject suggests that Terry Pratchett backs away hurriedly from the suggestion. He doesn't give very coherent reasons. The general impression is that he finds it embarra.s.sing.

The nearest thing to a fan club right now is available to anyone with a computer and a modem and, if they're unlucky enough not to work for a company or attend a university which gives them access, a modest monthly sum to give them the right connections.

It is called alt.fan.pratchett19 It is almost impossible to give a flavour of it in print without sounding strange. It is a little like written CB, and something like being at a party. Or several parties, all in one go. Blindfolded.

In theory it's a forum for those who appreciate the books, but exchanges segue into something completely different with extreme rapidity and generally head in the direction of the topics of food, traffic roundabouts, drink and, for some reason, pubic wigs. At the drop of a hat its members will argue about the origin of phrases like 'at the drop of a hat'. It is certainly international.

Terry Pratchett started writing occasional messages to it late in 1991, but generally reads the messages every day if only to stop them from piling up. Many of the personal mailings, at least around the start of the university terms, tend to be demands that he should state whether he is, or is not, him.

He said: 'When I first went on line I left myself open to about a thousand mailings on the lines of "Are you the Terry Pratchett or what?" It didn't matter what I replied. If I played it straight and said "Yes" some of them would reply, "Oh, go on, you're not, are you?" and I was d.a.m.ned if I was going to say "no".

'That's settled down a bit now. Anyway, there are at least two other Terry Pratchetts in the world one's a kid and the other, last I heard, was an airline pilot in America. I was slightly embarra.s.sed about saying "Yes, I am the Terry Pratchett" in case they came back with "What? It was YOU who foiled that hijacking over Chicago?"

'I like the international aspects of it the old "global community" bit. And it throws up surprises. For example, for several months I was in occasional correspondence with someone in San Francisco, and it was only when I met a friend of theirs in the flesh one day that I learned that my correspondent was female she had a unis.e.x name, which hadn't given this away. This intrigued me. It wasn't that I'd a.s.sumed she was male I hadn't a.s.sumed anything, I was communicating with another person without attributing any physical characteristics to them at all. We were simply paying attention to what each other said, which was nice.'

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER.

'It's All Klatchian to Me!'

The Discworld books are translated into thirty-seven20 languages, including j.a.panese and Hebrew. They present astonishing pitfalls for the translator.

The problems are not (just) the puns, of which there are rather fewer than people imagine. In any case, puns are translatable; they might not be directly translatable, but the Discworld translators have to be adept at filleting an English pun from the text and replacing it with one that works in German or Spanish.

What can loom in front of a translator like the proverbial radio on the edge of the bathtub of the future are the resonances and references.

Take Hogswatchnight, the Discworld winter festival. It's partly a pun on 'hogwash', but also takes in 'Hogmanay' and the old Christian 'Watch Night' service on December 31. Even if people don't directly spot this, it subconsciously inherits the feel of a midwinter festival.

Or there's the Morris Minor. To a Britisher 'an old lady who drives a Morris Minor' and there's still a few of both around is instantly recognisable as a 'type'. You could probably even have a stab at how many cats she has. What's the Finnish equivalent? The German equivalent?

Translators in the science fiction and fantasy field have an extra problem. SF in particular is dominated by the English or at least the American language. Fans in mainland European and Scandinavian countries must read in English if they're to keep up with the field. That means that a foreign translator is working under the eyes of readers who're often buying the book to see how it compares with the English version they already have.

Ruurd Groot has the daunting task of translating not only the plot but also the jokes in the Discworld series into Dutch.

Translating a pun is difficult but not impossible, he says, as long as it is a pun in the strict 'linguistic' sense: making fun by crossing the semantic and formal wires of words or expressions.

And even when it proves to be impossible to invent an equivalent pun for the destination language, a deft translator may solve the problem by 'compensating' introducing a pun for another word somewhere else in the sentence in such a way that the value of the original pun is restored.

Strangely, the similarity of the English and Dutch languages is not always helpful. Many Dutch words and expressions have been borrowed from English and, of course, the same thing has happened in reverse, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the English word 'forlorn', for example, comes from the Dutch 'verloren' = 'lost'. The side effect of this circ.u.mstance is that many Dutch readers of Terry's original English text do not always catch what he really wrote; words may look familiar, but meanings have changed with time.

In The Colour of Magic, Terry refers to the 'Big Bang hypothesis'. Sadly for Ruurd, the erotic Bang-pun proved untranslatable. In Dutch, the theory translates as 'oerknal', which provides no hand-holds.

However, the Dutch do refer to 'het uitdijend heelal' 'the expanding universe'. Ruurd altered this slightly to the 'het Uitvrijend' Model sounding much the same and which could be taken to mean 'the Making Love Outwards Model'. When the author heard this he apparently sat there grinning and saying it's the best ever t.i.tle for a scientific theory.

Much more difficult is the translation of jokes on local traditions or inst.i.tutions well-known to English readers. And there are special considerations here. Dutch readers of some sophistication (as readers of TP tend to be, it goes without saying) would never accept subst.i.tuting a reference to a Dutch television series for a similar reference to a BBC serial.

Brits may blithely a.s.sume that everyone knows about Morris dancing or 'A' levels, but it is the experience of the Dutch that most foreigners' knowledge of the country tends to run out somewhere south of the cheese, clogs and windmills department.

Strangely enough, to a Dutch reader a reference to strictly Dutch ephemera would be jarring; they couldn't imagine someone in Britain, let alone on the Discworld, being aware of them. Sad but true.

Translators for 'large' nationalities German, French, and so on can maintain the fiction that everyone else is German or French and just localise the jokes in question. 'Small' nationalities have to replace little items of English/British arcana by references to globally known international, or more famous English, items.

On the Discworld, that most international, or rather interstellar, of locations, strictly English or British references are only allowed in a Dutch translation if they are globally known like the works of Shakespeare in Wyrd Sisters.

Ruurd could rely on the fact that many Dutch people know Shakespeare, if only from television played by British actors and subt.i.tled in Dutch. But in Moving Pictures, problems for the translator exceeded all reasonable proportions. The films referred to in the book are well enough known, but the average Dutch reader might not recognise many of the translated quotations from the dialogues. In that case, he says, a translator can rely on a harmless version of sn.o.b appeal. If someone doesn't know or recognise something, the translator can write in a tone as if anyone reading it of course will know all and it turns out that they do . . .

'IK WEET NIET WAT JIJ ERVAN VINDT, MAAR EEN BORD ROTTI ZOU ER WEL INGAAN.' This is the closest that Ruurd could get to Death's line from Mort: 'I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.' A line for line translation here is impossible: a different colonial past means that 'curry' is not a household word in Holland. Also 'I could murder a . . .' in the sense of 'I could really enjoy a . . .' makes no sense in Dutch.

Casting aside the avoidance of 'localised' Dutch expressions on this occasion, Ruurd opted for 'rotti'. It is a near-funny word in itself, having the same echo of 'rotten' as it would in English. It belongs to the Surinam culinary tradition Surinam being a small Dutch colony in South America. 'Rotti', like curry, is very hot stuff. Its mention in the context, with the vague implication that Surinam is cosmically more famous than the Netherlands, helps to replace for the Dutch reader some of the fun lost during translation.

Characters' names, too, can cause problems. Rincewind is introduced in the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. In Pyramids there is a pa.s.sing reference to Lavaeolus, a Ulysses-type hero. Several books later, in Eric, we learn that Lavaeolus may have been Rincewind's ancestor and it's pointed out that Lavaeolus means 'rinser of winds'. How does a translator get out of that?

'In Dutch, Rinzwind is phonetically translated. It could be split into two parts, "Rins" and "zwind", the former meaning "sour" and the latter taken as a short form for the old "gezwind", meaning "fast". This leads to a cla.s.sical ancestor with a name like Oxytachus ("quickly soured"). To prepare the ground for this possibility, the Dutch printer has had strict instructions never to break the name Rinzwind at the end of a line, so that readers remain uncertain whether the name can be broken into Rinz- and -wind, or Rin- and -zwind.

'Although I knew about the Rincewind/Lavaeolus problem when I translated Pyramids, I still decided to translate Lavaeolus as Meloma.n.u.s, because this gave a better a.s.sonance to the cla.s.sical hero Menelaus, but I made a note in case I ever had to give him a younger nephew named Oxytachus in the future!'

Which is a point. A good translator of a series has to think ahead, to lay groundwork for the books to come.

Granny Weatherwax, on the other hand, presents no ancestral problems (at least, not yet: as Ruurd says, translators of a series have to try to avoid painting themselves into a corner). Her name translates more literally into Opoe Esmee Wedersmeer, although Weerwas would be more direct. 'Weder' is ye olde form of the word 'weer', meaning 'weather'. The 'smeer' part is a word used for greasy substances as applied to shoes or cart axles, but also for the stuff secreted in our ear pa.s.sages (earwax = oorsmeer). There is an etymological link with the English word 'smear'. Ruurd felt that the ordinary word in Dutch for 'wax' 'was' seemed less suitable, as being too ordinary.

'Esmee' is, as in English, short for Esmeralda, and Opoe is an obsolete endearing way of addressing grandmothers in Dutch. The term is still used to refer to certain old-fashioned ladies' bikes 'opoefietsen' = 'granny bikes'.

This has overtones of the 'Morris Minor' . . . You see? They have one after all . . .

And finally . . .