Hearings, Magistrates, Chauffeurs

March 15, 2016 10:26 AM

With trepidation, Weßel ordered a scan, which showed a typed carbon copy, with corrections in Koestler’s handwriting. The date on the title page, March 1940, was the date on which Koestler is known to have finished the novel. There was no doubt. Weßel had stumbled across a copy of the German manuscript of Koestler’s masterpiece. The implications of Weßel’s discovery are considerable, for Darkness at Noon is that rare specimen, a book known to the world only in translation.

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posted by Rustic Etruscan (16 comments total)

Huh. I had no idea that the _Darkness at Noon_ was a translation, actually.
posted by tavella at 10:37 AM on March 15, 2016

This book made a huge impression on me as a young adult. Thanks for the post.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:40 AM on March 15, 2016

I first read Darkness at Noon at university -- a long time ago, now -- for a course on 20th century political novels, and it made a deep and lasting impression. Thanks for this post -- it's fascinating!
posted by mosk at 11:06 AM on March 15, 2016

Superintense book is superintense. When people throw the word "totalitarian" around too easily, I recommend reading Darkness at Noon.....

Boy, did Koestler have issues, tho...the life that Koestler lived would be enough to drive anyone to character defects..... From a Michael Scammel retrospective of Koestler's life.....

" Koestler’s friend Manès Sperber spied “the paradox at the heart of his character” – a boastfulness and predilection for “provoking antipathy” coupled with sensitivity and insecurity. Another associate, Otto Katz, an editor Koestler worked with in Paris in the 1930s, told him: “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex – it’s a cathedral.” Koestler liked the line well enough to include it in a memoir."
posted by lalochezia at 11:10 AM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow. Fantastic and unexpected news; I've posted it at LH. Many thanks!
posted by languagehat at 12:41 PM on March 15, 2016

This raises the question, what other books are known only in translation? I have a vague notion of Greek material known only through Latin translations, but I can't for the life of me (or googlefu) nail down any examples.
posted by BWA at 1:27 PM on March 15, 2016

Googling on the phrase in translation, I discover that parts of the book of Esdras are known only as translations (in multiple languages) of the Greek that translated the Hebrew, with both Greek and Hebrew lost.
posted by tavella at 1:36 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

It sounds from the article as if Darkness at Noon was a fairly poor translation. I feel a bit sorry for Hardy: she was only twenty-two, and had been educated at art school after the age of fourteen, so producing a novel-length translation under severe pressure sounds like it was ferociously difficult.
posted by Azara at 2:27 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

So fascinating! I am not good enough at German to read the original, but will look forward to a new translation.

However, as a person who read this during the cold war: a lot of the euphemisms and indirect allusions were understood completely for what they were right there. I'm really happy to learn Koestler wasn't doing this deliberately, but even though I was born as late as 60's it was part of my secondary school education to learn to read eastern block and literature from fascist countries that way.
posted by mumimor at 2:58 PM on March 15, 2016

This raises the question, what other books are known only in translation? I have a vague notion of Greek material known only through Latin translations, but I can't for the life of me (or googlefu) nail down any examples.

Yvgeny Zamyatin's masterpiece We (1924) was written in Russian, was banned in the USSR, and appeared first in an English translation. A Russian edition was eventually published, supposedly back translated (but maybe based on the original).

In addition, several books of Jewish Hebrew literature survived only in Christian Greek translations (Book of Judith, Maccabees), and others in Ethiopian Jewish texts in Ge'ez.
posted by jb at 4:28 PM on March 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

> A Russian edition was eventually published, supposedly back translated (but maybe based on the original).

Just checked Russian sources to be sure, but no, this didn't happen (and why would it? the Russian text was widely available, just not in the USSR). You may be thinking of the fact that mutilated excerpts were published in the Prague journal Volya Rossii in 1927 for various complicated and annoying reasons, but that was more of a historical blip than an actual publication event.

A lot of well-known "Russian" works were originally written and published in other languages, from the letters of Chaadayev to the novels and memoirs of Victor Serge (in both cases the authors wrote in French), but that's a different thing, of course.
posted by languagehat at 4:58 PM on March 15, 2016

or maybe I just remembered wrong - I read about this 18 years ago. Or maybe the introduction to 1970s era paperback wasn't accurate.
posted by jb at 10:43 PM on March 15, 2016

But the excerpt thing does ring a bell. Maybe that was what I had read.
posted by jb at 10:44 PM on March 15, 2016

This raises the question, what other books are known only in translation? I have a vague notion of Greek material known only through Latin translations, but I can't for the life of me (or googlefu) nail down any examples.

The Book of Mormon
posted by flabdablet at 12:00 AM on March 16, 2016

The original version of Tristan and Iseult by Thomas of Britain was reconstructed based on an Old Norse translation. Though most of the original was still preserved.
posted by Kattullus at 8:19 AM on March 16, 2016

If we extend books to religious texts, there are a good number of Buddhist scriptures that we only have because of translations into Tibetan or Chinese from the original Sanskrit that we no longer have. For example, there is Sanskrit for only one portion of the Avatamsaka Sutra; the rest relies on Chinese texts.
posted by kokaku at 11:05 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]