Science fiction is an international phenomenon—it’s published far and wide, in every major country of the world and some surprising minor ones—and, since I’ve had a long and busy career, my books and stories have been translated just about everywhere. It’s been a little hobby of mine to track down those foreign translations, because I find it fascinating to stare at a book in, say, Finnish or Estonian, and know that I was the organizing intelligence behind all those words and yet am unable to read anything in the whole book except “Robert Silverberg.”
The number of my translated editions is immense. I’ve written about as much science fiction as anyone who ever tried it, and almost all of it has been published abroad, often many times over as a single title passes through one edition after another. For example, my novel The Book of Skulls has had three Italian publishers and four in France. Dying Inside has been done five times in France and twice in Italy. Add in the various German, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Japanese, Israeli, Czech, and other editions, and you can see that one novel can easily generate forty or fifty foreign items.
It hasn’t always been easy for me to get those foreign editions, though. Usually the publishers are contractually obligated to send them to me, but not all of them have done it, especially the ones who simply pirated the work, as was the custom in the Communist sphere before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over there they regarded our copyright laws as evil capitalistic nonsense and took whatever they liked, without asking permission or making payment. (And even after our Marxist brethren decided to honor Western copyright laws, I had an agent in that part of the world who cheerfully made sales for me in such countries as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, and pocketed the proceeds. Naturally he wasn’t sending copies of the books, either. Eventually I caught wise, but by then he had absconded to Slovakia and has not been heard from since.)
But some of the publishers have sent the books. I travel widely, too, and I’ve made a point, when visiting a country that I know has published my work, to check out the local bookstores and buy whatever I find. Also I’ve been lucky enough to make contact with fans in such places as Sweden, Finland, Israel, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, Greece, and even China who have located my translated books and sent them to me in exchange for English-language copies of my work. Sometimes I’ve even been able to connect with a foreign book dealer who can find and ship me my books.
But one big difficulty has been the lack of bibliographical information. Titles get changed when books get translated. I don’t necessarily know what the Polish edition of Downward to the Earth was called (W Dol, do Ziemi), or the Czech version of Dying Inside (Umiranu v Nitru, as it turns out), and so I can’t compile a proper wantlist. Sometimes I can guess—I’m fairly fluent in Italian, have a modest reading knowledge of French, Spanish, and German, and decoding Poland’s Czlowiek w Labiryncie into The Man in the Maze, or Stacja Hawksbilla into Hawksbill Station, wasn’t all that hard. But where there’s an alphabet barrier, as in China, Japan, Korea, Israel, or Russia, I can’t even begin to figure out which book is involved. So, despite years of diligent search, I’ve been lacking hundreds of my foreign editions. I keep a chronological ledger of all my story sales, one line per work with the last box on the line reserved for an entry about its publication, and the number of such boxes that were blank, in a ledger that goes back to 1953 and records my first foreign payment in 1958, was formidable and dismaying.
However, we all live in the far future, these days—the Internet age, where a couple of clicks will bring almost any bit of information you might want, and where you can communicate with people in remote lands instantaneously and without even any postage cost. So I’ve been spending a good deal of time this year in roving the planet via the aptly named World-Wide Web to track down those missing books. And a fascinating adventure it has been for me, an astonishing one, even, demonstrating for me again and again not only the international nature of science fiction but what a small planet this has become.
The first great Internet boon is bibliographical information. A little Googling around turns up wonders. I am missing many of my Polish translations, for instance—but a search for “Polish Science Fiction Bibliography” led me to the Institute of Literary Research in the Polish city of Poznan, and a quick e-mail query about Polish editions of my work brought me an immediate reply in good English from the wonderful scholar Zyta Szymanska, who was overjoyed that an actual living writer wanted to make use of the Institute’s research. (Again and again in this quest I encountered amazement at the foreign end of things over my inquiries, as though they had trouble believing that the actual Robert Silverberg would be writing to them or that he cared so much about his translated editions.) She promised to hunt out all of my Polish translations, and over the next few weeks she sent me a series of bibliographies—one of my novels, one of my short stories, and then a consolidated list that bore the dedication, “In homage to Sir Robert Silverberg and his free imagination sinking into our minds over Iron Curtain.”
And the lists were full of revelations. I knew, of course, about the works for which contracts had been sent and money paid. But I had no idea that in the bad old Communist days my stories had been used without my permission in such magazines as Tygodnik Demokratyczny and Problemy and Przeglad Techniczny. In 1987, the Klub Fantastyki of Lodz had published an entire collection of my short stories. Even more interesting was a 1970 entry indicating that someone—we will probably never know who—had put together a typed collection of my stories, what is called a samizdat edition in Russian, done by carbon copy in an edition of one hundred.
I haven’t yet been able to find a Polish bookseller on the Internet to sell me copies of all these books. But around the time you read this I expect to be in Poland myself, where I’ll do some bookshopping with Zyta Szymanska’s marvelous list in my pocket.
My Polish bibliography was a custom-made job. Bibliographies of science fiction translations in many other languages are readily available on the inter- net, though, and after compiling lists of the books I want it has been fairly easy—or, sometimes, amusingly difficult—for me to find booksellers to provide them for me.
Lithuania was one of the not-so-easy ones. A publisher called Eridanas had bought Lithuanian rights to The Man in the Maze in 1997. A wonderful French website called “Lunatik” shows color photos of hundreds of SF books from all over the world—you can find it easily through Google if you want to see what some of these books look like—and there, under the Silverberg entries, I found a group of translated editions of Man in the Maze, including a lovely green book called Zmogus Labirinte, my Lithuanian edition.
A quick Google for Zmogus Labirinte took me to the website of what was plainly a Lithuanian online bookstore. Ah, but the site, although it seemed to be a reasonable imitation of the amazon.com home page, was entirely in Lithuanian, a language unrelated to any other living language on Earth except Latvian, and I don’t know any Latvian either. It might as well have been a Martian website to me. But when I keyed Zmogus Labirinte into what appeared to be a search box, I found myself looking at that pretty green cover. I clicked on what I hoped was a link taking me to the checkout counter, but no, what I got was a review of my book—in Lithuanian. I’m sure it was all the most extravagant praise, but I’ll never know. Back to the first page for a careful study of the other information offered. The “kaina”—price?—was 10,27 Lt. That sounded affordable. (What currency do they use in Lithuania?) They promised delivery, or so I assumed “pristatymo trukme” meant, in “5-10 dienu.” I looked for a payment link. Nope: I had to enter a password first, and that required me to register for the site.
In Lithuanian.
I took a stab at “naujo pirkejo registracija,” which surely was a link for new registrations, and my guess was a happy one. What came up was a series of boxes that looked just like any other website’s new-registration form, except that the captions were incomprehensible. The first line asked for “prisjungimo vardas,” the second wanted my “slaptazodis,” and a third line requested my “pakartoti slaptazodis.” Feeling something like Champollion deciphering hieroglyphics, I concluded that I was being asked to pick a username, then a password, and to repeat my password. Yes! Onward now to my “vardas”—name?—and “pavarde”—address? Bluffing wildly, I filled out the whole registration form, clicked, and was overjoyed to find that I was now qualified to buy books from Lithuania. A few more desperate clicks in the dark and I was at a recognizable credit-card page, where it was not really hard to figure out where to enter my Visa number, etc.
Reader, I bought the book. Two weeks later I had my very own copy of Robert Silverberg’s Zmogus Labirinte. It is a joy to possess it. I find something wondrous in the sound of my own prose in Lithu-anian. Gregory Benford, if you are reading this, be advised that the same procedure will get you a copy of your novel Didzioji Dangaus Upi, which is advertised in the back of my book.
My venture into darkest Lithuania was the most dangerous of my forays in quest of my foreign editions. For all I knew, I was buying not only my own book with that blind click but hundreds of others from the same publisher, though that was not what happened. By comparison, my purchases from France, Germany, and Spain were sheer simplicity. The Dutch ones were tricky but not beyond my abilities, though it took some patience, as I will eventually relate. In Israel and Bulgaria, where not only can’t I speak the language, I can’t even read it, I was spared the need for wrestling with mysterious alien websites, because kind English-speaking friends there bought the books for me. I’ve had the same sort of assistance in Hungary and the Czech Republic. And in Italy—ah, but there’s no room here for the details of how I got my Italian books.
I hope you find this as interesting as I do, because I’m going to continue it next issue.
