Skip to main content

Publishing woes

As those of you know who have been visiting this blog for a long time, I have a degree in translation studies and work as a translator.

Part of my final thesis was the translation, into Icelandic, of the book Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation, by Umberto Eco. Just after I finished it and received my degree my supervisor applied for and got a grant to get the book published. The book would be an interesting addition to the small number of books on translation available in Icelandic and thus useful for translators wanting to study the theory behind their art. 

I recently met with my supervisor and he told me that he had been trying to discover who owned the publication rights to the original book, since permission must be sought from this party in order to legally publish the translation. This is where it gets complicated: no-one seems to know.

The book was written in English and published in Britain and thus the logical place to start was the British publisher. The British publisher pointed at the Italian publisher of a subsequent Italian edition, but when applied to they pointed right back at the British publisher. It's like some hellish Catch-22, but I for one am not laughing, since the publication of the translation is likely to be good advertising for my translation skills.

I am considering writing to Professor Eco to ask for his permission to publish, but where does one begin to search for contact details for someone who has very good reason to not want his contact information made public, lest he drown in fan mail?

Comments

George said…
I realize GOOGLE was demonized for their project to put every book online, but that would be better than the chaos in publishing that exists now. Books that are out-of-print become orphan books that no one seems to have any responsibility for. As you pointed out, getting rights for reprinting or translation is like an enigma wrapped in a riddle.
Dorte H said…
I can´t imagine the Italian publisher is not able to communicate with him. Have you tried to ask them to send a letter on to him?

If not, you could try the university of Bologna. He seems to be employed there. Again, they may not be willing to give you his address, but if you send him an official letter, I am sure they will hand it to him.
Bibliophile said…
Dorte, I will probably put together a letter to send to him, care of the University of Bologna. I'm thinking of checking if my supervisor can get me some paper with the University of Iceland letterhead or seal, to make it look more official.
Dorte H said…
An official letterhead sounds like the perfect move ;)

I wish you luck.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme