IT IS a dilemma that translators must face with some frequency:
what to do with a piece of bad writing. Make it sound better, and
save the author's blushes; or present the text, warts and all? But
when the text in question is Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler,
the dilemma is that much more acute.
For James Murphy, the first translator of the Führer into
English, the challenge of rendering such tortured prose into
something intelligible proved almost overwhelming, as his son
Patrick recounted in Mein Kampf: Publish or burn? (Radio
4, Wednesday of last week).
Mein Kampf comes out of copyright at the end of this
year, and the Bavarian regional government, who effectively own the
German copyright and have prevented any new editions since 1945,
are in a quandary what to do next. While publication in Germany
might constitute a breach of the law against incitement to racial
hatred, some argue that German readers should be able to engage
with the text, albeit accompanied by commentaries and apologias
indicating all the ways in which the text deviates from
reality.
Elsewhere, Mein Kampf is readily available, and
English-language publishers report steady sales.
Publishers such as Random House are keen to make clear that any
profits from such sales go to anonymised academic charities. One of
the most remarkable artefacts dug up by Chris Bowlby in this
documentary was a copy of Mein Kampf in serial form, with
all profits going to the British Red Cross Society. The
illustrations of "typical Jewish types" that adorn the pages are
all the more chilling when they appear in association with such an
august British institution.
The slippery nature of language and its translation was at the
heart of an excellent edition of Beyond Belief (Radio 4)
last week. What does it mean to be a fundamentalist? It is a term
that has been batted around the news and opinion columns with
increasing enthusiasm recently; but are we giving fundamentalist a
bad name?
Ernie Rea's academic guests certainly thought so, as did the
gentleman interviewed, who proudly described himself as an Islamic
fundamentalist when it came to issues of compassion and
tolerance.
The term "Islamic fundamentalist" entered Western consciousness
in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, where it was associated with
intense religious devotion and anti-modern, anti-Western cultural
politics. But, as the experts here argued, it is the expression of
Sunni Islam found in the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia which
more properly deserves the term fundamentalism.
Finally, Witness (World Service, last Friday) told the
story of Raoul Wallenberg. "An angel in hell" was how this Swedish
diplomat was described by one grateful survivor of the Holocaust in
Hungary; for Wallenberg is credited with saving thousands of lives
by distributing fake IDs. His fate? In 1945, he disappeared into
the Soviet prison system, perhaps on suspicion of spying for the
United States - which only goes to show that it is rarely good
enough just to do the right thing.