A LONG TIME COMING….AND THRILLED IT’S HERE! “It” being the opportunity to have a brand-new—and Totally COMPLETE!!—German translation of OUTLANDER (aka FEUER UND STEIN (“Fire and Stone”)….I wonder if they’d go for a new title, while they’re at it…). Long ago, when my then-agent made a deal with a German publisher for the first three books of the series, foreign publishers Did Not Talk to Writers, let alone consult them or inform them about translations. So it was quite some time before I learned that OUTLANDER, DRAGONFLY IN AMBER (aka DIE GELIEHENE ZEIT – “The Borrowed Time”; that one’s not too bad, but it’s not like there are no German words for “Dragonfly” or “Amber”….), and VOYAGER (“FERNE UFER” – “the far shore”) were each translated by a team of translators, in the interests of time. And, that in the process, roughly 25% of each novel had been excised. (No, they’re _not_ supposed to do that without written permission from the author.) I won’t go into the gory details—but in the fullness of time, I was tremendously fortunate in meeting the very talented photojournalist Barbara Schnell-- @Barbara_Schnell -- and still more fortunate in getting her as the translator of my work in German. Barbara works very closely with me, translating in my footsteps (i.e., I send her the completed chunks of book as they’re finished, rather than waiting for the whole manuscript to be assembled; this lets us get the German edition out almost as soon as the original English-language version), and her work has been widely praised by critics and fans alike. But both Barbara and I have always hoped for an opportunity to do a new, complete, from-scratch (well, from the original book) translation of those first three volumes. And…thanks to a new publishing arrangement, NOW WE CAN DO IT!!! We’re both absolutely thrilled and hope all our German readers will be pleased as well.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 09:37:10 +0000
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