Complex Numbers

Thumbs Out

Just an easy article today, and writing-related:

Please don’t let anyone Americanise it!  

Clearly, they didn't Americanize the headline.

Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams was best known for creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a wildly successful project that began in 1978 as a science-fiction comedy radio series and eventually evolved to become something much larger, in many formats and in many languages, adored by many millions of people around the world.

I'll just point out that he did a lot more than that, including writing for Doctor Who, but it's Hitchhiker's that has embedded itself into public consciousness. Well, maybe not "public," but at least in the circles I frequent, one sign of certain intelligence is a good Hitchhiker's quote. Or a bad one.

This typically entertaining letter, which was actually a fax, was sent in 1992 to US editor Byron Preiss, whose company at the time was producing a comic book adaptation of Adams’ ever-expanding opus. Having noticed some unnecessary changes, Adams was keen to give some feedback.

I wish they wouldn't do that. Sure, Hitchhiker's has been translated into dozens of languages, but I find it offensive when they translate from British to American, as if we're too dumb over here to recogni[z/s]e that Brits spell a few words differently and have different words for several things than we do. I grew up reading both American and British literature, and while the differences did confuse me for a while, in the end, I feel like I became a better reader and writer for it.

Probably the worst offense was when they translated Philosopher's Stone to Sorcerer's Stone in the Potter books.

Anyway, the rest of the article is the letter itself, which is written, not unexpectedly, with hints of his signature dry humo(u)r. I'll just quote a few passages here.

A thing I have had said to me over and over again whenever I’ve done public appearances and readings and so on in the States is this: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it! We like it the way it is!

So it's not just me. Making it American would be like trying to do an American version of Black Adder, with American actors who have American accents. I know they did that sort of thing with a series (The Office, maybe?) but I never saw either version.

Though Hugh Laurie (who was in Black Adder), at least, does a great American accent.

The ‘Horse and Groom’ pub that Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the ‘pounds’ they pay with are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five – inflation). So why suddenly ‘Newark’ instead of ‘Rickmansworth’? And ‘Bloomingdales’ instead of ‘Marks & Spencer’? The fact that Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist! American audiences do not need to feel disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction.

It is simply not possible to get the same effect if you substitute a British pub with an American bar. While there are a few drinking establishments in the US that approximate the British pub experience, the culture is still completely different.

Of course, this is only a problem for the very beginning of the story, when Earth still exists. (Spoiler)

Or we could even take the appalling risk of just recklessly mentioning things that people won’t have heard of and see if they survive the experience. They probably will – when people are born they haven’t heard or anything or anywhere, but seem to get through the first years of their lives without ill-effects.

Those sentences are pure Adams.

(Incidentally, I noticed a few years ago, when we still had £1 notes, that the Queen looked very severe on £1 notes, less severe on five pound notes, and so on, all the way up to £50 notes. If you had a £50 the queen smiled at you very broadly).

Quoting this because it legitimately made me laugh. Damn, I miss Douglas Adams. Neil Gaiman is the closest we have to him now, and while one of my favorite writers, he just can't do comedy.

One other thing. I’d rather have characters say ‘What do you mean?’ than ‘Whadd’ya mean?’ which I would never, ever write myself, even if you held me down on a table and threatened me with hot skewers.

I suspect the latter construction is a feeble attempt to render a British accent in dialogue. No. Make the thing British enough, and our minds will provide the accents.

I rarely close one of these entries with a direct quote, but it seems appropriate in this instance:

Otherwise it looks pretty good.