Me In Other Languages

Since I’ve seen some folks tweeting about the release of Rites of Spring (Break) in Brazil — apparently the cover is black on top, like the cover of the first two books, though I haven’t seen it yet — and I’ve been laboriously (ha!) translating the tweets from Portuguese with the help of Google translate…

Since I’ve been listening to all the extraordinary sounds my daughter can make and reading articles about all the neural pathways she is creating and then discarding because she doesn’t need them in this world, in this language, in this time period…

Since I’ve been thinking about the fact that I don’t know another language (except for a smattering of Latin and Spanish) and how much I wish I had one to teach to my daughter, and how my personal regret has no doubt inspired me to make so many of my characters into polyglots, putting me at the mercy of my thankfully-fluent-in-German editor, and forcing me at times to consult professional linguists in hopes that I don’t mangle dead languages too much (Diana Peterfreund: driving copyeditors crazy since 2005!)…

I got to wondering how many languages my writing has been translated into. Discounting pirated editions (which — come on guys — I can GoogleTranslate a tweet, but a whole book?) I’ve got:

Russian, Portuguese (both Brazilian and European), Simplified Chinese, Turkish, Indonesian, Spanish, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, French, and German.

And those are just the ones I know about. If there were any translation sales of Kiss Me Deadly, I am not aware of them (though I know it sold in the UK and in Australia).

A lot of my writer friends have foreign editions sitting around, or like to post the covers of their foreign editions and muse on the changes to the artwork. I’ve never done this, because of the books that have been translated so far, they’ve always used the same art — or art similar enough (the Russian Secret Society Girl) that you’d have to spend a lot of time staring at it to tell it’s not the same photo).

It’s very humbling to think that my work has been translated into languages (twelve of them!) that I don’t understand — some I’ve never even heard. (My grandfather spoke Hungarian… as well as six other languages. Talk about a polyglot!)

By far my best foreign market is Brazil. I love you, Brazil. I love you, Brazilians. One day I shall visit your splendid country and sit on your beaches and enjoy chick lit with you.

But first I have to brush up on my Portuguese.