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Nikita Khrushchev (second right) with John F Kennedy in Vienna, 1961
Nikita Khrushchev (second right) with John F Kennedy in Vienna, 1961. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
Nikita Khrushchev (second right) with John F Kennedy in Vienna, 1961. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Literary laurels for Mr Khrushchev

This article is more than 8 years old

13 February 1961: The Soviet leader beat Lenin into second place on Unesco’s list, with 198 translations published in one year

Paris, February 12.
Among authors, living and dead, Nikita Khrushchev is the first living one to have been the most translated of either category within a twelve months. The figures, supplied by UNESCO, are for 1959. Nikita had 198 published translations in that year, while the runner-up for the dead, Vladimir I. Lenin, who had held first place for several years, had only 174.

Mao’s comments are not yet known; perhaps he does not receive Unesco’s handouts. Close on Lenin’s heels comes the Bible with 171 new translations. Three more dead men fill the next places, Tolstoy with 130, Jules Verne (God bless him) with 124, and Dostoievsky with 114.

But the next competitor is still all alive-o, and indeed the only living author besides Nikita to have been translated more than a hundred times in twelve months. She is our Agatha Christie, with a score in 1959 of 103. When you think of the handicaps of her professional status, of the fact that all the meals she has cooked for her husband, Professor Mallowan, in the wastes of Assyria, have not yet secured her one translation into Kurdish, whereas during his brief stays in the Kremlin Nikita has only to wave his hand to win a point by a translation into Ostyak, her moral stature is even greater than her statistical success.

No hog?
But in fairness to Nikita it should be said that the total of translations into all the languages of the Soviet Union, ranging from Buryat to Lithuanian and from Ossete to Mordvin, was 5,254 as compared with 4,458 in 1958. Nikita does not seem to have hogged the market.

We should back the glory of our national Agatha all the more because another pillar of our quenchless fame, William Shakespeare, has had a setback. His translations fell from 127 in 1958 to 90 in 1959. Is any Government Department or university school of English looking into this?

Matter of importance
The continued success of Jules Verne is a matter of some importance to us islanders. In countries where the British are little known, his British heroes, the crew of “Five Weeks in a Balloon” (his first book), the principal characters of “The Children of Captain Grant,” the hero of “Round the World in Eighty Days” and even the cantankerous Captain Hatteras, who found the North Pole on a volcanic island in a warm hyperborean sea, have for nearly a century been among the most successful exponents of “the British way of life.” Jules Verne may have got it all wrong, but his young readers think it’s all right, and his generous books continue to win us friends.

All good humanists will also rejoice that Hans Andersen and Karl Marx are running neck and neck at 69 translations each, although Andersen, with twelve years of seniority, might be expected to feel his age more.

Two other living British authors have scored over fifty translations in the year - Mr Somerset Maugham and Mr Graham Greene. To most of us it will be of particular satisfaction that Pasternak, still alive in 1959, was also in the fifty class along with his dead fellow countrymen Turgenev and Pushkin. The Kremlin does not have it all its own way.

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