LEARNED BOOKS NEED NOT BE DULL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 407, 11 April 1947, Page 12

LEARNED BOOKS NEED NOT BE DULL

This article

by Sir

Stanley

Unwin

LLD.

President of the |

| Znternational Publishers’ Congress, is exclusive to,"The Listener" ; in New Zealand. Bx

HE idea that unless a learned work was dull and unreadable -and preferably omitted no fact, however obvious-it could not be thorough (grundlich), was most effectively propagated by the Germans. They themselves believed it, and before the war it was a€cepted as almost axiomatic in most parts of the world, We ourselves were doubtless partly to blame because we were far too modest about the merits of British books and failed to point out that many ideas in much vaunted ponderous German tomes had been previously and much more lucidly expressed

in 2Mngiisn. I remember on one occasion a German publisher telling me that a certain technical book by an English author could not be competent because it was so readable ‘and interesting. I challenged him to find one single error or one single important omission in it. \He retorted that with such a work that must be easy; | but a week later he

returned to admit that to his great_surprise he had failed to detect any mistake or omission. This left him completely puzzled that in such circumstances the book could be so readable. To-day, there is no such surprise because the world has woken up to the fact that it is precisély in the English language that the most attractive as well as reliable and up-to-date scientific, technical and medical books are to be found. For example, when I was recently in Budapest, a Hungarian -bookseller told me how enthusiastic he had been about a supposedly popular book on mathematics by a German until he read Hogben’s Mathematics for the Million, when he immediately realised that by comparison the German book was not even second-rate. Two-Fold Result Now the result of this discovery of the outstanding quality of English scientific, technical and medical literature is two-fold. There is an almost unbelieyable demand from all over Europe for British books in these categories with which, owing to paper and labour shortage, it is proving almost embarrassingly difficult to cope, despite the preference to export orders given by all the better publishers. Then there is an unparalleled demand for translation rights. In some countries | the foreign publishers were unable to } secure the necessary sterling with which to buy the rights. In many such cases the British Council was able to come to the rescue by accepting payment in the local currency, using it on the spot

for its own disbursements and paying the equivalent in sterling to the British author or publisher. In consequence more British books are appearing in foreign translations than at any previous time and the demand for them is intense. If the translationg are well made, this is all to the good and most encouraging. As an instance of the extent of the interest in British ideas and the British way of life here is a startling fact, Eighty per cent. of the translations published in Hungarian during the war were from the English language, only from seven to thirteen per cent. were from Germanwhether or not this is evidence of the. real sympathies of the Hungarian people ethers can decide, but it clearly proves

their love of English books. But the publication of translations is not a one-way traffic. The desirability and importance of the issue of editions in English of the work of the best Continental writers is increasingly recognised. The fact that so few English people read foreign languages accentuates this need; and from the foreign

author’s point of view the fact that English has become the universal language through which his work can penetrate everywhere, accentuates. the desirability of his work appearing in English. The Allied Ministers of Education at a series of conferences in London studied most closely this whole problem of the interchange of books and ideas between the peoples of different nations and were emphatic in stating their conclusion that no obstacles’should be tolerated which hampeted such a desirable end. The International Publishers’ Congress has always fought strenuously for freedom for books and with no little success; but fresh barriers have arisen in recent years and seem constantly to be arising. It will be, let us hope, one of the first tasks of UNESCO to secure the removal of all these hindrances to the people’s better understanding of one another, without which there is no hope of peace in the world. Those who believe, as I do, that "a nation’s literature is the permanent embodiment of the experience of its greatest men and women" will agree that there can: be no more desirable thing for the nations of the world to offer one another.