Secrets & Lies Korean Style
The temporary break in the Royal Mail strike has meant post being delivered canalside again. Now any package that does not contain dubious chemicals is reason for joy, but one unexpected parcel this morning had me dancing while still in my boxer shorts. Given it had my publisher's logo stamped all over it, I knew it was safe to rip open, but I was not expecting what dropped onto the table – a Korean edition of Secrets & Lies. The slip from my editor simply said with wonderfully precise irony: ‘Your fame spreads!’
Shamefully lacking any fluency Korean, I have no idea how my name translates or whether they have kept in my song nods in the picture captions. It would be shame if the references to The Ruts (Babylon Is Burning), Bowie (Station To Station) and Stiff Little Fingers (Alternative Ulster) have all been lost. Then again, given I am not sure how big Luke Haines’ exquisite Baader Meinhof project was in South Korea, it might only be a loss to one soul in Seoul.
There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty about Secrets & Lies Korean style: it looks beautiful. The cover is fabulously eccentric. Does having Harold Wilson, the tail of an Apatosaurus and an upside down George W. Bush grasping John Kerry sell books in South Korea? Having a pipe smoking Cary Grant and a praying Bill Gates on the back certainly works for me.
Inside it is almost as if a manga-influence runs through the 456 pages. Halftone dots and dashes of gravure effect as design elements, pictures erupting with the impact of a good graphic novel splash. The layout simultaneously gives my words both kinetic energy and gravitas. Even the backpage flap advertising the Korean edition of Conspiracy Theories reminds me of the ‘Next issue’ trailer used by DC. I adore it.
Shamefully lacking any fluency Korean, I have no idea how my name translates or whether they have kept in my song nods in the picture captions. It would be shame if the references to The Ruts (Babylon Is Burning), Bowie (Station To Station) and Stiff Little Fingers (Alternative Ulster) have all been lost. Then again, given I am not sure how big Luke Haines’ exquisite Baader Meinhof project was in South Korea, it might only be a loss to one soul in Seoul.
There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty about Secrets & Lies Korean style: it looks beautiful. The cover is fabulously eccentric. Does having Harold Wilson, the tail of an Apatosaurus and an upside down George W. Bush grasping John Kerry sell books in South Korea? Having a pipe smoking Cary Grant and a praying Bill Gates on the back certainly works for me.
Inside it is almost as if a manga-influence runs through the 456 pages. Halftone dots and dashes of gravure effect as design elements, pictures erupting with the impact of a good graphic novel splash. The layout simultaneously gives my words both kinetic energy and gravitas. Even the backpage flap advertising the Korean edition of Conspiracy Theories reminds me of the ‘Next issue’ trailer used by DC. I adore it.
Labels: Conspiracy Theories, Luke Haines, Secrets And Lies, South Korea
posted by David at 6:14 PM
8 Comments:
You sound like the proud father and rightly so.:-)
Congratulations.
I've been reading Secrets and Lies this week for the first time. While I am no expert on anything, I was deeply impressed with it. Respect.
I'm afraid the picture conjured up in my mind of you dancing in boxer shorts stopped me mid sentence and I could go no further, even at a langorous pace... only kidding! (not about the shorts)
Well done did the English version have 456 pages?
Wow that is so cool. Are they going to sell it in North Korea too?
Congratulations! How absolutely wonderful to see your book in print in another language. Even if you don't have any fluency. :)
That's awesome!! And I think you can be forgiven for not speaking fluent Korean! It's a beautiful language to look at though, isn't it? We have lots of Koreans in Seattle, so you see it about the place, usually on strip-mall churches.
Fantastic, congratulations! Nice that it turned out so well, and you are so pleased. Can you take a photo and give us a peek? Or refer us to the Korean amazon site? ;)
Kudos to you, David. Let me ask you something. When you see your words come back to you in strange tongues destined for faraway lands, does it feel a bit head-swimmingly otherworldly? I only ask because I had this experience once long ago, and it got me wondering how wordsmiths think about this phenomenon.
I had given a (really terrible) interview to a magazine many years ago - my own 3 minutes of family fame through the lense of an obscure trade publication. Fast-forward 5 years where I quite-by-accident discovered a Russian translation of the interview on this newfangled contraption called The Internet. To this day I can recall how discombobulated I felt. By what hand had my silly quotes been translated? Did anyone read them? How did they get there?
Such a small, remarkable world we live in, eh?
Babelfish is great for that. Type in your url, it translates your whole blog. Weird.
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