I’ve been working on the website and the foreign editions today. To my amazement The Lost Diary of Don Juan is now being published in twenty-five languages. The embrace of the novel by cultures from Finland to Taiwan and Brazil to Bulgaria has been thrilling. It is no doubt every author’s dream. Getting to meet many of my publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October of 2006 was certainly one of the highlights of my life. (As I stood there at the party looking out at the crowded room I looked back at my journey from a kid with glasses and a reading disability [It was Pepperidge Farm cookies that taught me to read, but that’s another story] to standing in a room with publishers from around the world thanking me for writing the book for the people of Finland, Brazil, etc. It was surreal, and I had to swallow my feelings more than once with a swig of Rioja.
Of course, writing about a mythic character that was born from the caldron of Golden Age Spain, it was particularly confirming when Berta Noy, an extraordinary editor at the largest Spanish publisher, Planeta, bought the worldwide Spanish rights. Perhaps, equally amazing, a Catalan publisher is also publishing the book for the 11 million speakers of Catalan; the Catalonian translator told me that the word fig had a slang usage in his language, which I’m sure that every reader can imagine. This was of course Don Juan’s intention, but I told each translator to translate the book as they thought it would best be understood. It has been a pleasure working with so many talented translators, editors, and publishers. I did explain to the translators that I tried only to use words that existed in English already in 1593, give or take a few decades. It was very important for me to write with words that reflected Don Juan’s linguistic time period (for example the word motivation didn’t enter the English language until 1873). Don Juan and his contemporaries didn’t have “motivations,” they just had their character—and their desires. But desires are everything, including the bold desire to write words that will be read around the world.
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