This afternoon, I received my author’s copies of the Chinese edition of The History of the Ancient World, published by Peking University Press.
The editors at Peking University Press seem to have chosen their own illustrations…and there are, sadly, no maps or timelines. Which does help trim the length. I think it must have been significantly abridged as well, and I’m curious about what was cut.
This is the author page:
I think it’s funny that they used that photo, which was pulled from a recent magazine article. But at least everyone in China now knows exactly how old I am.
So far, the History of the Ancient Worldhas appeared in Chinese, Russian (AST Publishing Group, Korean (Theory and Praxis), Bulgarian (Prozorets), Indonesian (PT Elex Media Komputindo), and Spanish (Paidos). I’m told by people who read Spanish better than I do that the Paidos translation is a particularly good one.
Foreign publishers don’t always send author’s copies, and so far I’ve only seen the Chinese, Korean, and Spanish volumes.
The History of the Medieval World is also in the pipeline, but translation is a long process…kind of like the books themselves.
Off now to cut some more pages from the still-too-long History of the Renaissance World manuscript…
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Any chance you’ll be able to find out what was cut? It would be interesting to see if the cuts were political or social or academic or some combination of the three.
No maps! Travesty… 🙂
Are these pictures taken with the new iPhone??
So how would one go about finding a copy of the Bulgarian translation? I just tried to google it, but couldn’t find it. But I did see where you had written back in 2007 (and apparently I commented on it) that you really wished you could read Bulgarian. My brother-in-law in NC is from Bulgaria…I’m wondering, if he would be willing, if he could help you out somehow with comparing it to the English version? He’s bilingual. Let me know if I can help you with this somehow!
Well, I can tell you that the author page says that “Susan Bauer is an American author who teaches in the English department at the College of William and Mary. Besides the four History of the World volumes, she has also published “The Well-Trained Mind a Guide to Classical Education at Home” (1999).” (I speak Chinese.)
Political considerations almost certainly played a role in what was cut, although genuine lack of understanding due to language difficulties tends to play a role as well. Really too bad about the maps–maybe that made the price more affordable for average people though?
I thought I’d add that it’s important to remember that writing a page of text in Chinese characters takes far less space than writing the same text in English (because every character or two characters represents an entire word). So the text may have been cut far, far less than it looks like it has been cut.
Now we know how to write your name in Chinese!
I found this on Amazon China, but it’s not in my local bookstore yet. I may order it (it’s a real process to order from Amazon here) for a friend of mine whose currently reading the Story of the World series in English. She’d love to have a version of your book in Chinese. Thanks for sharing this!
Is there any project of translation of your history books into French ? As a homeschooling mother in France (and in French…) I’d be VERY interested if so !