Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  I try to reply to everything because I once wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien praising one of his books, and I got a reply. It wasn’t a long one, but it was polite and he’d signed it and I’ve always thought, if he could do it with the kind of postbag HE got, I should too.

  Fans send in photos of themselves in ‘Discworld’ places. Apparently there’s a pub called The Shades in or near Skegness. There’s certainly a town in France called Oouks. So far no one has found Power Cable, Nebraska, but it is surely only a matter of time. And home-made badges turn up (many versions of ‘Librarians Rule Ook’). And suggestions for Discworld games and recipe books. And cakes (these sometimes turn up in signing queues).

  And always, there are more letters.

  A regular type of letter tends to originate with teachers and parents, and follows an almost standard line.

  Observation of a Discworld signing queue at an ordinary, city-centre bookshop (as opposed to one near a university, where the leather jackets creak like a tea clipper beating around Cape Horn) bears out claims that probably half Terry Pratchett’s readers are female. The general age of queuers appears to be in the mid-twenties (which may prove nothing; they may just be more likely to have an hour or two to spend in a queue). But there’s a lot of evidence that he has a big following among young teenage boys – particularly those who, in one librarian’s happy phrase, ‘don’t read’. Regular letters talk about reluctant readers and dyslexic boys who, after a dose of Discworld, are sprinting if not to university then at least to reading as a hobby. One letter put 12 GCSEs down to a massive course of Discworld books at the right time (there is no guarantee that this works for everybody.)

  No one seems to know why this is happening. The vocabulary of the books isn’t particularly easy. (Letter from an American reader: ‘I asked my mom what “priapic” meant. She said she thought it meant curly-headed. So we looked it up in the dictionary and found out: 1) that it didn’t mean curly-headed and 2) wow, what it really meant.’) An adult might feel that full enjoyment comes from spotting genuine historical references and hidden jokes, and could wonder whether anyone under eighteen could really understand the wound-up psyche of Granny Weatherwax or the middle-aged gloominess of Captain Vimes of the City Watch. But they seem to.

  Reviewers occasionally point out the lack of the basic sex act in the books (this will probably stop now that Corporal Carrot, in Men at Arms, has felt the Disc move for him). In fact there is sex in the Discworld books, but it usually takes place two pages after the ending. There is often, too, a lot of sexual atmosphere and, when Nanny Ogg is around, some fairly explicit coded references. It’s a winning formula – if you know what she’s getting at, well, you know, and if you don’t then you probably won’t notice.

  What some of the young readers like (according to Anne Marley) is that the Discworld is a place to which they can escape but, at the same time, find familiar characters to whom they can relate – even if, superficially, that character is a witch, a seven-foot skeleton or an orang-utan. They like the way that everyday things, everyday situations and everyday attitudes are transposed onto the Discworld and given that special spin.

  Terry’s popularity is spread, as it often is with the older fans, by peer-group word of mouth. A mutual knowledge of the Discworld is something which young people can share; it’s a world to which they belong and which belongs to them.

  Although Terry’s books are literate and, perhaps, complex, he keeps them lively with good use of dialogue to advance the plot and with descriptive passages carefully constructed in ‘bite-size’ chunks and enlivened with humour.

  The humour is an important factor, says Anne. Younger readers frequently characterise it as ‘anarchic’ – and they welcome this. The contrasts, too, are appreciated: Death is the traditional tall, black-robed skeleton riding a flying white charger . . . But the horse’s name is Binky; the Discworld is charged with raw magic, but a lot of the time it doesn’t work properly and much of the real magic is down to ‘headology’.

  The Discworld novels deal with ‘social’ issues, too, but his young readers like the way that concerns such as equal opportunities and racial/religious discrimination are dealt with in a way which puts across the issues without ramming a moral down the reader’s throat.

  What writers traditionally have not had to face is electronic fan mail.

  There is no formal Discworld fan club. The mail on the subject suggests that Terry Pratchett backs away hurriedly from the suggestion. He doesn’t give very coherent reasons. The general impression is that he finds it embarrassing.

  The nearest thing to a fan club right now is available to anyone with a computer and a modem and, if they’re unlucky enough not to work for a company or attend a university which gives them access, a modest monthly sum to give them the right connections.

  It is called alt.fan.pratchett19 It is almost impossible to give a flavour of it in print without sounding strange. It is a little like written CB, and something like being at a party. Or several parties, all in one go. Blindfolded.

  In theory it’s a forum for those who appreciate the books, but exchanges segue into something completely different with extreme rapidity and generally head in the direction of the topics of food, traffic roundabouts, drink and, for some reason, pubic wigs. At the drop of a hat its members will argue about the origin of phrases like ‘at the drop of a hat’. It is certainly international.

  Terry Pratchett started writing occasional messages to it late in 1991, but generally reads the messages every day if only to stop them from piling up. Many of the personal mailings, at least around the start of the university terms, tend to be demands that he should state whether he is, or is not, him.

  He said: ‘When I first went on line I left myself open to about a thousand mailings on the lines of “Are you the Terry Pratchett or what?” It didn’t matter what I replied. If I played it straight and said “Yes” some of them would reply, “Oh, go on, you’re not, are you?” and I was damned if I was going to say “no”.

  ‘That’s settled down a bit now. Anyway, there are at least two other Terry Pratchetts in the world – one’s a kid and the other, last I heard, was an airline pilot in America. I was slightly embarrassed about saying “Yes, I am the Terry Pratchett” in case they came back with “What? It was YOU who foiled that hijacking over Chicago?”

  ‘I like the international aspects of it – the old “global community” bit. And it throws up surprises. For example, for several months I was in occasional correspondence with someone in San Francisco, and it was only when I met a friend of theirs in the flesh one day that I learned that my correspondent was female – she had a unisex name, which hadn’t given this away. This intrigued me. It wasn’t that I’d assumed she was male – I hadn’t assumed anything, I was communicating with another person without attributing any physical characteristics to them at all. We were simply paying attention to what each other said, which was nice.’

  THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

  ‘It’s All Klatchian to Me!’

  The Discworld books are translated into thirty-seven20 languages, including Japanese and Hebrew. They present astonishing pitfalls for the translator.

  The problems are not (just) the puns, of which there are rather fewer than people imagine. In any case, puns are translatable; they might not be directly translatable, but the Discworld translators have to be adept at filleting an English pun from the text and replacing it with one that works in German or Spanish.

  What can loom in front of a translator like the proverbial radio on the edge of the bathtub of the future are the resonances and references.

  Take Hogswatchnight, the Discworld winter festival. It’s partly a pun on ‘hogwash’, but also takes in ‘Hogmanay’ and the old Christian ‘Watch Night’ service on December 31. Even if people don’t directly spot this, it subconsciously inherits the feel of a midwinter festival.

  Or there’s the Morris Minor. To a Britisher ‘an old lady who drives a Morris Minor’ – and there�
��s still a few of both around – is instantly recognisable as a ‘type’. You could probably even have a stab at how many cats she has. What’s the Finnish equivalent? The German equivalent?

  Translators in the science fiction and fantasy field have an extra problem. SF in particular is dominated by the English – or at least the American – language. Fans in mainland European and Scandinavian countries must read in English if they’re to keep up with the field. That means that a foreign translator is working under the eyes of readers who’re often buying the book to see how it compares with the English version they already have.

  Ruurd Groot has the daunting task of translating not only the plot but also the jokes in the Discworld series into Dutch.

  Translating a pun is difficult but not impossible, he says, as long as it is a pun in the strict ‘linguistic’ sense: making fun by crossing the semantic and formal wires of words or expressions.

  And even when it proves to be impossible to invent an equivalent pun for the destination language, a deft translator may solve the problem by ‘compensating’ – introducing a pun for another word somewhere else in the sentence in such a way that the value of the original pun is restored.

  Strangely, the similarity of the English and Dutch languages is not always helpful. Many Dutch words and expressions have been borrowed from English and, of course, the same thing has happened in reverse, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the English word ‘forlorn’, for example, comes from the Dutch ‘verloren’ = ‘lost’. The side effect of this circumstance is that many Dutch readers of Terry’s original English text do not always catch what he really wrote; words may look familiar, but meanings have changed with time.

  In The Colour of Magic, Terry refers to the ‘Big Bang hypothesis’. Sadly for Ruurd, the erotic Bang-pun proved untranslatable. In Dutch, the theory translates as ‘oerknal’, which provides no hand-holds.

  However, the Dutch do refer to ‘het uitdijend heelal’ – ‘the expanding universe’. Ruurd altered this slightly to the ‘het Uitvrijend’ Model – sounding much the same – and which could be taken to mean ‘the Making Love Outwards Model’. When the author heard this he apparently sat there grinning and saying it’s the best ever title for a scientific theory.

  Much more difficult is the translation of jokes on local traditions or institutions well-known to English readers. And there are special considerations here. Dutch readers of some sophistication (as readers of TP tend to be, it goes without saying) would never accept substituting a reference to a Dutch television series for a similar reference to a BBC serial.

  Brits may blithely assume that everyone knows about Morris dancing or ‘A’ levels, but it is the experience of the Dutch that most foreigners’ knowledge of the country tends to run out somewhere south of the cheese, clogs and windmills department.

  Strangely enough, to a Dutch reader a reference to strictly Dutch ephemera would be jarring; they couldn’t imagine someone in Britain, let alone on the Discworld, being aware of them. Sad but true.

  Translators for ‘large’ nationalities – German, French, and so on – can maintain the fiction that everyone else is German or French and just localise the jokes in question. ‘Small’ nationalities have to replace little items of English/British arcana by references to globally known international, or more famous English, items.

  On the Discworld, that most international, or rather interstellar, of locations, strictly English or British references are only allowed in a Dutch translation if they are globally known – like the works of Shakespeare in Wyrd Sisters.

  Ruurd could rely on the fact that many Dutch people know Shakespeare, if only from television – played by British actors and subtitled in Dutch. But in Moving Pictures, problems for the translator exceeded all reasonable proportions. The films referred to in the book are well enough known, but the average Dutch reader might not recognise many of the translated quotations from the dialogues. In that case, he says, a translator can rely on a harmless version of snob appeal. If someone doesn’t know or recognise something, the translator can write in a tone as if anyone reading it of course will know all and it turns out that they do . . .

  ‘IK WEET NIET WAT JIJ ERVAN VINDT, MAAR EEN BORD ROTTI ZOU ER WEL INGAAN.’ This is the closest that Ruurd could get to Death’s line from Mort: ‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.’ A line for line translation here is impossible: a different colonial past means that ‘curry’ is not a household word in Holland. Also ‘I could murder a . . .’ in the sense of ‘I could really enjoy a . . .’ makes no sense in Dutch.

  Casting aside the avoidance of ‘localised’ Dutch expressions on this occasion, Ruurd opted for ‘rotti’. It is a near-funny word in itself, having the same echo of ‘rotten’ as it would in English. It belongs to the Surinam culinary tradition – Surinam being a small Dutch colony in South America. ‘Rotti’, like curry, is very hot stuff. Its mention in the context, with the vague implication that Surinam is cosmically more famous than the Netherlands, helps to replace for the Dutch reader some of the fun lost during translation.

  Characters’ names, too, can cause problems. Rincewind is introduced in the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. In Pyramids there is a passing reference to Lavaeolus, a Ulysses-type hero. Several books later, in Eric, we learn that Lavaeolus may have been Rincewind’s ancestor and it’s pointed out that Lavaeolus means ‘rinser of winds’. How does a translator get out of that?

  ‘In Dutch, Rinzwind is phonetically translated. It could be split into two parts, “Rins” and “zwind”, the former meaning “sour” and the latter taken as a short form for the old “gezwind”, meaning “fast”. This leads to a classical ancestor with a name like Oxytachus (“quickly soured”). To prepare the ground for this possibility, the Dutch printer has had strict instructions never to break the name Rinzwind at the end of a line, so that readers remain uncertain whether the name can be broken into Rinz- and -wind, or Rin- and -zwind.

  ‘Although I knew about the Rincewind/Lavaeolus problem when I translated Pyramids, I still decided to translate Lavaeolus as Melomanus, because this gave a better assonance to the classical hero Menelaus, but I made a note in case I ever had to give him a younger nephew named Oxytachus in the future!’

  Which is a point. A good translator of a series has to think ahead, to lay groundwork for the books to come.

  Granny Weatherwax, on the other hand, presents no ancestral problems (at least, not yet: as Ruurd says, translators of a series have to try to avoid painting themselves into a corner). Her name translates more literally into Opoe Esmee Wedersmeer, although Weerwas would be more direct. ‘Weder’ is ye olde form of the word ‘weer’, meaning ‘weather’. The ‘smeer’ part is a word used for greasy substances as applied to shoes or cart axles, but also for the stuff secreted in our ear passages (earwax = oorsmeer). There is an etymological link with the English word ‘smear’. Ruurd felt that the ordinary word in Dutch for ‘wax’ – ‘was’ – seemed less suitable, as being too ordinary.

  ‘Esmee’ is, as in English, short for Esmeralda, and Opoe is an obsolete endearing way of addressing grandmothers in Dutch. The term is still used to refer to certain old-fashioned ladies’ bikes – ‘opoefietsen’ = ‘granny bikes’.

  This has overtones of the ‘Morris Minor’ . . . You see? They have one after all . . .

  And finally . . .

  CRIPPLE MR ONION

  Requests for the rules of this game – played by assorted Discworld characters in various books – are regularly sent to Terry Pratchett. News filters back of CMO competitions being held. The line from the author is that, since it’s an unreal game, there are probably no official rules and anything people work out for themselves and like to play is fine by him. But the production of a Discworld card deck means that some sort of rules ought to be set out, and these are adapted from a ‘reconstruction’ by Andrew C. Millard (with thanks to Terry Tao for help with the modifiers), first published on the Interne
t. Andrew’s rules were designed for a deck of eight suits; we’ve adapted them so that they can now be played with the Caroc.

  They are complex. This is always useful in card games, where the phase of the moon can be invoked as a reason why someone’s carefully constructed hand is worthless after all. People should feel free to modify, simplify or even ignore . . .

  The Deck

  The full pack of seventy-three cards – the four suits plus the full Arcana – is required. When using parts of the Arcana as straight playing cards, the following normal suit functions are fulfilled by the first thirteen cards of the Arcana:

  Ace = the Ruler

  2=Temperance

  3=The Pool of the Night

  4=The Desert

  5=The Dome of the Sky

  6=The Witch

  7=The Watch Man

  8=The Wizard

  9=The Star

  10=The Mountain

  J=The Fool

  Q=The World

  K=Death

  The Game

  The game is like a hybrid of poker and blackjack, with each player being dealt nine cards. The valuable card groupings are based around the concept of the onion, which is a combination of two or more cards adding up to twenty-one. Aces (A) are one or eleven, picture cards (P) score ten and all other cards score at their face value.

  Although best played with four or five players, the game can be played with any number from two to seven, each with a ready supply of coinage or tokens. The players need to sit around a table, with two small pots/boxes in the centre – one for bets, one for discards.

  First Steps

  At the beginning of each round, one player is identified as Dealer, with the player to the Dealer’s left being the Elder and the player to the Dealer’s right the Younger. This sets the order of precedence in being dealt cards and in winning in the event of a tie – starting with the Dealer and proceeding around the table to the Younger. Whenever the Dealership changes, so do the respective precedences of the other players. The round opens when the Dealer shuffles all seventy-three cards, the Younger cuts the deck and the players place an amount equivalent to the Stake in the pot. The maximum amount for a raise is set by agreement of all players.