Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 7, December, 2004
 Contents
Introduction (by Ben Forkner).	P. 1
Orange Juice for the Bears: Anthony Burgess in Hungary
(by Ákos I. Farkas)	P. 3
Burgess Translated Into Polish (by Joanna Wierzbinska). 	P. 15
L’étrange cas d’Antoine Bourgeois, écrivain français
(by Douglas Milton)	P. 25
Anthony Burgess Centre
Université d'Angers
Maison des Sciences humaines 
2, rue Alexandre Fleming 
49066 Angers Cedex 01 (France)
Newsletter editor: Ben Forkner
Associate editor: Valérie Neveu

Introduction
By Ben Forkner
This current issue of the Anthony Burgess Newsletter has not been without its problems, but most of us have now learned to live in a permanent state of crisis, and are able to walk forward around the sink holes, rattlesnake pits, and hornet nests, pleased with a measure of daily progress, despite the certitude of disaster around the next corner. By myself, of course, the only solution would have been long ago a clean shot between the eyes, but fortunately, I have strong companions in the crusade, and generous help whenever it is needed. I would like to thank Akos Farkas for all he has done for this seventh issue. To begin with, he provided his essay, “ Orange Juice for the Bears : Anthony Burgess in Hungary, ” filled with intriguing details from Hungary’s Burgessians, including the news of original music for the Hungarian dramatization of One Hand Clapping, composed by a group of popular singers called (I am citing Professor Farkas from the text) Dolly Roll. Somehow, the score of this performance has to be recovered, and printed in the next issue of the Newsletter. I would also like to print (in English translation) the last chapter of Tamas Benyei’s The Innocent County : the English Novel after 1945. Clearly, we have much to learn from Hungary, and from all of eastern Europe. In addition to sending his own revealing piece, Professor Farkas must also be considered a sort of co-editor of this issue, for suggesting the essay by Joanna Wiersbinska on “ Burgess Translated into Polish. ” By the way, both Professor Farkas and Professor Wiersbinska were contributers to the Second International Burgess Symposium, “ The Lives of Anthony Burgess, ” held at the University of Angers last December 2004, and organized by Graham Woodroffe and John Cassini. I recommend to all our readers the account of the Symposium written by Professor Woodroffe for our Burgess online site. The third article in this currrent issue, “ L’Etrange Cas d’Antoine Bourgeois, Ecrivain Français ” is one more high wattage performance from another bright light of the Symposium, Dougie Milton, our merry myriad-minded Paris correspondent. I thank all of them, and all of you, and finally, by no means a mere ritualistic bow in the direction of our online genius, I thank my good friend and helpmate Valérie Neveu, without whom not an inch of this voyage would have been undertaken. 

Ben Forkner

Orange Juice for the Bears: Anthony Burgess in Hungary
by Ákos I. Farkas
Written as an anniversary homage to the memory of Anthony Burgess, the first, and longest, section of this paper was read at the 2003 conference of HUSSE, the Hungarian branch of the European Society for the Study of English. Although more has happened in Burgess’ afterlife in Hungary since that date than one might expect to happen in two short years, I have decided, in the spirit of Burgessian economy, against throwing away the old just to make room for the new. What follows then in the first section below is a carefully revised and considerably expanded reproduction of the original conference presentation, supplemented with a newly written conclusion in section two bringing the story of Anthony Burgess’ Hungarian reception up to the present.

1. From the Page to the Stage: the early 1970s through the mid 1990s
To start in medias res, I would like to cite, in my own translation, two quotations to suggest the uneven standard of what has been printed in Hungarian about Burgess in the twenty-five years to be surveyed in the first part of this assessment. This period stretches from 1970 to 1996, the years that saw the publication of the first, necessarily incomplete, and then, a quarter-century later, the second, supplementary, entry headed “BURGESS, Anthony” in Világirodalmi Lexikon, Hungary’s comprehensive, nineteen-volume Encyclopaedia of World Literature. However, my representative quotations come from elsewhere. The genre, if not the actual source, of each can easily be inferred from its style and substance. The chronology of their appearance might be less obvious, even if this much is revealed in advance: one came out shortly after the first, the other some time before the second date highlighted in the subtitle of this section. Here then are my representative bits of Burgess criticism in Hungary with the source and date deliberately suppressed for the time being:

He wrote books of a higher literary standard, too, treating subjects at least as substantial as that of (A Clockwork Orange). These include Earthly Power (sic) [. . .] and The End of the World News [. . .] he also wrote about Keats and Napoleon. Some say that he was overproductive, that his works are sometimes overwritten, and that he was often unable to resist his urge to tell a rattling good story or to instruct the reader. On other occasions, as in his structural-anthropologist treatise based on the myth of Oedipus, he reached intellectual heights where no earthling could ever soar with him.

Anthony Burgess, a remarkably prolific writer and literary critic, whose style is animated by a sense of grotesque humour, and who also happens to be [. . .] an accomplished musical composer and expert amateur cook, has come up with another surprising idea. [. . .] Behind the harmony of the polyphonic composition of his (recent] novel ABBA ABBA appears the colourful world of Roman street life. [. . .] [T]he picture resulting from a bizarre configuration of verifiable historical facts bears a striking resemblance to the self-portrait emerging from (Keats’s] authentic correspondence. What is most remarkable of all is that this biographical fantasia [. . .] is not only a highly readable but also a deeply stirring novel.

	Were it not for the discussion of the novel ABBA ABBA as a recent work, together with the immediacy of present tense forms in the second one of these passages on the one hand and, on the other, the finality of the past in references to two later works by Burgess in the first, the order in which they were published would be far from obvious. Without those hints, one might easily be misled into believing that the piece quoted first must have been written first, too. Surely, the author of our first-quoted passage would have avoided embarrassing himself with all his ill-informed and yet patronizing unwisdom about a garrulous and incomprehensible Burgess in his obituary, as the piece quoted happens to be, had he been informed by the astute critical insight and reliable factual information characterising much of the commentary that had appeared on Burgess in Hungary since at least the second passage, a book-review, came out fifteen years before the first.
	It may be unfair to expect from the London correspondent of a commercial daily—Magyar Hírlap [Hungarian Daily] as the newspaper is called (Sárközi 1993)—the same erudition that can be taken for granted when the reviewer is one of Ágnes Péter’s calibre. A leading Central-European authority on English Romanticism today, Professor Péter was, after all, a more than promising young scholar at the time she introduced ABBA ABBA to the readers of the literary monthly Nagyvilág [The Great World] in 1978. And yet, this admittedly lopsided comparison has implications much more significant than the unremarkable inference that a hurried newspaperman had not done his homework, while an ambitious young academic had. The obituarist’s journalistic lack of familiarity with the expertise his more knowledgeable compatriots had to offer has been shared to this day not only by practitioners of his ephemeral trade but by many of Dr. Péter’s fellow-academics, too.
	This is not to say that, working together or in isolation, Burgess’s scholarly interpreters in Hungary had done all they reasonably could to render Britain’s most interesting, if not in fact most significant, contemporary novelist available to the non-specialist reader—including the journalist I have singled out, somewhat unfairly perhaps, for censure. With a dozen and a half shorter and three longer pieces published on him in the twenty-five-year period considered in this section, the bulk of Burgess-related criticism written in Hungarian was as yet far from impressive. As for Burgess translated into that small and exotic native language of mine, the amount so far—three novels and a handful of shorter pieces out of more than fifty books written by Burgess—is even more disappointing, regardless of the quality the translators’ work represents.
	And yet the efforts of Hungary’s Burgess devotees are not to be slighted. If unsatisfactory in its proportions, the body of criticism and translations produced by Hungary’s writers, scholars and translators is at least suggestive, if not comprehensive or even truly representative, in terms of works rendered into Hungarian and issues presented to Hungarians. By the time the first translation of a Burgess novel appeared in Budapest in 1979, the attentive reader had been able to glean most of the essential information on its writer from the above-mentioned Világirodalmi encyclopaedia and Nagyvilág magazine, supplemented by the annual short-story collection Égtájak [Points of the Compass]—publications meant to help Hungary’s literate population keep abreast with the latest developments in world literature (or its segment deemed sufficiently “progressive” for Socialist consumption). Mention in these sources had been made of five novels, including Honey for the Bears, a modern picaresque set in Leningrad ridiculing the myth of the homo Sovieticus superiorus while suggesting the vertiginous depths of the Russian soul. That the politically less sensitive A Clockwork Orange was still taboo, was largely due to the publishers’ philistine prudery, rather than their orthodox Marxism—unless the two were essentially the same. Two major non-fiction books of Burgess’ had also been referred to: his English Literature and the classic Here Comes Everybody, the latter a masterly introduction to James Joyce, whose work was still regarded by the academic hard-liners of Hungary as a prime exemplar of bourgeois decadence. If a blunder or two revealing the authors’ ignorance of some of the works surveyed or the life introduced went uncorrected by the otherwise ever vigilant editors—the title, for example, of the first piece in the “Malayan Trilogy” (Time for a Tiger) is repeatedly referred to as though the tiger in it was in fact the beautiful predator rather than the brand-name of Malaya’s most popular beer and Burgess’ “real” name is given, in the encyclopaedia at that, as Anthony Wilson (Tótfalusi 1970)—the major facts of Burgess’s life and the nature of his achievement had more or less been reliably presented to the Hungarian reader by the late 1970s.
	Not much, by way of translation, had yet been forthcoming, however. The dearth of actual reading matter by Burgess in Hungarian could as yet be explained by the enormous backlog that Hungarian publishers were toiling under until as late as the mid-seventies. Little, if any, contemporary Western literature had appeared throughout the fifties and early sixties.
	What can improve the overall impression is the fact that Burgess’s two short stories translated did in fact give a foretaste of things to come. The surprise-ending, in the style of an already popular Roald Dahl, of the piece called “I Wish My Wife Was Dead” (translated by Edit Kincses as “Bárcsak meghalna a feleségem”), together with its thematization of the spicy British-vs-American issue was not uncharacteristic of Burgess’s rapidly growing oeuvre, and thus the canny little story could not possibly fail to provide the kind of quality entertainment that its upper-middle-brow readers expected to find in Nagyvilág (Burgess 1969-70/1970). 
	Much the same can be said for “The Muse”, a quasi-Elizabethan SF-story anticipating the by then familiar sub-genre embedded in apocryphal history (John Fowles’s The Maggot or Martin Amis’ Times Arrow spring to mind as well-known analogies) posing some disturbing questions about the reliability of historical knowledge and the whole scholarly-scientific enterprise it deals with. Small wonder that the piece was later singled out for praise by at least two of Burgess’s major American critics and that the writer himself appended the story, with some minor changes, to his novel Enderby’s Dark Lady. The editor of the 1973 issue of Égtájak certainly deserves praise for having discovered this as yet unanthologised piece in The Hudson Review, a magazine far from readily available in this part of the world at a time copies of Newsweek or Time were hard to come by on this side of the iron curtain.
	Another six years passed without Hungary hearing anything much from Burgess before the first full-length novel, One Hand Clapping, was translated in 1979. Credit for the Hungarian version, called Egy tenyér ha csattan, goes to the same Gabriella Prekop who had translated “The Muse”. Ms Prekop, a knowledgeable literary historian as well as an excellent translator, wrote the afterword, too (Prekop 1979). What that fifteen-hundred-word essay demonstrates is not only its writer’s familiarity with all the major, and some of the minor, incidents in Burgess’s life but also the fact that she had actually read the novels introduced in her afterword, which include one of Burgess’s most challenging and rewarding works, Nothing Like the Sun. And yes, the formerly unmentionable is also mentioned in Prekop’s essay, so Hungarians uninitiated to the illicit cult of Stanley Kubrick’s movie could now see in state-authorised print the quaint collocation Felhúzható narancs ‘winding orange’ or, in a form much better known, A Clockwork Orange.
	Prekop’s remarks on that linguistic tour de force of a social satire had to be taken at their face value for quite some time to come. If one read English, the situation was different, however. Due to some oversight explicable perhaps by the general slackening of the regime’s totalitarian rigour (a process quickened by local traditions of Hapsburg-style Absolutismus gemildert durch Schlamperei), Budapest’s only foreign-language library named for the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky had kept a tattered copy of A Clockwork Orange on its stacks since as far back as I can remember. Still, it took another eleven years and a complete change of political system—Hungary’s Sulky Revolution of 1990—before the forbidden fruit was delivered in the shape of a Hungarian translation.
	The work of discovering and rediscovering Burgess did not stop in the meantime, though. Two articles in Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature, a cultural weekly airing moderately non-conformist sentiments at the time), and an appreciative if somewhat naive piece in the now defunct illustrated weekly called Új Tükör (New Mirror, a kind of poor man’s Der Spiegel) tried desperately to reinvent the Burgessian wheel (Farkas 1985; Köröspataki Kiss 1989). A more significant contribution was made by Tamás Bényei with his translation of “Enter Posterity”, the comic opening sequence of Inside Mr. Enderby, together with a succinct introduction attempting to locate, for the first time in Hungary to my knowledge, Burgess’s work in the broader context of European literary history (Bényei 1987).
	Mention is to be made of the first theatrical adaptation of a novel by Burgess in this country with the musicalisation of One Hand Clapping. Entitled Dupla vagy semmi [Double or Quits], the play was performed by the company Rock Színház, now in Pesti Theatre, now in Katona József Theatre, both upmarket playhouses in the heart of Budapest’s banking and entertainment district. Although the leading part was played by Enikő Eszenyi—an up-and-coming starlet at the time and a noted actress-cum-director now—and the music was composed and played by Dolly Roll, a Hungarian pop group whose popularity had just reached its apex, I have some very vague memories of the production, a lapse somewhat mitigated by the lack of any enthusiastic response locatable in contemporary reviews. Interestingly enough, Burgess himself found the performance worthy of note in his autobiography, on account of his share of whatever the production’s proceeds remaining “sequestered” here (You’ve Had 29). But then he believed to have reasons more substantial than the merely financial to feel irritated by the inappropriate success of this particular novel of his in “the old Soviet bloc”. It seems Burgess was convinced that the only reason why the book had been translated and adapted to the stage and the television screen from East Berlin to Warsaw and Budapest was that Socialist critics had mistaken the work for a blanket condemnation of “the whole capitalist Western life” (ibidem). Whatever the bosses of Hungary’s publishing houses may have thought of the book, it is clear from Prekop’s afterword and from contemporary reviews of the stage version that the spiritual wasteland depicted by Burgess was believed, at least in Hungary if not in Eastern Germany or Bulgaria, to lie on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In 1989 we already felt to be part of all that Western decadence—something most Hungarians were proud and ashamed of at one and the same time.
	In any case, the first greeting with which Hungary’s Burgessians hailed the new, post-Soviet, dispensation was a novel thematically related to One Hand Clapping, that satire of consumer idiocy fed on television shows. The Hungarian translation of The Doctor Is Sick touched in some new features of the emerging portrait of Burgess. These included a much higher degree of linguistic awareness characterising author and quasi-autobiographical hero than anything the educationally challenged heroine-narratrix of the previously translated novel could, or would, muster up. In its comic malfunctioning very much unlike that of his creator, the mind of the novel’s eponym Edwin Spindrift, doctor of philosophy rather than medicine, is just as well stocked with edifying and amusing miscellanea from Grimm’s Law to Finnegans Wake as Burgess’s awesome memory famously was. Pál Békés, himself a writer of considerable distinction in Hungary and a kind of last reserve resorted to by the editors of Európa kiadó (Európa House, one of Hungary’s very few publishers of modern Western literature for decades) whenever the untranslatable had to be translated, did an excellent job of rendering in Hungarian the learned ribaldry that this urban picaresque of Burgess’ revels in (Beteg a doktor 1990).
	The same historic year of 1990 saw the publication of the one book that Burgess’s somewhat misconceived reputation as a “cult-writer” depends on to this day. Once again, Európa hired an old hand at quality literary translation in the person of László Gy. Horváth. If the resulting book, called Gépnarancs [Machine Orange, literally], does not really qualify as a genuine masterpiece (A Clockwork Orange is indeed untranslatable), it served as a gap-stopper giving as it did a much more accurate picture of what Burgess was up to than a clandestine copy of Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation made with a hand-held 8mm camera in a cheap West-Berlin cinema. The afterword, although twice as long as the one appended to the Hungarian translation of One Hand Clapping, did less than its length suggests to enhance the Hungarian reception of Burgess. With its rehearsal of apocryphal biography and mistranslated titles, the piece has inspired untold numbers of term-papers submitted by generations of English majors to their unhappy professors at the various English Literature Departments of Hungary. The reductive interpretations of the past were hereby replaced with the writer of the afterword András Csejdi’s own, equally one-sided, summary of the supposedly pessimistic message conveyed by a work whose comedy has as much to do with Dante as it has with Menippus. That, at least, is the critical consensus based on the original edition of the A Clockwork Orange, as opposed to the “uncompromisingly” bleak philosophy of the curtailed, American, edition that had inspired Stanley Kubrick. Despite a half-hearted curtsy he makes in the afterword to the all-important twenty-first chapter presenting little Alex as a harmless yet free adult ready to settle down, Csejdi obviously projects impressions originally formed by the shortened version, if not indeed Kubrick’s film, on the full-length original whose Hungarian translation he sets out to explicate.
	Although not essentially different from Mr Csejdi’s verdict in its assessment of the downbeat philosophy he assumes to be underlying A Clockwork Orange, Ferenc Takács’s review essay shortly following the translation did much to improve the general standard of Hungary’s Burgess-criticism. Whether one agrees or not with Professor Takács’s conclusion that the three competing discourses that little Alex’s case is submitted to completely cancel each other out, and that any “naïve” belief in man’s eligibility for salvation is thoroughly purged from the reader’s system by novel’s end, one cannot help being overawed by the elegant logic, impressive erudition and delightfully appropriate wording that characterise the essay’s reasoning. In any case, the theoretical assumptions implicitly underlying the review’s argument—mainly Bakhtinian and Derridan in origin and thus refreshingly innovative in the Hungary of the early 1990s—are probably more important than any specific conclusion the article actually arrives at.
	More immediately relevant, however, to the specific purposes of this paper is what Dr Takács has to offer to the student of Burgess’s Hungarian reception. The article expounds the reasons—political, aesthetic and psychological—why Hungarian orange-fanciers had had so long to stand in line waiting for their favourite book to be rendered in their native tongue. (Incidentally, the reference to an orange-line in the title of the review—“Gépnarancs régi sorbanállóknak” or A Clockwork Orange for Veterans in a Queue—is a wryly humorous allusion to Socialism’s scarcity culture where actual fruit, especially of the tropical kind, was as hard to come by as the proverbially forbidden type represented by the novel being reviewed.) Takács’s reasons, except for the narrowly political, have an unchanging relevance to Hungary’s reception of Anthony Burgess to this day. That we still have to do without Nothing Like the Sun, MF or Earthly Powers in Hungarian is because of our lingering doubts about the feasibility (or saleability) of non-realist experimentation à la Joyce—stale prejudices imported from a convention-ridden TLS as much as inherited from Georg Lukács’s dogmatic disciples—and our laziness or timidity to take on the linguistic challenge of Burgess’s more “writerly” prose.
	As it is, the Hungarian reader looking beyond the three novels mentioned so far has very little to read in his or her own language. Available in Hungary are now two passages from the as many volumes of Burgess’s “Confessions”, together with an essay on Europe, published by Nagyvilág in Márton Mesterházi’s masterly rendering, and—printed in the pages of Magyar Lettre Internationale—two more short pieces: a selection from Mozart and the Wolf Gang later followed by “Meeting in Valladolid” (the opening piece of Burgess’s only short-story collection The Devil’s Mode). The latter two (“Variációk Mozartra” [Variations on Mozart] translated by Péter Balabán and “Találkozás Valladolidban” [“A Meeting in Valladolid”] rendered Miklós by N. Nagy) are likely to have been selected more on grounds of their perceived political than their undeniable literary merits. No doubt, the topical treatment of the Middle-East problem in the one and the topos of “our divided yet common European heritage” in the other is what one feels to be the reason why a Shakespeare pitting his wits against Cervantes’ in Spain or the Grazioso Quartet—Mozart and Mendelsohn’s newest “celestial companions” blown by terrorists to heaven—have found their way to the Hungarian reader.

2. Innocence to experience: Hungary’s Burgess in the 2000s
The original version of this paper was concluded with a promise made on behalf of a colleague at Debrecen University where my Burgess-related presentation was held. The colleague, Tamás Bényei, a youngish but already senior professor at my alma mater in the provincial city hosting the HUSSE event in 2003, was already an old hand at Burgessian scholarship. Besides his above-mentioned short translation and his astute comments on Burgess’s place in the history of European letters appended to it, he had scattered his remarks on the master in his two book-length studies of postmodern fiction in English and Spanish left somewhat unfairly out of the foregoing (Bényei 1993; 2000). The substance of the promise, based largely on hearsay at the time, concerned the appearance of a truly major Hungarian-language assessment of post-war English fiction to be written by my good friend Tamás in the near future. What I did not realise at the time was the fact that the manuscript of the book that I thought of more as a plan than an actuality had in fact been completed. Not only that, but the usually sluggish work of editing, printing, and distributing the opus must also have been nearing completion. In any case, the volume with Tamás Bényei’s name on its broad ridge hit the shelves of Hungary’s major bookshops before the year was out, a copy to land on my desk shortly thereafter. More than a year has passed since and I am still recovering from the amazement with which I put down the bulky tome entitled Ártatlan ország: Az angol regény 1945 után [The Innocent Country: The English Novel After 1945] after a perusal of the chapters with the most alluring titles. Where, I asked myself in desperation, had this huge book of more than 500 pages, or 230,000 words, been written, at a time I kept running into Tamás at various formal and informal events—academic, social and ... erm ... convivial—in the three short years between its publication and the appearance of his previous, somewhat shorter but still substantial, study on the interplay of criminality, metaphysics and the postmodern in the novels of just about everybody in world literature from Wilde and Waugh through Orwell and Nabokov to Borges and Burgess? Well, the answer was, obviously: in between—in between doctoral dissertations evaluated, British Council sessions for young scholars chaired, conferences attended in England, Hungary and elsewhere on the Continent by this laddish-looking young professor ubiquitous in the seminar rooms, lecture halls, private apartments and popular student haunts of his native Debrecen.
	The astonishment at my friend’s no less than miraculous, and curiously Burgess-like, productivity may not in itself be sufficient reason for concluding this overview with the detailed discussion of his most recent contribution to Burgessian scholarship that is now to follow. The quality, as much as the quantity, of Bényei’s insight into the precise nature of Burgess’s contribution to the development of the English, and indeed world, literature of his time is my excuse for these comparatively elaborate comments.
	Burgess’s reputation as an outstanding twentieth-century practitioner of the novel genre seems to be secure enough and would thus hardly require the services of an “obscure” Hungarian academic. However, Bényei’s repeated remarks on the lack of monographic studies truly worthy of Burgess’s stature (John Stinson is the only one quite making the mark, with Ghosh-Schellhorn narrowly missing it) should give us pause. No less worrying, we are reminded, is the merely episodic part that Burgess plays in the definitive histories of contemporary English literature: even such fellow-writers and scholars on Burgess’s own side give him cursory treatment as Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge, which is not to mention the cold shoulder he is given by Bernard Bergonzi, Andrzej Gasiorek or Stephen Connor. The situation is exacerbated by the even more painful absence of the more daringly experimental novels (MF and Napoleon Symphony are the Hungarian scholar’s examples) from the list of Burgess’s novels readily available in recent editions. Can it then be taken for granted that Burgess’s oeuvre occupies the pre-eminent position in the “canon” that its unique coupling of excitingly innovative technique with delightful readability would deserve? Is it only in far-away countries like Hungary or Poland where his only novel singled out for discussion in university seminars is A Clockwork Orange? As the answer in both cases is unequivocally in the negative, the next question suggesting itself to one as objectively partial to Burgess as Tamás Bényei is can only be this: What is one to do to change the situation? Before proffering an explicit answer, the writer of Ártatlan ország demonstrates, with the example of his own reading, re-reading or creative misreading, of Burgess’s major works from the “Malayan trilogy” and the Enderby-novels through the Shakespeare-, Napoleon and Marlowe-biographies to Earthly Powers and back to The Doctor Is Sick, how Burgess can be rediscovered for the twenty-first century reader. In conclusion, Bényei sums up his recipe already applied in his analyses: Burgess can, and indeed should, be submitted to the same theoretically advanced interpretative procedures that have been accorded to others of his calibre. Besides being carefully re-examined through the lenses of structural and myth criticism, Burgess’s oeuvre should be opened up to the equally legitimate poststructural, post-Bakhtinian, and postcolonial readings that Bényei not only promotes but himself practices. Although some of his suggestions might be familiar from elsewhere—Frank Kermode’s seminal reading of MF as a work inspired by structural anthropology (Kermode 1983), Ferenc Takács’s above-mentioned discovery of Bakhtinian multivocality in A Clockwork Orange or my own remarks on a Rabelaisian-Bakhtinian sort of richly corporeal “gigantism” in Burgess’s novels would perhaps have deserved mention by Bényei himself—many of my Debrecen colleague’s ideas are as original as they are revelatory. While there may be little radically new about his discovery of the omnipresence of the carnivalesque in Burgess or his reconfiguration of the mythical method in A Vision of Battlements or Napoleon Symphony, Bényei’s discussion of how the various fallacies of Orientalism are satirised in the Malayan trilogy long before their exposure by Edward Said and, perhaps even more surprisingly, of the analogy between Burgess’s brand of “serious comedy” and the Beckett-phenomenon lead one to conclusions hardly met in previous discussions of my favourite novelist.
	These and related strategies of a postmodern re-reading of the Burgess corpus would prevent its marginalisation by poetically inappropriate or ideologically hostile misrepresentations of it as an exemplar of flawed realism or political incorrectness. Translated into English, the thirty-page Burgess-chapter concluding Tamás Bényei’s phenomenally insightful and encyclopaedically comprehensive study of recent English fiction could certainly be used by the international Burgess-community as a conceptual template in assigning Burgess his well-deserved place in the ever-changing canon of the English novel. As it is, the Hungarian original provides Bényei’s colleagues at home with a fresh vocabulary of practical and theoretical criticism in their own language with which to convince their literature-loving compatriots that the mission of rendering Anthony Burgess accessible to the Hungarian reader is far from accomplished.

	Works Cited

Burgess in Hungarian: Translations

Balabán, Péter, trans. “Variációk Mozartra” [Variations on Mozart: Excerpt from Mozart and the Wolf Gang]. Magyar Lettre Internationale 1991.3: 8-10.
Bényei, Tamás, trans. “A költő és az utókor: részlet az Enderby c. regényből” [Enter Posterity: Excerpt from the Novel Enderby]. Határ Apr. 1987: 120-24.
Békés, Pál, trans. Beteg a doktor [The Doctor Is Sick]. Budapest: Európa, 1990.
Horváth, László Gy., trans. Gépnarancs [A Clockwork Orange]. Budapest: Európa, 1990. 
Kincses, Edit, trans. “Bárcsak meghalna a feleségem” [“I Wish My Wife Was Dead”]. Nagyvilág Oct. 1970: 1515-18. 
Mesterházi, Márton, trans. “Vallomások” [Confessions: Excerpts from Burgess’s autobiography]. Nagyvilág Jan-Feb. 1993: 49-81.
N. Nagy, Miklós, trans. “Találkozás Valladolidban” [“A Meeting in Valladolid”]. Magyar Lettre Internationale 1994.13: 33-38.
Prekop, Gabriella, trans. “A múzsa” [“The Muse]”. Égtájak. Budapest: Európa, 1973. 174-196.
Prekop, Gabriella, trans. Egy tenyér ha csattan [One Hand Clapping]. Budapest: Európa, 1979.

On Burgess in Hungarian: Critical Reception

Bényei, Tamás. Az ártatlan ország: Az angol regény 1945 után [The Innocent Country: The English Novel After 1945]. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 2003. 
Bényei, Tamás. “Előszó” [Foreword] to “A költő és az utókor” [Enter Posterity]. Trans. Tamás Bényei Határ. Apr. 1987: 120.
Bényei, Tamás. Esendő szörnyeink és más történetek [Frail Pet Beasts and Other Stories]. Budapest: Pesti Szalon, 1993. 
Bényei, Tamás. Rejtélyes rend: A krimi, a metafozika és a posztmodern [A Mysterious Order: Thrillers, Metaphysics and the Postmodern]. Budapest, Akadémiai, 2000. 
Csejdi, András. “Utószó” [Afterword]. Gépnarancs [A Clockwork Orange]. Trans. László Gy. Horváth. Budapest: Európa, 1990. 185-96.
Farkas, Ákos. “Mit tudunk Burgessről” [What We Know About Burgess]. Élet és Irodalom 8 Feb. 1985: 12.
Komáromi, Sándor. “Burgess, Anthony”. Világirodalmi Lexikon [Encyclopaedia of World Literature]. Vol. 19. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1996.
Köröspataki Kiss, Sándor. “Burgess két vétke” [The Two Sins of Burgess]. Új Tükör 22 Oct. 1989.
Mesterházi, Márton. “Anthony Burgess útjai” [The Paths of Anthony Burgess: An introduction to Excerpts from the “Confessions”]. Nagyvilág. Jan-Feb. 1993: 47-8.
Péter, Ágnes. “Burgess Keats-látomása” [Burgess’s Vision of Keats]. Rev. of Abba Abba. Nagyvilág. Mar. 1978: 452-53.
Prekop, Gabriella. “Utószó” [Afterword]. Egy tenyér ha csattan [One Hand Clapping]. Trans. Gabriella Prekop. Budapest: Európa, 1979. 187-193.
Sárközi, Mátyás. “Burgess halálára” [On the Death of Burgess]. Magyar Hírlap 4 Dec. 1993. 
Takács, Ferenc. “Gépnarancs régi sorbanállóknak” [A Clockwork Orange for Veterans in a Queue]. Élet és Irodalom 19 Oct. 1990: 10.
Tótfalusi, István. “Burgess, Anthony”. Világirodalmi Lexikon [Encyclopaedia of World Literature]. Vol. 1. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1970.

Other

Biswell, Andrew. “A Review of Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations by Á. I. Farkas”. Anthony Burgess Newsletter No. 6, December, 2003. http://bu.univ-angers.fr/EXTRANET/AnthonyBURGESS/NL6biswell.htm (Last accessed: 22 Apr. 2005].
Burgess, Anthony. You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. 1990. London: Penguin, 1991.
Farkas, Ákos. “A Dash of Blood Orange.” Voices: A Collection of Working Papers. Budapest: ELTE University, 2004. 7-16.
Farkas, Ákos I. Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations. Akadémiai: Budapest, 2002.
Goldmann Márta. James Joyce kritikai fogadtatása Magyarországon [The Critical Reception of James Joyce in Hungary]. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Budapest, 2002.
Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes.” Essays on Fiction 1971-82. London: Routledge, 1983.

Burgess Translated Into Polish
by Joanna Wierzbińska
Anthony Burgess is known in Poland mainly as the author of A Clockwork Orange. However, it is difficult to estimate whether it is Burgess’s book or Kubrick’s film that occupies the Polish audience’s imagination. Four of his books have been translated into Polish: One Hand Clapping (1976), A Clockwork Orange (1991 and 1994), Man of Nazareth (1995) and The Wanting Seed (2003), but only A Clockwork Orange, One Hand Clapping and The Wanting Seed are known to a wider public. This selection contributed to the Polish reception of Burgess as a writer who specialized in creating gloomy visions of the future. His image in Poland is evidently ‘off the mainstream’. Such a reception is clearly unjust and Polish readers are offered an immensely impoverished selection of Burgess’s oeuvre. 
The choice of A Clockwork Orange or The Wanting Seed for translation should not come up as a shock. The appearance of One Hand Clapping in this fine company, a book which, according to Burgess “sank like a stone” both in Britain and in the United States, may seem at least surprising, though. 
One Hand Clapping, translated as Klaskać jedną ręką by Jadwiga Rutkowska (Burgess, Anthony, Klaskać jedną ręką, Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1976), was a huge success in Poland. Burgess wrote it within a month and published it as Joseph Kell in 1961. The book was a result of his observations of major changes in British society. After his return from Malaya and Brunei he discovered a new and alien world of television and youth culture back in Britain. The inspiration for the plot and for the narrator’s idiolect was stirred by TV programs that Burgess’s first wife, Lynne, enjoyed watching. 
The narrator, Janet Shirley, is ‘a material girl’ who finds pleasure in enumerating objects that she and her husband either posses or lack. Being affluent and living a comfortable life is her only principle. She needs to be perceived as well off and successful. Her husband, Howard, wins one thousand pounds in a Quiz Show on TV and multiplies the amount by gambling. However, money does not bring happiness; how much can one buy, eat or drink? The new luxurious lifestyle leads to sloth, infidelity, madness, suicidal thoughts and ultimate murder.
The book can be easily interpreted as an expression of contempt for a materialistic lifestyle and accumulating goods. It shows the world which endeavours to appeal to the lowest tastes in any sphere of life, be it music or literature. When talking to a journalist, Howard raises some accusations: 

‘What I mean is that you get so low it stands to reason you’ll be appealing to the majority, the majority being stupid for the most part and just like animals.’
‘This is a democracy,’ said the young man. ‘Sort of, that is. People are entitled to have what they want. What would be better, do you think? Us educating them and telling them how to behave and what to think and all that, which is communist or fascist?’

The last clause, containing the words “communist” and “fascist” disappeared from the translation. In the Polish version the journalist does not evoke these two ideologies and Howard is clearly presented as the wiser one, who has certain expectations and does not accept democracy, as it leads the world to degradation.
Burgess was a strong advocate of free will and he showed it in A Clockwork Orange, where Alex is clearly a criminal, but Burgess does not allow easy judgment. The borderline between good and evil is never clear-cut. One Hand Clapping is similar in this respect. Burgess merely shows people’s opinions and behaviour, refraining from praise or condemnation. The Polish translation of the book did not leave that much room for interpretation. Democracy is obviously crooked. The reader is not made to ponder over the fact if the communist methods of imposing opinions, rather than letting people choose for themselves and err, are acceptable. 
Russia is mentioned once in the novel, though in a culinary context: “I got our supper ready now and, as we were in the money, I’d brought some tinned Russian Crab, which was very expensive just about then because of the trouble or something, and we had it with vinegar and tinned potato salad.” In the Polish translation ‘the trouble’ vanishes and the above quoted passage changes into: “I got our supper ready now and, as we were in the money, I’d brought some tinned Russian Crab, very expensive, and we had it with vinegar and tinned potato salad.” The semantic change is incurred ideologically; Russian crabs are expensive not because of, as Burgess nicely puts it, ‘the trouble’, but because they are top quality products, which foreigners can barely afford.
At a certain point, Howard commissions Redvers Glass, a young poet, to write a verse about the rottenness and decay of contemporary England:

But we saw England delivered over to the hands of 
The sneerers and sniggerers, the thugs and grinners,
England became a feeble-lighted
Moon of America, our very language defiled
And become slick and gum-chewing

This poetry must have appealed to the communist propagandists and in the Polish translation its message is even strengthened by the use of words such as ‘paws’ (łapy) instead of ‘hands’, ‘our unhappy language’ (nieszczęsny język) instead of ‘our very language’, or ‘lies’ (kłamstwa) instead of ‘slick’.
It is implied that England is deteriorating, because it is influenced by the United States. Such conclusions seem very natural. Strong criticism of the US reappears in the book:

“(…) people from places like Bermondsey and Stoke-on-Trent pretending to be Americans and writing as if they were Americans. I’ve nothing against Americans, and we’ve seen them at firsthand for ourselves, but I don’t want to see English people turned into second-hand Americans”.

How could a book like that fail to gain popularity in a Communist country? Burgess was aware of his book’s success in Poland and even had an explanation ready for it: 

But in Eastern Europe it had a late success. It was regarded as a condemnation for money-making, a debased culture, the whole capitalist Western life, than to endure it would be better to be dead. It was adapted for television in Warsaw and turned into a stage musical in Budapest. It was read in Eastern Germany. It was one of the two books for which I was known in the old Soviet block.

I can only agree with Burgess’s diagnosis of the factors, which, first of all, brought One Hand Clapping to Poland and, second of all, secured the book’s popularity. The novel could be easily interpreted in tune with Soviet ideology and the translator managed to emphasize the ‘appropriate’ passages in the novel and eliminate the ‘unwanted’ ones; Jadwiga Rutkowska kindly improved Burgess’s otherwise ideologically correct work.
A Clockwork Orange is by far the best-known book by Burgess in Poland. It did not, however, have an easy way into the hands of Polish readers. For 15 years censorship had waged an inexorably fervent war against it. The first two chapters, translated by Robert Stiller, were to be published in 1974 in No. 2(34) of Literatura na Świecie – a literary magazine. Only Stiller’s introductory essay, Horrorshow! Czyli bój sie pan jeża, appeared though and the translation was rejected. Rumour has it that the crusade against A Clockwork Orange was not aimed at the book itself, but at its title. It is said that, having watched Stanley Kubrick’s film, some high official from the Political Bureau, presumably Zenon Kliszko, could not hide his disdain and announced that it would never be allowed in Poland.
Stiller managed to extricate his translation from Literatura na świecie and make a few copies. This leaflet got into some libraries and marked the book’s otherwise virtual existence in Polish. The translation was ready, but it could be published only underground, so Stiller preferred to wait and maintain the book’s illusory existence, rather than sentence A Clockwork Orange to non-existence. In 1991 Wema Published Mechaniczna Pomarańcza, but only in ten thousand copies. In 1994 Gebethner i Ska offered to reissue the book.
A Clockwork Orange constitutes an immensely interesting case in the history of translation as it was translated three times by the same person, Robert Stiller, and its fragments were translated by Cezary Michoński. 
In his comments published together with his second translation of the book, Stiller highlights the fact that there is no comparable satisfaction, as the one enjoyed by the readers of both versions. It is so on account of the fact that there is no other case, where one translator created two completely distinct and separate idiolects in order to translate the same novel twice and in entirely different ways. 
The first translation of A Clockwork Orange by Robert Stiller appeared in 1991 as Mechaniczna Pomarańcza and it was marked as ‘Version R’, where ‘R’ stands for ‘rosyjski’ or Russian. The idiolect of the droogs was rendered into Polish as a mixture of Polish and Russian. In 1994 his second translation appeared, this time entitled Nakręcana Pomarańcza. Stiller kindly explained why he undertook his second attempt; “When history made a sudden turn and it appeared that Polish language would no longer be influenced by Russian, ‘Version R’ of the novel lost its validity. It became more probable that our language would be Americanised. This process is equally deadly to our language, however, for historical reasons, less unpleasant. This version of Polish language is not made up. Our mother tongue is indeed heading in this direction”.
Thus, ‘Version A’ (where ‘A’ stands for ‘angielski’ – English) was created and it used an idiolect being a mixture of Polish and English. In ‘Version A’ Stiller announces his third attempt at translating A Clockwork Orange. This time he is working on a dialect combining Polish with German and it will be entitled Sprężynowa Pomarańcza. The readers are still waiting for it.
The idiolect devised by Stiller in ‘Version A’ is very clumsy. He employs unfortunate borrowings, which sound ridiculous, for example, he “Polonizes” the word ‘shop’ as ‘szop’(which signifies ‘a raccoon’ in Polish) and the expression ‘in a shop’ as ‘w szopie’, (which signifies ‘in a hut’ in Polish). Thus, his decision to use Polish spelling for English loanwords sometimes results in unintentionally funny solutions. 
Some of the neologisms used by Stiller either function in Polish in their original spelling (e.g. shop (not ‘szop’), TV (not ‘ti wi’), or fair (not ‘fer’)) or would be read correctly by Polish readers, even if the original spelling was maintained (e.g. come back, very, or never rendered as ‘kom bek’, ‘wery’, or ‘newer’). Stiller’s neologisms are more foreign than the foreign language itself! Even if it was Stiller’s idea that the teenage dialect should reflect contemporary developments in Polish, he seems to ignore the fact that we tend to adapt loanwords to our pronunciation. Therefore, the spelling, which reflects English pronunciation, does not seem natural. For instance, the word ‘especially’ cannot be pronounced as ‘yspeszli’ by Polish language speakers, as Stiller implies. It is rather pronounced as ‘espeszyli’, as we tend to pronounce all the syllables. This tendency prevails even if Poles acquire the language via television or radio – our speech organs are used to different phonetics. 
Another doubtful idea is the fact that in Stiller’s translation not only Alex and his droogs use NADSAT. The old women at the bar or the priest are acquainted with the slang as well and they are capable of speaking it fluently.
Moreover, Stiller employs many vulgarities, which are absent from Burgess’s original. Burgess made Alex use Russian loanwords instead of Standard English ‘dirty words’. Stiller often translates Russian borrowings employed by Burgess as Polish vulgar lexical items or as non-standard words from very low registers (cf. ‘litso’ rendered as ‘ryj’, ‘I’d peeted’ – ‘wydoiłem’, ‘nogas’ – ‘giry’ or the use of words such as ‘kudły’, ‘morda’, ‘łeb’, ‘łachy’, or ‘dziadu’). Thus, Stiller changes the register and makes Alex’s dialect very low, actually much lower than in the original. Alex’s mother is always referred to as ‘mum’, whereas Stiller utilizes pejorative words such as ‘maciora’, ‘macica’, ‘maciocha’, or ‘mać’.
This draws attention to yet another questionable feature of Stiller’s idiolect, where one neologism in Burgess’s original is replaced by more than one lexical item in Stiller’s translation. For instance, the word ‘droog’ is rendered as ‘frendzik’, ‘paluczek’, ‘drug’ (sic! Russian creeping into ‘Version A”), ‘budek’, or ‘brajdaszek’. The amount of lexis is overwhelming. Burgess sometimes explains certain elements of NADSAT, e.g. “the twittwittwittering in the bare or nagoy branches”, while Stiller misinterprets this stylistic device and clarifies Polish lexical items using…other Polish words: “ćwir ćwir ćwirkania w gołych (czyli łysych) gałęziach” – “the twittwittwittering in the bare (or naked) branches” (JW)
Instead of incorporating single lexical items, Stiller decided on entire phrases or indeed clauses, which makes the idiolect indecipherable. Stiller maintains that he endeavoured to present the Polish language of the future, basing on the processes he was witnessing. If it was so, he should have either employed those English loanwords which had really entered Polish, or refrained from incorporating too implausible neologisms, such as ‘ołdy tajm’ signifying ‘all the time’ or ‘na elitł’ signifying ‘for a little’.
One more perplexing characteristic of ‘Version A’ idiolect is the fact that it does not merely incorporate English loanwords, but also Russian (horror szoł, czaj, da, Bog) and German ones (wunder bar, fertyk, frojda, szmucyk, kwacz, natyrilig, rychtyk). It makes the idiolect inconsistent and deprives ‘subliminal penetration’ of a possible coherent agent.
In 1987, Cezary Michoński published his translation of one of the chapters of A Clockwork Orange in No 2(28) of Akcenty. Michoński was then a young student and did not suggest any innovative ideas. He merely repeated Stiller’s idea from ‘Version A’, (which was approved by Burgess himself) and used a combination of Polish and English. At the same time, though, he did not manage to avoid certain doubtful ideas, such as the use of NADSAT by characters other than Alex and his droogs. Stiller criticizes Michoński’s translation severely in his edition of Mechaniczna Pomarańcza. I have to admit, though, that Michoński was much more successful as far as the choice and realm of borrowings is concerned and he managed to follow Burgess’s principle of inserting single lexical items, rather than clusters, into Polish. 
‘Version R’ might be referred to as the most faithful one for it incorporates Russian (the language chosen by Burgess) into Polish. Inspiration for A Clockwork Orange idiolect came when Burgess was about to go on a cruise to Russia: “The vocabulary of my space-age hooligans could be a mixture of Russian and demotic English, seasoned with rhyming slang and the gypsy’s bolo. The Russian suffix for –teen was nadsat and that would be the name of the teenage dialect” Burgess, however, did not incorporate Russian into Polish, but into English, so the issue of translation’s faithfulness, which is a vague, subjective and disputable notion anyhow, should not be applied in this case. Not all levels of meaning are attainable in any translation. Burgess created NADSAT out of a mixture of English and Russian, as they seemed to him very distant and mutually ‘exotic’: “Russian loanwords fit better into English than those from German, French, or Italian. English anyway is a mélange of French and German”.
Polish is already a mélange of different Slavic roots. Thus, if the faithfulness of a translation was to be judged by the faithfulness to the author’s intentions, whatever they are and whether we are capable of stating them, ‘Version R’ fails. It does not rely on a clash between two very different languages. Russian and Polish have been interacting and borrowing lexis from each other since time immemorial. Therefore, the effects of their confrontation are not blatant. Stiller uses far fewer Russian loanwords than Burgess. Many of them, such as noga, litso, chellovek, slovo, yahzick, starry are simply ‘too Polish’ to be approached as foreign (cf. Polish noga, lico, człowiek, słowo, język, stary). Therefore, Stiller was forced to introduce other Russian lexis that was not employed by Burgess in the original.
Moreover, Burgess enjoyed the fact that Alex mixes languages of two opposing countries, which were then in the period of Cold War. The use of strange, enigmatic and apparently hostile Russian made the teenage dialect all the more perverted and condemnable: “And there was fine irony in the notion of teenage race untouched by politics, using totalitarian brutality as an end in itself, equipped with a dialect which drew on the two chief political languages of the age”. This level of irony is lost in the Polish translation. Other meanings proliferate, though. Since Poland belonged to the old Soviet block, the infiltration of Polish language by Russian acquired new meanings, unintended by Burgess. Cultural references and the political situation of the audience altered the book’s reception completely.
The idiolect devised by Burgess is the more striking and innovative if we consider the fact that such a language does not exist; Burgess did not copy or mime any other register or slang. It was not Burgess’s intention to show factual processes occurring in the language. On the contrary, he made English undergo an infiltration, which it has never experienced. Stiller’s second attempt – ‘Version A’ – is crooked as it relies on the principle that Alex’s dialect is a possible dialect of the future and he depends on the Americanised slang that is indeed used by Polish teenagers, only exaggerating it.
Did Burgess presume that English would resemble Russian one day? I would not venture such an assumption. On the contrary, the combination of English and Russian seems so implausible as to be doubly shocking and striking. For Stiller, Alex’s dialect is a prophecy. First he believed that Polish would undergo Russification, then that it would be (and indeed is) Americanised. Therefore, Stiller transports the novel into our culture and environment, treating both the language and the plot of A Clockwork Orange (increasing criminality and growing brutality and bravado of adolescent hooligans) as genuine prophecies about contemporary Poland.
Burgess looms as a demanding author for both his translators and readers. Because of his linguistic innovativeness he is perceived as a difficult writer, which entails that he is not widely read. The innovative language both of the original and four (sic!) translations cause that Burgess remains undiscovered, appreciated by a few. Fortunately, his book was adapted for the cinema by Stanley Kubrick. The film, being a less demanding medium, popularised A Clockwork Orange and thus made Anthony Burgess a cult writer in some circles - among those who were encouraged to read the book after they had seen the film.
 Burgess started writing The Wanting Seed in 1961 and published it in 1962. As he had spent several years in the over-populated East, he got interested in the theme and started to develop a fantasy about the possible effects of demographic disasters. The book was translated into Polish in 2003 by Robert Stiller (Burgess, Anthony, Rozpustne Nasienie, Krakow: Vis-à-vis etiuda, 2003). Burgess was not very happy about his novel and he was aware that it “had little chance of becoming a bestseller”. He agreed with critics accusations of half-bakedness: “The novel needed a longer gestation, but I needed money (…) Reworking does no good, though I have spent the last twenty-five years thinking that it might, and that The Wanting Seed could, in my leisurely old age, be expanded to a length worthy of the subject.” The book depicts a world divided into three superpowers: ENSPUN, RUSPUN and CHINSPUN, which implement various methods of demographic control. The plot is set in ENSPUN, which is quite liberal. The protagonist, Tristram Foxe, is a history teacher, who lectures his students on three phases, which constitute a never-ending historical cycle: Gusphase, Pelphase and Interphase. The world is strictly secular and priests function underground. Homosexual relationships are promoted and begetting offspring is shameful. Cannibalism is the only solution to the problem of overpopulation.
Was this vision of the world valid in 1962? The Polish translation appeared two years ago and the domination of two superpowers, which might have inspired Burgess to create the three superpowers of the future – the USA and Soviet Union – had ended. The translation comes too late to be treated as a plausible vision of the future and, obviously enough, it can only be read as sheer fantasy. Then, why was it chosen for translation now and by Robert Stiller, who sees Burgess as a prophet? I believe that it was Stiller’s personal choice to work on The Wanting Seed in order to build a coherent image of “alternative” or “futuristic” Burgess. 
As The Wanting Seed is not easily accessible (it is hard to encounter a copy of it in the original in any bookshop, because it has not been reissued either in England or in the US for quite a while), it has the flavour of a cult book available to a few “initiated”. It reinforces the image of Burgess as an underground writer, as an alternative to the easily accessible mainstream literature, an author, who only an inquisitive reader can discover for himself and feel the pleasure of belonging to a closed circle of comparatively few Burgess devotees. 
Another argument in favour of my supposition that Stiller wanted to create Burgess’s image as a “fantastic” writer are the covers of both novels. The cover of A Clockwork Orange represents Alex during Ludovico treatment. A special cap is put on his head, his eyes are wide open and his mouth is screaming. The same face can be recognized multiplied on the cover of The Wanting Seed. The ‘helmet’ is eliminated and merely the terrified eyes and mouths open in horror remain. (The cover of A Clockwork Orange was designed by Marek Piwko, the cover of The Wanting Seed was designed by Robert Stiller himself, based on Marek Piwko’s drawing). This builds an unavoidable link between the two books. Not merely the persons of the author and translator connect them; the visual association created by the front covers builds a connection on another, subconscious level. The editions seem to convey a convoluted message that the presented world in The Wanting Seed can fascinate the reader as much as the one depicted in the widely successful A Clockwork Orange. The implication is that both books are complementary and representative of the same underlying ideas. Whether it is true or not remains to be pondered over.
Already at the beginning of his career, in 1962, Burgess was recognized as “having periods”: “The first period was exotic, the second repatriate, the third fantastic, meaning A Clockwork Orange and the new book (The Wanting Seed – J.W.)” Merely the ‘fantastic period’ is commonly known in Poland. The limited selection of his works which were published in Polish gives a misleading impression about his literary output. Indeed, the majority of his translators’ efforts concentrated on one novel, neglecting other works by Burgess. Since only a fraction of his oeuvre has been translated into Polish, he is unjustly perceived as the author of one book – A Clockwork Orange. Sadly enough, Burgess’s rich oeuvre is either ignored by Polish translators or translated badly: One Hand Clapping was subject to ideological manipulation, A Clockwork Orange underwent sometimes questionable linguistic experiments. 
Moreover, Burgess is seen as an alternative author: A Clockwork Orange has the flavour of a forbidden fruit as Communist censorship did not allow it to be published and as it daringly presents the usually hidden world of ultra-violence; The Wanting Seed is not easily accessible and presents a very controversial view of the future; One Hand Clapping is a relic of old propagandist literature and attracts those who are interested in discovering the manipulation tools of the past. All of these factors contribute to the image of Burgess as the author of experimental fiction, who created outside the mainstream. 

L’étrange cas d’Antoine Bourgeois, écrivain français
By Dougie Milton
I apologise in advance for beginning on a personal note. There is a reason, apart from vanity and the desire to immortalise myself in the pages of the Burgess Newsletter. For the past five years I’ve been living in France, first in St-Germain-en-Laye and latterly in Paris. I’ve also lived in Paris on and off over the previous two decades. I’ve been reading Burgess even longer than that, and I’ve recently been struck by the disparity between his views on the French and my own. In addition, I’ve come to realise that Burgess either didn’t realise just how much he was respected in France, or chose to ignore this in case relations ever got dangerously close to an entente cordiale. In this essay I will attempt to reassess his position vis-a-vis a culture which I believe was absolutely crucial to his development as an artist for most of his life.

One can start in 1929, when the young Burgess or Wilson was fiddling with a crystal radio set he’d built himself. By chance he happened upon a performance of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune and was entranced. It was a defining moment for him, and awakened the interest in classical music and composition which was to play such an important role, not just because he taught himself to write music, but also for the influence it was later to have on his prose and his idea of how a novel should be structured. Had it not been for this early exposure to impressionism, it’s quite possible that novels like Napoleon Symphony and Mozart and the Wolf Gang would never have been written. Interestingly, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music describes the young Debussy as ‘an erratic pianist and a recalcitrant in matters of harmony and theory’, which sounds familiar. In later life he was to write reverent essays not just about Debussy but also on Ravel and Berlioz, most of which are to be found in One Man’s Chorus, edited by Ben Forkner. He was less respectful about Pierre Boulez as a composer but admired his restrained conducting style. So, the music of France was of tremendous importance to him from an early age, and in that department at least he had no complaints about the French.

His first encounter with the country itself was less happy. In 1939 he, his wife-to-be Lynne and a girl called Margaret Williams went on a walking holiday through Belgium, France and Holland. On arrival at Zeebrugge, the girls drew the attention of the local Flemish youths, at whom Burgess swore in French, a linguistic faux-pas he would not have made later on. When they finally crossed the border into France it was pouring with rain, they were served a filthy meal and a female taxi driver was rude to them. This incident seems to have obsessed Burgess, for the subject of French arrogance and haughtiness is referred to again and again in his later essays and novels like Earthly Powers. A bad beginning. And yet the book in his knapsack was Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. While the French might be rebarbative in person, the culture was calling out to him.

In his early novel The Worm and the Ring, a book almost immediately withdrawn because of a notorious libel action, there is an account of a school trip to Paris. Burgess had not yet visited the city, but in a Paris Review interview – 1974, I think, I don’t have a copy – he says that although it smelt of maps and guide books it was ‘better than the real thing’. This could be seen as an early example of Burgess’s strategy of coping with a people he disliked and distrusted by encasing them within his own art. He was to do it again many times.

The next long account we have of Burgess’s clash with the French is in the second volume of his autobiography, where he describes the trip he took across France, in straitened circumstances, with his second wife Liana in a Bedford Dormobile. It’s very funny but it must have been harrowing at the time. They were thoroughly robbed in Avignon, and the loss of Liana’s passport was to prove a major problem in the months to come. Yet again, France had let him down.

It only began to make amends when Burgess’s novels started to appear in French. I recently spent a long hot afternoon in the basement newspaper archives of the Bibliothèque Francois-Mitterand tracking down old reviews of Burgess’s books. The number of unfavourable reviews is vastly outnumbered by those that praise his work. He was beginning to attract the attention of serious critics. In November 1968 the first two Enderby books were reviewed by Hélene Cixous for Le Monde. Cixous, a structuralist and a Joyce scholar, was already a heavyweight and her review, while not entirely a rave, is respectful and sees the point of Burgess. He was to be seen by the French as a European writer, not a mere provincial English one, and he was taken seriously.

He was later to become a mainstay on Bernard Pivot’s literary TV programme “Apostrophes”. Upstairs in the media room of that same library, I watched on a computer screen the famous edition where Burgess was appearing to promote Beard’s Roman Women along with Alberto Moravia and Günter Grass. In his autobiography Burgess is disparaging about his command of the language, describing it as ‘adequate’, but in fact he gives a great performance through mephitic clouds of cigar smoke, and even though he’s speaking French he still sounds exactly like Anthony Burgess. Pivot, a rare anglophile in the French literary world, is respectful and obviously delighted to have such a literary lion on the programme. What comes across most is that Burgess is perfectly at ease here, and not at all the grumpy Englishman smarting over waitresses who correct his grammar. I believe that was all part of a persona he constructed for himself, as most great writers do, a way of keeping the world at arm’s length. The French were to be admired for many things, but they musn’t be allowed to get above themselves. He may have been an Englishman abroad, but he was still an Englishman, dammit. The battle of Waterloo was an on-going process, not a mere fact of history.

Burgess has been cast as a fictional character both by Paul Theroux and A S Byatt, but it was a Frenchman who first immortalised him in a novel. This was the novelist, critic and literary gadfly Philippe Sollers, ex-structuralist and Maoist, co-founder of the influential magazine Tel Quel and all-round provocateur. In his 1983 novel Femmes, he gives an account of a Paris cocktail party given to promote the French translation of Earthly Powers, Les Puissances des ténèbres. He approaches Burgess and asks him for his opinions on Vatican II. Burgess would rather talk about Joyce. (Sollers is another French Joycean and moreover reads him in English, something many respected French critics can’t do.) Sollers, or his literary avatar, presses him and Burgess gets pugnacious. An American journalist, Kate, challenges his views on marriage for priests, abortion etc. Burgess gets more pugnacious. It’s a satirical portrait but a believable one. It’s interesting that it should have been Sollers who fictionalised Burgess for he seems to me to be the closest equivalent to AB in France. Prolific, with a wide-range of interests, a musician (he’s written an excellent short book on Mozart), another anglophile (his family hid British airmen in their house on Bordeaux during the war and he grew up listening in secret to the BBC), frequently criticised by the literary establishment for the size of his output and for being, as they say here, trop médiatique, the producer of two doorstop volumes of brilliant literary essays which remind me a lot of Homage To Qwert Yuiop and One Man’s Chorus, it seems to me that, despite the difference in their social backgrounds, they have a lot in common. The reader may deduce that I’m a fan, but let me temper the praise with the fact that our esteemed editor once met Sollers at a party and was almost driven to punch him in the face.

Burgess was also well-served by his French translators. Throughout the decades Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier have produced superb versions of all of Burgess’s major novels. Belmont seems to have something of Burgess’s ability to work under any circumstances. Andrew Biswell, who interviewed him for his biography of Burgess, recounts how Belmont translated the final Epistle To The Reader from Napoleon Symphony – which is in rhyming couplets - during the course of a car journey. More recently, Jean-Luc Beaudiment-Piningre has wonderfully rendered three of Burgess’s early novels for Le Cherche Midi. For one of them, the translation of A Right To An Answer, the publishers cleverly used the iconic photograph of a naked Christine Keeler sitting on a chair for the cover photo, and the French, being French, gave it maximum window space.

Shortly before emailing this article to Angers I paid a visit to my local branch of the Fnac book chain on the Avenue des Ternes. Inspecting the shelves I found over half a dozen of Burgess’s books in French – Napoleon Symphony, Pianoplayers, The Doctor Is Sick, A Clockwork Orange of course, others. A small fraction of his output of course, but I’ve never been in a French bookshop which didn’t have at least a few of them. One can’t always be so confident of finding his work in the UK. I was shocked, on visiting a branch of Waterstones in London, to find not one Burgess novel, although many of them are in print from Penguin and Vintage. But it’s all of a piece with the way Burgess was always more honoured abroad than in his native country. The French made him a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Les Puissances des ténèbres won a prize for best translation, the late Prince Rainier made him a Commandeur du Mérite Culturel, in Italy he won countless awards. In England he was once made Critic of the Year, essentially for his Observer reviews, and presented with a perspex statue by Margaret Thatcher. Apart from that all he got was some piffling Best Northern Writer prize. Unlike Kingsley Amis or Angus Wilson, he received no official honours. Not much in return for a lifetime’s dedication to teaching and to expanding the boundaries of the English novel in a way none of his contemporaries could ever achieve.

His sales were always better in France too, something he acknowledges in his autobiography. He was appreciated here. So why this continued hostility, exemplified in essays like Morbus Gallicus and That Sweet Enemy? I think the reasons are two-fold. Firstly, he was a very sensitive man, easily hurt despite the bluff persona, and the French can be merciless when they scent weakness. There is still plenty of Anglophobia floating about here – Americanophobia too now since the Iraq war, which has been an absolute godsend for a France that was beginning to despair of ever playing a part again on the world stage – although more commonly among media types and politicians than among the ordinary people whom I’ve always found charming and courteous. But secondly, I’m reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s account in his autobiography of how, while a student at Cambridge and later as a young writer in Berlin, he became terrified of losing contact with his native tongue and would deliberately shut himself off from the surrounding culture, immersing himself in his beloved Russian and keeping contact with the locals to a minimum. Burgess had a tortuous relationship with England and the English, but he also knew that it had produced the greatest literature in the world and he was damned if he was going to defer to any damned foreigners, even if he had translated Cyrano and could discourse learnedly – and in French – on Debussy’s use of the whole tone scale.

Despite this, Burgess was a French writer, just as he was an Italian writer and a German writer and even an American writer. He knew no boundaries, suffered no limitations. To be a writer was to be universal and he succeeded at this where perhaps only Joyce and Hemingway had succeeded before him. The haughty waiters, the rude taxi drivers, they were the stuff of newspaper squibs, mere material for anecdotes. Burgess was a citizen of the world and in an era when nationalism and xenophobia are rearing their heads again, we should treasure that. Salut mon ami.

Mind you, I spent over an hour trying to pay an electricity bill this morning. When it comes to French bureaucracy, I’m with Burgess all the way.

Dougie Milton is Paris correspondent for the Burgess Newsletter.