Since 1947 - one year after the publication of his first novel - Gore
Vidal's writing has been published in 39 foreign languages, and
one of his essays has even been rendered in Braille. My collection
includes translations in all of those 39 languages, and the links in each
section below will introduce you to many of the covers of these editions,
along with some information about each cover.
The rare Thai edition of his 1978 novel Kalki (top left) has a dedication inside the book that reads, "For Kukrit Pramoj, who first told me of Kalki." The Thai publisher put these words, in English, on the book's cover, presumably to make it more appealing to Thai readers. Pramoj was a great Thai statesman and the prime minister of Thailand for a while in the 1970s. Vidal has called the cover illustration of the novel "lurid." Pictured top right is the only Slovak translation of a Vidal novel: It's his historical novel Burr, a name probably not too familiar to Slovak readers, so the title has been changed to "I Could Have Been President." And below right is the Greek edition of Julian.
Vidal's 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge appeared in a 2003 Taiwanese
edition (left). The title in Chinese means "Forever, Perpetual Myra."
Vidal's 1967 novel, Washington, D.C., was translated into Chinese
in Beijing in 1981. That book's title in Chinese,
roughly translated, means "a fiery desire to be on the political stage,"
although Vidal's
name in Chinese doesn't mean anything at all. An Indian scholar,
Jayanto Ghosh, has translated Vidal's 2001 essay on the World Trade Center
attack into Bengali and hopes to publish it soon in an Indian journal. In
the meantime, he has provided The Gore Vidal Index with the
first 100 words of his translation. This is the first known
translation of Vidal into Bengali.
Vidal has not been published in Urdu, although a Pakistani psychiatrist living in London is working on a translation of Messiah that he some day hopes to publish. He has provided the Index with this Urdu sample of the book's title and Vidal's name beneath it. Nor has Vidal been translated into Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. To remedy that oversight, I have translated Vidal's name into Amharic, and I offer an explanation of my choice of Amharic letters. Here, too, is Vidal's name in braille. And for the truly needy (and nerdy), here is Vidal's name translated into two of the languages of Star Trek. So far, none of his books have appeared in these (or any other) invented languages.
I've grouped the titles in the sections below by subject rather than by language, which will allow you to see how different publishers at different times interpreted the novels through their cover illustrations, and also how foreign publishers often changed the titles of the books. You can click on every cover in this link to get a closer look at it. As always, feel free to send me comments about this or any page in The Gore Vidal Index.
Here's a miscellany of covers
from around the world that presents more than half a century of Vidal's
writing. His earliest translations appeared in Scandinavia and then in the
rest of Europe, especially France and Italy. In the 1960s, when he
returned to writing fiction, his historical novels enjoyed worldwide
interest and success (often in pirated editions, which naturally didn't
please him). So, too, did his essays, offering the world a series of
bristling dissertations on history, culture and politics. But in terms of
translations, that's about it: His early novels have rarely been
translated in foreign countries, which seem to prefer his historical
novels (especially the American Chronicles) and his often-incendiary
political writing. Pictured here are the world's only two translations of
Vidal's seminal novel, Williwaw (1946), whose title refers to a
type of ocean storm unique to the Aleutians, where the novel takes place.
Both the French and Italian titles - Ouragan and
L'Uragano, respectively - simply mean "hurricane." Strangely, in
2004, a Syrian publisher issued Vidal's 1949 semi-autobiographical novel
The Season of Comfort in an Arabic translation. One wonders how
the translator dealt with the homosexual content of the novel in a culture
that is far less tolerant than even America was at mid-century. FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of various book covers from early works by Vidal.
The covers of Myra Breckinridge show
how different cultures captured the spirit of the novel - in some case,
much more provocatively than U.S. editions. Myra has been
translated into more than a dozen languages, and in Italy alone, there
have been numerous cloth and paperback editions in the last 30-plus years.
After the death of Franco, Spain got to read the book, which still
apparently has not been translated into Russian, although it exists in
Japanese and Turkish. Two different French translations, published in 1970
and 1988, seem to be especially squeamish about translating some of
Vidal's most explicit language. Pictured here, at left, is the 1978
Spanish edition with a cover that shows Raquel Welch in a racy scene from
the awful 1970 film version of the book. And at right is the 1999
Portuguese edition, the most graphic Myra cover anywhere in the
world. Quite clearly, someone has been a very bad boy. FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of covers from Myra Breckinridge.
The covers of Julian and
Creation, Vidal's two highly regarded novels of antiquity, have
not differed widely from country to country: Virtually all show familiar
images of the ancient cradles of civilization in the few centuries before
and after Christ. So the covers of
Julian and the covers of
Creation have provided international publishers with
opportunities to create some of the most colorful covers in Vidaliana -
although these covers are somewhat more conventional than the books they
illustrate. Pictured here are the covers of two Iranian editions of the
novel, the first from 1989 (published in two volumes), and the second from
2004. Each had a printing of around 1,350 copies. The Bulgarian hardcover
of Julian is especially attractive inside, offering about a dozen
glossy pages with black-and-white photographs of actual Roman artifacts
and busts. At the back of the book, there's a fold-out map of the Roman
empire as it was in the days of Julianus II. FEATURED
PAGES: A slide show of covers from
Julian or from Creation.
Vidal wrote two novels that might well be called
tales of a
death cult: In Messiah, published in 1954, a former
undertaker who preaches that "death is good" becomes the Christ-like
center of a new world religion; and in Kalki, published in 1978,
a deranged Vietnam veteran concocts a religious cult from Eastern dogma
with the intention of killing humankind and repopulating Earth with his
own progeny. Both books embrace very cynical views of religion and
postulate that it doesn't take much to turn people into ideological sheep.
The covers of these books tend to capture the haunting and moribund
sensations of the novels, like the beguiling Bulgarian cover of
Kalki, at left, which suggests how Kalki plans to kill everyone
on earth - by dropping poisonous flowers from an airplane on the people
he's seduced into believing he's the new messiah. The striking cover of
the Brazilian edition of Messiah, pictured here at right, taps
into its notion that the repeated, televised image can seduce people into
submission regardless of its content. No other cover of Messiah
plays on this element of the book, with most choosing to depict its
cult-religion overtones. Vidal began writing Messiah in 1949,
somewhat before this notion became common currency thanks largely to the
writing of Marshall McLuhan. Together these novels are interesting
companion pieces, excellently told (or foretold) and, finally, very grim.
FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of covers from Messiah and Kalki.
When Vidal published The City and the
Pillar in 1948, he miscalcuated the degree to which prudish
middlebrow book critics would associate its story of a young homosexual
with Vidal himself. The daily critic for The New York Times refused to
reviews Vidal's next few novels, and though The City and the
Pillar sold briskly and won Vidal a reputation, it wounded his novel
sales and forced him to begin writing screenplays and teleplays. Around
the world, the novel has been translated almost as widely as
Julian and Myra Breckinridge. Some international covers
display the book's homoeroticism, while some depict the character of Jim
as a tennis instructor (which he is for a time). Still others simply
capture a sense of the central character's isolation, suggesting that the
dark lonely city is a place where tragic figures like Jim Willard are
likely to be found. The Greek edition, seen here at left, features a
Norman Rockwell painting of two all-American young men - just like the
novel's Jim Willard and Bob Ford. The title means "a young man by the
river," borrowed from the 1949 French re-titling of the book. The 1949
Italian first edition, at right, retitles the tale "The Perverse City" and
calls it "a drama of the third sex." FEATURED
PAGE: A
slide show of covers from The City and the Pillar.
Around the world, the seven books of Vidal's
American Chronicles have taught some history lessons not found in standard
texts. The
first five books cover the time from the American Revolution through
the first two decades of the 20th Century. The last two books pick
up the story around 1937 and take the characters into the early 21st
Century. Some of these books were quite popular in former Soviet-bloc
countries, so much so that a Bulgarian publisher issued all of the novels
in uniform
Bulgarian editions, joining earlier Bulgarian translations of three
novels by three different publishers. In the early 1970s alone,
translations of Washington, D.C. appeared in Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia, Albania and Armenian. The first six books in this series are, in
order of American history, Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood
and Washington, D.C.,
although Vidal did not write them in that order. In the fall of 2000,
Vidal published The Golden Age, a finale to the remarkable series
of historical novels. This last book retraces the years of Washington,
D.C. to tell the story from a different point of view. The covers of
the American Chronicles in translation usually depict images of Americana.
The snazzy cover of the 1971 Latvian edition of Washington, D.C.
(top left) shows two impressionistic revelers puttin' on the Ritz at a
cocktail party, perhaps like the one that opens the novel. But in
neighboring Lithuania, the same novel (top right) has a cover that appears
to depict a politico-thug spewing his demagoguerie at a collection of
microphones. The very rare Armenian edition of Washington, D.C.
simply has the name of the book and author on the front (lower left). And
in Latvia, in 1991, a Russian translation of Lincoln appeared in
three paperback volumes. Pictured here, lower right, is the cover of
volume one. Click on it to see volumes one and two. FEATURED PAGES: Watch a slide show of covers from
Washington, D.C. and The Golden Age, or from
Lincoln, or from
Burr.
Vidal prides his inventions quite
highly among his novels, using them to satirize all aspects of American
life and culture. In fact, because he wrote contemporary novels early in
his career - like such literary ancestors as Hemingway and Fitzgerald -
and then turned to writing metafiction, he has said that his work is the
missing link in the study of the 20th Century novel. Few literary
scholars have taken up his challenge. Vidal's first invention was the
ribald Myra Breckinridge in 1968, followed by asequel,
Myron, in 1974. Three others inventions ensued: Duluth, Live
from Golgotha and The Smithsonian Institution, the latter
being something of a bridge between his historical fiction and his
metafiction. Pictured here, at left, is the brash Brazilian edition of
Myron, which visualizes the central character's
struggle with his sexual identity, although the real Myron would only be
caught dead in a dominatrix outfit, and he certainly didn't have so fine a
physique (at least not as a man). The striking image on the Bulgarian
edition of Golgotha, at right, evokes a Munchian crucifixion.
FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of covers from Vidal's inventions.
In the 1950s, his literary novels not selling
well, Vidal wrote three mystery novels under the
pseudonym "Edgar Box." The first of these novels appeared as a Dutton
hardcover in 1952, with one following from Dutton for each of the next two
years. Vidal's British publisher at the time, Heinemann, also issued
hardcover editions of the books. Then, Edgar Box disappeared, although he
remained in print for decades in a variety of U.S. and U.K. paperback
editions, not to mention translations in about half a dozen countries.
Seen here, at left, is the colorful 1955 Italian hardcover edition of
Death Before Bedtime, and at left is a 1986 Italian edition of
the same book with a new title and from a new translator - and also, with
"Gore
Vidal" cited as the author rather than "Edgar Box." Only in very small
print on the copyright page does the 1986 edition mention the book's
"original" author. And note the spelling of the author's name on the
cover of this
1955 French translation of Death Likes It Hot. No doubt
someone at the French publishing company lost his job over that faux
pas. FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of covers from the Edgar Box novels.
Vidal’s many and varied
works of nonfiction have appeared in far fewer languages than his
fiction, and when they are translated, the covers are often very
straightforward or even austere. Most of his foreign-language nonfiction
consists of selected essays about literature, politics and occasionally
himself. Very few of these collections correspond one-to-one with an
American counterpart: rather, the editors of the foreign editions choose
essays from a variety of collections that they believe their country’s
readers will enjoy. The 1971 German essay collection Betrachtungen auf
einem Sinkenden Schiff has a title that's virtually a literal
translation of the
American title, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969), but
contains only 10 of the American edition’s 25 essays. Its cover is quite
phallic and
provocative: the front (at left) pictures a shapely woman straddling the
barrel of a gun and wearing only an American flag, with a hotdog held
high in her hand; and the back (at right)
shows - well, a rear view of the same woman wearing even less. Vidal's
books on
the Sept. 11 attacks have been translated around the world, and in
some cases, they have appeared in other countries before appearing in the
U.S. In addition
to essay collections, Vidal’s little Screening History, in which
he reflects upon his childhood love of movies, has appeared in French and
Italian, while the engaging Views from a Window: Conversations with
Gore Vidal exists in French and Spanish editions. And in 2001 there
appeared a Spanish translation of Sexually Speaking with a racy
cover to beat all covers. Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, has been
translated into a few languages but always with a cover very similar to
the American edition, which features a photo of the author as a young man.
Vidal's
Inventing a Nation is unique in his canon: It's a book of
history, not a historical fiction, and not merely a collection of essays.
So far, it has only been translated into two languages: Italian ( left)
and Spanish (right). In the book, Vidal's tells the story of America's
founding by George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and various
other early Americans in their circle and their orbit. The founders of the
United States of America become crystal clear about the need for a federal
constitution after the Shays rebellion of 1786-87. Before it, a Federalist
faction favored a strong central government, while an anti-Federalists
(later "Republican") faction favored wider states' rights. But when Shays
rose up against the moneyed class and fought for the overtaxed poor,
"there were no Federalists, no future Republicans," Vidal writes, "only
frightened men of property." Vidal's narrative in Inventing a
Nation sticks pretty much to history, although sometimes he moves
very forward, drawing parallels between his central historical
events and the emerging history of the 21st Century. The Sept. 11
terrorist attacks pop up, as does Britain's New Labor prime minister, Tony
Blair, whose victory Vidal sees as a reminder of the pre-destiny - or at
least, the consistency - of national character, for better or for worse.
Money and power are the villains of the piece, although Vidal never goes
so far as to suggest that the People would do any better. Needless to say
that while the book is a work of history, it's heavy laced with Vidal's
interpretation of his historic events.
©Copyright 2005 by
Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh
kloman@pitt.edu
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