A SECRET SUBTERRANEAN LAIR IN AN UNSPECIFIED PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE OFFICE ― Stifling maniacal shouts of dastardly glee and stroking a white cat on his lap, editor Iago Heep sent the final copy to print of a newly translated Penguin Classics edition of the 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos Monday, having intentionally reverted the translator’s English rendering of the title.
“This is my favourite part of the job,” explained Heep, which is an alias that he adopted at fourteen when he first decided he wanted to grow up into a literal literary supervillain. “There’s so much distasteful labour you have to do as an editor, reworking awkward sentences, catching grammar mistakes, bitterly watching authors succeed at what you always dreamed of doing and knowing it was you who gave them their first chance. But this makes it all worth it.”
Heep saves translation hijinks for “a little treat” when his other book-based schemes have grown old, such as mind-numbingly uniform book covers that the authors all hate, not printing a page number on the first page of a chapter, using endnotes instead of footnotes so readers have to flip back and forth, and continuing to publish books by Stephen King.
“I love to imagine the look on the reader’s face when they finally find a long-sought treasure tucked away in a quaint little bookstore that doesn’t do returns, only to open it up and find that it’s not in Polish, which they learned just to read that specific book.”
“Isn’t that satisfying, Whitemalkin?” he added, addressing the sleeping cat, whose care costs are paid for by Penguin as being a “necessary expense” for a diabolical publisher.
“I’m also working on a truly incompetent modernization of Hamlet, one where the Dane asks ChatGPT ‘should I die?’ And then, of course it tells him yes, because it’s ChatGPT. It’ll drive high school English teachers crazy.”
Nevertheless, Heep quickly sobered up. “Usually I prefer to do this with a combination like Czech-Finnish. You know, something where there’s very little chance that the person will know the other language. This isn’t quite the same buzz. But it’s also always fun to fuck with the French, as a rule. And it’s been a while, so I thought, hey, why not?”
Heep says he and Penguin are not the only evil masterminds in publishing. “I know a guy in educational resources. He’s gone out of his way for years to stymie passable translations of great historical American speeches into Italian, just so he can release a collection with an Italian title that’s still all in English. Any day now, any day.”
Meanwhile, just as Heep was submitting the text, Michelle Lévesque of Granby, QC opened her sneakily English copy of a previous masterpiece of Heep’s and stared at it, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand,” she said, when reached for comment. “Why on Earth would someone do this? It makes zero sense.”
