My Life and My Efforts | Page 6

knight" and "The Treasure of Nugget Mountain" were published, containing a severely abridged and altered translation by Marion Ames Taggart of Karl May's most famous novel "Winnetou". Among other things, the main character is changed from a German, implicitly a Protestant, into an American, whom the translator has named Jack Hildreth and who keeps on emphasising that he was a Catholic. In one place, the translator has even added a line in which the hero is made to point out that the religion of the murderer Rattler was not his own, but that of a non-Catholic, when Winnetou suggests to him that he had the same religion as the murderer. In the original book, the hero simply answers "Yes" and then goes on to explain, as he also does in the translation, that the murderer did not keep the commandments. These liberties of the translation are particular serious since Karl May often had to defend himself against allegations of promoting Catholicism, though being a Protestant, just because he published many of his stories in a Catholic magazine. In 1900, the series of translations by M.A. Taggart was continued with "Jack Hildreth on the Nile", based on Karl May's "Der Mahdi" a.k.a. "Im Lande des Mahdi". You can find these three books on the Internet at: http://karlmay.uni-bielefeld.de/kmg/sprachen/englisch/primlit/index.htm
In 1955, a translation of the beginning of Karl May's big oriental adventure by M.A. de Becker and C.A. Willoughby has been published under the title "In the Desert". I have neither read this, nor any other later translations, but I have read about this translation that it had a tendency to simplify, shorten, and paraphrase the text. It is also peculiar that someone would only translate the first volume of a novel in six volumes. Thus, the reader would witness the hero finding the body of Paul Galingre in the desert and starting on his pursuit of the killers, but he would never solve the mystery and discover the criminal mastermind behind all of it in the end of the last volume. In 1971, two volumes of short stories entitled "Canada Bill" and "Captain Cayman", translated by Fred Gardner, have been published in London. These sold only about 3000 copies each. In 1977, a series of translations by Michael Shaw was published. It included "Ardistan and Djinnistan" (2 volumes), "Winnetou" (2 volumes), and "In the Desert" (1 volume). These translations have been described as faithful to the original. In 1979, the series was continued with 4 books, entitled "The Caravan of Death", "The Secret Brotherhood", "The Evil Saint", and "The Black Persian", continuing the oriental adventure which had started with "In the Desert". Only between 3000 and 4500 copies were sold per volume. In 1980, some of these books were reprinted as pocketbooks, but less than half of the printed books were actually sold, which put an end to all plans for further English translations. (By the way, the German original of "Winnetou" had sold about three million copies in the edition as volumes 7 to 9 of "Karl May's collected works" alone, when I bought it many years ago.) In 1998, there seems to have been a new edition of Michael Shaw's translation of "Winnetou", and in 1999, David Koblick published his abridged translation of the first volume of "Winnetou".
In this first (and only) volume of his autobiography, Karl May describes his life until about 1887/88 and then turns to the current events of 1910, when he had to defend himself against various slanderous accusations, touching only upon those events from the meantime which are somehow connected with these lawsuits. In the time from 1887 to 1899, he wrote most of those novels which have been the foundation of his lasting popularity. In 1899/1900, he went on his long journey through the Orient and, in 1908, he visited America. In the unwritten second volume of his autobiography, Karl May had planned to discuss those novels and his travels in detail. Here, I only want to give a short list of his work and a few events in his life after 1887:
1887: Karl May publishes "Der Sohn des Baerenjaegers" in a magazine for boys, published by Wilhelm Spemann. In the course of the following years, he off and on publishes several stories there, which are later collected in seven books. This gets him the reputation of being mainly an author for children, against which he vigorously protests in this autobiography. Nevertheless, these stories, mainly set in the Wild West, still rank among his most popular works.
1888: May finishes his big oriental adventure novel, which he had already started publishing in a magazine called "Deutscher Hausschatz" in 1881. For eight years (with interruptions), the readers of this magazine had been able, to follow the adventures of the first person narrator,