Cloud Atlas: UK and US Editions

[Ursa major]

I was always aware that sometimes a book's title -- and sometimes some of the vocabulary -- was altered when a book written for the UK (or US) market was picked up by a publisher in the other market, i.e. US (or UK). And I think I subconsciously accepted that a change in vocabulary might require slightly larger changes (because a straight word-for-word change might be either impossible or clumsy).

However, I think I was relying too much on a simplistic version of how these changes come about, i.e. that a book is produced for one market and then, in effect, "translated" from UK English to North American English (or vice versa), i.e. that there was a single definitive text from which the others flowed. Sometimes there isn't single source, and this is the case for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

This Grauniad article reveals what can happen. As the article says:

Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck, University of London was writing a paper on Cloud Atlas, working from the UK paperback published by Sceptre, and from a Kindle edition of the novel, when he realised he was unable to find phrases in the ebook that he could distinctly remember from the paperback. He compared the US and UK editions of the book, and realised they were “quite different to one another”.

Here's an example:

In the UK text, for example, Mitchell writes at one point that: “Historians still unborn will appreciate your cooperation in the future, Sonmi ~451. We archivists thank you in the present. […] Once we’re finished, the orison will be archived at the Ministry of Testaments. […] Your version of the truth is what matters.”

In the US edition, the lines are: “On behalf of my ministry, thank you for agreeing to this final interview. Please remember, this isn’t an interrogation, or a trial. Your version of the truth is the only one that matters.”

So how did this come about? Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper:

They occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House. Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US. When his new US editor David Ebershoff took over, Mitchell was presented with a substantial list of changes for the US edition, and “due to my inexperience at that stage in my three-book ‘career’, it hadn’t occurred to me that having two versions of the same novel appearing on either side of the Atlantic raises thorny questions over which is definitive, so I didn’t go to the trouble of making sure that the American changes were applied to the British version (which was entering production by that point probably) and vice versa”.

Mitchell goes on:

“It’s a lot of faff – you have to keep track of your changes and send them along to whichever side is currently behind – and as I have a low faff-tolerance threshold, I’m still not very conscientious about it, which is why my US and UK editors now have their assistants liaise closely,” Mitchell told Eve. “I really never dreamed back then that anyone would ever notice or care enough to email me about it, or that the book would still be in print 13 years later, let alone sell a couple of million copies and be studied or thought about by academics.”

 

[mosaix]

I saw this in the Grauniad and was intrigued.

BTW have to say that both the film and the book are stunning. Cant recommend them highly enough.

 

[BAYLOR]

I could not get into this book.

 

[Rodders]

I have the movie at home, but I haven't yet watched it. I have heard a lot of good things about it, though.

 

[S Blake-Smy]

Loved the book, and was pleasantly surprised by the film. Even though it had T.Hanks in it.