Ask the Author: Geoff Baldwin
Answered Questions (5)
Geoff Baldwin
Take a break, and hope it goes away soon.
Geoff Baldwin
It's very satisfying to have written something that really hangs together, particularly when you run across it later and say to yourself: "Damn, that's good!"
Geoff Baldwin
Back in the golden age of science fiction (age 13, if you didn't already know) I read an article giving advice to young writers: write a lot and keep at it. I didn't want to hear this, and you may have the same feeling, but it turns out to be absolutely true. The more you write, the better you get at it (but not necessarily any faster).
Geoff Baldwin
While I was working on this project, the publishing industry imploded. It's going through its worst ruction since Gutenberg, and don't forget: he died broke.
I am currently bogged down in the publication process, at the moment: publicity, of which this item is a case in point. I hope soon to get back to working the manuscript of the entire History into publishable shape (which has turned out to require much more work than I expected or planned for).
I am currently bogged down in the publication process, at the moment: publicity, of which this item is a case in point. I hope soon to get back to working the manuscript of the entire History into publishable shape (which has turned out to require much more work than I expected or planned for).
Geoff Baldwin
In the mid-nineties, I happened to read Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia. A Translation and Analysis, by Richard Pipes (Cambridge, Harvard University, 1959). I found it fascinating. I was aware that Karamzin had also written a classic multi-volume history of Russia around 1820 and I was eager to read it, but was unable to find an English translation. There the matter rested until January 2005, when I was on a tour of Moscow, St. Petersburg and environs, attempting to appreciate the full glory of a Russian winter. Our bus was lurching over icy roads a couple of hours east of Moscow and I happened to be sitting next to a professor of Russian. We hit it off from the start. I told her of my interest in Karamzin, that I had taken two years of Russian at Reed College a long, long time ago, and that as I had recently dropped out of graduate physics for the second time in forty years, I was a bit at loose ends. She had the temerity to suggest I might set myself the task of reading Karamzin’s History in Russian. At first I thought she was out of her rabbit-ass mind, but the idea slowly grew on me, like some kind of internal fungus. When I got home I verified that in 180 years, the classic History of the Russian State had never been translated into English. This struck me then, and still does, as a deeply deplorable state of affairs. I estimated that for about twice the (very large) effort of reading the History, I could produce a translation. I would then have, instead of merely a bent brain, “a treasure for all time,” as Thucydides puts it. I managed to buy a slightly used set of volumes on the Internet; initial attempts to translate parts of it went much better than I had any right to expect, and I settled into a systematic routine. By July 2011 I had a second draft of the entire work – almost 900,000 words in English. My translation strives for accuracy, but places a very high premium on readability. About half of Karamzin’s text is endnotes, which I have not translated: to do a proper job with these notes, which are properly addressed to academic specialists, would require truly exceptional credentials in the field. The text proper, on the other hand, is intended as a popular work, and is surprisingly readable, particularly for a historical work. The Reign of Ivan the Terrible and The Reign of Boris Godunov are currently available excerpts from this work. I hope to publish the entire work a few years hence.
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