We must thank Philip Boehm and Penguin for the new translation of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (Report, 25 September). We should also thank Michael Scammell for his thoughtful and incisive introduction. Equally, it seems, we are indebted to them for revealing that the 1940 translation by Daphne Hardy (my mother) was in several respects inaccurate, due to her inexperience and to the difficult conditions under which she worked. Three generations of readers, along with many eminent critics over the years, appear to have laboured under the misapprehension that they were reading a masterpiece of 20th-century literature.
It is pointed out that Hardy mistranslated a few official terms, such as putting “hearing” for “interrogation”, incongruities that were no doubt glossed over previously. Those not versed in the brutal history of the Soviet regime might, it is suggested, have been misled by such inadvertent softening, as to the way in which due legal process was brushed aside by Stalin, most blatantly during the show trials, Rubashov’s “Punch and Judy show”. But we are left in no doubt about the brutality of the regime.
From December 1940 Koestler made this country his home and from then on only wrote in English. Yet he never saw fit to revise Hardy’s translation, which was reprinted by Penguin year after year and was included in a new hardback edition of his collected works in the 1960s.
Koestler’s English was good and he would, I believe, have checked every word Daphne wrote. The book mattered to him more than anything else he ever wrote and he would have made sure that what was published contained only what he wanted to say. Incidentally, Hardy attended a German school in Holland where she was taught by nuns, in German, hence she was very fluent in the language, as well as in Dutch and French.
Paul Henrion
Seaford, East Sussex
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