29: Recollections of Japan, Hendrik Doeff

The memoirs of the chief of Dutch trade in Japan, 1799-1817. A lot of David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" was based on these very memoirs, which is why I picked it up.

This would have been great in Dutch.

It's merely good in English, because, unfortunately, it was translated by Annick M. Doeff, who is...well, hell if I can be bothered to find out exactly. She's married to a descendant of Hendrik Doeff, and does not appear to be a historian.

I can't tell whether the translation is biased, but I certainly can tell the introduction and notes are. I'll paraphrase. "Hendrik Doeff was a great, benevolent, intelligent, diplomatic, centuries-ahead-of-his-time man, the English were all evil, scheming jerks, and the Americans were awesomely fantastic and upright, just as we are today. Also, I won't actually use a capable editor, stick my footnotes in willy-nilly, randomly choose not to translate words that have perfectly good English equivalents, explain words that any person interested in history will know, oh, yes, and do so incorrectly." (No, Annick: the Greeks did not wear togas. They wore tunics. The fucking Romans wore togas. And a "tabard" doesn't need a fucking note explaining it. And it's not a fucking toga, to begin with. Jesus H. Christ in a handbasket.)

't ain't worth the $22 you're charged. Just wait for a Dutch version.

So all that said: the words of Hendrik Doeff himself are excellent (even through this bizarre translation filter). Just ignore the stupid notes.