A Good Book

While the four hundredth anniversary of the Authorised Version has been marked in Britain with grovels to Mammon and crass political posturing, a new Norwegian translation of the noted collection of X-rated fairy tales has become a bestseller. Thirty translators, priests and academics were involved in rendering the original Greek and Hebrew into Norwegian, which was then given a stylistic polish by a team of twelve literary authors. Stine Smemo Strachan of the Norwegian Bible Society, who worked on the project, has attributed its success to the translation's readability, and "the fact that its publication is seen as a cultural event": the original printing ran to twenty-five thousand copies, but the book has already sold more than three times that number since mid-October, despite lacking an introduction by Michael Gove.

Me at Poetry-24
To Ronald Searle