![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBack when I was still a teenager, I saw Tom Clancy's Op Center: Balance of Power in Charlottetown's Coles bookstore. I'm not a Clancy fan as such; I think that The Hunt for Red October was an interesting middle-brow novel, but that his subsequent bloated works demonstrate clearly why all writers need editors, particularly the famous million-selling ones. I read quickly, a couple thousand words per minute, and so I scanned the first few chapters of Balance of Power as I stood in the aisles.
I was flabbergasted that the title was published. The ludicrous plot elements of Balance of Power were adequately described in Barcelona Business (Google's cached copy is here).
Don't forget that all Catalonians are virulent racists who are ready to commit genocide against the Andalusians, that the amount of respect paid by the profoundly corrupt Spanish state to civil and human rights is proportional to the amount of money one is ready to pay, and that all the Catalonian characters have stereotypically Hispanic family names like Ramirez. No funny foreign names like Puig or Pujol in Barcelona!
It seems that Balance of Power caused some stir in Spain, not only because of its poorly researched vision of interethnic relations in Spain but because of a contentious Spanish translations which, in order to avoid offending large chunks of the Spanish marketplace, dropped the worst inanities. David R. Thompson's "Patriot Games: Translation, Censorship and the Representation of Modern-Day Spain", published in November 2003 in Trans no 15, trying to negotiate between a global culture ignorant of the Spanish reality and a history of profoundly interethnic conflict.
Don't read the Clancy. Do read the Thompson.
I was flabbergasted that the title was published. The ludicrous plot elements of Balance of Power were adequately described in Barcelona Business (Google's cached copy is here).
The insults in the English-language version start on page three, with a slur on Spanish manhood. Clancy then rips into the corruption, nepotism, sexism, policemen rapists, superstition, fascism and blood-lust that he imagines in Spanish society. The plot is simple - Catalonian bankers in league with Basque terrorists assassinate an American woman in Madrid to trigger a tourist scare designed to bankrupt Spain. The wiley and wealthy Catalonians hold the state to ransom, having extended easy credit prior to the stunt. The political price for putting the country back in the black is the stuff of real-life Catalonian president Jordi Pujol's dreams. Throw in a military coup d'état in response and the Clancy formula is complete.
Don't forget that all Catalonians are virulent racists who are ready to commit genocide against the Andalusians, that the amount of respect paid by the profoundly corrupt Spanish state to civil and human rights is proportional to the amount of money one is ready to pay, and that all the Catalonian characters have stereotypically Hispanic family names like Ramirez. No funny foreign names like Puig or Pujol in Barcelona!
It seems that Balance of Power caused some stir in Spain, not only because of its poorly researched vision of interethnic relations in Spain but because of a contentious Spanish translations which, in order to avoid offending large chunks of the Spanish marketplace, dropped the worst inanities. David R. Thompson's "Patriot Games: Translation, Censorship and the Representation of Modern-Day Spain", published in November 2003 in Trans no 15, trying to negotiate between a global culture ignorant of the Spanish reality and a history of profoundly interethnic conflict.
Don't read the Clancy. Do read the Thompson.
