Manuscript Found in Accra

It's an odd game, translation. Give ten translators the same sentence and you can almost guarantee you'll end up with ten different translations - all of which may be perfectly valid. Because a big part of translating is interpretation of the text, deciding what the original writer would have wanted, but also understanding how your reader would want it to be reproduced. It was during my MA that I learned that Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho had been elevated from airport paperback-tier in his native country to a literary figure of world renown thanks largely to a very capable set of English translations that rendered his words far more highbrow than they had ever been in Portuguese. So it was that, despite my increasing proficiency in Portuguese, I thought that it might be best to start his back catalogue in English.

Manuscript Found in Accra is one book by Coelho that perhaps didn't need any help. While I can see that the translator may have had opportunity to make the prose more poetic or, dare I say it, biblical, in nature, it can't obscure the fact that the ideas on show here are certainly worthy of praise in their own right.

Following a brief contextual introduction that lays out what the book actually is - supposedly a set of parchments found in the Middle East in the early 20th Century - the majority is given over to the speeches of a mysterious figure known only as "The Copt" - a man of apparently Greek origin who finds himself in Jerusalem in 1099 AD, called on as a source of advice by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike as the Crusaders gather outside the walls of the city.

The book takes a loose call-and-response form, as members of the crowd ask The Copt about various topics and he answers at length. His speeches deal with things such as beauty, love, anxiety, the future... nothing that hasn't really been done before and in ways that seem lifted straight from the world's religious texts a lot of the time. A few select quotes should sum up:

"And to those who believe that adventures are dangerous I say, Try routine: that kills you far more quickly."

"What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace."

"The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back."

But as trite as it may have been a lot of the time, it's hard to criticise Manuscript Found in Accra, simply for the fact that it's worth being reminded of these simple truths from time to time - less is more, as it were.

So while the book didn't change my life, it did help me take a step back and remind me that a lot of the answers in life are things that we've always known deep down, and that humanity could probably gain a lot by falling back on them.

4/5

Otherwise summarised like this: