It was brought to my attention recently that two different translations of the same text – Natural History by Pliny (originally published around AD77-79) – show an interesting… erm…quirk.
The first, in 1938 by Harris Rackham, was published by William Heinemann in London and Harvard University Press in the USA. The second, in 1991 by John F Healy, was by Penguin.
When you put the translations side by side, there is at first little difference. But on page 321 of Volume 1 of the former and at paragraph 189 of the Penguin version, there is a glaring disparity.
Rackham in 1938 felt sufficiently secure to include Pliny’s record of Africans as “wise because of the mobility of their [climate]” compared to those “in the opposite region of the world” he adds “with white frosty skins and yellow hair that hangs straight” are who are “fierce owing to the rigidity of their climate”.
In Healy’s version in 1991 this section was omitted. But guess which version is more readily available? Yes, Healy’s – although the Natural History Museum’s library only holds the Rackham translation. Luckily my local library also keeps Rackham’s in its reserve stock.
This discovery made me think about the media coverage of the Haiti earthquake. In the same year Rackham was publishing his tome, the scholar CLR James published A History of Negro Revolt.
In it is an account of how the enslaved Africans on San Domingo (Haiti) overthrew first the British, then the French. Records show how the European nations were outwitted and outgunned by the Haitians while they were busy squabbling (with the Spanish) over who would own this rich nation in the 1790s.
So how does a nation go from being the richest Caribbean country to the poorest in the Western Hemisphere? There has been little mention of how France (and the USA) made Haiti pay – economically and otherwise – for what it meted out to the European nations. And there is a catalogue of abuse that runs through until today.
Consuming information without questioning it is dangerous.
