Ponying the Slovos began as an attempt to define Nadsat, the invented language at the heart of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and then examine how translators dealt with it. We believed that by isolating and examining the translation of an invented language, which does not emerge from an organic culture, it would help to reveal translator’s various strategies for translation more obviously.
Read moreBurgess’s most substantial foray into invented languages was, curiously enough, not conducted for a novel. Ulam is a simplistic language with a slender grammar and limited lexis of terms. Nevertheless, unlike Nadsat or Easy Walker’s slang, it functions independently of English. As well it ought to, since it was intended to be a recreation of proto-Indo-European, the ur-language from which most of the tongues spoken from India and Iran to Ireland ultimately originated. In this sense it can be considered as a more fully realised development of the chanting which he had appended to his version of Oedipus.
In 1978, Burgess published what can best be described as a tribute to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, entitled 1985. This rather odd book is made up of a number of sections, including a dialogue between two aspects of Burgess himself. One section is fiction, an attempt by Burgess to update Orwell’s dystopian vision to the 1970s. In it, Britain is Tucland, a failing state dominated by heavyhanded union leaders and the infiltration of Arab money. It is, therefore, very much the vision of an expatriate who was not living and had not lived in Britain for quite some time, and was reliant upon newspaper reports for his perspective on the nation.
