Remember the novel The Psychoanalyst by John Katzenbach I recently posted about? The one that has two sequels only available in Spanish for a reason nobody knows?
I read the first sequel in Spanish, and it’s definitely a translation. There are some expressions that are calques from English and don’t exist in Spanish. The author is definitely American.
The sequel is good. These novels sold millions of copies in the Spanish-speaking world. But something mysterious is going on with these books. I bought this novel on Kindle but then the Kindle version disappeared from Amazon. Even the page no longer exists. It’s so weird.
The reason I like the novel is that the superhero protagonist is a bookish man in his fifties. He’s 53 in the first novel, 58 in the second, and 68 in the third. And the decisive, hardcore woman who saves everybody in the second book is 87.
I’m now reading the third book in the series that was published last year. Again, it’s only available in Spanish. This is a literary mystery, and I found no explanation for it anywhere.
Clarissa's Blog 
“a literary mystery”
I mentioned before William Wharton who for some reason was hugely popular in Poland and a few of his books apparently have only been printed in Polish translations.
So, I suspect this kind of thing is more common than you might think, you just noticed this example because of the Spanish connection.
I wonder what other authors are more popular in translation…. Edgar Wallace comes to mind since his books were reprinted endlessly in German decades after English speakers could no longer be bothered….
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I think the book is so popular in the Spanish -speaking countries precisely because it’s such a very old-school American tale of resilience, strength, and heroism. The main character is a modern-day Pilgrim of sorts. People outside of America are very attached to this American ethos. The America of micro-aggressions and victimhood confuses them and who can blame them?
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Also, Fenimore Cooper and Jack London. N is persecuting every American he has to talk to with Fenimore Cooper, and they all stun him by saying they have no idea who he is.
We can all quote these authors by heart. Oh, and O. Henry. Another forgotten American author that looms large in the post-Soviet space.
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This is hilarious. 🙂
So this author gets a publisher and an ongoing writing gig but may not be the most stellar of writers in that language … oh, who would have thought that possible?
[looks at you being totally hilarious]
AHAHAHAHAHAHA YES 🙂
What’s weirder then, that the publisher appears to be OK with leaving all of those “calques from English”, perhaps the kinds of things that exist in environments such as Miami, or that there are all of these people coming out of the woodwork with help and …
Oh do go on, this is hugely fun! 🙂
Let’s do a theory here: what he was writing wasn’t going to get published in the US anyway, because to the American reader he was just a Miami Herald writer who filled a literary gap for it (while it and the people involved lasted), and so what was a liability to him in America (as in the whole Miami connection, as opposed to the locations of Dark Satanic American Publishing Houses) turned out to be an asset to him in Latin America (where Miami gets a lot more respect).
Now ask why what he was writing wasn’t going to get published in the US.
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This is Katzenbach. He’s the author of Hart’s War and Just Cause. He’s a mega-bestselling author in the US, not some unknown guy.
And there’s a small handful of clumsy phrases. Overall, the translation is great. I only picked up the very few mistakes because I was specifically looking and I’m a professional translator.
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