Kristina Roy, Martinko: A Slovack Story (Hong Kong: Bible Light Publishers, n.d.).
This is the fifth novel by Royová that I’m reviewing, following upon Sunshine Country, Three Comrades, Only a Servant, and Kept by a Mighty Hand. But, as it turns out, Martinko is the very first book she wrote!
It was published originally in 1893 until the title Bez Boha na svete, or “Without God in the World,” though the protagonist does bear the name Martinko. Royová wrote it in response to a general challenge for someone to produce some kind of children’s literature “for God.” It now stands as the single most translated work of Slovak literature—the introduction to my copy notes that it has appeared in innumerable German editions as well as Hungarian and Russian. I’ve since found references to editions also in Spanish, Romanian, Korean, Japanese (!!), French, and Croatian.
So that’s pretty cool. However, Royová went on to write nearly seventy novels, and frankly it’s pretty obvious that this one is her first. I’ve spoken warmly of the emotional and spiritual complexity in some of her other works, but this one is so pious as to border on the saccharine. A poor little orphan boy, kept alive but not well-loved by the townspeople, yearns for God, finds a Bible and some mentors, inadvertently re-enacts certain aspects of Jesus’ ministry, and dies tragically from injuries gained while saving a lost sheep, an inspiration to the half-hearted Christians all around him. The christological allusions are heavy-handed at best.
But as so often is the case with Slovak lit from before the Velvet Revolution, the circumstances of its translation are what really draw my interest… though unfortunately, at the time of posting, the results are inconclusive.
Before I got the hardcover pictured above, I tracked down this version, but as I initially suspected and later confirmed, it’s a severely truncated, bowdlerized, and editorialized version, not a proper translation. And fair enough; it’s not aiming to be a translation, but a Sunday School-type lesson for children. Still, I was a little annoyed at what was done to it.
I did eventually find a print copy of the full English translation. But once again, the mystery thickened. It’s obviously an old book, but there’s no date inside. And, stranger still, the title page and copyright page were pasted over with stickers, all the same, labeled: “Bible Light Publishers P.O. Box 96568, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, H.K.” Those last initials stand for Hong Kong.
A Slovak novel in English published in Hong Kong?!?!
So, naturally, I held the page up to the light to peer at what was under the stickers, hoping for something racy, but it just turned out to be, on the title page, “Christian Book Room,” and on the back, bookstores in Montreal, Woodbridge NJ, Oak Park IL, and once again the Christian Book Room—this time identifed as being located in Hong Kong.
Well, it turns out that whether you search for “Bible Light Publishers Hong Kong” or “Christian Book Room Hong Kong” they take you to the same place. And sure enough that same place is a Christian book publisher that’s been in business over one hundred years and still now ships Christian literature to the Chinese mainland… and still carries Martinko in its catalog! The cover is different, though similar. And, by a very great coincidence (or is it?!), the catalog also carries Greasy the Robber, a story translated by Charles Lukesh, the very man and missionary who translated two others works by Royová into English.
Naturally, I shot off a message to the Christian Book Room of Hong Kong to ask if they could shed any light on the mystery—the date of publication, the translator (only identified as “F.B.” in the introduction), and for that matter how on earth this book made its way to Hong Kong. My only lead was that the introduction said that Martinko had already been translated into… wait for it… Chinese!
I did hear back from Karen Short at the Christian Book Room, who could tell me that the original edition came out about eighty years ago. That roughly coincides with a WorldCat entry for an edition published in 1944 in Stirling—presumably the one in Scotland—but this time, no publisher is listed! A little more digging on WorldCat revealed the entry for my edition, published in “Kowloon” (a neighborhood of Hong Kong).
The WorldCat entry for an edition published in Shanghai lists no official date either, though it includes in brackets “[between 1918 and 1937?].” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, or what it’s based on.
All that was left to me to try was the final entry WorldCat: Bible Truth Publishers, but again—argh!—no date. I found that they carry a number of Royová’s books in their catalogue (so, go to their site if you want copies of your own instead of chasing down the rare originals that I’ve found). And, in addition, they also carry Greasy the Robber, translated by Charles Lukesh. Did I mention that Lukesh worked as a missionary with the Brethren? Or that Bible Truth is a Brethren publishing house? I was sure I was zeroing in on my target now.
But once again, I hit a wall. I immediately heard back from John Kaiser and Stephen Rule at Bible Truth Publishers, who said that while Sunshine Country and Three Comrades have been in their catalogue for over forty years, Martinko is a recent addition, meant to complement the Christian Book Room of Hong Kong edition on the other side of the world. By now even the English of Royová’s works are in public domain, so there was no rights acquisition process that might have revealed the book’s earlier history in English. The fine folks at Bible Truth also shared leads in their archives with stories from missionaries in China and Hong Kong, but I couldn’t find any reference to Royová in any of them. But I did get the list of other translations—I’m still stunned that Martinko has appeared in Japanese, though I haven’t been able to find a copy yet.
Frustrated, I went back to that one reference to “Stirling.” I googled for publishers in Stirling, Scotland, and lo and behold I turned up the Drummond Tract Depot, alternately known as the Stirling Tract Enterprise… which was again a Brethren publisher! I wrote to the archives to ask if they had any leads but, thanks to covid, they’re closed.
Then Stephen at Bible Truth followed up with another lead: a copy of Martinko with the publisher identified as “Alfred Holness/R. L. Allan and Son.” The former was based in England, the latter in Glasgow, but both were Brethren publishers and both were aquired by Pickering and Inglis in 1919. So it looks like the original translation came via this path and then on to the Christian Book Room and Bible Truth Publishers.
One more step! I contacted a bookseller who had this edition of Martinko on offer to ask if there was any date on it. There wasn’t, but he sent along a photo of the title page, which includes the earlier spelling convention “Slovack” as well as a little more data on the translators:
Searching for them, I turned up this site, the English page of the Slovak outfit Berea Publishing, which is—you guessed it—the press for the Brethren in Slovakia. The bottom of the page announces forthcoming “biographies of the church planters in Slovakia, brethren Frederick Butcher and Michal Sadlon.” No further leads on Frederick Butcher, but this does finally give us a plausible path to translation: Frederick and presumably his wife with the initials M. K. went to Slovakia as missionaries, learned the language, and found Royová’s writings. Without a date it’s hard to be sure, but this may be the earliest translation of her writings, and possibly the first translation of Slovak fiction into English at all!
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