Interview with Jerome Resiman of Reisman Peirez & Reisman: Clients Invested a Total of $150 Million with Madoff

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A Clockwork Orange is Antony Burgess’s best known and most popular work. But there are several other novels which have earned him acclaim among readership throughout the world. One of them is One Hand Clapping which can be interpreted in tune with the Soviet ideology of the time so the Japanese Translation Services translator has emphasized the fitting passages in the novel and eliminated the unnecessary ones. Hours of strenuous and laborious work had to be spent by the translator, Kenji Ozaki, in order for Burgess’s ideologically correct work to be corrected.

Written in 1961 in less than a month, One Hand Clapping was published under the pseudonym of Joseph Kell, and immediately Europe recognized it as a masterpiece. In the novel he accounts his observations on the turbulent changes in the British society after his return from Brunei and Malaya. Youth culture was concerned with a new and alien world of television – this is what he discovered back in Britain. His major source of inspiration were the TV programs his first wife Lynne liked watching, which found expression in the plot he was composing. The novel is narrated by Janet Shirley, a French Translation Services worker and a material girl whose pleasure lies mainly in making long lists of objects that she and her husband either possess or lack. Living a life of luxury and being affluent is her one and only mission in life. One day, her husband, Howard, wins one thousand pounds in a TV Quiz Show after which he doubles the prize on gambling. Insanity, laziness, unfaithfulness, thoughts of suicide and finally a murder are some of the things their new lifestyle brings them, contrary to the happiness they have thought money would bring them.

The novel can be interpreted as expressing contemptuous attitude to the materialistic lifestyle and the accumulation of goods. Music, theatre, painting or literature – these are only some of the spheres in life that the novel appeals to their lowest tastes. Thus, when Howard talks to a worker, the words fascist and communist which appear in the last clause are cut out in the translated version. Howard, however, is presented as the wiser one in the Portuguese Translation Services version, as he considers democracy leading the world to degradation and does not accept it.

A champion of free will, Burgess makes this appear quite obvious in A Clockwork Orange, as the borderline between good and evil is not quite tangible. The reader is never asked to meditate if the communist methods of imposing opinions are appropriate, which implies that In One Hand Clapping democracy is purposefully perverted by Burgess. The decay and rottenness of contemporary England is the subject of the article that has to be written by Redvers Glass, a German Translation Services poet who is hired by Howard at a certain point in the novel to show the negative influence of the USA. As the U.S. is the target of criticism in the novel it is natural to make such conclusions.

Having become very successful throughout Eastern Europe, it was wrong to think that the book was bound to failure in any Communist country. Being regarded as renouncing money-making, the whole capitalist Western life and its desecrated culture, it is explicable why the novel appeared much later in the Middle East. The Arabic Translation Services were instrumental in the book’s gaining popularity in the United Arab Emirates. First it was turned into a musical in Abu Dhabi and then it was adapted for television in Dubai.