For anyone who may be interested in Twain translations into Chinese, which began as early as 1904, see Selina Lai-Henderson's Mark Twain in China (Stanford, 2015).  --skh

Susan K. Harris


________________________________________
From: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Kevin Mac Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 8:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Twain's fame/notoriety in Europe

There's a flaw in Rodney's reasoning. He's conflating stats for both the
Jumping Frog and Twain's later collected sketches (which followed the
publication of Innocents Abroad). The first Canadian edition of Jumping Frog
did not appear until 1870 (in a single small edition), the same year IA was
published in Canada in at least three editions and two type-settings.
Rodney's checklist of foreign editions of Twain's works is woefully
incomplete and spotty, but it would be interesting to compare an accurate
listing of every printing and reprinting of his early works. A comparison of
edition sizes would be critical, but editions sizes are known only for some
of the Hotten and Chatto editions, and those don't tell the whole story. A
comparison of the reviews each book attracted would also be revealing, but
it would be very important to distinguish between the Jumping Frog and later
collections of his sketches (1870, 1874, 1875, 1879, 1880, etc.). You would
also have to compare the rate of spread of JF before and after the
appearance of IA in 1869 to get a sense of which book was really carrying
his fame the furthest. Twain himself killed the 1867 edition of JF in 1870
after five printings whose sales totaled 4,000 copies. IA appeared in 1869
and in its first year had gone through at least four large printings, with
sales many times larger than JF in America, not to mention English and
Canadian sales. It gets complicated. JF certainly introduced Twain to
European readers, but I would argue that IA became the bestseller--the coat,
if you will--whose tails carried his other writings along and spread his
fame far beyond the notoriety of the JF.

Kevin
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-----Original Message-----
From: Holger Kersten
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 7:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Twain's fame/notoriety in Europe

"Mark Twain's first book, /The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, and Other Sketches/, published in 1867 in both the United States
and Great Britain and followed shortly by Canadian and Australian
editions, immediately captured an international audience with its droll
and colloquial title story. During these earliest years as a free-lance
writer and traveling correspondent, Twain turned out many "sketches" and
anecdotal [xxix] short stories in successive editions that rapidly won him
popularity among Anglo-American readers. At least eleven American and
Canadian editions and twenty-six British editions appeared before 1880. By
1889 these collections multiplied to some seventy-three editions since
1867, certainly among the best-sellers of that period. Their popularity
spread to the Continent with translations into Danish, German, and Swedish
in 1874, followed by nine editions in each of these languages by 1889.
Twain's stories were further translated into Polish in 1881 and Russian in
1888."

Robert M. Rodney. /Mark Twain International: A Bibliography and
Interpretation of his Worldwide Popularity/. Westport Conn: Greenwood
Press, 1982: xxviii-xxix.


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Holger Kersten
Magdeburg, Germany