Antony Burgess is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange. However, some other novels of his have also gained popularity among audiences worldwide. One of them is One Hand Clapping which can be interpreted in tune with the Soviet ideology of the time so the Japanese Translator translator has emphasized the fitting passages in the novel and eliminated the unnecessary ones. Kenji Ozaki, who translated the work, had the difficult task to improve Burgess’s ideologically correct work, on which he spend hours of strenuous work.
One Hand Clapping, which had an enormous success especially in Europe, was written by Burgess within a month and was published under the pseudonym of Joseph Kell in 1961. After his return from Malaya and Brunei he noticed the turbulent changes in the British society which is mirrored in his novel. What he discovered back in Britain was the youth culture was concerned with a new and alien world of television. His major source of inspiration were the TV programs his first wife Lynne liked watching, which found expression in the plot he was composing. A material girl and a French Translation Services part-time employee, the narrator of the story, Janet Shirley finds most pleasure in composing long list of the things she either owns or wants her husband to buy. The only two things she is interested in her life are the luxury and the wealth she wants to possess. Howard, her husband wins a thousand pounds in a popular TV Quiz Show one day, and then gambling brings him double the prize. Nevertheless, this does not bring them instant happiness – on the contrary, they start leading a lifestyle which is marked by thoughts of suicide and consequently a murder, insanity, unfaithfulness and laziness.
The expression of contemptuous attitude to the accumulation of goods and the materialistic lifestyle is how the novel is interpreted. In it the world is shown as attempting to appeal to the lowest tastes in all spheres of life, no matter whether music, literature, theatre, painting. 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. The wiser of the two people is Howard, who does not accept democracy as it leads the world to degradation – this is how the Portuguese Translation Services version renders the story.
It is quite obvious that Burgess was an advocate of free will, as the borderline between good and evil is not so tangible in a Clockwork Orange. Brugess shows in One Hand Clapping that the reader is not invited to consider whether the communist methods of imposing opinions are acceptable, which means democracy is deliberately crooked. At a certain point, Howard hires Redvers Glass, a young German Translation Services poet, to write an article about the rottenness and decay of contemporary England, which implies that England is deteriorating, due to its being influenced by the United States. The U.S. being the main object of criticism in the novel, such conclusions are natural to reach.
Bound to failure in any Communist country, the book was widely read and very successful in Eastern Europe. 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. It became very popular throughout the United Arab Emirates, as it was turned into a musical in Abu Dhabi and adapted for television in Dubai with the help of the Arabic Translation Services.