Some time ago I talked of the problems facing the translator who had to render one of my books into Italian. (I spared you the agonies of the poor academic who had to translate another book of mine into Japanese.)

All told, my books have been translated (or are being translated) into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Danish, Greek, Korean, Chinese, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten about, besides Italian and Japanese. And, oh yes, Irish Gaelic.

I think I’m rather behind the Bible, though: the father of the famous palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey first came to Kenya to translate the Bible into Kikuyu, and that was in 1902. I admit that very little of my oeuvre is likely to get translated into Kikuyu, let alone Malayalam, Tagalog, Cree, Tamil, Welsh, Russian, Mandinka, Turkish, Punjabi, Slovenian, Dogon, Czech, Gujerati, Inuit, Sanskrit, Flemish, Frisian, Latin, Hawaiian, Yoruba, Bahasa Indonesia, Somali, Pidgin, Wolof, Anglo-Saxon, Pitjantjara, Elvish (Quenya or Sindarin, Sir?), Esperanto or Klingon: I expect the Bible has made it into many of these, if not all.

The first language of the Bible was, of course, Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is notoriously hard to translate, which accounts for the many large gaps and differences in interpretation, variously inhabited by the innumerable sects of Judaism, Christianity (and Creationists, of course).

Modern Hebrew is marginally less difficult, and none of my books have made it into that language, either.

Not so the Harry Potter canon, which has probably been translated into more languages than are actually spoken. My friend Petrona passed me this story on the trials of the person whose career has, for most of the past decade, been to translate the adventures of the Hero of Hogwarts into the language of the Prophets.

Oy Veh! It’s enough to make your eyes water.