Mozart for Martians
In one of PKD's old novels, Galactic Pot-Healer as I recall, there's a running gag about a language-translating computer. Employees working with the machine would amuse themselves by having the computer translate a short phrase into any of several different languages. Then they would feed the result back into the computer for translation into English. The end product was a sort of Orwellian doublespeak that was as amusing as it was enlightening.
Just a matter of months before PKD's death, Daniel H. Levack did us all a great favor by compiling the exhaustive PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (Lancaster: Underwood-Miller, 1981.). I begrudged the $7.95 for the hardcover version, and can honestly say I've gotten more than my money's worth out of the deal. One amusing thing I've noticed throughout the book is the titles given some of Phil's foreign translations. While not fluent in any language except English, I've had a smattering of German and have read widely enough to be able to recognize a few words from other languages. It's my opinion that if I could read any Japanese the list below would increase manifold.
From the shockingly hilarious Mozart for Martians to the merely mundane Joe from Milkstreet, these titles run the gamut of science fiction sentiments. The Germans seem especially prone to mistranslating Phil's titles; perhaps they were paying him back for all the German names and phrases he sprinkled throughout his works. What I've done here is listed a few of my favorite "re-translations". See if you can match each title to its original. I've provided the English titles alphabetically in the column to the right; the correct answers are reproduced at the bottom of this page. It may help to recall what each story is about rather than what the title literally means.
| THE TRANSLATED TITLES | THE ORIGINAL NOVELS |
| Chains of the Future (French) | Clans of the Alphane Moon |
| The Divergent Moon (F) | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? |
| Flight in Visions (Dutch) | Eye in the Sky |
| Joe from Milk Street (German) | Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said |
| LSD Astronauts (G) | Galactic Pot-Healer |
| The Maze of Rats (G) | The Man in the High Castle |
| The Mountain Oracle (G) | Martian Time-Slip |
| Mozart for Martians (G) | A Maze of Death |
| Reach After the Sun (G) | The Penultimate Truth |
| Robot Blues (F) | Solar Lottery |
| The Schizos' Ball (F) | The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch |
| Small Moon for Psychopaths (G) | Time Out of Joint |
| Temporal Episode (Italian) | We Can Build You |
| Ten Years After the Blitz (G) | The World Jones Made |
| Timeless Time (G) | The Zap Gun |
The Answers
The correct order is:
The World Jones Made
Eye in the Sky
A Maze of Death
Galactic Pot-Healer
The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The Zap Gun
The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time-Slip
Solar Lottery
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
We Can Build You
Clans of the Alphane Moon
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
The Penultimate Truth
Time Out of Joint