Sir, – I don’t know who is responsible for the English version of the text on the revolutionary poster that accompanied Orlando Figes’s review of Mikhail Bulgakov’s diaries and letters (“Manuscripts don’t burn”, August 24th).
However, unless advancing years have severely depleted my once-fluent Russian, the text actually means “A book is nothing other than a person speaking publicly”. It says nothing about the relative significance of books and those who talk about them, as your caption indicates (“Books are nothing, but men who talk about them are everything”) . – Yours, etc,
RON HILL,
(Fellow Emeritus, Trinity
College, Dublin),
Dartmouth Square, Dublin 6.
Sir, – Your translation of the Soviet poster used as an illustration for the review of Mikhail Bulgakov's Diaries and Selected Letters (Weekend Review, August 24th) was linguistically inaccurate and therefore historically misleading. Your translation read: "Books are nothing, but men who talk about them are everything". An accurate translation would be: "A book is nothing other than a person speaking in public", or, more colloquially, "A book is just someone speaking in public". This may indeed imply an oversimplified aesthetic, but the poster is trying to demystify books and open them up to a wider readership, not to say that they don't matter. A little further research reveals that this was probably not your translation, since the same mistake is found in at least one of your sources (Getty Images). A salutary reminder that apparently reliable sources can be wrong. – Yours, etc,
DAVID DENBY,
Gartan Avenue,
Glasnevin, Dublin 9.