Curiouser and... (Zenobia, in multiple languages)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
It seems like a long time ago now that Matt Emmens, then the CEO of Shire (and now its chairman), called me into his office and asked if I'd ever seen "that book" about mice, change, and cheese. Technically I'd seen it. I hadn't, though, actually read it, but that, as it turned out, proved immaterial. Matt was wondering, he said, if I might like to embark on a small journey—on the co-authoring of a book that wouldn't be about cheese or mice or hamsters, even, but about, say, the role of the imagination in corporate America. About risk, adventure, and dreams. I gave him one of my funny looks, then scurried away for awhile. Reread Calvino and The Little Prince, a few chapters from Alice in Wonderland. Began to conjure up a place that became, in time, Zenobia—an architectural wilderness, a corporate behometh, a case study in brokenness and ruin and its ultimate (in this case magical) repair. Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business emerged as a fable, a fantasy; its illustrations were entrusted to my partner. And all of this became an odd little book, published one year ago by a house that took (shall we say) a risk. A house known as Berrett-Koehler.
Old news. History. Brought up only now because my mail box has been filled of late with the most interesting concoctions—Zenobia done over in Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese (the complex characters). It's a wonder to see the same book unveiled in so many different colors, with so many reconvened titles, with extraordinary new illustrations that feature clowns and one-eyed men. Moira, our heroine, mostly gets to keep her bright red shoes. But her hair changes color, and it flows, a reddish brown, and I'm thinking that she's had her bright eyes Lasiked, because how else might you explain the sudden absence of her big-framed spectacles?
I am delighted by these renditions which I cannot read and wish I could. I am desirous of a bigger brand of knowledge that would enable me to know how a story has gotten told in languages that look like wash and wonder to eyes such as mine, which have seen too little of this planet.
