Stephen Sachs comments on the lamentable performance of Kim Jong Il’s latest book. Nice piece.
Out of the strange but true history of your current blogger, way back when, 1995 or so when living in Moscow, I was asked to help on the translation of an earlier book of his. Kim’s that is, not Stephen’s.They already had a rough translation into English, and wanted someone to proof read / edit the thing. I was doing similar work for Donosy, an online Polish paper ( for free ) and also for the English language version of Commersant ( for beer money ).
In the day job we were selling aluminium to a N Korean company, so I was approached. Didn’t do it in the end as $ 500 for a 350 page book just didn’t sound worth it. I was also slightly put off by the N Korean KGB style guy threatening to kill me over a late delivery.
In fact that whole experience of dealing with N Korea was odd. Meetings with the secret service style fixer, plus his aide, plus always two Generals. Those Generals had to have everything explained. What is a letter of credit, why did we need one, why the good name of the DPKR wasn’t quite enough, who inspected the cargo, why someone inspected the cargo and on and on and on.
The KGB style guy understood capitalism quite well. He waited until after he had received his cash commission to make the threat.