A Note on the Translation

Summary

The following is a full translation of Pieter Albert Bik's autobiographical manuscript. While the nature and circumstances of the manuscript were introduced in chapter 1 above, a few words are in order here specifically concerning the nature of the translation. The first thing to note is that Bik's writing is by no means smooth or sophisticated: perhaps because of his personality, or perhaps because of the circumstances in which the notes were written, his style is often rough and rushed, and his sentences unfinished, unpolished or simply meanderingly long. The translation attempts, as far as possible, to retain this style, restructuring sentences only where necessary to make the meaning intelligible in English. For the same reason the often unwieldy paragraphs have also been left in their original form, as too much editing for the benefit of the reader would detract from the particular character of the manuscript. By and large the translation preserves Bik's spelling of the names of places and people, although he is not always consistent. Generally this does not impede understanding: for example, Bik writes Zwol instead of Zwolle, or s’Gravenhagen instead of 's Gravenhagen, minor variations. For the digraph ij in Dutch names, the archaic y is used rather than the modern ij, although the two are practically indistinguishable in Bik's script.

In the original manuscript there are various marginalia that could not be satisfactorily reproduced in the translated version. These consist primarily of a date (only the year), marked at the top on the left-hand side of each page, and various notes regading arrivals and departures (e.g. “Departure from Batavia”) that serve to structure the many travel accounts. As these markings provide no additional information that cannot be found in the body of the text, they have been omitted here. On the other hand, the dates that structure the diaries of the court trip in Japan and the return journey to Europe from Batavia have been incorporated into the text, being presented at the start of each paragraph rather than in the margins. Other, less systematic additions in the margins or between the lines of the original are pointed out and explained in the footnotes.

Terms that are in languages other than Dutch (generally Javanese, Malay or Japanese) in the original are not translated in the body of the text, but explanations are provided in the footnotes.