Would it be possible to separate my translation of a novel from the previous editions of the work?

[Ali]

Dear Goodreads librarians,

I recently produced an original translation and adaptation of the novel Sangre y arena by Vicente Blasco Ibañez. The work was added to the Goodreads database a few weeks ago. Here is the link to the page for the book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Unfortunately, the Goodreads database or a librarian has merged my book's entry with all of the previous editions of Sangre y arena.

This is quite a big problem for me, because my aim in retranslating the book from scratch was to remove from the novel the issues that readers have criticized when they have reviewed the Spanish version or translations of the work that were published over a hundred years ago. I've tried to make a version of the book that reads as easily as a freshly written historical-fiction novel (departing from the original at times in order to achieve this) and omits the incoherent or repetitive bits of the original, but when Goodreads users click on the page for my version of the book, they see lots of reviews that talk about how bad the old translation of it is!

The merging has also made it impossible for Goodreads users to find my version by entering its title (By the Horns) into the platform's search box. I could only look up the work when I was filling in the "This topic is about" field of this discussion-topic form by using my book's ISBN.

Both these issues will have quite a detrimental impact on my attempts to market my book.

Would it be possible to 1) return my book to having its own page; 2) make it so my book can be found by searching for it using my title for the work?

Thanks for taking the time to read over my query.

Best wishes,

Ali

[Suzi]

the cover nor the description makes it clear that this is an adaptation, unless I am missing something.

Adaptations are not combined with the original work, but translations are.

The cover says translated by, not adapted by.

Can you provide a description that clarifies the book's content?

[Ali]

Thanks for your reply. I suppose whether or not the book is an adaption or a translation depends on how you define those terms. I don't know if Goodreads has its own criteria in this regard.

I would say my work is both translation and adaptation, and inside the book I describe my version as a "new translation and telling." The basic story is the same as the original, but the telling of it departs from the original in various significant ways. To give some examples: the work has been divided into three parts and sixteen chapters instead of the original's ten chapters; some passages have been moved from one chapter to another; some characters have new names, and those names are not the product of translating; the prose tries to capture the emotional force of the original by expressing ideas in a different way to how they were originally expressed by the author, as opposed to replicating the author's grammatical/syntactic/lexical choices via translation; passages of narrative that run across several pages in the original have been turned into shorter dialogues between characters; some new descriptions of places and historical events have been added in so that a twenty-first century reader can make sense of them; about ten thousand words of the original have been removed; some small amendments have been made to characters' back stories to remove factual/historical inconsistencies; the story is explicitly set in 1907 and 1908, whereas no chronological setting is defined in the original.

I would be happy to send you a copy of my version and a pdf of the public-domain translation from 1908 if you wanted to compare the two and decide for yourself whether it's a translation or an adaptation according to Goodreads' criteria. If it's just a question of having the cover say "adapted by" instead of "translated by", I could arrange to have the cover amended.

[Scott]

It doesn't seem like an adaptation by GR standards to me.

Tomas Olde Hevelt "adapted" his own novel Hex for American audiences, moving the location, changing names and generally Americanizing everything, but we still consider it the same book.

[Ali]

Thanks for the quick and clear answer.

Would it at least be possible to make it so people can find my edition when they type in its title or my name? At the moment, every other edition of the work (e.g., "Sangre y arena", "Blood and Sand", "The Blood of the Arena", "Arènes sanglantes") can be found separately when you start typing its title in the Goodreads search bar, but mine cannot. The only way for people to find my book on Goodreads is to use its ISBN.

[Scott]

We can't do anything about the search, but normally it would come up if they include your name. The edition was only added in the last couple weeks, so it could take a while for that to occur. This is known behaviour.

[Ali]

Thanks for the clarification, and for taking the time to look into my book's entry in the GR database.