Ilija Trojanow: The Collector of Worlds
Like his protagonist, Ilija Trojanow has lived and travelled in many parts of the world. He was born in Bulgaria and as a child fled with his family to the Federal Republic of Germany, before he moved on to Kenya, where, as a young boy, he discovered his interest in Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). For Trojanow, Burton - the central character of his book “The Collector of Worlds” - is one of the most unusual amongst many eccentric figures of the nineteenth century. His fascination with the flamboyant explorer, translator, writer, soldier, ethnologist, linguist and diplomat shines through in his account of Burton’s adventurous journeys through India, Saudi Arabia and East Africa. But his is not a traditional biography of the British colonial officer, whose amazing life has been chronicled in books and films before. A bestseller in Germany and translated into more than twenty languages, “The Collector of Worlds” is a reflection on the life of Sir Richard Burton as an extraordinary explorer who seeks to comprehend and appreciate the societies he encounters on his journeys.
Burton was clearly enthralled by cultures other than his own and to a large extent he adopted their customs, including dress, in order to better understand them. His expertise as a linguist who learnt more than twenty languages helped along this process of metamorphosis, letting him experience the traditions he came across not from the vantage point of a spectator but through immersion into those traditions. A notorious traveller, Burton left England for British India, before he travelled to Arabia and later to Africa, where, together with John Hanning Speke he discovered Lake Tanganyika in his quest for finding the source of the Nile. He was the first European to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, he studied the lifestyle and philosophy of the Brahmans as well as Islamic mystical poetry, and his travel writing and translations, including “The Thousand and One Nights” and “Kama Sutra”, brought these distant and hitherto unknown worlds to a European audience. Burton’s life was full of so much extraordinary, intriguing and often perilous adventure that it provides plenty of material. “The Collector of Worlds” portrays him as a mediator between cultures in three distinct phases of his travels, but it is not just Burton’s life we learn about. Trojanowleads us to the three main stations of his life, but we also listen to voices other than his in these settings. In India, where Burton was a young Captain in the army of the East India Company, the story is alternately told by his servant, Ramji Naukaram, and written down, with a fair share of embellishments, by the Indian scribe to whom Naukaram tells his story. About Burton’s time in Arabia, when he converted to Islam, studied the Koran and craftily traveled as an Islamic doctor, we also learn through the correspondence of the Ottoman authorities who wonder about Burton’s motivations. In the third section, which describes the expedition to discover the source of the Nile, the alternate voice is that of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a former slave, who accompanied Burton and Speke as a guide and who describes the hardships the expedition had to face.
Trojanow’s account of Burton’s life provides a much more rounded portrait than a traditional biography could do; rather than telling the tale of a life lived adventurously in a linear fashion as a heroic tale, “The Collector of Worlds” offers a polyphonic approach that makes for constant shifts of perspective. These shifts of viewpoints present the West as well as the East alternately from an insider’s and an outsider’s vantage point, creating a dynamic view of ‘the other’.
An immense amount of research preceded the writing of “The Collector of Worlds”: Trojanow travelled extensively in the footsteps of Burton and his travelogues “Along the Ganges” and “Mumbai to Mecca” were published in 2003 and 2004 respectively. It might be this first hand experience that allows him to present his readers with enormously vibrant descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of cities such as Bombay- he masterfully captures its atmosphere in a very expressive style of writing that evokes the intense physical detail of the scene. Trojanow is an excellent story teller and his poetic prose makes this delicately layered story an enjoyable and entertaining read. His biographic fiction offers a competent and nuanced portrayal of the traveller and adventurer Sir Richard Burton and the different worlds he lived in, while at the same time highlighting multiple cultural perspectives and the fluidity of cultural identity – a theme that, although set in colonial times in “The Collector of Worlds”, is highly topical today.
The Book
Troyanov, Iliya: The Collector of Worlds, translated by William Hobson. – Faber Fiction. – 464 p. - ISBN 9780571239467 , Australian publication 2008 Original title: Trojanow, Ilija (2006): Der Weltensammler (German)
