Among the pantheon of eccentric Victorian adventurers, explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton stands out as one of the strangest.

Eschewing the colonial camaraderie of the officers' mess in India, disguising himself as a Muslim to join the Hajj to Mecca, toiling through jungle and desert in search of the Nile's source, Burton doggedly followed his own path.

Now we have a novel based on these adventures, Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds, which has, appropriately enough given its subject's linguistic felicity, been translated into twenty languages (including Arabic and Chinese). It has finally made it into English thanks to the labours of translator William Hobson, who has brought Troyanov’s story about the enigmatic nineteenth-century polymath sparklingly to life.

Troyanov himself has been no slouch when it comes to travel. He was born in Bulgaria, but was taken to West Germany by his family when they fled communism. Subsequenly he lived in Kenya, India and South Africa. When I asked him whether his travels had given him any insight into Burton’s wanderlust, he replied, ‘Well, the readers will have to be the judges of that. But it certainly helped to have grown up with four languages in Kenya, as a refugee from Communist Bulgaria.’

It took seven years for Troyanov to write The Collector of Worlds and involved ‘numerous people across three continents’. Much of this time – five years’ worth – was spent researching Burton’s life, ‘especially regarding the regions and cultures and religions he interacted with.’

‘During the research’ he says, ‘I took notes, filling dozens of notebooks full of impressions, conversations and all sorts of information, from philosophical insights to weird paraphernalia. Then I lived and wrote like a monk (in Cape Town) for two years, day in day out, amalgamating the diversities.’

So what, in the end, was Troyanov’s view of Burton? He puts it succinctly: ‘Much of the best, some of the worst, always on the edge and never a safe bet.’

The success of the book across Europe and the world has been gratifying for its author. ‘I am,’ he says, ‘very fortunate that there are 20 translations and each one of them is an avatar of my novel, so – having no ambition of being cloned into another language – I am quite happy to marvel at the new lives of this story, here there and nearly everywhere.’

The English translation has come relatively late in the book’s publishing history. Does Troyanov have an opinion about why British readers seem to be reluctant to try books that were originally written in other languages? He gives two answers. ‘The polite answer would be: as with the cuisine it takes time to discover and cherish the marvels of the diverse. And the impolite: a postcolonial mindset that still harbours illusions of grandeur and superiority. But then again, without the imported literatures within the English language, there wouldn’t be that much of a British literature to talk about. Forgive me, AL Kennedy!’

I ask him to name a few writers whose work you admire but who aren’t published in the UK – or aren’t well-known enough. ‘According to me, the greatest living author is Antonio Lobo Antunes, a Portuguese maestro extraordinaire. His novel Knowledge of Hell has recently been published by Dalkey Archive Press and has,' he adds sarcastically, 'risen in the Amazon sales ranking all the way to 964,021. Evidently, English readers are already familiar with hell.’

That’s probably true, but we should also make sure that we familiarise ourselves with Troyanov’s exuberant and thoughtful novel. There’s plenty more to come from him as well: ‘A novel about a glacierologist, a novel about an anarchist and an apparatchik in Communist Bulgaria and a play called Renaissance Timbouctou.’ This is further proof, if any were needed, that one thing Iliya Troyanov is certainly not short of is ideas.

Interview by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

July 2008

The Collector of Worlds is published by Faber