A moment's reflection over the last ten years, when I have had the privilege of knowing Dr. Risto Delev, has led me to explain the circumstances in which I have helped with the preparation of his story. My initial task was to complete Dr. Delev's Statement of Facts, submitted to the Appeal Court of Quebec. Subsequently he asked me to translate, from French into English, judge Pierre Boudreault's Judgment in the first instance. While completing these two lengthy projects, in 1982-83, I held many discussions with my client about his case. Then, and later when I was translating volumes of evidence and other correspondence, I became acquainted with many of the minutiae which had occurred in Dr. Delev's life.

The great seriousness of the case has been apparent to me from the start. Dr. Delev always forcefully insisted that the defending psychiatrists and hospitals had never established their argument. He had neither been seriously ill nor dangerous to anybody. Upon first reading the story, I confess to having felt some incredulity that such injustice could have happened, but soon I became a supporter of his cause.

Every man is "an intersection of biography and history", as Charles Wright Mills said. In Dr. Delev's story, we will be impressed by his exceptional traits of character -- and here I must stress that I have always known him to be a kind and very gifted man. We will also follow his struggles in Yugoslavia and Canada, with glimpses of the historic background of our exciting times.

I shall only briefly comment on the linguistic problems. The greatest issue in translation is, to what extent one must improve the structure of sentences and paragraphs to produce clarity without effacing the original writer's peculiarities.

The author's grasp of both the English and French languages posed considerable linguistic difficulty, but this is less of a problem now. In the Court testimonies and medical records, we see the problems of a man whose French was rather poor and English extremely weak.

Much more astonishing were the language difficulties of the Francophone psychiatrists and witnesses, since even the professionals committed serious mistakes in the use of their native language. Thus, especially in the medical records we find both downright confusion of grammar and incorrect or highly idiomatic expressions (such as the word "dangerosité") and neologisms. To show the absurdity of using slang words in very important documents, we coined the word "dangerosity" in English. I refer the reader to Chapter XI: Language Imbroglio in My Internment and the Trial.

Roman Hromnysky, B.Ed., M.A.