Quote:
Originally Posted by Friedel
Add
I do not think they ever had exclusive rights since all of Watchman Nee's books, with the exception of The Spiritual Man which he had in fact written, were transcripts of messages and therefore in the public domain. The language was polished and then published as books. Steven Kaung has been described as an excellent translator and that is how many of Nee's "books" were published in English in the US. (Regarding publishing rights of Watchman Nee's material Witness Lee possibly had another story.)
In England Angus Kinnear published a couple of books in hard cover, including The Normal Christian Life. He must have started in the 1960s and probably at the behest of his father-in-law, Theodore Austin-Sparks, who had probably received copies of messages from people he had met in Taiwan and elsewhere.
Witness Lee often put down Steven Kaung and effectively isolated him on the east coast.
|
I think many in the LC have the impression that LSM is the only publisher of WN works, or at the very least LSM has published all of Nee's works. If I search for "Watchman Nee" on Amazon, many of the results are books from other publishers.
What I find interesting is that I have seen very few people in the LC who have any non-LSM Nee books. Is this just a coincidence? If many of Nee's works have been translated by Kaung then that would explain it. I don't know how things were back in the old days, but it seems that currently a lot of Nee's works are ignored in the LC. I am surprised how much is out there that I have never heard of before.