Book Fair Post Mortem

Easing back into blogging, I thought I'd do a nice easy What Katy Did in Frankfurt post. Except of course nothing is easy these days, so it'll be a bit of a shit sandwich.

I skipped the book fair last year because I had had a tough time in my personal life and needed a rest. The contrast was all the more stark. Because exhibitor numbers are down, my international publishers were no longer miles away in Hall 8, necessitating long and hasty dashes to appointments, but relatively central in Hall 6. And because of global warming, the sun was shining. The effect, though, was a pleasant one: even though it's still a huge event, this time it felt more friendly and social. All six remaining halls are arranged around a central square dotted with pricey food trucks and odd constructions hosting extra events. So instead of walking between them along glassed-in walkways reminiscent of airport interiors, everyone headed outside and the "Agora" became a great place for coincidental meetings. Special thanks to Simone Buchholz here for the spontaneous ibuprofen/hug combination. But also to all the other people I ran into or met up with outside.

Number-one talk of the fair was the dearth of publishers' parties, followed as usual by the imminent death of the publishing industry. I still managed to go to two parties every night, though, so maybe things aren't drying up that fast... A friend who knows about the events industry tells me that sometimes, the money is actually there but the managers don't want to give the impression they're frittering it away. Sartorially, though, it was a disappointingly sombre affair, meaning I stood out like a sore thumb in my optimistic colours, especially at the parties. My advice: Dress for the publishing industry you want to be in, not for a Depeche Mode concert. Unless you want to be in aging goth publishing; in which case go ahead, you have my utmost respect.

On Friday night there were three levels of party insider status. Level one (and always my number-one Frankfurt party) was the German indies' party at the Literaturhaus, where anyone can attend for a small cover charge and drinks aren't free but cheap, with the dancing starting immediately after the awards ceremony (more on that below). Level two was the Dumont party, where you had to be on the invitation list and the drinks were free and everything was like it always is – crowded, dancefloor too packed for self-expression, much standing around and chatting to German publishing people – so much so that some people got confused about whose party it was, and possibly what year it was. It was there that I learned about insider level three, the Canongate party, for which you needed a paper invitation. There were, however, paper invitations to be had from relative strangers from KiWi Verlag, if you asked nicely. I got one and it proclaimed something like "This is the last party we will ever have. You must come or you will be sacrificed to the gods of netflix and amazon prime. It will go on until 5 in the morning so that you will make foolish decisions on Saturday." At around 3 AM, my brain so numbed by talking to publishing people for three days in a row that I barely remembered the existence of this blog, I decided it would be cooler to have had an invitation for the level-three publishing party but not actually attended. The logic being that getting more sleep would enable me to go and see a particular band in Berlin on Saturday, which would be eminently cooler than hanging out with yet more tipsy/tired publishing people. So I passed the slightly crumpled card along to a friend.

Here comes the shit part: Nazis. Last year there was a lot of stress around events organized by extreme right-wing publishers, featuring extremist writers and politicians and rightly eliciting protests. This year, the book fair placed all the dodgy publishers in one remote corner – except one of them pulled off a scam, pretending to wind up their press and then registering for a stand under a different name, claiming they'd be presenting books about freedom of speech. They ended up in the midst of left-leaning indies, rubbing their hands in delight. To be honest, that felt like the kind of elaborate and childish provocation my sister used to practice on me when we were eight and ten, so like most other people, I followed my mum's advice and ignored them.

But on Friday, the AfD's Björn Höcke was slated to promote his hate-filled book How I Will Whittle Down Germany's Population to Keep Only the Strong and the Blond (not actual title). This year the fair put him in a separate room and restricted access, blocking off escalators for much of an afternoon and calling in a significant police presence. Plain-clothes police officers threatened protesters and were generally more heavy-handed than one would expect at a publishing industry event – writer Sophie Sumburane was ejected from the premises for no explicable reason. Inside the promotion itself, a book fair representative ended up reassuring reporters that they were of course within their rights to record the proceedings, never mind what the organizers said, but television cameras were not allowed access. To be honest, the less airtime devoted to platforming Björn Höcke's hateful ideas the better, but the principle of excluding parts of the press is wrong.

If the book fair is serious about promoting human rights, it would do well to rethink hosting individuals known for propagating racism and belittling genocide. Things were better this year, I believe, with no reports of violence. But the book fair must be a safe place for all those who attend, and hosting Nazis makes it a dangerous place for many of us.

Back to the plus side: the blocked escalators meant I discovered the halal food outlet hidden away at the back of hall 4.0, which sold "Desi food like back home", including excellent samosas served up with cheeky quips. They'll be there next year too, so that and the supermarket outside hall 5 for affordable Coke Zero and emergency hosiery (if they don't demolish hall 5 as rumour has it) would be my top tips.

And now to my highlight, the olive on a cocktail stick pierced through the shit sandwich. The most delightful of all the delightful people to spend time with at the book fair were the people from Verbrecher Verlag. They never mince words – they'll let you know you if they think your idea is crap or if a book won't sell – so you can tell they really believe in what they do. They've begun championing bibliodiversity, changing their catalogue up from dude-heavy to a more balanced mix, with the women they publish selling more, it turns out, and garnering honours galore. Plus they're supportive and kind and funny. This year they were basically running around picking up prizes: Manja Präkels won the German YA Prize for Als ich mit Hitler Schnapskirschen aß, a novel about growing up with neo-Nazis in rural East Germany. I met her and she was lovely and very funny and got me a free copy. Bettina Wilpert accepted the aspekte debut novel prize for Nichts, was uns passiert, about a rape and the devastating ripples it causes. At the Hotlist indies awards on Friday – where ten publishers all got a prize each, a room full of love and support with slightly too little ventilation – that same title also won the Melusine Huss Prize, voted on by independent booksellers. Seeing their excitement made me very happy.

I was too tired to make it to the gig on Saturday.

#Frauenzählen now counting coverage

Thanks to the Institute for Media Research at the University of Rostock, we now have a reliable pilot study on book review coverage and gender in the German press, radio and TV. It's only available in German as yet – at frauenzählen.de – but it is clear and will form a solid basis for future research. The study is similar to the VIDA count, except it's publicly funded and applies to a smaller market. The count was carried out in March of this year (a big month for spring book reviews).

I can't decide whether or not I'm surprised that the key figure maps neatly onto the stats on translations into English by gender: one third of review coverage goes to women, with men getting twice as much.

Men write more reviews than women, and most of the books they review were written by other men (74%). Women also review slightly more male-authored books than books by women, but they dedicate more column inches or air time to women's books when they do review them, so their coverage works out equal in the end. However, women critics get less space in the first place, compacting the problem. Only women's magazines give women's writing more coverage than men's.

In terms of genre, male and female-authored children's and YA books get equal coverage, while 70% of non-fiction reviews cover books by men. Crime writing reviews top the discrimination charts, with 76% dedicated to male-authored books. In the category the study calls "general Belletristik" – so probably fiction and literary non-fiction, the largest group garnering almost half the reviews – male authors pick up 61% of reviews.

Things will really get interesting in 2019, when the researchers will be able to add newly published books by author gender to the mix. We'll see then, I hope, what's going on inside publishing houses and whether women's writing is being ignored after publication or published less in the first place. Or both, perhaps. They might also have a chance to look at a range of intersectional factors, as VIDA has started doing, or at least think about gender in a less binary way.

The report is not exactly cheerful reading, but it's good that media editors can now calmly consider which books they cover and who they commission to review them. For improved finger-pointing purposes, it would be great to get breakdowns by publications – but with the state of play as it is, pretty much everybody's guilty anyway.  Have a great book fair!

Maxim Biller: Sechs Koffer

Maxim Biller, eh? He comes across as a bit of a one, a bit of a man-about-my-part-of-town. I don't watch TV shows about literature because I prefer my viewing less stodgy, except I did occasionally watch Maxim Biller ripping other people's books to pieces on that show he was on, before he left to concentrate on his writing. He's been annoying the German literary establishment for so long that he's become very good at doing so in an entertaining way. I'm glad he went back to writing, though. My feeling is that he writes two kinds of books: serious literary tomes that don't interest me as much, and short, playful fillers that turn out excellent. Sechs Koffer falls into category two, as did Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz.

The novel is shortlisted for the German Book Prize, and is my favourite of the titles I've read so far. Ostensibly, it's a story about the Biller family, which is a fascinating subject in itself, as evidenced by Elena Lappin's memoir What Language Do I Dream In? Lappin's brother Biller, however, takes a  more mercurial approach. His six chapters are presumably the six suitcases of the title, in some way I can't quite work out. Perhaps they each contain a suitcase; certainly there's a lot of migration involved. They are set in different times and places where family members live: Prague, Zurich, Hamburg, with a storyline spanning from the 1950s to the present day. Our narrator, let's call him Maxim Biller, has been trying for decades to find out a family secret. His grandfather was hanged by the Soviets for black-marketeering – and someone must have betrayed him. Each of the chapters adopts a different character's point of view.

The nuclear family starts off in Prague, though the mother Rada has moved there from Moscow, where she met the father Sjoma, a translator (heart emoji). Uncle Dima is married to Natalia – an attractive filmmaker generally considered a bad egg – and is put in prison for trying to escape to the West. There are two more brothers, Lev and Vladimir, in West Berlin and Brazil, who send occasional luxury goods. And there is Jelena, Maxim's sister, and Maxim, who grows up mainly in Hamburg. We meet the family on the eve of Dima's release, as seen by his brother and his sister-in-law respectively, then when Maxim visits Dima in Zurich ten years later, then in a letter from Natalia, sent from miserable Montreal to her ex-lover, Sjoma. The last two chapters are told from the perspectives of a grudge-bearing Lev, at the time of Dima's funeral, and a present-day Jelena. It's important, and is stressed, that the family is Jewish; although there is very little religion involved, communist Europe is not a safe place for them.

Imagine a game of Cluedo with six unreliable narrators. Biller has a lot of fun with us, sowing seeds of suspicion and then unearthing them again, varying tiny details – was the fridge red or blue, was it the lead piping or the candlestick? All the time, though, giving us a fascinating portrait of a Jewish family spread around the world. I've read it twice now and of course I'm none the wiser, but I do respect the author's writing skills all the more. There is the humour of the voice – today's "Maxim Biller" telling us about how his parents or sister or uncles saw events at various times. There's the quiet, affectionate humour of the characters themselves, the father not going into the kitchen because he knows he'll shout at his kids, the sister looking through photos of her own grown-up children and thinking about what to cook for Shabbat if her daughter comes to visit – "with her goy or without him, that was up to her". And in the longest section, the one in which a young Maxim plays the starring role – can this be a coincidence? – there's a great comic-relief character, the kind of teenage wannabe lothario who makes me grind my teeth in vicarious embarrassment.

And then there's the excellent writing, the well-crafted sentences, the melancholy descriptions: of rainy Hamburg, shabby 1970s Zurich, the alluring smell of a brand new Skoda in 1965. There are the literary references that are never quite transparent. The novel works partly because of its mischievous plot and partly because Biller is simply very good at writing. I recommend it.

Mireille Gansel: Translation as Transhumance, tr. Ros Schwartz

Here is something like a translation memoir, the story of Mireille Gansel’s multiple and changing relationships to various languages and to the act of translation. The author begins, in delicate prose, with stories of Hungarian and German in her French childhood. Gansel comes from a Jewish mitteleuropäische family spread across exiles in Europe and Israel, who speak Hungarian (which she does not understand as a child, but loves to hear her father translate aloud) and the German of the pre-Nazi Austro-Hungarian empire. She writes beautifully about the inflections of Czech, Yiddish and Hebrew in her relatives’ accents, their language as a relic of history. Her translator Ros Schwartz has given us a polished rendering, letting the author’s precise and considered voice shine through and always staying this side of kitsch, but I would have expected no less from her.

Gansel learns German at school and goes on to study it and eventually translate its poetry, but for her, language is a literary medium that has a deep association with the individuals who speak it. Transhumance means taking sheep from one pasture to another, but every time I read it the word human stands out – a productive misunderstanding. Writing about the poets she has translated, Gansel tells us very personal stories about them. How she discovered their work, what happened when they met (if they were still alive), what influenced them, the melodies of their verses and voices. Her repeated query is: How was I to translate this? Each writer necessitates a different approach. It seems almost to be a question of passing a poem between two human beings, and to do so Gansel seeks a close understanding of the work and its creator, spending time with them and then finding the fitting place to translate.

Gansel writes fascinatingly about her work in Vietnam on Vietnamese poetry, taking a new tack as bombs were falling during the 1970s. Her translator Ros Schwartz told me: “A good translation doesn’t colonise the work but preserves the joys and beauties of its ‘otherness’ without resorting to weird foreignization.” Gansel herself quotes the translator Nguyen Khac Vien’s guiding principle: “‘Staying faithful means first and foremost seeking to recreate the work’s humanity, its universality.’ An approach that meant liberation from all forms of exoticism, appropriation, and the cultural and spiritual annexation characteristic of the translations produced under colonisation.” She does just that, not only in her translations but in the way she thinks about poetry and people, moving directly from the Vietnamese To Huu’s lines on casuarina forests to Brecht’s thoughts on the near-criminality of talking about trees in difficult times – though conditions are very different in a country stripped of vegetation by Agent Orange.

To help her work on the texts of minority language-speakers in the Vietnamese mountains, she looks to field ethnology gathering spoken language in the Alps, “absorbing the rhythms and cadences of those words and voices, discovering an entire register of expressions, accents and constructions.” All this helps her to understand the nature of orality and form. People, I understand from her working method, are human wherever they are. That shepherding metaphor has at its heart a sense of less crossing but rather ignoring and defying boundaries. Over its long history, German has been spoken across shifting political borders and overlapping with other languages, as Gansel points out, making the notion of pinning language to nationality a fallacy.

That helps, I’m convinced, to reclaim German from its abuse by fascists, as Brecht did and as many exiled writers attempted, including Nelly Sachs, whom Gansel translated with great care. It’s hard for me to judge her work in this instance without understanding French; by necessity, the book uses various translators’ English renderings, which vary in effectiveness. But the questions she raises, of how to capture Sachs’s dense Hebrew-infused poetry, are fascinating. In the face of repeated right-wing calls for everyone living in Germany to adhere to an ill-defined Leitkultur, asserting a pluralist vision of German language, literature and culture is still a key task. The “German-speaking world” is a place where many languages are spoken, now too, and where those languages permeate each other to produce exciting writing, influenced far more widely than by any standard canon. Mireille Gansel reminds us that the world is more complex and wonderful than those who call for a single dominant national culture would have us believe.

That, and her lessons about taking great time and care over the human aspect of translation, will stay with me for a long time to come.

Sandra Hoffmann: Paula

PAULA is a strange, disturbing book. It refuses to sit firmly in any one category. In many ways, it’s a memoir. It’s made up largely of Sandra Hoffmann’s memories of her grandmother, the Paula of the title, and the silence that she spread across the family. Paula, a devout Catholic from rural southern Germany, had two illegitimate children. One died shortly after his birth; the other was Hoffmann’s mother. Paula refused to tell anyone who the father or fathers were.

It’s that silence, that yawning gap in the family’s history, that means the book isn’t quite a memoir. Over the years, Hoffmann has had to use fiction to imagine her own origins, the reason why she and her mother are darker-skinned than anyone else in the village.

Several times in my life, I’ve been thought Greek, Moroccan, Turkish, half-Indian, French or Italian. I’m still searching for the root that nurtures these assumptions. Where does my skin colour come from, my dark, wiry hair?

She has explored her possible origins in stories and a novel, Was ihm fehlen wird, wenn er tot ist. And in this book too, she resorts to her imagination to fill in the blank spots. The author refers to her book as a “narrative”; its editor calls it a “memoir”; it can be read as a novel and certainly has the beautiful language and carefully crafted structure of one. I know that Sandra Hoffmann wrote a much longer book and pared it down to a highly atmospheric 157 pages.

Paula left a collection of some 400 photos, which Hoffmann uses to beautiful effect as a narrative device. Again, though, these are real pictures, of real people – unidentified people. The narrator combs through them repeatedly, searching for men who might be her grandfather or someone her grandmother once loved, and for clues about the rest of her story. Meanwhile, we read about her increasingly oppressive life under one roof with Paula, and with parents who have abandoned curiosity in favour of a comfortable life. An understandable choice, and one that Hoffmann doesn’t condemn them for, although she clearly mourns it.

Interspersed with reflections from the present day, we learn more and more about Paula as the narrator gets older and her perspective alters. Her grandmother changes from a familiar, soothing presence, who teaches her to pray and protects her from her fears, to an infuriating disruption, refusing to respect her personal space and making her ill. And eventually, a woman who had a tough life and was shaped by it. The narrator pieces together a story for her grandmother out of snatches of conversation, stories told to her as a child, things her father tells her later. Yet there is no way to find out where she herself comes from. The conclusion, if there can be one, is that Sandra Hoffmann became a writer precisely because of that family silence, as a way to understand herself.

This is not, however, a purely therapeutic exercise. The book is a joy to read, thoughtful and precise and self-possessed, yet it always feels intimate. Hoffmann was influenced by Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, but her book is all her own. It presents a number of exciting challenges for translators: natural use of Swabian dialect, capturing the oppressive tone of family life, getting the careful sentences right – and the central idea, that of Schweigen, which doesn’t have a direct equivalent in English. I don’t want to jump the gun on that because Sandra Hoffmann will be our writer-in-residence at the BCLT Summer School in Norwich next week, and the participants will have the pleasure of finding solutions. I’m very much looking forward to it, and to the outcome. It feels to me like a book where translators will benefit hugely from direct conversation with the author.

Autumn 2018 Gender Stats

Hello there!

Just to let you know, I've updated my list of original German hardcover Belletristik (fiction, poetry, essays, and I think I included one collection of plays) in a selection of publishers' catalogues, counting up writers by gender. It is of course disheartening reading, with 54 books by women coming out at the same time as 90 written by men. That's 37.5% women, up half a percentage point from autumn 2016. As usual, genre fiction leans towards women, with dtv bringing out 7 female-authored and only 3 male-authored books this autumn, for instance. Literary fiction catalogues (Suhrkamp 2:10, Fischer 1:5, Diogenes 0:5, Hanser 1:4, KiWi 3:8, and so on) tend to do the opposite, heavily favouring men.

Here's something that certainly cheered me up, though: Hanser Berlin is publishing an anthology of women writing in German about sex and power, edited by Lina Muzur, on 23 July. Featuring Fatma Aydemir, Antonia Baum, Kristine Bilkau, Heike-Melba Fendel, Nora Gomringer, Annett Gröschner, Anna Katharina Hahn, Helene Hegemann, Margarita Iov, Mercedes Lauenstein, Juliane Liebert, Anna Prizkau, Annika Reich, Anke Stelling, Margarete Stokowski, Jackie Thomae and Julia Wolf. At least we have that.

What is a good translation?

I'm still thinking about how we define "good" in terms of literary translation. For the Seagull Books newsletter, I asked a whole lot of other translators their opinions, and wrote about why it matters, whether we can demand that reviewers understand, and how taste plays a role. You can read it here.

On Appreciating Translations

As translators demand and gain increased recognition, our greater visibility has both pros and cons. It means that while some critics acknowledge our existence with a swift and not unwelcome "smoothly translated by" that might previously have been cut by an editor, others seek to engage with our work but in a negative way, pointing out its flaws. At which point other translators leap to our defence. This week, Emma Ramadan published the first part of a year-long diary at the Quarterly Conversation. Among other very interesting things, she addresses this issue, asking:

Why is it that anyone who dares write a negative review of a popular translation becomes a target? This is a problem. Or is it? Should we only positively review translations so that we lift the boat of translations in general? Should we all form a pact to refrain from reviewing translations we don’t like? Shouldn’t translations be able to stand up to the same criticism as books originally written in English?

For a while, I tried to organize a workshop bringing together critics (paid and unpaid) and translators, with the aim of talking about what makes a good translation, what makes a good review, and what makes a good review of a translation. I'm too far away from the UK, though, so it came to nothing. Maybe I'll try again some time. But for now, I'll gather my thoughts about it here.

I hope that translations are able to stand up to the same criticism as books originally written in English. Emma writes about abandoning a review because she disliked the book, and I know others who have done the same. In fact, back when I was reviewing books regularly here, unpaid, I usually chose not to bother finishing books I disliked – why prolong my misery and then write about it? (Part of this is probably because like many women, I want people to like me, I want to be nice.)

What I would also like, though, is for critics to deal fairly with translations, not treat them like country cousins. That would mean taking them seriously and making an attempt to critique different aspects: plot, style, language and translation. At the moment, critiquing the translator's work often takes one of two approaches, as I mentioned above: the single-adverb compliment – robustly, smoothly, adeptly, elegantly, etc. – and the find-the-flaw game, in which the reviewer points out misunderstandings and poor word choices. In her fascinating book on translation, This Little Art, Kate Briggs addresses this mistake-spotting with reference to two much-criticized (women) translators:

It has to be possible, in other words, for someone, for the critic, for the philosopher, for the harder-working translator, to identify and correct the translator's mistakes. Doing so can be a means of alerting readers to the fact of translation (...) and of preparing the ground for retranslation. It has to be possible to continue this inexhaustible work together: to query and vary each other's decisions, holding to or elaborating alternative measures of precision and care, without quarrelling, necessarily, or policing. And without shaming? This, it seems, is less clear.

My answer would be this: when we write about translations, we should bear in mind that they've been written by fallible human beings – as have all books. Translation is difficult. So is writing. It is hard to move a literary text between languages that don't overlap in terms of semantics, sounds, traditions. It is also hard to write descriptions of things that exist without words, thinks like sex, music, fields of daffodils. Literary criticism assesses how well those difficult things have been achieved.

I think I'm not alone in feeling that negative criticism of translators' work would be easier to stomach if it were accompanied by positive, in-depth appreciation of the occasions when we do well. On Twitter last week, I suggested a short list of positive attributes I look out for in translations, and others, including Frank Wynne – double-nominated for the Man Booker International Prize only hours later – added some more. Here are many of them:

Maintaining a rhythm
Creative word choices
Preserving oddities
Finding (new) ways to bring across cultural specifics
Playful approaches
(Re)creating a viable and distinct voice, authorial or character-driven
Taking chances, intervening more than usual
Recreating humour
Preserving a sense of place/period
Imaginatively dealing with dialect/slang, making them sound natural
Reproducing a sense of cadence
Using calque to good effect
Reproducing the uniqueness of a voice rather than smoothing it out
Recovering rare words
Maintaining linguistic resonances through consistent word choice
Preserving alliteration and aptonyms

I realize it's difficult to spot some of these things if you don't speak the original language and so can't compare, particularly with word choice issues. And I admit that not every translation has to tackle all these difficulties; some writing is simply smooth, so the translator's task is to render it smoothly. But I think we can pick up on many of these positive achievements regardless of our knowledge of the original. I'm currently judging an award for international literature translated into German, reading books translated from many different languages into a language that isn't my native tongue. I find myself quite capable of spotting in these translations both flaws – inconsistency, bumpy rhythm, unconvincing voices – and achievements – language patina, a sense of urgency, rescued humour, successfully solved linguistic sudoku.

And at our monthly translation lab in Berlin, we occasionally take the time to appreciate a specific translation. We compare it to the original and focus only on all its many positives, all the things we might emulate in our work. Sure, there are always things we might have done differently and it's hard to resist pointing them out. But I think if we only have negative role models, we end up aiming only for an impossible notion of flawlessness.

Kate Briggs has a gorgeous, reassuring parenthesis on page 86:

(If you don't want to make mistakes, don't do translations, I was once told – an enabling dictum that I keep close to my heart.)

So instead of pretending there can ever be a flawless translation, let's take translators seriously, celebrate what we do well and find ways to criticize without policing. When we review translated literature, let's aim to review all aspects of it. I'm a big fan of the translation reviews at the Glasgow Review of Books, by the way, because that's what they do.

Selim Özdogan: Wo noch Licht brennt

Having been thinking a lot about cronyism among critics, I have to start this review with a full disclosure: Selim Özdogan is a friend of mine and has been for about ten years. The friendship evolved through the first book in what became this three-part series, Die Tochter des Schmieds, when I was a pretty much unpublished translator trying hard to get a foot in the door. Next came Heimstrasse 52 and now we have the final part, Wo noch Licht brennt. Together, the three novels tell the life story of Gül, who grows up in 1950s Turkey in the first volume, comes to Germany to work in book two, and in the new novel grows old between the two countries.

In my past reviews (linked above) I wrote a lot about what these novels mean in political terms: finally giving a literary voice to the women of the Gastarbeiter generation who propped up the West German economy, emphasizing individual stories rather than religion, painting a three-dimensional portrait of a family. All that is still true of Wo noch Licht brennt but I found myself reading it differently. By now, I feel so familiar with Gül that the last part of her life story felt like a warm and welcoming chat, catching up with a friend after a long gap. There would be tea, and with Gül involved probably pastries. The TV might be on in the background but we'd ignore it, or maybe we'd end up talking about soaps.

At the start of the novel, Gül returns to Germany after attempting to retire to Turkey, only to find that her husband has been having an affair while she was away. The Turkish husband having an affair with a German woman is a bit of a trope in stories about Gastarbeiter, I presume because it happened a lot in real life. There are other things in the novel that ring true because we've heard about them before: Gül's difficulties with the German language, her feeling that the Germans are cold, her daughters' and grandchildren's lives being very different to her own. And then there are surprising individual moments: her friendship with a young criminal, her observations of drug use around her, the family back home suddenly arguing, a memorable dieting episode. Gül's husband Fuat is still around to provide wry comments and comic relief, and her daughters lead their own lives with their own ups and downs. We get a potted history of Turkish-German media habits, from five-mark pieces saved for telephone boxes to multiple mobile phones, from the one Turkish programme on German TV to satellite dishes to Facebook.

And of course the story is told from Gül's perspective, although not in the first person. It's the tone, perhaps, that makes the novel feel so personal. Gül reflects on life a great deal; she's not an educated woman and the language is simple and sometimes verging on kitsch, but the ideas are not. We follow Gül's moral dilemmas and feel with her; she feels destined to suffer because she lost her mother at a young age and became a kind of mother to her younger siblings. And she thinks about the nature of truth and how we all twist it. Özdogan uses a lot of sensual language and comparisons, and I was very pleased to find once again the repeated glimpses into the future that made the previous novels shine in terms of style. Like its predecessors, the book skips from one episode to the next, showing us small moments of tenderness, shock, pain and friendship. A life lived simply under complicated circumstances.

What Wo noch Licht brennt reminded me of, quite strongly at certain points, was Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. I hadn't read her work before the first two in the series, but I think they too fit the bill. Selim Özdogan tells the story of a woman's life in loving detail, revealing social changes as they affect her and showing us how she reacts to them. And he also draws us into that life, makes us almost part of the family, creates an addictive pull so that we have to find out what happens next to this woman, whose life is superficially unremarkable. I think this trilogy is a great achievement – as a fictional document of a group of people otherwise ignored by German writers, as a piece of fiction that calmly tells a gripping story, and as a warm and loving portrait of a strong woman, a great survivor.

I wish Anglophone readers will one day get an opportunity to read it. 

German Book Prize Longlist: Some Musings

The list of twenty titles in the running for the German Book Prize was announced yesterday. In the past, I've shadowed the prize quite closely. It is, after all, the German-language equivalent to the Man Booker, with a large PR budget. The prize makes people sit up and notice books, and those people include editors at foreign publishing houses. The majority of the winning titles have since been published in English, most recently Lutz Seiler's amazing Kruso, translated by Tess Lewis. So it's important for my work.

But. Amit Chaudhuri has a piece in today's Guardian about why the Booker is bad for writers. The idea is not a new one: choosing a "book of the year" focuses attention on one book at the expense of others and there are some who suggest it encourages writers to produce a certain kind of book. Chaudhuri criticizes the Booker system and also those who criticize the judges' choices, saying they "ritually add to its allure". So here I am, about to join Chaudhuri in ritually adding to the German Book Prize's allure.

Allow me a quick caveat before I begin: having done my own "jury service" for the International DUBLIN Literary Award, I understand that choices are made within a complex dynamic, partly due to time pressure. I'm not in favour of imposing quotas on longlists or shortlists, but I do think judges should be aware of the messages they send with their lists. I was proud of our Dublin shortlist; it was beautifully international, covered a wide range of styles and subjects, and the gender ratio mirrored that of the nominations. Yes, I counted – after the fact.

Let me move on to the German Book Prize longlist now. The award website offers brief descriptions of the nominated books, which is good because I've only read part of one of them; eight of them aren't published until next month. There is, however, a definite theme: men (writers, professors, occasionally more down-to-earth characters) who have reached a crossroads in their lives. A writer friend and I picked apart the list yesterday, lying on towels at the outside pool. We ended up doubled over with laughter... We counted nine of these beauties. Admittedly, neither of us has read any of them, and we suspected a couple of them might be playing with the trope in an amusing way. But nine out of twenty books being riffs on a similar theme still seems... a little samey.

What I've decided, then, is to look only at the novels on the list that interest me. It's my party over here and I get to make the guest list. I am flat out nonplussed by books about white men over forty breaking out of the mould to make life-changing decisions. But there are a few books I definitely do like the look of.

In alphabetical order, with links to information in English where available (and German where not):

Franzobel: Das Floss der Medusa – what happened on board the raft of the Medusa, as depicted in Géricault's 1819 painting? Could be an examination of racism, human nature, survival instincts...

Jakob Nolte: Schreckliche Gewalten – werwolves, feminist terrorism, 20th century: "a black rainbow of horror". What's not to be very curious about?


Kerstin Preiwuß: Nach Onkalo – almost falling into the dull trope, but this one's about a forty-year-old man left stranded when his mother dies and how he finds ways to survive.

Sven Regener: Wiener Strasse – this is the one all my non-literary friends are looking forward to. I'm hoping it will stand alone because it's part of a whole series of books revolving around Frank Lehmann, a hapless charmer of a character who stumbles through life in West Germany, this time in 1980s Kreuzberg. I translated a sample and loved every minute of it. The first sentence is eight words long; the next two and a half pages. And it's funny. I am biased but I'd like a UK publisher to pick it up, even though Berlin Blues didn't make much of a splash in 2004. Times have changed, UK publishers!

Sasha Marianna Salzmann: Außer sich – English world rights have already sold to Text Publishing, so you'll get to read this at some point. I know I'm looking forward to it hugely. Antisemitism, Soviet Union, migration, family history, gender identity. By a writer whose plays and whose work at the Gorki Theater I really admire. A shining star on this list.

Christine Wunnicke: Katie – how could I resist a book inadvertently named after me and set in 1870s London? Except I've had it on my shelves since the spring and haven't got round to it. I will now, and I suppose that's part of the point of the prize.

Well, would you look at that? The love german books shortlist of six is gender balanced, all by itself. The German Book Prize longlist is not – but take a look at publishers' catalogues for an instant idea of why. They bring out significantly more men than women on their German literary fiction lists, and that's reflected in all award longlists. Thankfully, women and men have started to question conditions in the bottleneck of creative writing schools. You can read their texts on the Merkur Blog, and some of them are horrifying.
My hope is that this feeder, the programmes that take in a majority of female students and turn out a majority of male debut novelists, will change. And that editors at German houses will pay a little more attention to who they're publishing, perhaps shift the focus from the late works of accomplished white men to more innovative people and projects.

To some extent, it's a coincidence that the German Book Prize longlist was announced on the same day as President Trump applied the term "very fine people" to white supremacists. In other ways, it's not. The German Book Prize reflects the state of German literary publishing, which reflects the German-speaking countries as a whole. Some exciting things are happening, some progressive ideas are coming to the fore, but all in a culture in which the middle-aged, middle-class white male experience is considered the norm and worthy of more attention.   

In his Guardian article, Chaudhuri writes:

I’m not saying that the Booker shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that it requires an alternative, and the alternative isn’t another prize. It has to do instead with writers reclaiming agency. The meaning of a writer’s work must be created, and argued for, by writers themselves, and not by some extraneous source of endorsement (...). (A)s in other walks of life under capitalism, there has been a loss of initiative among writers: a readiness to let others decide why their work is significant while they busy themselves at literary festivals (...). Only rarely is silence a useful riposte.

I think that's a good conclusion, and I take from it the following tentative plan: as time and life allow, I'm going to follow the novels on the longlist that interest me, and also draw attention to other exciting German books coming out this autumn. I agree that a prize nomination is not the only measure of excellence we have, and nor are sales figures or numbers of reviews or many of the factors editors consider when commissioning translations. Defining excellence, meanwhile, is an impossible task, just like translation. The kind I relish most.

Käthe Kruse: Lob des Imperfekts

Käthe Kruse has a book out, Lob des Imperfekts. Kunst, Musik und Wohnen im West-Berlin der 1980er Jahre. It's an ebook, actually, about music, art and squatting back in the day. Fittingly, it is not neat and tidy, not professional as we may have come to expect.*

Kruse was the drummer in the band Die Tödliche Doris. Wikipedia says the article I've linked to here relies too much on references to primary sources. What other sources would you want to rely on, I wonder? The band was part of the Geniale Dilletanten movement. They spelled it like that on purpose, unlike the Wikipedia article, where someone "corrected" the spelling in 2012 and it has stayed that way. Which has its own charm, I suppose. The idea, as I understand from Kruse's book, was to just get on and do things, make music and art and books with enthusiasm, ingenuity, rather than years of practice. Dilletantism like the herb and your favourite auntie. You're never going to achieve perfection, so why try? Kind of like art-school punk, to use an Anglophone comparison, only less angry, less a reaction to what came before, and more a simple creative urge? Maybe. I'm not an expert.

And that was kind of the point. Kruse writes of the movement:

Perfection can't be expected. Most of us couldn't play any instruments or couldn't repeat what we'd played once before. And that's where the basic premise of the Geniale Dilletanten comes to the fore: that anyone can make music who has ideas and energy (...). In any case, the Geniale Dilletanten stopped leaving the things they cared about to the experts, the self-appointed or otherwise responsible, and took charge of them in person.

So it's not exactly easy listening. My mum used to have an Einstürzende Neubauten CD and she'd play it really loud and hoover at the same when the downstairs neighbours had pissed her off.

But it was a thing, you know? You can hear their influence still now in some bands. Kruse writes about the music scene in 80s West Berlin, where everyone's surname seems to have been Müller and everyone worked in either a bar or a record store, and people ran shops that never sold anything, and it seems like an island where money wasn't necessary and they could make art out of embroidered cushions and get ripped off by a gallery owner and then get their revenge by mass-producing the cushions and selling them for much cheaper, and they'd get invited to art things all over the Western world and do a show or make a video and send that and it would be funny and fun and everything was an experiment and no one got up early in the morning.

And just as that might be getting a bit samey, with some other dude called Müller doing some other artsy thing, the book switches from music and art to something more tangible: how these people actually lived. This is the longest piece of the three that make up the book, followed by a more straight-forward interview with Käthe Kruse. Like the other two articles, it's been used before but is very recent, published in an architecture magazine. Because putting together old things to make new things is good. So Kruse writes – in an almost conversational style – about how she joined one of West Berlin's 164 squats in 1982 and how the squatters lived and worked and went about saving buildings that were slated for demolition, and with them whole swathes of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg.

The experiments extended beyond art, then, to the way people lived. In her building, they started out with forty people sharing space in which to cook, eat and sleep, allocating tasks like washing up, cooking, scavenging building material, repairs, construction. What began as a temporary solution to a lack of affordable living space became more permanent, with band practice rooms and then whole water processing and energy production plants set up in the basement, and smaller, more private spaces coming about as and when needed.

One of the reasons I was so fascinated is that I've known people over the years who have lived in these houses, and seen some of the conflicts that arose there, from a distance. But Kruse details how they were dealt with – new people moving in and bringing bursts of energy, employing a janitor to make sure someone's responsible for certain jobs, making sure the smaller living units are shared by people who get on well. About half of West Berlin's squats have since been legalized, and Kruse takes us through that process as well, and the compromises it entailed. But basically, the squats created the economic conditions for those who lived in them to lead those laid-back lives, experimenting with instruments and making new things. I'm glad the two aspects come together in one short book.

So here's the thing I've been thinking. What if some of us bloggers are our own breed of ingenious dilletants? Doing things our own way out of enthusiasm, writing differently to paid critics, the experts in our case, less for the fame than for the fun, having come across a space in which we can experiment. Sure, some literary bloggers go on to write professionally, and good for them. But at a time when monetizing is almost expected of us, maybe it's cool to just make something new for the love of it and not for the cash.

*The book is professionally produced, of course, by Mikrotext, with photos and all the features you'd expect from an ebook, plus samples from their other stuff. And there'll be a book launch somewhere in Kreuzberg, at some date in September, which is again nicely dilletantish.

Gedanken übers Außenseitersein und Sexismus

Sabine Scholl schrieb neulich so gut darüber, wie es sich anfühlt, im Literaturbetrieb Außenseiterin zu sein. Ich möchte darauf antworten, meine eigene Geschichte erzählen, auch mit den vielen guten Texten über Sexismus an Schreibschulen im Hinterkopf, besonders die von Martina Hefter und Stefan Mesch. Letzte Woche kam eine Anfrage von einer Zeitung, ein paar Zeilen zum Thema Sexismus im Literaturbetrieb zu schicken. Ich konnte nicht, weil ich mitten in einem Umzug steckte – aber auch weil ich dachte, ein paar Zeilen zu meinen Erfahrungen reichen nicht aus, die Sache ist komplizierter.

Für mein Gefühl bin ich mehrfache Außenseiterin im deutschen Literaturbetrieb. Ich bin nicht in Deutschland aufgewachsen, deutsch ist nicht meine Muttersprache. Ich bin Übersetzerin und keine Autorin oder Kritikerin. Ich bin atheistisch erzogen, in der dritten Generation. Ich bin Mutter, halbzeit-alleinerziehend, auch das in der dritten Generation. Ich habe Freunde, die keine Bücher lesen. Ich bin nicht verheiratet, war es nie, und habe gerade keinen Partner. Was ich auch nicht habe, um an Sabine Scholl anzuknüpfen, ist einen Bildungsbürgerhintergrund.

Ich komme aus London. Dort reden wir noch über Klasse, manchmal vereinfachend; dabei ist das Thema gar nicht so geradlinig. Meine Eltern sind typische Aufsteiger, haben die Klasse gewechselt als die Gesellschaft in den 60ern durchlässiger wurde. Die Mutter bekam mit elf ein Stipendium für begabte Arbeiterkinder, besuchte eine Internatsschule, fühlte sich sieben Jahre lang fehl am Platz. Zu Hause arbeitete ihr Vater als Lastwagenfahrer und die Mutter als Dienstmädchen und Putzfrau. Mit ihrer guten Schulbildung ausgestattet, fing meine Mutter ein Studium an – hörte aber schnell wieder auf, weil sie meinen Vater vermisste. Er hatte die Schule mit sechzehn abgebrochen, landete nach einer Weile dank Vollbeschäftigung auf den Füßen und lernte Tontechniker bei der BBC. Seine Mutter hatte ihre drei Söhne alleine aufgezogen, war Stenotypistin bei der Post, während ihr Exmann in Fabriken arbeitete und in der kommunistischen Partei aktiv war.

So waren meine Eltern nirgendwo ganz zugehörig. Seine Arbeit und ihre Bildung trennten sie von der Arbeiterklasse ab, schenkten ihnen aber nur oberflächliche, prekäre Bürgerlichkeit. Sie kauften sich ein Reihenhaus, lasen sich Wissen an, mein Vater brachte sich selbst Klavierspielen bei, meine Mutter machte Verwaltungsjobs und consciousness-building und studierte dann doch mit vierzig Sozialwissenschaften, nachdem die beiden sich getrennt hatten. Meine Schwester und ich wuchsen mit Büchern auf, aber auch mit Popmusik und Fernsehen. Wir machten Amateurtheater, Pantomimes in der Mehrzweckhalle, fuhren als Scheidungskinder nicht mehr ins Ausland in den Urlaub sondern immer in verregnete englische Kleinstädte. Wir hatten verschiedene Untermieterinnen, wie die Großeltern schon ihr Einkommen aufgebessert hatten. Alles war gut, das Geld reichte meist knapp.

Und dann waren wir dran: meine Schwester und ich studierten beide. Meine Mutter hatte gerade rechtzeitig verhindert, dass wir die ersten Familienmitglieder an der Uni waren. Meine Schwester wurde nicht fertig, ich schon. Sie arbeitet jetzt mit älteren Menschen als eine Art ungelernte Sozialarbeiterin, ist auch alleinerziehend, hat eine Behinderung und kommt damit klar. Alles ist gut, das Geld reicht meist knapp. Bei mir sieht’s ähnlich aus, nur dass ich meine Arbeit liebe und keinen Anspruch auf eine Sozialwohnung habe. Den Bachelorabschluss eingesackt, bin ich bloß schnell weg von der Uni, von England, ab nach Berlin. Ich zog mit einem Gartenbaulehrling zusammen, er hatte eine Einraumwohnung in Friedrichshain, mit Ofenheizung aber immerhin mit eigenem Badezimmer. Nachdem wir uns trennten fiel er durch die Gesellenprüfung durch.

Nach weiteren lebensbereichernden Brüchen begab ich mich nichtsahnend in deutsche Literaturkreisen. Ich finde es hier schwer, Klassenhintergründe einzuschätzen; ich kann die Zeichen immer noch schlecht lesen und die Deutschen reden auch nicht freiwillig darüber. Florian Kessler hatte aber vermutlich recht mit seiner Ärztesöhne-Theorie. Was ich gemerkt habe: man kennt sich mit klassischer Musik aus aber hört textbetonten Indie-Pop. Man trägt keine knalligen Farben. Männer machen Witze, Frauen lachen – aber nicht zu laut. Man reist viel und versteht was von Wein aber trinkt selten über den Durst. Man flirtet nicht, höchstens sehr subtil und am späteren Abend. Oder vielleicht steht man nur nicht auf mich, keine Ahnung. Jedenfalls mache ich einiges falsch und fühle mich oft fremd in der Szene, manchmal wie eine teilnehmende Beobachterin.

Und doch finde ich immer wieder Räume, in denen ich mich wohlfühle. Manchmal sind sie vorübergehend: Buchmessen, der ehemalige Salon von Adler und Söhne, bestimmte Lesungsreihen. Oft liegt es an den Gastgebern, die sich wie zum Beispiel im LCB darum bemühen, dass alle sich wohlfühlen. Das sind Orte, wo ich im pinken Kleid zu roten Schuhen tanzen und Witze reißen kann, wo ich betrunken die letzte Bahn verpassen kann und jemand nimmt mich im Taxi mit, wo ich zu viel von mir erzählen kann, immer schön in der verpönten ersten Person, wo es auch mal knallen darf. Manchmal erschaffe ich diese Räume selbst, in der Form eines Blogs oder einer Veranstaltung. Ich will weiterhin einiges falsch machen.

Und es gibt Leute, viele davon Frauen, die auch keine glatten Lebensläufe haben und die sich gegenseitig unterstützen. Ich erhalte von vielen Frauen im Literaturbetrieb Hilfe und Zuspruch: es sind andere Mütter, Alleinerziehende, Feministinnen, Ausländerinnen, Übersetzerinnen, andere lautlachende, spaßverstehende, talentierte Fettnäpfchentretende. Diese Frauen und Männer sind es, die mich in diesem komischen Betrieb bei der Stange halten. I hope you know who you are.

Denn ja, der deutsche Literaturbetrieb ist immer noch von bürgerlichen weißen Männern dominiert. Es reicht also schon, eine Frau zu sein, um sich hier als Außenseiterin zu empfinden. Der Betrieb ist immer noch ein Ort, wo Frauen nach ihrem Aussehen verurteilt werden und sich vielleicht deswegen selten trauen, Körperlichkeit in ihrem Schreiben zuzulassen. Wo sie sich auch selten trauen, Wut zu zeigen, radikal zu denken, reden und schreiben. Deswegen freue ich mich so sehr, dass ehemalige und jetzige Schreibschulstudierende über die Bedingungen dort klagen. Ich glaube, ich bin nicht die Richtige, um über Sexismus-Erfahrungen im Betrieb zu erzählen, denn ich stecke wie gesagt nicht richtig drin und möchte es auch nicht unbedingt. Ich bin nicht vom Wohlwollen der bürgerlichen weißen Männern abhängig, jedenfalls nicht der deutschen.

Aber ich beobachte vom Rande und wünsche mir, dass Frauen es leichter haben, erfolgreiche Schriftstellerinnen zu werden, damit ich ihre Bücher übersetzen kann. Bücher von Menschen ohne glatten Lebensläufe, wie einige der Autorinnen, die ich übersetzt habe und übersetzen werde: Inka Parei, Annett Gröschner, Christa Wolf, Helene Hegemann, Rusalka Reh, Olga Grjasnowa, Heike Geißler. Und denkt noch an diese anderen geilen Schreibbräute: Katja Lange-Müller, Herta Müller, Julia Franck, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Judith Hermann, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Antje Rávic Strubel... Ich wünsche mir mehr, noch mehr, ich möchte baden in Büchern von unangepassten Autorinnen.

Passt euch meinetwegen bloß nicht an. Schreibt nicht brav, schreibt mit Pathos oder Wut oder Witz oder Experimentierlust. Macht dasselbe im Leben. Helft euch gegenseitig, heißt andere Frauen willkommen. Seid eure eigene Seilschaft. Macht das Außenseitersein zur Tugend, erklärt euren Literaturbetrieb zur Außenseiterinnenrepublik. Seid geschmacklos und verhaltet euch falsch.

Very Busy

I have been very busy, translating and parenting as usual but also judging the International Dublin Literary Award. That means reading 147 novels published in English during 2015, translations and original English writing nominated by libraries all over the world. I bought a special armchair for the purpose. It has been thrilling, enlightening and fascinating but time-consuming and of course I haven't been able to read many German books.

The two I've squeezed in and liked very much are Olga Grjasnowa's forthcoming Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen, both novels.

I'll also try and update my statistics on newly published original German fiction by gender to cover this spring. I'd hoped that someone else might start working on stats in German publishing but nobody seems to have gone for it so far.

And I just read Ekkehard Knörer's rather delightful nostalgic sigh of an essay about early German blogs. In that spirit, a personal revelation of sorts: I've been thinking quite hard about book reviewing, about whether I could do my bit to tip the scales in terms of women writing criticism and reviews in German publications. Two hurdles, though: it takes me a long time to write in German and I have no wish to pretend to be an all-knowing general authority without a personality. I wrote a slightly po-faced personal "manifesto" about how I would like to write reviews for German publications; maybe I'll put that here too.

Still thinking.

Fantasy Publishing House

Seeking solace, I have been daydreaming about my ideal job. So here it is: I'd like to be the person who commissions translations in a fantasy publishing house where money is no object. Obviously I'd only do that half the time; the rest of my time would still be spent translating fabulous books from German. And travelling around in my chauffeur-driven Sunbeam Alpine (see above). Well-paid staff would do the other, more gruelling parts of the publishing work: accounting, editing, production, publicity, distribution...

My translator friends would come to me with impeccable recommendations for books to publish, and I would say yes, of course, if you love the book then it must be wonderful. Let's do it. And critics will snatch them out of our hands and fight over who gets to review them. But there'd be no need to argue because it's fine to have several reviews of any particular book, even in one publication, each pointing out in a supportive manner what delightful aspects the previous reviewer couldn't find room to mention. Although probably column inches wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

My first list, on the German side of things, would consist of the following titles:

Non-fiction
Heike Geißler: Saisonarbeit/Season's Greetings from Fulfillment
Carolin Emcke: Gegen den Hass/Against Hate

Fiction
Julya Rabinowich: Krötenliebe/Toads and Tempest
Antje Rávic Strubel: In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens/Into the Woods of the Human Heart
Senthuran Varatharajah: Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen/Before the Signs Mount Up
Rasha Khayat: Weil wir längst woanders sind/Because We're Elsewhere Now

Children/YA
Finn-Ole Heinrich: Die erstaunlichen Abenteuer der Maulina Schmitt/The Amazing and Astonishing Adventures of Maulina Schmitt
Kirsten Fuchs: Mädchenmeute/Girl Gang

I might be too busy being driven onto beaches to do all the translations myself. If you have unlimited funds and would like to give me a part-time job doing exactly this, feel free to contact me. I understand if you'd rather invest your unlimited funds in getting rid of reactionary world leaders, though, so if I don't hear from you I'll know that's where your priorities lie. That's fine.

Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer – A Translator's Note

February 2016 

I have just submitted my translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar. It’s the best book I’ve translated so far, has stretched me the most and required the most drastic approaches. I feel tearful. For added bathos – and this is a book with a lot of bathos – my email got an out-of-office reply from the publisher.

I’ve been following the novel since 2008, when Clemens first published what became the final chapter as a short story in an anthology. It was even filthier than the present version. He read it at an event that was recorded for radio, checking nervously with his editor if it was really OK to put it on record. Last week I read from that final chapter myself, blushing, and was pleased that other people liked it too.

It took a long time to find a publisher willing to take a risk on this novel, which was originally published in German in 2013. It is long, which means my translation has been expensive. And it’s a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist, Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and diversification in the present day. Not everybody’s cup of tea.

Translating it was all-consuming. It required a great deal of research because I wasn’t directly familiar with the sex industry before working on it. But it was also emotionally draining because of the intensity of the writing. Translators are used to immersing ourselves in writers’ work but this book – and Clemens’s writing in general – is so unflinching that it affected me more than ever before.

***

Most translation requires us to explain the source culture to some extent. In this case, though, the legal situation with regard to prostitution in Germany is completely different to that in the UK and the US, even Nevada. Since 2001, German law has enabled prostitutes to work under regular employment contracts, explicitly stating that prostitution is no longer an unconscionable act. Sex work is legal and widely accepted – although the area is not free from moral judgement – and sexual services are advertised plainly. That means the language around it is different.

I started out by looking for British ads for sexual services. They do exist but they are so euphemistic as to be no use to me; the language in Bricks and Mortar is very much to the point. Meyer plays on the codes used in small ads, abbreviations and cute phrases, and I needed an equivalent that made sense. Thankfully, there are internet forums where punters rate ‘adult service providers’, and one of them provides a glossary containing exactly what I needed. I also read the Feminist Press’s very useful $pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution for a sense of how people in the US sex industry talk about their work, and many articles in the British press. TV dramas were also helpful for a sense of how readers might expect sex workers to talk, especially the excellent Band of Gold.

Another key difference between the cultures is that a lot of prostitution in Germany takes place in apartments in normal buildings; I once lived above one, in fact, which closed down after a shooting. Street prostitution exists but is unsafe, like anywhere else, and only comes up on the margins of the novel. Again, that makes the language different. Where British and American sex workers speak of “clients”, I preferred to stick to the German “guests” with its suggestion of hospitality, an issue several characters raise.

And once I started creating my own language for the novel’s unique situation, I felt I could take that approach even further. So readers will come across two neologisms – “in the Zone” and “after the Wall”. I hope this is the kind of novel in which readers can deal with new phrases. I’m very pleased with “in the Zone” because it sounds aptly science-fictional, referring simply to East Germany in communist days. And “after the Wall” is shorthand for “after the fall of the Iron Curtain”. Where German has the succinct “Wende” for the turning point in its late-20th-century history, a sailing metaphor, English struggles with all sorts of long-winded explanations. Meyer writes very rhythmically and it was important to me to cut anything that interrupted the flow – although that flow is sometimes jagged and abrupt, sometimes smooth and colloquial.

Emboldened, I then did something translators of “serious literature” are not supposed to do. I changed a character’s name. A hard-punning punter by the name of Ecki – a quiet homage to Hubert Fichte’s Jäcki in Die Palette – has an internet radio show called Eckis Edelkirsch, named after a cheap cherry liqueur. But that reference wasn’t strong enough for me, or not strong enough for a character who’s anything but subtle. I wanted the crass “cherry”, the overtly sexual title for an overtly sexual show, not something foreign and unpronounceable. And so Ecki became Jerry and his show became Jerry’s Cherry Pie, inspired by a sex shop in West Ealing. Meyer gave me permission for the change – and Jerry is still not far from Jäcki. Jerry’s two chapters were a joy to translate, punning and rhyming and getting almost psychedelic.

My favourite chapter, though, is now called ‘My Huckleberry Friend’. Meyer, knowing I was so keen on it, gave me the first page of the chapter from the first galley proof – in a frame – for my fortieth birthday. It’s typical of his writing, interweaving two women’s voices and never making it quite clear whether what’s happening is really happening. The German title – like many chapter titles in the book – is a song, a slow waltz in fact. The two sex workers may or may not end up dancing to the song, which isn’t mentioned by name other than in the melancholy title, a song about saying goodbye: ‘Sag beim Abschied leise Servus’. Although the direct reference to parting is lost, I hope my new title conjures up Audrey Hepburn’s yearning for glamour in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film I’m sure the two characters might watch together. And ‘Moon River’ is a slow waltz that many readers can probably hum, keeping that essential rhythmic element intact.

***

July 2016

As of the 4th of July, the Commons inquiry into prostitution has recommended legalizing brothels and soliciting as quickly as possible in the UK. Bricks and Mortar may give British readers an idea of what might happen once sex workers are allowed to work in greater safety. First and foremost, though, I hope readers will value it as much as I do, as a novel that makes no apologies as it pushes back the boundaries of what literature can do. ‘A journey into the night, brutal, dark, somnambulistic, surreal and often cruelly precise. A book about Germany, today’ wrote the critic Volker Weidermann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. He was right. 

***

17 October 2016

Bricks and Mortar is published in the UK today by Fitcarraldo Editions. My copies should arrive on Wednesday.

Sie können aber gut Deutsch – Ade, Chamisso-Preis

Der Chamisso-Preis schafft sich ab. Die Trägerin des Literaturpreises für „herausragende auf Deutsch schreibende Autoren, deren Werk von einem Kulturwechsel geprägt ist“, die Robert-Bosch-Stiftung, begründete die Einstellung mit der nicht unzutreffenden Aussage, Schreibende mit Migrationsgeschichte könnten inzwischen viele andere Preise gewinnen. Geschäftsführerin Uta-Micaela Dürig sagte: „Viele dieser Autoren wollen heute nur für ihre literarischen Leistungen gewürdigt werden, und nicht wegen ihres biografischen Hintergrunds.“
 
Bei diesem Satz sollte man aufhorchen, denn er ist ein Zeichen, dass die Organisatorinnen auf die Schriftsteller hören. Der Chamisso-Preis entstand in den 1980er Jahren, angetrieben von Harald Weinrich, u.a. Professor für Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Die Auszeichnung förderte ursprünglich „deutsch schreibende Autoren nicht deutscher Muttersprache“. Sie war also die mit Preisgeld aufgeladene Verkörperung des zweischneidigen Kompliments „Sie können aber gut Deutsch!“ Das mag im letzten Jahrhundert angemessen gewesen sein; tatsächlich hat sich aber durch den Preis oder vielleicht nur nebenbei viel geändert – „Gastarbeiterliteratur“ ist als Begriff durch „Migrationsliteratur“ oder den schauderhaften Euphemismus „Chamissoliteratur“ ersetzt worden; Autoren, die woanders geboren sind, zeigen Präsenz auf Nominierungslisten und in den Medien und vertreten Deutschland im Ausland. Was diese aber nicht mehr brauchen, ist eine ins Gönnerhafte neigende Auszeichnung für ihre (fremd-)sprachlichen Leistungen.

Literaturpreise schaffen Aufmerksamkeit, keine Frage. In Großbritannien wurde der jetzige Baileys Prize für Romane von Schriftstellerinnen ins Leben gerufen, nachdem 1991 keine der sechs Nominierten für den Booker Prize Frauen waren. Inzwischen ist der Baileys Prize wirtschaftlich sehr erfolgreich; die Autorinnen auf der Shortlist können damit rechnen, viele neue Leserinnen zu gewinnen. Der Unterschied zum Chamisso-Preis? Die Initiative kam von innen: von Frauen (und Männern) innerhalb des Literaturbetriebs. Die Preisjury besteht seitdem ausschließlich aus Frauen. Der Chamisso-Preis wurde von Menschen ohne Migrationserfahrung gegründet; in der diesjährigen Jury sitzen sechs Biodeutsche und Feridun Zaimoglu. Der Preis ist – natürlich wohlmeinend – von oben herab entstanden und wird noch heute so verliehen.

Über die Jahre hat die Bosch-Stiftung versucht, den Chamisso-Preis zeitgemäßer zu gestalten. Die Kriterien wandelten von der nichtdeutschen Muttersprache zum prägenden Kulturwechsel; 2015 ging die Auszeichnung an Esther Kinsky und Uljana Wolf, zwei in Deutschland geborene Schriftstellerinnen, die üblicherweise von dem Migrantenetikett verschont bleiben. Das war ein großer und richtiger Schritt. Die Stiftung schreibt dazu auf ihrer Webseite: „Die gesellschaftliche Realität zeigt heute, dass eine stetig wachsende Autorengruppe mit Migrationsgeschichte Deutsch als selbstverständliche Muttersprache spricht. Für die Literatur dieser Autoren ist der Sprach- und Kulturwechsel zwar thematisch oder stilistisch prägend, sie ist jedoch zu einem selbstverständlichen und unverzichtbarem Bestandteil deutscher Gegenwartsliteratur geworden.“

Ebenso richtig. Nur ist diese Botschaft nicht in der Gesellschaft angekommen. Immer noch müssen die Ausgezeichneten den braven Ausländer spielen, immer noch wird ihr Anderssein betont, die sprachliche Bereicherung, die sie einbringen. Nicht so sehr die Bosch-Stiftung sondern Moderatoren und Journalisten stellen immer noch dieselben Fragen, auf die die Ausgezeichneten immer nur dieselben Phrasen geben können: „Ich habe mich in die deutsche Sprache verliebt“, „auf Deutsch schreiben ist für mich befreiend“, „ich musste mir die deutsche Sprache aneignen, um zu überleben...“ Anstatt zuzugeben, dass es schlicht bizarr wäre, auf die besseren Verdienstmöglichkeiten auf dem deutschsprachigen Literaturmarkt zu verzichten, wenn man schon mal seinen Lebensmittelpunkt in Deutschland, Österreich oder der Schweiz hat. 

„Chamisso-Autoren“ sitzen  zusammen auf Podien und sollen übers Ausländersein reden und nicht übers Schreiben. Sind keine Autoren wie alle anderen, sollen keine Geschichten erzählen wie alle anderen, sondern nur Geschichten übers Ausländersein. Haben sprachliche Würze zu sein in der faden deutschen Suppe. Die deutsche Sprache ist in dieser Erzählung der rettende Anker; die deutsche (oder eben österreichische oder schweizerische) Gesellschaft das Mutterschiff. Die Preisträger gehören einer eigenen Kategorie an: einer literarischen Parallelgesellschaft, von der Mehrheit erschaffen. Seit Jahren aber rebellieren Autoren dagegen. 2008 schrieb Preisträger Saša Stanišić über „drei Mythen vom Schreiben der Migranten“: als philologische Kategorie, mit monothematischen Stoffen und als sprachliche Bereicherung. Mehrere Preisträger und Nichtpreisträger haben sich kritisch geäußert, weigern sich, den „Kanakenbonus“ (Imran Ayata) auszunutzen oder die „Berufsfremde“ (Terézia Mora) zu spielen. Bloß: welch schreibender Mensch lehnt €15,000 Preisgeld ab? Da zeugt die Entscheidung, Autoren nicht mehr für ihren biografischen Hintergrund anzuerkennen von Respekt für ihre Wünsche. 

Jörg Sundermeier schrieb in der taz, ein Preis, der „Deutsch endlich in einer weltoffenen Literatur“ ankommen lässt sei nötiger denn je. Das stimmt sogar, aber kann nicht jeder Literaturpreis, der für alle Deutschschreibende offen ist, genau das erreichen? Ist nicht ein Bachmannpreis, ein Deutscher Buchpreis für Schreibende mit anderen Herkunftssprachen oder ethnischen Hintergründen viel mehr Wert als diese paternalistische Auszeichnung, die das Gespräch in eine einzelne Richtung lenkt? Es liegt an den Verlagen, marginalisierte Autorinnen zu entdecken und zu fördern, sie für Preise einzureichen – denn marginalisiert sind noch viele, und der Weg zum Verlag ist schwer. Es läge an der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, endlich eine Autorin aus einem anderen Kulturkreis mit dem Büchner-Preis auszuzeichnen. Auswahl gäbe es da – auch dank der Arbeit der Bosch-Stiftung – reichlich. Der Chamisso-Preis in seiner bisherigen Form hat ausgedient. 

Das Gute behält die Bosch-Stiftung konsequenterweise bei: das Programm, bei dem Autoren in Schulen gehen und Kindern zeigen, dass nicht alle deutschsprachige Schriftsteller deutschsprachig auf die Welt kommen. Dadurch werden sie zu Vorbildern und inspirieren womöglich eine neue Generation. Ilija Trojanow und José F.A. Oliver klagten in der FAZ, das würde sie auf eine „bildungspolitisch nützliche Rolle“ reduzieren. Aber eben diese wertvolle Arbeit kann der deutschsprachigen Literatur zugute kommen, sie mit Nicht-Arztsöhnen beleben, Kinder von syrischen Flüchtlingen oder englischen Übersetzerinnen beflügeln. Die Bosch-Stiftung könnte auch Eigeninitiativen von marginalisierten Autoren unterstützen; die Zeitschrift Freitext zum Beispiel möchte sich wiederbeleben. Wer Geld zu verteilen hat, wird es nicht schwer haben, Projekte aufzutun. Der Chamisso-Preis schafft sich ab, und das ist gut so – aber wir dürfen auf ihre Weiterexistenz gespannt sein.