Advertorial: Inka Parei's The Cold Centre

Typograhical Era is apparently looking forward to Inka Parei's latest book in my translation, The Cold Centre, which comes out in February. They say:

Parei’s novel is set to deliver a timely reminder about how we tend to react in the face of disaster. It seems a bit White Noise-y in premise, but with a real accident and the desolate setting of East Berlin before the wall was torn down serving as its focus, this one appears to be primed to deliver much more realistic shocks.

As in her previous two novels, Inka explores German history and gets us all worked up in the process, this time returning to Berlin for a furious race against time, if you like. I adore it, as you can imagine.

If you'd like to find out more about Inka's work – and see some startling photos of the novel's key setting, now lost to the world – you can read a conversation she and I had at Music & Literature.

My India Soundtrack

I'm back from India! I'd almost adjusted to the minus-ten degrees here in Berlin, but thankfully it just got a bit warmer. To start with, here's a list of the music we heard on our travels.

1. Inka Parei and I were welcomed to Mumbai* International Airport by a muzak version of Don't Cry for Me Argentina. It was night, hot, and it smelled of India. There was a great deal of queuing and pink carpeting.

2. In Kolkata, we took part in the Apeejay Literary Festival, which was great. We attended part of an open-air session asking "Is Kolkata still the literary capital of India?" - at which, for some reason, a teenage boy played the Cranberries' Zombie on the electric guitar. A very friendly, relaxed and creative afternoon.

3. Still in Kolkata, we went to an amazing performance in Sasha Waltz's Dialoge series. Mainly German and some Indian dancers took over a crumbling palace and re-enlivened it, along with the Mahler Chamber Soloists. Dance is not something that's usually on my radar and I found it difficult to interpret the stories the artists were telling. But I was still spellbound by the unique atmosphere and the chance to explore the palace, and the music was breathtaking. You can watch a short report on the event (in German but watch it anyway for the atmosphere) at 3Sat. During the two-hour performance the "real-world" Kolkata kept butting in, with processions and fireworks and hooting horns, etc, while there were light projections on the opposite building from within the palace.

4. We travelled around most of the cities by car, with hired drivers. India is not the place for non-residents to try driving. So we got a sample of taxi-drivers' musical taste, often Hindi love songs from Bollywood movies. Dorothee Elmiger told us she often recognises the backdrops in Hindi films as the song passages are commonly shot on location in the Swiss Alps. In fact there's a whole branch of tourism taking Bollywood fans to Swiss resorts, complete with canteen-style eateries serving genuine Indian food. Yes, cooked by Indians.

5. There was a lot of eighties pop, most notably Stars on 45 in one hotel bar, which reminded me of my local ice-rink in Berlin, rather a marked contrast.

6. Still in Kolkata, we hung out in the Seagull Books office, which is a beautiful space full of beautiful people. You should probably go to India just to pay them a visit. The after-hours music there was Johnny Hodges. Imagine the world outside is stressful and strange and crowded with people and poverty, advertising on every free space - even on the police road blocks - and inside there's great food and wine and company and conversation, calm lighting, books lining every inch of wall, and jazz.

7. In New-Delhi we had the experience that will probably leave the most lasting impression out of many. We were invited to the home of the Nizami Brothers, a group of Sufi qawwali musicians. You can see them playing here - and you can see more of the setting in the movie Rock Star. Watch both. First of all they played what felt like an hour of love songs to Allah, weaving in references to Hindu gods and beauty and just love in general. Sufism is a "people's religion" that works - in my crude understanding - by putting worshippers into a trance so they can better convene with their god. The music worked so well like that on all of us. We were all bedazzled and I was reminded of the ecstatic feeling of dancing myself into a similar state. Giant smiles on all our faces, conjured up by harmonium, percussion, vocals, shouting and clapping, performed by total dudes who we all fell a little bit in love with. There was also the world's cutest boy snuggled in between them, playing air guitar. Watch the Rock Star clip to understand why. After that we were shown around the shrine to the Sufi saint Nizamuddin, and to the poet Amir Khusro, who founded the qawwali tradition. It was a very strange feeling, especially as our party was mainly female and we women weren't allowed inside the actual shrines. Luckily I was reading Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists at the time, which helped me to understand what was going on in my head and to retain my cynicism. But everything had been explained to us beforehand, and afterwards I learned that Khusro's work had clear homoerotic elements and this particular shrine had, up until the rise of fundamentalism about ten years ago, blessed homosexual couples.

8. In another car, there were video screens for the back seat. Unfortunately, I was sitting next to the driver, so I heard rather than saw what was presumably a low point for both Rutger Hauer and Omar Sharif: Beyond Justice. Unaware of the screens, I took it for an EFL audiobook with very simple dialogue - with an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

9. At the Hyderabad Literary Festival, we saw clips from India's first silent film, Raja Harishchandra, made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. There was actually music to accompany most of it in the background but I can't find a video with music, sorry. It was great fun, very confusing, and the audience loved the slapstick humour.

10. Another bizarre moment: driving through bustling, modern, overrun Hyderabad with Clarence Carter's Slip Away playing in the taxi. I smiled.

11. The last song we heard in India was more muzak at the airport, this time ABBA's Dancing Queen. Nobody said the whole trip could be deep and meaningful.


*My conscience as a Brit dictates that I use the official names of India's cities. Most of the Indians we spoke to didn't, as they felt they'd been imposed by Hindu nationalists using the issue of colonialism as a Trojan horse, or perhaps they just preferred the old names out of habit.

India!

January will be quiet at love german books. On Friday I leave for a two-week trip around India with the writers Inka Parei and Dorothee Elmiger. We'll be reading in Kolkata, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune, and also generally hanging out with the people at Seagull Books and attending dinners and receptions and performances and talking to students and having an interesting time. There will be good food and wine, I'm reliably informed. I'm very excited to have been invited and will no doubt tell you all about it when I get back.

For the moment, I'm just pleased to be taking two books featuring young women who liberate themselves from oppressive situations to India right now: Invitation to the Bold of Heart and The Shadow-Boxing Woman.

Inka Parei in New Zealand

My favourite writer Inka Parei just got back from New Zealand. You can watch a video about her trip here (in German) and read her blog in three languages here. It's beautiful writing, really.

Inka Parei in New Zealand

One of my favourite German writers, Inka Parei, is travelling around New Zealand in a campervan. You can read about her adventures and observations on her very first blog - in German, English and Te Reo Maori.

What I find fascinating about it is that otherwise, Inka writes about Germany, weaving contemporary history into her stories and going into great depth and detail. She writes slowly and carefully, revising over and over again. And now I can see almost the bare bones of her writing, for two reasons: firstly because she's observing the unfamiliar in a different continent, and secondly because writing for a blog demands a different kind of speed. Do take a look.

BTBA 2012 Longlist

They just announced the 25 titles longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. I'm delighted to see three German books among them, including Peter Stamm's Seven Years, translated by Michael Hofmann. I'm even more delighted to see my friends Thomas Pletzinger and (top translator) Ross Benjamin on the list for their book Funeral for a Dog. And to be perfectly honest, I'm over the moon to find Inka Parei's wonderful, wonderful novel The Shadow-Boxing Woman there, which I translated.

Here's what they say:

February 28, 2012—The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this afternoon. This is the fifth year for the BTBA, which launched in 2007 as a way of highlighting the best works of international literature published in the U.S. in the previous year.
Featuring authors from 14 countries writing in 12 languages, this year’s fiction longlist illustrates the prize’s dedication to literary diversity, ranging from works by established and classic authors, such as Moacyr Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards and Imre Kertesz’s Fiasco, to works by emerging voices, like Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, and Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman.
The longlist also includes an eclectic mix of translators, from Steve Dolph—whose translation of Juan José Saer’s Scars is his second full-length publication—to world-renowned translators Bill Johnston—who has two entries on this list, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski and In Red by Magdalena Tulli. As in years past, the list is dominated by smaller independent publishers, such as Dedalus, Seagull Books, Melville House, and Archipelago Books, although a number of larger houses—like W.W. Norton, Knopf, and Bloomsbury—are also represented.

The shortlist will be out on 10 April, but up to then make sure you go to Three Percent regularly for biased and unprofessional hymns in praise of all the longlisted books.

Seagull Books

Deutschlandradio has a short feature in German on Seagull Books, the Calcutta publishers who are shaking up the book world. They interview founder Naveen Kishore (who I personally pronounce differently than they do, but maybe I'm the one who's wrong) about how their unusual venture came about.

In 2005, Naveen says, major English-language publishers started opening dependencies in New-Delhi. So he decided to play at their game in the other direction, gradually persuading European publishers to sell him world English-language rights to their books. It took him a while, but now Seagull has an incredibly impressive list of international titles, including a German and an upcoming Swiss list. One of the things they do differently is asking their translators for wish-lists of books to publish in English. And here comes my full disclosure: I'm one of those translators.

You very possibly can't imagine how it feels to be asked straight out by a very charming and dapper publisher which books he should buy the rights to for you to work on. So let's just pretend you're a Jehovah's Witness and have been turned away at two hundred front doors, unable to spread the news of the thing you really and truly love and believe in. Now and then someone has grudgingly allowed you in but not offered you tea and biscuits, and then deigned to take your Watchtower magazine – but you're pretty sure it's going to end up lining the cat-litter tray.

And then one friendly person stops you on the street and says, Hey, don't you want to tell me about God? And I'll buy you a slap-up meal while you're at it, and then I'll give you your own evangelist TV station to help share your passion with other people. And it'll be broadcast around the whole entire world, not just in Texas.

This is what Seagull Books do. As Deutschlandradio point out, they may well be a tad crazy and megalomaniac, but they're publishing and selling international literature on an international basis. They're making beautifully designed books with the translators' names on the covers. And they're trusting us translators to recommend titles we absolutely adore. That means fantastic writers such as Esther Kinsky, Thomas Bernhard, Ralf Rothmann, Max Frisch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and many more.

May sees the release of the book on the top of my wish-list, Inka Parei's The Shadow-Boxing Woman. And Naveen once took me out to dinner at the Savoy.

Read an Excerpt from The Shadow-Boxing Woman

You can get a taste of my translation of Inka Parei's outstanding novel The Shadow-Boxing Woman on the publisher Seagull Books' website. Enjoy.

Things I Am Looking Forward To in 2011

One of my favourite German rituals is the New Year's Eve tradition of "lead-pouring". You take little plugs of lead (actually aluminium these days), melt them down over a candle, and then pour them into cold water to see what shape they make and predict your fate for the coming year. Of course it's all in the interpretation, but this year I got a saxophone. Make of that what you will. I also had a fortune cookie that told me to "be patient and optimistic" - and chose not to apply that to my love life.

There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.

Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.

Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.

And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.

On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.

Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.

Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.

So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.

Shadowboxing Berlin

I wrote last year about how much I loved Inka Parei's novel Die Schattenboxerin. And now I've gone and translated it. The English version by the name of The Shadowboxing Woman will be out next spring from Seagull Books.

Of course this is all incredibly exciting. And because I love the book so much and just can't wait for you all to read it, and because it's partly about Berlin and how the city changes during the early 1990s, and because I love Berlin as well, I've made the book its own little website:

Shadowboxing Berlin. It's not quite finished yet, but there's enough there for you to get a taste. Do go back to the "older entries", as the site looks at four of the locations in the novel and they won't all fit on one page. I hope it whets your appetite for the book.

On Meeting the Author

I've written about it before, but it's such an odd moment that I feel the need to share all over again. Meeting the person who wrote the book you've been labouring over, chose the words you've been mulling in your mind for weeks and months, thought up the plot that's been accompanying you for such a long time.

It's an oddly misbalanced situation. Because as a translator, you have to creep into your own interpretation of the writer's mind and rewrite their words on their behalf. So of course you think you know them - but of course you don't. The writer, on the other hand, has no idea of their translator, except perhaps an impression they might have gained from a few sporadic email enquiries. Which is probably more reliable than trying to judge a writer through their work, no matter how intimately one knows it.

I'm always slightly wary of that meeting. I often try to put it off, or just not meet the writer at all. It feels almost like surrendering control over my own translation, sometimes. I quite like just watching people I've translated short pieces by read at events, but am them wracked with nerves when I go up to say hello afterwards. As a rule they're pleased, flattered, interested. A friend of mine once said she loves talking to writers, they're great listeners because they're permanently gathering material to write about. And she had a distinct déja vu when she read a particular sex scene...

Today I met up with Inka Parei, whose novel Die Schattenboxerin/The Shadow-Boxing Woman I'm translating. And it was pleasant, and productive, and of course it confirmed that I had no idea what she's really like. And we talked about Berlin - which is very much one of the characters in the novel - and how things have changed here, and how so many people live very much on the surface of the city without knowing the almost personal history of the places around them. And of course about the book, with a lot of gesturing and drawing and trying to find a common language in which to answer those niggling little translation questions.

Of course most translators don't live in the same country as the writers they translate, let alone the same city. But for the very lucky ones here in Germany, there are occasional stipends to get together and consult with the author, or to travel to the place where the book is set. And the Literaturfestival Leukerbad last week invited six translators out of German to a two-day colloquium with the Swiss writer Rolf Lappert, to really get down to the nitty-gritty. I'd be interested to hear how that went, by the way.

And no, I haven't met Helene Hegemann.

City-Lit Berlin: Inka Parei, Die Schattenboxerin

Many of the books that have made their way into City-Lit Berlin were recommended to me by all sorts of people; some of them I knew and loved already; and this one I found trawling the net and fell in love.

Die Schattenboxerin (The Shadow-Boxing Woman - see link for sample, trans. Mike Mitchell) is Inka Parei's debut novel, published in 1999. She's since written one more, Was Dunkelheit war, and is working on Die Kältezentrale. So it's quality over quantity with Parei.

And what quality! Translated into eleven languages (although not English), this slim novel really captures the atmosphere of 90s Berlin. My copy is riddled with sticky notes, marking passages I wanted to include in the anthology. Only two of them made it in though. A young woman by the name of Hell goes quietly mad in a run-down tenement building in Mitte. Or perhaps she's quietly recovering. A crime novel-type plot starts out structuring the novel, but as we read on we're increasingly thrown off the tracks. Who is the girl's missing neighbour? Who is the strange young man looking for her too? Who is Hell (light), who is Dunkel (dark), and why the shadow-boxing?

I most enjoyed Hell's excursions around the city to familiar places, easily identifiable but slightly alienated and always beautifully melancholy: the post-industrial wastelands of Oberschöneweide, the abandoned pleasure park at Plänterwald, the quasi-ghost town of North Neukölln before the fall of the Wall. And in one breathtakingly well-written passage Hell dreams of a map of Berlin, revealing her own subconscious topography of the city. Here and throughout the book, Berlin is a sick city, a place that reflects the narrator's own traumas.

It's a crying shame that this book has never made it into English. It paints a picture of Berlin far from the clichés of crime writers and image brochures, but is much more than a city portrait. The complex novel with its compelling narrator really draws you in, and spits you out emotionally exhausted at the end of it all. One of my absolute favourites.