Jenny Erpenbeck: Gehen, ging, gegangen

We know what Jenny Erpenbeck does. I even met a woman who was enthusiastically reading her The End of Days on a train to Poland. Jenny Erpenbeck writes award-winning novels interweaving stories of lives in German history. And she writes about women. Now, though, Erpenbeck has written a book about men in the present day. Gehen, ging, gegangen is the story of Richard, a professor of Classics just retired and casting about for something to fill his time. He comes across a protest by refugees from various African states, who have occupied a Berlin square to try to obtain the right to stay in the city. As Tony Malone wrote in his recent review, Richard is initially motivated by little more than boredom and curiosity to find out about the men, once they’ve been moved into accommodation in his own suburb. But as the novel progresses, the protagonist’s interest becomes less academic and more personal. (Seeing as Tony’s review concentrates on Richard, I’m going to look at other aspects here.)

In between, however, Erpenbeck does build in her trusted technique of patching stories together – the stories of the men Richard gets to know, how they ended up in Berlin, where they came from, why they had to leave. There’s a lot of geopolitics here, but also individual details. The professor starts by interviewing one man at a time, approaching their lives laterally: what songs did they sing as children, what dishes did they eat on religious holidays, how long does it take to build a hut in the desert? But as they become friends, the men’s life stories flow more naturally and we learn about both the harrowing details and the good times.

The novel is based on real events, when a group of refugees from across Germany marched to Berlin to campaign for more rights, occupying Oranienplatz and a nearby school and eventually coming to an agreement with the city council that saw them moved to slightly more comfortable housing, with the promise that their cases would be reviewed. Which they were; only European law, as we’re probably all now aware, flatly denies asylum to individuals in countries other than those where they first set foot on EU soil. Meaning that almost all the men, having been unable to fly to Germany because that’s practically impossible in most cases, weren’t entitled to stay in the city where they wanted to live with their friends. The city council refused to offer the group of protesters any leeway and set about deporting them.

Erpenbeck takes that situation and reflects it back though Richard’s appalled point of view. Because yes, it is appalling. Rather like Chris Cleave in The Other Hand/Little Bee, she gives us a white middle-class European to help us relate to her refugee characters. I think anything else, for instance writing in the voices of the refugees, would be presumptuous.* And I think it works very well. Richard’s initial view gave me occasional cause to flinch; although he’s generally open-minded, he’s a man of his time and place – a man who grew up in East Germany (again true to Erpenbeck’s form). He’s not used to people of colour, and indeed the men’s skin colour is mentioned over and over, at least to begin with, in a way Anglophone readers might find disturbing. Yet as their relationships become closer, skin becomes less and less important to him.

He researches the difficult legal situation from scratch so that we readers can learn with him, accompanying friends to appointments with lawyers, officials and doctors. He finds small ways to help the men but is angry with himself for giving nothing but cheap charity. Eventually, though, Richard does more than that, taking a political stance. I’d see the book itself as a similar step further than charity. While it includes a call for donations in the final pages, Gehen, ging, gegangen is much more important in that it helps us to grasp a complex situation and feel something like understanding for the way refugees are treated in Europe.

With classicist Richard as its main protagonist, the novel also explores the idea that human nature and human emotional lives have changed little over many centuries, another of Erpenbeck’s literary premises and something reflected in the title. One critic objected to Richard’s comparisons of some refugees with mythological figures, from Apollo to Tristan, saying it detracted from their individuality. For me, though, this quirk underlined the book’s moral message. And yes, I think it’s fine for a novel to have a moral message. What came across for me was that flight, exile, escape from poverty, war and conflict, whatever you wish to call it, has happened throughout history and that Europeans should not presume it can’t happen to us again. As such, we are obliged to take in those it’s happening to now.

Gehen, ging, gegangen is less of a smooth read than The End of Days, for example, with less supportive structure. That does not make it any less of a novel, however. Its topicality has rather crept up on it, which some reviewers seem to find off-putting. I can’t imagine that was calculated – instead, it comes across as though Erpenbeck was moved to write by the people she met on Oranienplatz – whom she names in the back of the book – rather than by any desire to make a buck. It will come out in Susan Bernofsky’s translation in 2017 – and I will be disappointed if it doesn’t win the German Book Prize on 12 October.

*Although I’m curious about my friend Michaela Maria Müller’s novel about a Somali husband and wife, which mainly uses a closer narrative standpoint but isn’t yet published.

Tenfold Women's Whammy in Translation Prizes

Having spent the past year complaining that women don't win translation prizes – and I wasn't the only one – I am absolutely thrilled about the latest crop of awards announcements.

Let's start with the US PEN Translation Prizes for fiction and poetry, which went to Denise Newman (for her translation from Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Babboon) and Eliza Griswold (for I Am the Beggar of the World, translated from Pashto). That makes two women translators and two books by women.

Moving on the America's Best Translated Book Award, we see that the fiction prize last night went to Can Xue's The Last Lover, translated from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and the poetry prize to Roció Cerón's Diorama, translated from Spanish by Anna Rosenwong. Bringing us up to four books by women, translated by four women.

Most superduperexcitingly, for me, is the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, awarded in my country of origin. And as you may know by now, at yesterday's swanky champagne reception it went to....

Jenny Erpenbeck and Susan Bernofsky for The End of Days. Here's my review from way back when. I'm very pleased indeed for Erpenbeck and Bernofsky and the world at large, because this is an excellent German novel, no doubt in an excellent translation, which deserves recognition and readers.

So we have ten women winning translation prizes. The only book I know of the five is Erpenbeck's, but I'm happy that all our angry foot-stomping has prompted judges on two continents to look a little more closely at fiction and poetry by women in translation. Or it could of course be coincidence that five outstanding books written and translated by women happen to have caught their eyes. I don't really care either way.

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated from the Pashto - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-award-poetry-translation#sthash.NPmz2oC1.dpuf

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated from the Pashto - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-award-poetry-translation#sthash.NPmz2oC1.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpufger

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

Prizes, Nominations!

So many prizes! Here's a little catch-up.

First off, the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators (from German to English) has gone to Sophie Duvernoy, a New York writer, editor and translator. Congratulations on getting that "wow factor" down!

Then there's the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, sort of a grown-up version for actually published books translated out of German, and that will be awarded to Catherine Schelbert for her rendering of Swiss writer Hugo Ball's "rollicking, zany, melancholy story of about the rise and fall of a troupe of performers in the louche world of cafés, taverns, nightclubs, and vaudeville theaters in a Switzerland where the Great War is only a distant rumble," Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor. Congratulations go to Schelbert in Switzerland!

And then we have the nominations for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, an award for literary translations from any living European language into English. The eight nominated translators include two from German: Susan Bernofsky for Jenny Erpenbeck's novel The End of Days and Anne Stokes for Sarah Kirsch's poetry collection Ice Roses. I'm pleased for them because this is one of those prizes where everyone's a winner, celebrated all together at Oxford Translation Day.

I have a feeling I may have forgotten something.

Erpenbeck/Bernofsky, Kehlmann/Brown Janeway Shortlisted, Brambach/Kinsky, Showghi/Waldrop Longlisted

Lists! The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist is out, and features Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and Daniel Kehlmann's F, translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Guess which one's my favourite?

And also the American sort of equivalent, the Best Translated Book Award, has announced its longlists. No German writing on the fiction list, but two titles on the poetry longlist (if anyone runs a blog called Love French Books, they'll be really pleased about both lists, though): Collected Poems by Rainer Brambach, translated by Esther Kinsky, and End of the City Map by Farhad Showghi, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

Jenny Erpenbeck, Aller Tage Abend

Jenny Erpenbeck's new novel Aller Tage Abend was longlisted for the German Book Prize, upon which the judges surprised me and a good few other people by not hoisting it onto the shortlist. I'm not sure why but I do have two suspicions, one of which I'll come back to later. My other suspicion is that they've done like this year's Booker Prize judges and upped the intellectual ante by choosing mainly very, very literary titles. For which there was no great need, unlike in the UK, because the German prize now has a history of picking books that are both readable and challenging. The winner is announced on Monday, by the way, and I'm curious to see which of the six titles makes it – although I have no particular favourite other than Clemens Setz's Indigo, which I'm reading at the moment and finding a wee bit wacky.

Back to Erpenbeck, however. Aller Tage Abend is a novel about 20th-century history, following four generations of a family from a Galician village via New York, Vienna, Moscow, Siberia to East Berlin. Which has been done before, let's say. Only Erpenbeck does like to have a trick, and this time it's possible deaths of her main protagonist, from the first time as a baby and its consequences to the last time in a desolate care home, ravaged by Alzheimer's.

The novel is divided into five "books" detailing the unnamed characters' lives as influenced by a specific death in very distinct styles. The family is originally Jewish but the protagonist's mother has already been married off to a gentile, a very minor Austrian civil servant on the railways. In the first book, the girl dies at only a few months of age in the early years of the century, prompting her father to flee to America and her mother to slide down the rungs of society. In the second, she dies as a teenager after the Great War, in the third she becomes a communist writer and is arrested for Trotskyist tendencies, dying in Siberia, whereas the fourth sees her falling down the stairs in the young, still hopeful GDR. The fifth book ends with her death in reunited Berlin, old and confused, her life's work somehow ridiculed by the care home's phone call to her son: "We are all in God's hand."

Between the books, Erpenbeck places "intermezzos" playing on the theme of chance. Had her mother rubbed her tiny chest with snow, had she slipped on a frozen puddle, had the file been placed on the right-hand pile - the protagonist would have evaded death. And the separate stories too give chance a major role. Each death means an opportunity for someone else, to find out a truth for example, bitter though it may be. Yet some things are repeated in each version, historical factors beyond escape – poverty, the Holocaust – and character influences such as the protagonist's strong desire to write and her mother's strong will to survive. As we go through the novel, our picture of the family completes itself.




All these possible twists of fate might be a tiny bit gimmicky if Erpenbeck weren't such a good writer. There are some beautiful passages here (albeit interrupted too often for my taste by whimsical pondering). Yet what I especially appreciated was Erpenbeck's anger at things like pogroms, purges, and those who take advantage of them. The strongest section to my mind is the part set in Moscow. It's also the most difficult to read, flitting between a description of the protagonist awaiting her impending arrest and statements from nervous comrades, betraying others to protect their own backs. The communists who sought exile from the Nazis in the Soviet Union included a number of writers, and their story is fascinating. Erpenbeck gives us a devastating insight into those times of fear, sacrificing her protagonist to the whim of a series of bureaucrats while the character herself struggles for admittance into the very system that is about to dispose of her. 

If you've read last year's German Book Prize winner, Eugen Ruge's In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts, you'll remember the sections set among communist exiles in Mexico, where the situation is equally back-stabbing but less fatal, and the father's memories of a Siberian gulag. And here we come to my second suspicion about why the novel might not have made it onto the shortlist: on the face of it, there are too many similarities to Ruge's book. Sweeping family saga, East Germany, communists, the woes of the twentieth century - except that happens to be something German writers do very well, and which exports well too. 

As a whole, the book works on several levels. Fans of middlebrow novels (sorry, but you know what I mean) will enjoy the whole twists-of-fate scenario, historical fiction lovers will get into the documentary aspects and those who enjoy good writing will of course get their kicks too. You'll be pleased to hear that Portobello Books will be publishing the English translation - perhaps vindication for that shortlist setback. Is it twee and tasteless to say that as one door closes, another door opens? Very possibly.

Erpenbeck, Kehlmann, Schlink Longlisted

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. Libraries from all round the world nominate books written in any language (but available in English) to form a whopping great longlist. The nominees for 2012 are all books first published in English during 2010. And this year's longlist includes three German books: Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, trans. Susan Bernofsky,  Daniel Kehlmann's Fame, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, and Bernhard Schlink's The Weekend, trans. Shaun Whiteside.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that one or other of them makes it onto April's shortlist of ten. Certainly the lovely Visitation has been shortlisted for all sorts of things - wouldn't it be nice if it won something?

Erpenbeck/Bernofsky on Another Shortlist

That daring duo have done it again: Susan Bernofsky's translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's book Visitation is shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. My fingers will be well and truly crossed for them both on 26 May. As they will be on 29 April, when the winner of America's Best Translated Book Award is announced.

Thanks to my roving reporter at the London Book Fair, Jamie Lee Searle, for the bulletin.

BTBA Shortlists

The ten-title fiction shortlist for America's Best Translated Book Award is out now. And lo and behold, the book that I championed with bare-faced favouritism has made it among the finalists - Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky. Plus another German title by a dead writer which I haven't read, Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, translated by Joel Rotenberg.

It's a little sad that Julia Franck's book The Blindness of the Heart (trans. Anthea Bell) didn't make it through, but on the other hand it's a more commercial title and obviously up against some stiff competition. And no German-language writers on the poetry shortlist either.

The winners are announced at the PEN World Voices Festival - which looks like it'll be a ball although the full schedule's not out until tomorrow - on 29 April.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist

The good people of Booktrust have announced the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. And there are three German contenders out of the fifteen:

Daniel Kehlmann's Fame, trans. Carol Brown Janeway
Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, trans. Susan Bernofsky
and Juli Zeh's Dark Matter, trans. Christine Lo.

As they point out, there are a lot of independent publishers on the list, including the delightful Peirene Press who only do translated titles. This is a great way to call attention to their work, but it also goes to show how few major publishers bother with translations nowadays. I know there are editors at larger houses who long to do more translated fiction, and I hope the increasing attention going to international writing gradually puts them in a stronger position to do so.

The shortlist is out on 11 April, and the winning writer and translator will be announced on 26 May. They get 5000 pounds each and lots of little stickers on their book. And a magnum of champagne - not sure if they have to share that or there's one each.

Triple the Fun

I shall be making good use of my magic carpet* on Wednesday, 2 March. Because there are three readings I want to go to that day (so far) and two of them are in London.

I shall start with Julya Rabinovich reading from her fresh novel Splithead (trans. Tess Lewis) and Jenny Erpenbeck at the Royal National Hotel in London, at 1 pm. Then I'll have a bite to eat and pop back to the hotel for Johanna Adorján, reading from An Exclusive Love (trans. Anthea Bell, picture of rose petals on the cover) at 5.30 - both part of Jewish Book Week.

From there I'll whizz over to Berlin's Festsaal Kreuzberg for Selim Özdogan, who's launching his long-awaited follow-up to Die Tochter des Schmieds, Heimstraße 52. Please ignore the picture of the orange on the cover - the novel has nothing to do with fruit. But the citrus thing does have the advantage of freeing book buyers from pronouncing Özdogan's difficult name (approximately: ers-de-wan), as they can simply go into a shop and ask for "that book with the orange on the cover". Cleverly enough, his publishers are re-releasing the previous novel in the trilogy with a picture of a fig on it. No doubt part three will feature a watermelon.

I may have mentioned it in the past, but just in case you weren't listening - a Selim Özdogan reading is always an extraordinary event. Selim is a fabulous entertainer and usually reads a cross-section of his writing, from novels to short stories to poetry, with the odd snippet thrown in that he finds along the way. You should definitely go along if he reads in your town.


*Magic carpet available for hire, prices on request.

Visitation for Miss Universe

I was asked to share with the readers of Three Percent why a certain book ought to win the Best Translated Book Award.

So I did.

Lovely Links

Apologies for my silence - there is a reason, but I'm not revealing it quite yet.

Here's a quick round-up of links to keep you going:

Lovely Harvill Secker editor Rebecca Carter in a podcast about "the joys of doing books in translation".

Last Saturday's Guardian has a rave review of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation (trans: Susan Bernofsky) by Michel Faber. Then yesterday, John Hopkins asked on the Guardian books blog if there is such a thing as the Great European Novel - and would we ever see it in English?

Also in the Guardian - which is fast becoming the place to go for newspaper coverage of world fiction - Maya Jaggi interviews Günter Grass. Grass' book The Box (trans: Krishna Winston) is a milder sequel to the autobiographical Peeling the Onion, this time narrated in the voices of his eight children (poor kids) and is out in the UK now.

And the New York Times has a long article by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, attempting to explain the whole awful debate over Islam and leitkultur (neatly explained by translator Ciaran Cronin as "guiding national culture"):

That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding of our liberal constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.

Jenny Erpenbeck at Soho House

I'd been looking forward to Dialogue Berlin's event to launch Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck's latest novel translated by Susan Bernofsky. In fact last night's event was held kind of in conjunction with the British publishers Portobello Books, only I've had to link to the US publishers New Directions above, because I can't actually find the book on the Portobello site.

And it was a great event. Jenny Erpenbeck read a little of the German original, followed by a reading from the fantastic and wonderful translation, which I really savoured. You know when words jump out at you for their sheer beauty? Last night that word was "plashing". Followed by Q&As proving how good Erpenbeck's English is. And all expertly moderated by Sharmaine Lovegrove of Dialogue Berlin, with a warm and friendly audience.

The book tells the stories of various people who lived in a summer house outside Berlin, taking in a vista of twentieth-century German history along the way. An opportunist architect, a wealthy Jewish family, East German writers, etc. Each chapter has its own voice, but all of them are simply stunningly written. Read my interview with Susan Bernofsky for far deeper insights into the novel itself and the translation process.

So having got all the positive stuff out of the way, here comes the complaining. Because although everything was right with the reading, a good few things were wrong with the venue - in more ways than one.

Soho House is a private members' club in Berlin-Mitte, but graciously opened its doors to us mere literature-lovers last night. I was sceptical from the very beginning, seeing as this kind of exclusive rich-people-only culture is one of the reasons I'm very glad I don't live in London. The place operates a hotel, a fitness club and various bars and stuff. Basic membership costs €900 a year and you have to be recommended by an existing member. So it's not just out of the financial reach of the neighbours in the tower blocks all round it - they wouldn't let them in anyway either.

The people behind it have invested a huge amount of money to do up the place in a 1930s aesthetic. In fact the building dates back to 1928, when it was a department store (Kaufhaus Jonaß) where the area's poor population bought on credit. The Jewish owners went into exile, selling the building to the NSDAP in 1942. From then on, it was the headquarters of the Nazi Reich Youth Leadership, who ran the Hitler Youth. Nice, huh? From 1946 to 1959 the building housed the Socialist Unity Party headquarters, followed by the party's Institute of Marxist-Leninism. It had been empty since 1995.

Quoting German Wikipedia (see that link above):

The memorial tablets (of Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl) have been removed. As of summer 2010, a glass stele unveiled by Rainer Eppelmann on 5 June 2008 is no longer in place. This was part of a senate project making sites of Berlin history visible. It contained photos and text in four languages about the history of the former Kaufhaus Jonaß.

Strangely then, the building the event was held in reflects just as much German history as the house in Visitation - not that you'd notice. The Soho House website tells us you can in fact hire out Wilhelm Pieck's former office (including a recreation of the original wall-panelling), but there's no mention of Nazi war criminal Artur Axmann having come up with the idea there of sending 17-year-old Hitler Youth volunteers to war in their very own SS division. The phrasing on the website merely claims the building was "seized by the wartime government". So now, media people plash in the rooftop pool (tastefully lit in green) where the Hitler Youth leader may well have surveyed the ruins of Berlin.

The event itself was in the basement library, which the website says is "filled with an assortment of art and design books". I know one can't artfully drape books, but this is the closest I've ever seen. It certainly didn't look like anybody's ever read any of them, and many of them seemed to be duplicate copies. Lovely shelves, I must say, though if I were a shelf I would long for something more substantial to contain. The room is all brown leather sofas and crushed velvet seat covers, a warm and cosy place to partake of drinks if not to actually peruse the reading material. Unfortunately, the PA system gave off a faint scraping sound all through the event, which made me think someone was sharpening pencils just to the left of my head.

The staff also failed to meet the standards one might expect. Not that I've ever been to a private members' club in London, but I would expect a level of friendliness verging on the obsequious. Nothing doing in Berlin - the woman on reception failed to recognise my name when pronounced correctly and then ordered me to wait in a tone that brooked no argument, the bar staff practically threw us out at the end of the event, and there were difficulties over a table afterwards. OK, obsequiousness is an alien concept to Berliners, but if you're going to land a spaceship full of Anglo-American culture right in the middle of the city, you might as well go whole hog.

And speaking of hogs, the bar upstairs smelt pungently of bacon and was full of people I didn't like. I chose not to go on to a nearby event about gentrification, having been convinced in the flesh that it exists.

All in all, then, a strange evening. A great event, well planned and well executed. But in a location not really in keeping with the novel, I felt. And certainly not in keeping with its surroundings.

Interview with Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is one of our best-known and best-loved translators out of German, a champion of great literature including the work of Robert Walser. I interviewed her by email about her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's wonderful novel Heimsuchung, now out as Visitation. As Susan points out, this could well be the book to make Erpenbeck a household name in the English-speaking world. My fingers are certainly well and truly crossed.

Susan, tell us about the book:

I think of Jenny's book as a sort of family saga, except that instead of an actual family line you have a house that's holding together the different "generations." Because of where the house is located (in the countryside outside Berlin), every political upheaval that hits Germany causes the people living there to have to flee - and so the book tells the story of constant departure and loss. It nonetheless manages to be full of happy, humorous moments, but definitely the overall tenor is one of wistful nostalgia and melancholy - the house is constantly being remembered by those who have left it, and that's where the haunting of the title comes in.

The house is being visited by the ghosts of its former inhabitants - a feeling made even stronger by the fact that the story is based on that of an actual house in which Jenny spent the summers of her youth. By telling the stories of all these other families, she is channeling her own feelings of loss at having had to say goodbye to this place that witnessed so much of her own personal history.

There is indeed a strong sense in the novel that places bear witness to human lives. I think that's what the character of the gardener is all about. This gardener is superhuman - or rather: mythical. He witnesses the lives of many many generations. He is older than the house itself, and while we do see him growing old near the end of the book, we never see him young. He is like the human incarnation of the memory of the place - that's why he's so knowledgeable too - his is a collective knowledge. I love how he's used in the novel, and the ambiguity surrounding him.

I loved that gardener too. Erpenbeck also seemed to be making a point with him - a continuity not only of natural processes in the garden - changing seasons, repetitive tasks - but also of power relations. The political systems may change, but the gardener always remains an employee, his working conditions remain pretty much unchanged. I especially liked the way he's introduced, with a lot of very sensual language. Did you manage to retain that sensuality and continuity?

Katy, I think you're going to have to be the one to answer that question! I sure hope so. In any case, I tried very hard. The first sections were particularly challenging, because Jenny used language that gave the text a very faintly archaic flair. So I wound up, for example, doing quite a lot of research for those few sections about grafting fruit trees - you know? So apparently if you want your apple trees to produce apples in a nice luxuriant way, you have to do all sorts of things to them, generally involving splicing bits of other trees onto or into them. So I used the word "inoculate," which isn't used for grafting any longer, but was still commonly used for this in the early 20th century. I thought it went well with "propagate," which is also being used in an old gardening sense. The point isn't to make a "fake old" text but to have the text gesture at oldness.

Although there's a single omniscient narrator, the tone varies a great deal from chapter to chapter. At times I felt you could tell which characters the narrator approved of and which not. How did you deal with that in your translation?

I'm so happy this came through! Yes, there's a sense of greater and lesser distance there. I didn't do anything conscious to achieve this, though I did want to achieve it. You must know how this goes - a lot of translation is about hearing the voices and feeling where they're coming from, and if you feel the distance - which has to do with tone, tonality, intonation - it will just automatically come through. That's not what I can tell my students though. I guess I'd say if pressed: the tone gets established because there are a few words and phrases slipped in that signal a sort of cold or coolish formality, and it's important to recognize them and then try to match them tonally.

You mention the strong sense of place in the novel. If I can, I like to see at least pictures of the settings I'm translating. Did you do a research trip for the translation - or is the house really now lost?

In fact I had the great blessing to be able to participate in a field trip to visit the actual house the novel is based on, led by the author herself! The book is a novel, not non-fiction, but Jenny did carefully research the histories of the families who lived in this house, which was also in her own family during her childhood.

And then I found myself at the wonderful Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (where Susan and I met - kjd) for their Internationale Übersetzerwerkstatt (that's international translation workshop), and they'd asked me and Jenny to do a workshop on the novel, and Jenny wound up offering to take the entire group of translators (several of whom were translating the book into their respective languages) on a trip to see the house. So the LCB hired a bus for the day and sent house photographer Tobias Bohm along with us, and it was a fascinating visit. Freezing cold, mind you - you know what Berlin is like in March. Not all the descriptions of the house in the book look exactly like what the house looked like to me that day, but getting a feel for what the house and its surroundings looked like was definitely a great help when I was revising those passages.

This is the third of Jenny Erpenbeck's books you've translated, right? What's your working relationship like?

Jenny is wonderful to work with. She's very generous about answering questions and giving feedback when I'm not sure how to handle one of her many untranslatables - for example in The Book of Words I wound up having to make up a whole little passage about lilies and lilies-of-the-valley to replace her play on Näglein (little nails) in the dialect sense of Nelken (carnations), and it was very helpful to be able to talk it through with her.

Actually we had a little incident in that same book - she didn't think to tell me that she had cobbled together an entire word-collage page based on her own translations of lines from American pop songs circa 1978 - thank goodness I noticed one of them, and then my editor Declan Spring noticed a lot more, and then Jenny sent me a list of all the songs she'd used. It would have been nuts if all those titles had wound up as back-translations from her (sometimes rather idiosyncratic) German renderings. But now she's taken to compiling, for each book, a list of all the questions her translators ask her - then she sends the list around to the other translators, just as a FYI. Now that's an exemplary author.

She's also a very lovely person, it's always huge fun spending time with her. She'll be over in New York for a literature festival in November, which I'm really looking forward to.

Does it get easier to translate a writer when you're very familiar with their work, or do new challenges keep cropping up with every book?

Yes and no. It definitely helps to have gained experience capturing an author's voice, but I've never seen a book that wasn't a minefield in its own right.

The title is tricky, huh? In German, Heimsuchung bears a lot of weight - the word home is hidden inside it, and a search for that home, but it's also very ominous with ideas of haunting and disaster attached to it. It's heavy with superstition and Catholicism (although that Catholic element isn't in the book, the superstition comes in at the very beginning and the end in a couple of very beautiful passages). But of course, as so often, you can't get all that into a single English word. Tell us how you came to Visitation.

Actually someone from Portobello Books in London suggested this (the title was already in the contract they sent me), and this anonymous title-giver really hit on something ingenious, even though the process they went through might have been as simple as looking up "Heimsuchung" in an on-line dictionary - I was immediately in agreement with the choice. Yes, it's very tricky and lovely, that German title. Its two important aspects are the notion of haunting and the notion of home. But all the English variants that included "home" seemed so heavy-handed and disappointing.

The wonderful thing about Visitation as a title is that it not only includes the idea of haunting, but it also takes an interpretive step that actually works for the novel. You can certainly say that all the characters in the novel are at home in the house - this is thematized throughout. But there's also a sense in which all of them are just passing through. This isn't stated explicitly anywhere in the novel, but it's the sense you get from reading it, especially since the book begins in the Ice Age and ends with the demolition of the house. So the English title picks up this thematic thread in what seems to me a delicate and appropriate way. I'm very happy with it.

Some translators wait for books to come to them, and others actively promote books for translation to publishers. Which camp are you in? How did Visitation come about?

I've never had very much success promoting new authors to publishers; New Directions came to me with their first Erpenbeck book, The Old Child and Other Stories, which had been Jenny's first big hit in Germany. I think it's really wonderful when a publisher decides to stick with an author and publish multiple books, even if the earlier ones aren't such a commercial success. A lot of people really loved the other Erpenbeck books, but she hasn't been a big seller so far. I think Visitation might be her breakthrough book in English.

How did you come to translation in the first place?

I started translating as a teenager. At first it was just a creative writing exercise - I was setting out to be a fiction writer, and translating seemed to me an intriguing way to study the craft, and I had teachers who encouraged me to try it. It was really about a decade before it turned into something I was really focussed on.

Do you follow contemporary German writing? Is there a writer or a book you'd love to translate but haven't yet had the chance?

Yes, I do, in part by reading your blog! And there are a lot of really interesting writers who haven't been translated yet. Right now I'm rooting for Wolfgang Herrndorf (I love his stories in Jenseits des Van Allen-Gürtels). And I really wanted to translate Gerhard Falkner's short novel Bruno, but I couldn't find a publisher who wanted to commit to the project.

What are you working on right now?

I've been translating a beautiful book of poems by Uljana Wolf, Falsche Freunde/False Friends (they're prose poems that play with letters of the alphabet). We just found out that Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn is going to publish it, which is wonderful news. Next after that will be a 19th century horror story for New York Review Books: The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf. I can't wait! It's one of the most frightening stories I've ever read, and also one of the most beautiful.

Many thanks again to Susan Bernofsky for finding the time for this fascinating interview - and for keeping on keeping on.

Book-Writers' Bookshops

The German book trade mag, excitingly titled Börsenblatt, runs a little feature series in which writers reveal their favourite bookshops. It's rather fun to read, in a geeky kind of way. But usually I'm not actually interested in Bernsteinbuch in Nittendorf, Buchhandlung Bittner in Cologne or Buchhandlung Geist in Bremen.

This time, though, Jenny Erpenbeck, a much-translated and rather good author, recommends a shop I could actually reach during a public transport strike. Just in case I have a sudden craving, you know. I have tended to avoid the shop, I think, as my strange ex-boyfriend lives round the corner, but I will have to rethink that now. Especially as the Canadian author Peter Behrens, who I saw in Leipzig, seems to be reading there on Saturday. What the site doesn't mention is that his début novel was translated by Brigitte Walitzek (Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson...).