The Geisteswissenschaften International programme exists to promote translations of German humanities and social science publications at the academic end of non-fiction. It's been quite successful, as far as I'm aware, but one hurdle has been identifying good non-fiction translators. So they came up with the idea of a competition. You can read their press release here - it turns out they had about 200 entries, which is pretty incredible.
First prize went to Sarah Pybus for her "lucid translation" that "effectively and impressively conveys both the ideas and the tone of the original". Second and third places went to Fiona Graham and Sinead Crowe. Congratulations!!!
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
Thursday, 16 October 2014
New Competition for Emerging Non-Fiction Translators
One of the hurdles for publishers wanting to bring out translated books in English, particularly in the non-fiction sector, is finding someone to translate them well. We now have a number of training programmes, networks and awards for budding translators of novels, but non-fiction has proved trickier. For me, translating non-fiction is a slightly different challenge to translating prose – and a whole different ball-game to translating poetry.
A non-fiction translator needs to get the right register and thoroughly understand the original, has to either know about or research the field in question and particularly its terminology, and must be familiar with the traditions and expectations around non-fiction writing in their target language. While you could say fiction translators do that too, non-fiction translators do it all to a much greater extent. So how can publishers find people to do that well?
Geisteswissenschaften International is a body set up to encourage non-fiction translations from German to English, providing funding for selected books partly so that academics can continue to write about complex ideas in their native language and still find a large readership. They've now teamed up with the German Book Office in New York to sponsor a competition for emerging non-fiction translators. The details are all in this leaflet – anyone can enter, as long as you haven't published more than one book-length translation before. There are cash prizes and one of the judges is my award-winning translator friend Shelley Frish, so you know the winners will be pretty darn good. Deadline is the first of December.
A non-fiction translator needs to get the right register and thoroughly understand the original, has to either know about or research the field in question and particularly its terminology, and must be familiar with the traditions and expectations around non-fiction writing in their target language. While you could say fiction translators do that too, non-fiction translators do it all to a much greater extent. So how can publishers find people to do that well?
Geisteswissenschaften International is a body set up to encourage non-fiction translations from German to English, providing funding for selected books partly so that academics can continue to write about complex ideas in their native language and still find a large readership. They've now teamed up with the German Book Office in New York to sponsor a competition for emerging non-fiction translators. The details are all in this leaflet – anyone can enter, as long as you haven't published more than one book-length translation before. There are cash prizes and one of the judges is my award-winning translator friend Shelley Frish, so you know the winners will be pretty darn good. Deadline is the first of December.
Friday, 15 November 2013
Maxim Leo: Red Love
There are books that work better outside of their own territories, and Maxim Leo's Red Love seems to be one of them. It is a piece of long-form journalism investigating the author's family history, in the GDR but also under the Nazis and more recently. In Germany, it went fairly unnoticed by the press, perhaps because East German politics aren't considered all that sexy here, or perhaps because it all seemed too familiar. Then in 2011 the book won the European Book Prize. Either it's just me not speaking good enough French, or this is possibly the world's least transparent book award. It seems to be run out of Brussels and it seems to award prizes to essays and to "novels and narratives", with Red Love fitting into the narrative rather than novel category. Whatever the case, in 2011 Julian Barnes chaired the judging panel, and provides the cover quote for Pushkin Press's English version: "A wry and unheroic witness... an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists." I have no idea how he could have judged the German book.
Having made all those provisos, I am in fact glad that Pushkin Press picked up the book and got my friend Shaun Whiteside to translate it – in a solid and capable style, which I'd have liked better if he'd adjusted the tenses more liberally to knock off a few jagged edges. I hope he'll still be my friend after reading this.
Maxim Leo is a journalist from Berlin and approaches his subject with intelligence and tact. His family provides plenty of material, which he distributes evenly across the book. His maternal grandfather was the son of a Jewish lawyer, who left Germany for France early on under the Nazis, having won a case against Goebbels before 1933. Gerhard Leo grew up in France and joined the resistance as a teenager, becoming a communist and a journalist in West Germany and then moving to East Berlin. He's probably the character Maxim Leo is most interested in, especially after viewing his Stasi file. Then there are the author's own mother and father, Anne and Wolf, whose relationships to the East German state are shaped by those to their parents as much as by the circumstances. On the other side there is Werner, Wolf's estranged Stalinist father who has repressed his memories of being a Nazi. Later we catch a glimpse of Anne's maternal grandfather, a member of a communist splinter group murdered in a concentration camp. And finally Maxim himself, who seems to feel dwarfed by all these relatives with their passion for politics, and rejects the GDR mainly for material reasons.
I've been in (East) Berlin for seventeen years now and have heard plenty of family stories. I know that some people have a tendency to whitewash their own histories, to put themselves at the centre of historical moments and to make their roles look more heroic than they really were, and indeed their politics more straight-forward. Leo cuts through this tendency by means of thorough research, reading notes, diaries and files and going through photo albums, always questioning. He makes that discovery process part of the narrative, which is perhaps why I found the book so compelling. And in fact he finds out a number of things that upset his original simplistic view of his family, giving the story a little added tension. It's well-written journalism with a personal touch.
What disappointed me was Leo's almost exclusive focus on the men in the family, with the exception of his mother. I found myself rather drawn to Werner's abandoned first wife, to his second wife and his younger daughter, Maxim's half-aunt. Likewise, I'd be interested to know more about Anne's mother, who somehow survived after her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis but who is strangely invisible beside her larger-than-life husband Gerhard. Certainly I don't remember reading how she and Gerhard met. I realise, though, that one of the achievements of the twentieth century was that women came to lead more interesting lives, in East and West, and perhaps that is embodied in Anne - who is portrayed in the most sympathetic light, with Leo explaining her many political doubts and her inner conflict with the state over the years.
Despite this minor niggle, Red Love provides a nuanced view of political and personal life in East Germany, and is well worth reading for those unfamiliar with the subject. I particularly enjoyed young Maxim's trip to France, where his grandfather introduced him to the kind of communists who live in Mediterranean villas, and his teenage game of pretending to be from the West. When he and his friends make girls cry when "leaving the country", they decide to give it up. The investigative journalism extends even to the author himself.
Having made all those provisos, I am in fact glad that Pushkin Press picked up the book and got my friend Shaun Whiteside to translate it – in a solid and capable style, which I'd have liked better if he'd adjusted the tenses more liberally to knock off a few jagged edges. I hope he'll still be my friend after reading this.
Maxim Leo is a journalist from Berlin and approaches his subject with intelligence and tact. His family provides plenty of material, which he distributes evenly across the book. His maternal grandfather was the son of a Jewish lawyer, who left Germany for France early on under the Nazis, having won a case against Goebbels before 1933. Gerhard Leo grew up in France and joined the resistance as a teenager, becoming a communist and a journalist in West Germany and then moving to East Berlin. He's probably the character Maxim Leo is most interested in, especially after viewing his Stasi file. Then there are the author's own mother and father, Anne and Wolf, whose relationships to the East German state are shaped by those to their parents as much as by the circumstances. On the other side there is Werner, Wolf's estranged Stalinist father who has repressed his memories of being a Nazi. Later we catch a glimpse of Anne's maternal grandfather, a member of a communist splinter group murdered in a concentration camp. And finally Maxim himself, who seems to feel dwarfed by all these relatives with their passion for politics, and rejects the GDR mainly for material reasons.
I've been in (East) Berlin for seventeen years now and have heard plenty of family stories. I know that some people have a tendency to whitewash their own histories, to put themselves at the centre of historical moments and to make their roles look more heroic than they really were, and indeed their politics more straight-forward. Leo cuts through this tendency by means of thorough research, reading notes, diaries and files and going through photo albums, always questioning. He makes that discovery process part of the narrative, which is perhaps why I found the book so compelling. And in fact he finds out a number of things that upset his original simplistic view of his family, giving the story a little added tension. It's well-written journalism with a personal touch.
What disappointed me was Leo's almost exclusive focus on the men in the family, with the exception of his mother. I found myself rather drawn to Werner's abandoned first wife, to his second wife and his younger daughter, Maxim's half-aunt. Likewise, I'd be interested to know more about Anne's mother, who somehow survived after her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis but who is strangely invisible beside her larger-than-life husband Gerhard. Certainly I don't remember reading how she and Gerhard met. I realise, though, that one of the achievements of the twentieth century was that women came to lead more interesting lives, in East and West, and perhaps that is embodied in Anne - who is portrayed in the most sympathetic light, with Leo explaining her many political doubts and her inner conflict with the state over the years.
Despite this minor niggle, Red Love provides a nuanced view of political and personal life in East Germany, and is well worth reading for those unfamiliar with the subject. I particularly enjoyed young Maxim's trip to France, where his grandfather introduced him to the kind of communists who live in Mediterranean villas, and his teenage game of pretending to be from the West. When he and his friends make girls cry when "leaving the country", they decide to give it up. The investigative journalism extends even to the author himself.
Friday, 21 January 2011
On Not Eating Animals
600 people at an alleged €17 a pop, and a piece on the late-night news. That's what you get when you invite Jonathan Safran Foer and Karen Duve to read from their books and talk about not eating animals. I went along for free, because my friend Isabel Bogdan translated Mr Safran Foer's book along with two other lovely and talented translators, Brigitte Jakobeit and Ingo Herzke. But I was one of the small minority in the huge audience who hadn't actually read Eating Animals. I read Anständig essen (Eating Decently) instead.
Karen Duve is a top fiction writer with a sharp sense of humour. You can read her novels This Is Not A Love Song and Rain in English, trans. Anthea Bell (although that took a bit of research to work out - the publishers Bloomsbury seem loathe to mention the fact). I loved her last book, Taxi. And now she's written her first piece of non-fiction, a personal account of her ten-month attempt to eat like a decent human being. She starts off going organic, then vegetarian, then vegan, and finally only eats plant products that don't kill the plant itself when you harvest them, i.e. fruit but no potatoes, peas but no carrots, etc.
Which ties in nicely with Safran Foer's book, presumably. Except that the two of them took rather different approaches to what is essentially the big problem with trying to tell other people what they should and should not eat - the preachiness of it all.
As far as I gathered at last night's reading, JSF (I can't pronounce it so I'll just abbreviate it from now on) tried to tell people what's bad about eating animals without actually telling them what to do about it. Certainly he was very coy in person about how better to persuade people to become vegetarians. It was all about setting a good example and being a better person, not getting on anyone's nerves, doing the right thing, starting with yourself, loving your grandparents, and so forth. Which in itself has a saccharine aftertaste - to me personally - that says, "Hey, you guys just go ahead and destroy the environment and torture poor creatures, I'll be over here with my nut loaf and my clear conscience. Oh, and did I mention my son wrote a letter to David Attenborough?"
Karen Duve, on the other hand, took the more typically German approach - just to labour another cliché. She started with herself, but she's not afraid to get out that moral club and beat you over the head with it until you fall to the ground whimpering and begging for tofu. What she did to take the edge off her preaching was to use her sense of humour.
So the book opens with a device, an external conscience by the name of - wait for it - Jiminy Cricket, Duve's housemate who is a paragon of virtue. Isabel and I aren't sure the woman really exists, but she certainly makes for entertaining reading. Duve does her best to convince Jiminy/Kerstin of what she's doing at each stage, going from suggesting organic farming might be an absolute gift to animals, who get a roof over their head and three square meals a day and a nice stroll around the meadow, to not letting her mow the lawn because it hurts the blades of grass. And she thoroughly enjoys out-consciencing her conscience by eating as ethically as she can.
Or there's a fantastic scene in which Duve visits her family and preaches at them about veganism and factory farming, while her brothers and nephews and so on get bored and walk away and her mother suggests she have a nice drink of milk - it's OK, it's skimmed. She's perfectly aware she's become a food bore, but she milks it (excuse me, I couldn't resist) for all the gags it's worth. She also gently teases other ethical eaters, from the lady in the wholefood shop who lets her water expand in a jug before she drinks it to the rivalling Alpha males in the raw food movement.
In between, of course, there are shocking facts you're probably already half aware of about farming and slaughtering methods, climate change reports, a spot of live animal liberation, interesting stuff about Jainism, and a lot of ethical qualms and indecent cravings. Towards the end, when Duve was living on a diet of peas cooked in coconut milk, the theories became rather addled to my mind. I was reminded of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, forced to eat only peas for a medical experiment, and I clearly recalled an undergraduate seminar in which someone (it may have been me) pointed out with perfect 20-year-old logic that it was no wonder he killed his girlfriend if his diet was so restricted.
Karen Duve didn't kill anything but a few insects, but she does get rather vague about some kind of "creation" that meant all living beings to be equal, and I couldn't help laughing at the accidental lie-detector tests on office plants. All in all, though, the book was rescued by her admissions at the end - that it's not easy eating ethically but she's going to try her best to be as vegan as possible.
All this comes at a time when vegetarianism, we're told, is in fashion. Judging by snippets I picked up at the reading, a lot of people came because of the subject rather than the writers. There were activists in animal costumes outside, calling attention to a demonstration tomorrow. And the guy selling sandwiches in the corridor was keeping rather quiet about his salami baguettes. Add to that the latest farming scandal over contaminated eggs, and we may be witnessing a turning point. Still, it's a hell of a lot easier to be vegetarian in Britain than it is here, and has been for about twenty years.
Things may be looking up, though. The whole publishers and translators kit and caboodle went to a vegan restaurant after JSF had finished signing 3 million autographs. I'm told it was excellent, although I personally have made a vow not to do so much ligging and therefore didn't even attempt to invite myself along, even though it was very conveniently situated on my way home.
I still eat meat, so far. Isabel's given it up, more or less.
Karen Duve is a top fiction writer with a sharp sense of humour. You can read her novels This Is Not A Love Song and Rain in English, trans. Anthea Bell (although that took a bit of research to work out - the publishers Bloomsbury seem loathe to mention the fact). I loved her last book, Taxi. And now she's written her first piece of non-fiction, a personal account of her ten-month attempt to eat like a decent human being. She starts off going organic, then vegetarian, then vegan, and finally only eats plant products that don't kill the plant itself when you harvest them, i.e. fruit but no potatoes, peas but no carrots, etc.
Which ties in nicely with Safran Foer's book, presumably. Except that the two of them took rather different approaches to what is essentially the big problem with trying to tell other people what they should and should not eat - the preachiness of it all.
As far as I gathered at last night's reading, JSF (I can't pronounce it so I'll just abbreviate it from now on) tried to tell people what's bad about eating animals without actually telling them what to do about it. Certainly he was very coy in person about how better to persuade people to become vegetarians. It was all about setting a good example and being a better person, not getting on anyone's nerves, doing the right thing, starting with yourself, loving your grandparents, and so forth. Which in itself has a saccharine aftertaste - to me personally - that says, "Hey, you guys just go ahead and destroy the environment and torture poor creatures, I'll be over here with my nut loaf and my clear conscience. Oh, and did I mention my son wrote a letter to David Attenborough?"
Karen Duve, on the other hand, took the more typically German approach - just to labour another cliché. She started with herself, but she's not afraid to get out that moral club and beat you over the head with it until you fall to the ground whimpering and begging for tofu. What she did to take the edge off her preaching was to use her sense of humour.
So the book opens with a device, an external conscience by the name of - wait for it - Jiminy Cricket, Duve's housemate who is a paragon of virtue. Isabel and I aren't sure the woman really exists, but she certainly makes for entertaining reading. Duve does her best to convince Jiminy/Kerstin of what she's doing at each stage, going from suggesting organic farming might be an absolute gift to animals, who get a roof over their head and three square meals a day and a nice stroll around the meadow, to not letting her mow the lawn because it hurts the blades of grass. And she thoroughly enjoys out-consciencing her conscience by eating as ethically as she can.
Or there's a fantastic scene in which Duve visits her family and preaches at them about veganism and factory farming, while her brothers and nephews and so on get bored and walk away and her mother suggests she have a nice drink of milk - it's OK, it's skimmed. She's perfectly aware she's become a food bore, but she milks it (excuse me, I couldn't resist) for all the gags it's worth. She also gently teases other ethical eaters, from the lady in the wholefood shop who lets her water expand in a jug before she drinks it to the rivalling Alpha males in the raw food movement.
In between, of course, there are shocking facts you're probably already half aware of about farming and slaughtering methods, climate change reports, a spot of live animal liberation, interesting stuff about Jainism, and a lot of ethical qualms and indecent cravings. Towards the end, when Duve was living on a diet of peas cooked in coconut milk, the theories became rather addled to my mind. I was reminded of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, forced to eat only peas for a medical experiment, and I clearly recalled an undergraduate seminar in which someone (it may have been me) pointed out with perfect 20-year-old logic that it was no wonder he killed his girlfriend if his diet was so restricted.
Karen Duve didn't kill anything but a few insects, but she does get rather vague about some kind of "creation" that meant all living beings to be equal, and I couldn't help laughing at the accidental lie-detector tests on office plants. All in all, though, the book was rescued by her admissions at the end - that it's not easy eating ethically but she's going to try her best to be as vegan as possible.
All this comes at a time when vegetarianism, we're told, is in fashion. Judging by snippets I picked up at the reading, a lot of people came because of the subject rather than the writers. There were activists in animal costumes outside, calling attention to a demonstration tomorrow. And the guy selling sandwiches in the corridor was keeping rather quiet about his salami baguettes. Add to that the latest farming scandal over contaminated eggs, and we may be witnessing a turning point. Still, it's a hell of a lot easier to be vegetarian in Britain than it is here, and has been for about twenty years.
Things may be looking up, though. The whole publishers and translators kit and caboodle went to a vegan restaurant after JSF had finished signing 3 million autographs. I'm told it was excellent, although I personally have made a vow not to do so much ligging and therefore didn't even attempt to invite myself along, even though it was very conveniently situated on my way home.
I still eat meat, so far. Isabel's given it up, more or less.
Friday, 4 June 2010
Interview: Shelley Frisch
I first met the wonderful non-fiction translator, activist and Germanist Shelley Frisch in line for the ladies' toilet at the Frankfurt Book Fair. One of her books recently won an award, and that seemed like the perfect opportunity to interview her for love german books. Everything else, I think, is self-explanatory.
Shelley, Fromms won a gold medal at the Independent Publishers' Book Awards. Tell us about the book.
Fromms, by Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, is the story of Julius Fromm, a Jewish entrepreneur whose condom manufacturing company in Berlin is seized by Hermann Göring in the 1930s and given as a present to Göring’s godmother in exchange for two medieval castles, while the Fromms flee to England, stripped of their possessions, their company, their adopted homeland, and even the right to continue using the family name when they rebuild the business in London. This true story is a powerful case study of how state-fueled greed coupled with pernicious ideology undid a man’s life’s work while undoing the moral fiber of an entire society.
The book’s umbrella of themes encompasses life in Weimar, the emerging field of “sexology,” the international history of condoms (I now know what kind Casanova wore!), the condom manufacturing process, brothel etiquette and aesthetics, and, first and foremost, the agony of expropriation and exile from Hitler’s Germany. There are moments of levity, such as Peter Lorre’s first encounter with Alfred Hitchcock (Peter Lorre was a friend of Max Fromm) interspersed with harrowing stories, such as the scandalous journey of the Dunera, a British ship that imprisoned Jewish and other refugees and brought them to Australia under concentration camp-like circumstances. One of the passengers on that ship was Julius Fromm’s son Edgar Fromm. Edgar’s son Ray and I were in touch by phone several times while I worked on the translation, and Ray contributed a wonderful afterword to the American edition to update the story with the poignant and revealing perspective of a family member.
And how was the ceremony?
The ceremony for the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards (known, for some reason, as the IPPY Awards) was grand fun. It took place in a lavish party space, a disco-like setting, on West 57th Street in Manhattan, with all kinds of bells (that is, food) and whistles (drink). Quite a nice change from my cramped little study where the text came into being! Fromms won the gold medal in the history category. If I’m not mistaken, it was the only translation to win a prize in any category.
When winners were called up to the stage to receive their awards, true hilarity ensued. Male awardees got to pose for a photo op with a scantily clad woman in stilettos; female awardees like me posed with a playboy-type boy toy. The medal he hung around my neck was so heavy and humongous that I had trouble remaining upright (slight hyperbole here… but it is large and heavy).
You've translated a long list of non-fiction titles from German. I know each book presents its own challenges - what were the big issues with Fromms?
Every book I’ve translated poses seemingly insurmountable challenges. Just when I think that a new project will be easier than the last, I find that it’s in fact devilishly difficult, with medium and message inextricably intertwined, and thus fundamentally resistant to translation.
In Fromms, one set of lexical challenges centered on the crazy quilt of Nazi bureaucratic titles for all kinds of offices that sound ludicrous (and worse) to our ears. There was also an overarching issue of tone, since the book alternates between harrowing, heart-rending stories of foiled escapes across borders and sober, detailed lists, such as the prices fetched by household objects auctioned from the Fromms’s home in Berlin.
How did you get into translation in the first place?
My path to translation from the German came via my studies of exile literature, particularly of the Mann family, where I found myself drawn to the linguistic dimension of their transculturation. Right from my first published translation—a piece in Simon Wiesenthal’s now-classic volume The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness—I have gravitated to subjects at the margins of their respective societies. The themes in my translated books span history to histrionics, psychology to physics, pre-Socratic philosophy to pilgrimages, marooned refugees from Hitler’s Germany to Maroon colonies in Jamaica, castrati to concentration camps to Communism and now—to round out an alliterative set, I suppose—condoms. Translating non-fiction entails a dizzying leap to instant quasi-expertise on the widest variety of themes.
You've said that you like to improve upon your texts occasionally. What do you do and how far do you think we translators ought to go along that road?
This topic is a hornet’s nest! The range of theories along what I call the literal-to-literary spectrum is vast, and the stuff of flared tempers. At one extreme, you have George Steiner warning you against “betrayal upward” (which he defines as enhancing a text’s stylistic quality or emotional scope) and claiming that all translation is per se “tawdry.” You also have Vladimir Nabokov worrying that his translations are “not ugly enough” until they are fully “defowlerized” (his coinage for “uglified”). Way over at the other end of the spectrum is the newest kid on the theory-of-translation block, Douglas Hofstadter, whose mantra of “poetic lie-sense” positively demands taking major liberties in translating texts.
I don’t think of myself as a card-carrying member of any “translation camp,” but every text entails navigating between the Scylla of literal rendition and the Charybdis of literary enhancement. While Hofstadter takes quite outrageous liberties at times (translating the French “chamade” as “mad ache” simply because they are anagrams!!), I do agree that the translator should inject a voice of his or her own to allow a text to come alive in its new linguistic garb. And I see no case for “defowlerizing” a text, or providing the stilted, near-interlinear translations Nabokov promotes (not that he practiced what he preached, luckily). After all, one of the cruelest possible barbs about a writer’s style in English is to accuse a text of sounding “translated from the German.”
When I read over my many drafts, I vocalize and subvocalize the text, and, like a cook at a stove, try a dash of alliteration here, a pinch of sibilants there, and just a smidgen of contrast intonation to bring out the flavor of my sentences. Above all, I need to feel confident that the end result does not read like “translationese.”
Translators run hot and cold on the issue of whether to contact and bring the author into the translation process. I always seek out the author, especially if I think textual incursions might be advisable. Ideally—and typically—a productive symbiosis results, and several of my authors have become close friends. One of my translator friends holds the view that “the only good author is a dead author.” Not me; I like mine alive!
What has been your favorite book to translate?
My favorite translation project is generally whichever one’s just been published! After you submit the manuscript, a good year passes before the book sees the light of day, and amnesia sets in regarding all the painstaking research and quests for the right shades of meaning. Just when you’ve practically forgotten you ever worked on the book at all, suddenly it’s out, and you get to ogle it in bookstores, linger on its Amazon rankings, and savor some glowing adjectives in reviews.
My translation of Stefan Klein’s Da Vincis Vermächtnis (Leonardo’s Legacy, published in Germany by S. Fischer, and in New York by Da Capo Press) came out just last month. It is certainly my current favorite! I am in awe of Stefan Klein’s deft presentation of Leonardo’s scientific and artistic achievements in the context of the Renaissance and beyond. The author himself figures prominently in the book, retracing Leonardo’s steps through the various places the artist-scientist lived, worked, and conducted research.
I know you're a dedicated campaigner for translators and their rights and recognition. What would you say at a private audience with Obama?
Obama has his hands full with the oil spill, the economy, two wars, and the Tea Partiers. I’ll spare him my yes-we-cans regarding the translation profession until he’s past those exceedingly troubling issues. In the meantime, I’d like to appeal to editors to recognize that translators craft the words that their readers read. Robert Weil at W.W. Norton, one of my all-time favorite editors, has stated in the pages of Publishers Weekly that his translators are his authors in the United States. And along with the other members of the PEN Translation Committee, I am fighting the good fight for proper remuneration for and recognition of our profession.
As it now stands, our best reward—and it is a very fine reward indeed, though not in monetary terms—comes when the book is published and reviewers remark on the work of the translator. We translators then become collectors of adjectives. Among the ones I’ve savored in reference to my own translations are “fluid, flawless” (Publishers Weekly), “evocative, idiomatic” (LA Times), “crisp, heroic” (New York Times), “felicitous” (New Republic), and my personal two favorites: “wonderfully supple” (thank you, William Gass!) and “zingy, dramatic” (thank you, Michael Dirda!).
What are you working on now?
I’m now translating volume two of a projected three-volume Kafka biography, by Reiner Stach. This project is most closely allied to my own area of scholarship (20th-century German literature), and it is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Each of the three volumes is quite hefty (volume two alone exceeds 700 pages!), so this’ll take a while. My identification with this project has already taken dramatic turns. A few weeks ago, I started sneezing and coughing uncontrollably. Hay fever, you say? No—it was because Kafka had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis!
I'd like to say many thanks again to Shelley for taking the time for the interview, for sharing so much wisdom and for being such an inspiring role model in general.
Update: contrary to popular interpretation, the interview didn't actually take place in the ladies' restroom last October - we conducted it between Berlin and Princeton last week via email. Sorry to have been a little misleading.
Shelley, Fromms won a gold medal at the Independent Publishers' Book Awards. Tell us about the book.
Fromms, by Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, is the story of Julius Fromm, a Jewish entrepreneur whose condom manufacturing company in Berlin is seized by Hermann Göring in the 1930s and given as a present to Göring’s godmother in exchange for two medieval castles, while the Fromms flee to England, stripped of their possessions, their company, their adopted homeland, and even the right to continue using the family name when they rebuild the business in London. This true story is a powerful case study of how state-fueled greed coupled with pernicious ideology undid a man’s life’s work while undoing the moral fiber of an entire society.
The book’s umbrella of themes encompasses life in Weimar, the emerging field of “sexology,” the international history of condoms (I now know what kind Casanova wore!), the condom manufacturing process, brothel etiquette and aesthetics, and, first and foremost, the agony of expropriation and exile from Hitler’s Germany. There are moments of levity, such as Peter Lorre’s first encounter with Alfred Hitchcock (Peter Lorre was a friend of Max Fromm) interspersed with harrowing stories, such as the scandalous journey of the Dunera, a British ship that imprisoned Jewish and other refugees and brought them to Australia under concentration camp-like circumstances. One of the passengers on that ship was Julius Fromm’s son Edgar Fromm. Edgar’s son Ray and I were in touch by phone several times while I worked on the translation, and Ray contributed a wonderful afterword to the American edition to update the story with the poignant and revealing perspective of a family member.
And how was the ceremony?
The ceremony for the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards (known, for some reason, as the IPPY Awards) was grand fun. It took place in a lavish party space, a disco-like setting, on West 57th Street in Manhattan, with all kinds of bells (that is, food) and whistles (drink). Quite a nice change from my cramped little study where the text came into being! Fromms won the gold medal in the history category. If I’m not mistaken, it was the only translation to win a prize in any category.
When winners were called up to the stage to receive their awards, true hilarity ensued. Male awardees got to pose for a photo op with a scantily clad woman in stilettos; female awardees like me posed with a playboy-type boy toy. The medal he hung around my neck was so heavy and humongous that I had trouble remaining upright (slight hyperbole here… but it is large and heavy).
You've translated a long list of non-fiction titles from German. I know each book presents its own challenges - what were the big issues with Fromms?
Every book I’ve translated poses seemingly insurmountable challenges. Just when I think that a new project will be easier than the last, I find that it’s in fact devilishly difficult, with medium and message inextricably intertwined, and thus fundamentally resistant to translation.
In Fromms, one set of lexical challenges centered on the crazy quilt of Nazi bureaucratic titles for all kinds of offices that sound ludicrous (and worse) to our ears. There was also an overarching issue of tone, since the book alternates between harrowing, heart-rending stories of foiled escapes across borders and sober, detailed lists, such as the prices fetched by household objects auctioned from the Fromms’s home in Berlin.
How did you get into translation in the first place?
My path to translation from the German came via my studies of exile literature, particularly of the Mann family, where I found myself drawn to the linguistic dimension of their transculturation. Right from my first published translation—a piece in Simon Wiesenthal’s now-classic volume The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness—I have gravitated to subjects at the margins of their respective societies. The themes in my translated books span history to histrionics, psychology to physics, pre-Socratic philosophy to pilgrimages, marooned refugees from Hitler’s Germany to Maroon colonies in Jamaica, castrati to concentration camps to Communism and now—to round out an alliterative set, I suppose—condoms. Translating non-fiction entails a dizzying leap to instant quasi-expertise on the widest variety of themes.
You've said that you like to improve upon your texts occasionally. What do you do and how far do you think we translators ought to go along that road?
This topic is a hornet’s nest! The range of theories along what I call the literal-to-literary spectrum is vast, and the stuff of flared tempers. At one extreme, you have George Steiner warning you against “betrayal upward” (which he defines as enhancing a text’s stylistic quality or emotional scope) and claiming that all translation is per se “tawdry.” You also have Vladimir Nabokov worrying that his translations are “not ugly enough” until they are fully “defowlerized” (his coinage for “uglified”). Way over at the other end of the spectrum is the newest kid on the theory-of-translation block, Douglas Hofstadter, whose mantra of “poetic lie-sense” positively demands taking major liberties in translating texts.
I don’t think of myself as a card-carrying member of any “translation camp,” but every text entails navigating between the Scylla of literal rendition and the Charybdis of literary enhancement. While Hofstadter takes quite outrageous liberties at times (translating the French “chamade” as “mad ache” simply because they are anagrams!!), I do agree that the translator should inject a voice of his or her own to allow a text to come alive in its new linguistic garb. And I see no case for “defowlerizing” a text, or providing the stilted, near-interlinear translations Nabokov promotes (not that he practiced what he preached, luckily). After all, one of the cruelest possible barbs about a writer’s style in English is to accuse a text of sounding “translated from the German.”
When I read over my many drafts, I vocalize and subvocalize the text, and, like a cook at a stove, try a dash of alliteration here, a pinch of sibilants there, and just a smidgen of contrast intonation to bring out the flavor of my sentences. Above all, I need to feel confident that the end result does not read like “translationese.”
Translators run hot and cold on the issue of whether to contact and bring the author into the translation process. I always seek out the author, especially if I think textual incursions might be advisable. Ideally—and typically—a productive symbiosis results, and several of my authors have become close friends. One of my translator friends holds the view that “the only good author is a dead author.” Not me; I like mine alive!
What has been your favorite book to translate?
My favorite translation project is generally whichever one’s just been published! After you submit the manuscript, a good year passes before the book sees the light of day, and amnesia sets in regarding all the painstaking research and quests for the right shades of meaning. Just when you’ve practically forgotten you ever worked on the book at all, suddenly it’s out, and you get to ogle it in bookstores, linger on its Amazon rankings, and savor some glowing adjectives in reviews.
My translation of Stefan Klein’s Da Vincis Vermächtnis (Leonardo’s Legacy, published in Germany by S. Fischer, and in New York by Da Capo Press) came out just last month. It is certainly my current favorite! I am in awe of Stefan Klein’s deft presentation of Leonardo’s scientific and artistic achievements in the context of the Renaissance and beyond. The author himself figures prominently in the book, retracing Leonardo’s steps through the various places the artist-scientist lived, worked, and conducted research.
I know you're a dedicated campaigner for translators and their rights and recognition. What would you say at a private audience with Obama?
Obama has his hands full with the oil spill, the economy, two wars, and the Tea Partiers. I’ll spare him my yes-we-cans regarding the translation profession until he’s past those exceedingly troubling issues. In the meantime, I’d like to appeal to editors to recognize that translators craft the words that their readers read. Robert Weil at W.W. Norton, one of my all-time favorite editors, has stated in the pages of Publishers Weekly that his translators are his authors in the United States. And along with the other members of the PEN Translation Committee, I am fighting the good fight for proper remuneration for and recognition of our profession.
As it now stands, our best reward—and it is a very fine reward indeed, though not in monetary terms—comes when the book is published and reviewers remark on the work of the translator. We translators then become collectors of adjectives. Among the ones I’ve savored in reference to my own translations are “fluid, flawless” (Publishers Weekly), “evocative, idiomatic” (LA Times), “crisp, heroic” (New York Times), “felicitous” (New Republic), and my personal two favorites: “wonderfully supple” (thank you, William Gass!) and “zingy, dramatic” (thank you, Michael Dirda!).
What are you working on now?
I’m now translating volume two of a projected three-volume Kafka biography, by Reiner Stach. This project is most closely allied to my own area of scholarship (20th-century German literature), and it is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Each of the three volumes is quite hefty (volume two alone exceeds 700 pages!), so this’ll take a while. My identification with this project has already taken dramatic turns. A few weeks ago, I started sneezing and coughing uncontrollably. Hay fever, you say? No—it was because Kafka had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis!
I'd like to say many thanks again to Shelley for taking the time for the interview, for sharing so much wisdom and for being such an inspiring role model in general.
Update: contrary to popular interpretation, the interview didn't actually take place in the ladies' restroom last October - we conducted it between Berlin and Princeton last week via email. Sorry to have been a little misleading.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
German Non-Fiction Books to Love and Cherish
I wrote about failing miserably to come up with any non-fiction titles translated from Germany. So here's an attempt to make up for that with a small selection of recent titles. The list is fairly random, I'm afraid. It also consists mainly of books on German history and culture - which reflects what gets translated.
You could start with Stefan Aust's revised Baader-Meinhof. The inside story of the RAF, trans. Anthea Bell. It does what it say on the tin really. The book made a huge mark on German society when it first came out in the 1980s, and now includes new material from Stasi files, etc.
Aust knew some of those involved in the RAF through his work as a journalist, but for a more academic look at German history, you might look to Götz Aly. You can choose from Hitler's Beneficiaries (trans. Jefferson Chase), Fromms. How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (trans. Shelley Frisch), or how about Into the Tunnel. The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 (trans. Ann Millin). Or wait for his highly controversial take on how the 68ers weren't as free from totalitarianism as they liked to think, Unser Kampf - although it could be a long wait...
On the subject of controversy, why not look out for Jörg Friedrich's The Fire. The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (trans. Allison Brown). Apparently it's very good for low blood pressure. To calm you down again, try a more light-hearted read: Hape Kerkeling's I'm Off Then, about his pilgrimage across the Pyrenees and translated again by the very busy and very delightful Shelley Frisch.
In a more literary vein, keep an eye out from January for Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov (trans. Ross Benjamin), apparently "a vital new perspective". You can also get Maar's The Two Lolitas (trans. Perry Anderson) and Bluebeard's Chamber (trans. David Fernbach) on Thomas Mann.
Now if you happen to be a publisher thinking, hmmm, what a lot of fine non-fiction is coming out of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there's a chance for you too to get a cut-price ticket for the bandwaggon. The initiative Geisteswissensachaften International provides funding for translations of humanities titles into English. Hooray!
You could start with Stefan Aust's revised Baader-Meinhof. The inside story of the RAF, trans. Anthea Bell. It does what it say on the tin really. The book made a huge mark on German society when it first came out in the 1980s, and now includes new material from Stasi files, etc.
Aust knew some of those involved in the RAF through his work as a journalist, but for a more academic look at German history, you might look to Götz Aly. You can choose from Hitler's Beneficiaries (trans. Jefferson Chase), Fromms. How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (trans. Shelley Frisch), or how about Into the Tunnel. The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 (trans. Ann Millin). Or wait for his highly controversial take on how the 68ers weren't as free from totalitarianism as they liked to think, Unser Kampf - although it could be a long wait...
On the subject of controversy, why not look out for Jörg Friedrich's The Fire. The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (trans. Allison Brown). Apparently it's very good for low blood pressure. To calm you down again, try a more light-hearted read: Hape Kerkeling's I'm Off Then, about his pilgrimage across the Pyrenees and translated again by the very busy and very delightful Shelley Frisch.
In a more literary vein, keep an eye out from January for Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov (trans. Ross Benjamin), apparently "a vital new perspective". You can also get Maar's The Two Lolitas (trans. Perry Anderson) and Bluebeard's Chamber (trans. David Fernbach) on Thomas Mann.
Now if you happen to be a publisher thinking, hmmm, what a lot of fine non-fiction is coming out of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there's a chance for you too to get a cut-price ticket for the bandwaggon. The initiative Geisteswissensachaften International provides funding for translations of humanities titles into English. Hooray!
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