Stefanie de Velasco: Tiger Milk

A teenage narrator shares her recipe for a good time:

One best friend
One carton milk from the school canteen
One bottle cheap brandy
One carton maracuja juice
One widemouthed container of Müller chocolate milk (empty)
Two pairs stripy stockings
One strawberry-flavoured condom.
Mix with a long finger and consume in Berlin's red-light district. 

Nini and Jameela call it tiger milk and they drink it like it's going out of fashion, while picking up punters on Kurfürstenstraße and fleecing them for less than they're worth, usually. They're fourteen and practicing for when they lose their virginity. It's enough to make a mother's heart stand still, but our heroines' mothers have other worries – something that might be agoraphobia or just plain depression, and in Jameela's case expulsion to Iraq. The girls have been friends and neighbours somewhere in West Berlin since they were kids and now they ponder on whether they're grown up; narrator Nini opens the novel with her first "childhood memory", a gritty moment involving a Barbie doll, a spat-out chewing gum and an unwanted sibling. And if she has a childhood memory, she reasons, she can't be a child any more.

She still is, I would say, although Stefanie de Velasco puts her through all sorts of perilous adventures in her debut Tiger Milk. There's a murder and a magic spell and a love story and a party, and that fun hobby on Kurfürstenstraße turns out to have its down sides, one of the most chilling scenes I've read recently. In essence, though, de Velasco gives us the story of a summer spent at the outdoor pool and the local playground, on the U-Bahn and on the streets of Berlin. There's a defunct phone box that serves as a message board because all the kids carry sharpies, and graffiti is a means of emotional communication. If you liked the film Prinzessinenbad (and who didn't?), you need to read this.

It's a book that inspires adoration, maybe because of Nini's fantastic voice. We read the prizewinning opening chapter when I ran a course on contemporary German writing, and one of the participants was inspired to mix us up a round of tiger milk. It's not bad at all. And one translator friend of mine fell for the novel pretty hard too, but in the end the job of putting it into English went to Tim Mohr. Tim has ended up kind of specialized in books with teenage narrators, after Wetlands, Broken Glass Park and Why We Took the Car, so you can see why that happened. And again, he's done an astounding job. I love the almost unpunctuated rhythm he's got going, and of course the wordplay and just the generally believable tone of a bunch of fourteen-year-old kids. I don't think I could ever aspire to do it. Sometimes it sounds very American for a British publishing house but that seems to me to be absolutely appropriate. But he never irons out the fact that it's all happening in Berlin. I am a fan.

The best thing about Tiger Milk? It's just plain funny. Although these kids are going through fourteen kinds of torture, Stefanie de Velasco never makes victims out of them. It doesn't feel like sociology, the way some German books look down on the poor proletariat; it never gets patronizing. I found myself laughing through my shock all the way through, right to the bitter end. Of all the possible reasons to read it – realistic portrayal of teenage terror, Berlin from below, exhilarating language – that humour would be my killer argument. And yes, someone's writing a screenplay.

Tschick in English in Berlin

Please join us for a whole evening talking about the late Wolfgang Herrndorf's novel Tschick (Why We Took the Car), from 8 p.m. on Sunday, 16 February at Keule Berliner Mundart, Simon-Dach-Straße 22 in Berlin-Friedrichshain.   

It will be a discussion featuring Marcus Gärtner, Wolfgang Herrndorf's editor at Rowohlt Verlag; Tim Mohr, whose translation of "Tschick," entitled "Why We Took the Car," was just published in the US and UK; and moderated by Katy Derbyshire, Berlin-based translator and author of the blog love german books

PARTICIPANTS:

Marcus Gärtner is the Editorial Director for fiction at Rowohlt Verlag. In addition to Wolfgang Herrndorf, Gärtner has also edited Rocko Schamoni and Heinz Strunk, among others. He studied history and German literature in Konstanz and Berlin, and worked at Stiftung Weimarer Klassik and Rowohlt before becoming editorial director there in 2006.

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors such as Charlotte Roche, Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, and Dorothea Dieckmann. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Duff McKagan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Paul Stanley. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and the Daily Beast, among other publications. Prior to starting his writing career, he worked as DJ in Berlin.

Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Clemens Meyer, Dorothee Elmiger, Simon Urban and Sibylle Lewitscharoff. She is also known internationally for her blogs http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.de/ and http://goingdutchwithgermanwriters.wordpress.com/

REVIEWS OF TSCHICK IN ENGLISH

"With its car window on the German landscape and teen culture, the late Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel (nimbly translated by Tim Mohr) fuels an especially expansive reading experience." - The Washington Post

"...funny, poignant, and intermittently profane and raunchy." - The Wall Street Journal

"By no means a wholesome story, 'Why We Took the Car' is exuberant and without a mean bone in its narrative." - The New York Times

"...this alternately wild, sad, hilarious, and tender tale chronicles the development of a strange and beautiful friendship." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"...sits squarely and triumphantly at the intersection of literary tall tale and coming-of-age picaresque." - Kirkus (starred review)

Exciting New (and Forthcoming) Books

Three exciting books translated from German:

Chantal Wright is a translator and an academic and has written an experimental translation of Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue. So you get the English version, translated from the German, on the left, interspersed with Chantal's notes and thoughts and annotations on the right. I am very excited indeed about this, and I'll read it very soon. Hi Chantal!

Donal McLaughlin is a translator and a writer and has written a Glaswegian translation of Pedro Lenz's Swiss-German Der Goalie bin ig, called Naw Much of a Talker, reviewed in The Scotsman here. Donal read some of his translation to a group of us around a table up a Swiss hill this time last year, and it was a real thrill. Congrats on the book and the great review, Donal!

Tim Mohr is a translator and a journalist and has written a long-awaited translation of Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick, with the English title Why We Took the Car. It's sad that the author died before it comes out in January - but I know people are biting their nails to read it in English because about ten people searching for it come here every day. I'm looking forward to it, Tim!

A Titular Conundrum

So the news is Mr. Tim Mohr has finished his translation of the follow-up to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands and the English version will be out in spring of 2013. Hooray - a braver man than me. But this time the title's much trickier. Schoßgebete is a play on words (like Feuchtgebiete meaning, umm, moist areas and wetlands), and also echoes the previous title. The literal translation is something like lap or maybe crotch prayers but it's a pun on the word Stoßgebet, which – I kid you not – means a short prayer sent up to heaven, also referred to as an ejaculation.

Any bright ideas? You can read my disappointed, damning review here for inspiration. My best idea so far is Fifty Shades of Brown. Ha! Add your suggestions in the comments section.

Hooray for Tim Mohr

May I call your attention to an article in the Wiener Zeitung about the US translator Tim Mohr? Actually it's not altogether fresh, because when I first read it I was so envious of Mr Mohr that I had to spend two weeks sulking. A lovely, ethusiastic two-page piece about him, written by Klaus Stimeder, whose essay "Hier ist Berlin" Mohr seems to have translated. Because the world's been waiting for "the definitive essay" about Berlin, especially in English. Whatever. Mohr seems to be also writing a book about punk rock in the GDR, which is cool because there really isn't anything much about that in English. And everyone tells me he's delightful and really cool and a good DJ, and he translates Charlotte Roche and Alina Bronsky, and he slagged off Daniel Kehlmann, and I really shouldn't be as envious as I am.

NYT Outdoes Itself

Amazingly, the New York Times managed to run two articles mentioning the word translation on one day. I know... I've heard the excuse (from a different media outlet) "Sorry, we've already had a piece about translation this week." But maybe my article was just crap.

First up there's a slightly rambling op-ed that everybody's loving: Michael Cunningham writes about being translated and the writing process.

And then they've done something very clever and asked a translator to review a translated book. And not just any old translator and any old book, oh no! It's Tim Mohr on Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Carol Brown Janeway. And my, does he get his teeth into the translation. And into Daniel Kehlmann too. I enjoyed every word. The only thing is, I'm hideously envious of Tim Mohr for being able to write "Tim Mohr is a translator and a former Berlin club D.J." in his byline. Mine would have to say "Katy Derbyshire is a translator and hideously envious of Tim Mohr."

Thanks to David and Harvey (and Shelley and Isabel and Susan) for the links.

Anyway, these two articles will help to while away the time before the German Book Prize is announced today at nineteen-hundred hours CET (which you can listen to on a Deutschlandfunk livestream at www.dradio.de). I'm incredibly, terribly, knee-shakingly excited about it, and I'm just going to hide away my two favourites in this unrelated post:

Thomas Lehr's September and Peter Wawerzinek's Rabenmutter.

You'll hear more from me on this subject this evening.

Alina Bronsky: Broken Glass Park

Everybody’s loving it, so I thought by rights I ought to hate it – but I can’t, dammit. Broken Glass Park (trans. Tim Mohr) is the story of Sascha Naimann, a seventeen-year-old living in a Russian ghetto near Frankfurt. Her stepfather has murdered her mother and her lover and Sascha's plan is to kill him back. So far, so juvenile. Yet the book has a large cast of quirky characters that lift it out of the teen segment and make it what’s commonly known as a jolly good read.

Let me state right here that the claim on the back cover that the novel “recalls the narrative art of Zadie Smith” is bollocks. Smith, I suspect, would have pulled her plot a little tighter than Bronsky has here – but perhaps the reviewer was casting about to find a comparison for the “fiction about immigrants that isn’t about being an immigrant” genre, one that isn’t all that established in Germany. Because despite the basic coordinates and the setting, Broken Glass Park isn’t really about being Russian in Germany.

Instead it’s about young love, young hate, the family and the community. Although Sascha falls into that hardworking, studious category of immigrant so beloved in US fiction (think The Kiterunner and Girl in Translation, The Namesake, etc. etc.), the book’s really about being a traumatised teenager, regardless of nationality. Our heroine meets a comparatively wealthy father and son, sleeps with a Nazi, has various terrible accidents and, you know, comes to terms with stuff.

In between we get plenty of cameo appearances from the Russian community, from the blonde who walks round and round the courthouse in the hope of meeting a nice lawyer to the disabled chess genius with a talent for narrating porn films. The Broken Glass Park of the title is where the bad kids hang out, although sadly some of the later broken glass gets lost in translation, unavoidably so I think.

On the subject of translation, it’s rather good. Tim Mohr has a fine hand for dialogue and cusses. Here’s a sample conversation between Sascha’s younger sister and brother, aged 3 and about ten:

“That was my card, you buttfucker,” says Alissa. “Scum,” retorts Anton.

And I rarely had that oh I’d have done that differently feeling.

All in all, it’s a tad fluffy but a decent, quick read. It’s also a good book to introduce younger readers to the worlds of international writing out there without scaring them back into their shells. Alina Bronsky is probably still touring the States right now, and she does a good line in cute photos, belying the fact that she has three kids – respect.

Wetlands... I Was So Right!

Remember my hot tip on who I suspected was translating Wetlands? Well, I was right. BILD broke the story on Tuesday but I didn't notice. Now you can admire the translator Tim Mohr alongside Charlotte Roche, plus read his draft versions of Roche's rude words. According to BILD, it'll be "the most difficult translation of the year". Yeah, right.

Guantánamo and Tim Mohr

Michael Faber reviews Dorothea Dieckmann's novel Guantánamo in Saturday's Guardian, and makes it sound like a very good read indeed.

What caught my eye, though, was the attention devoted to the translator. Faber writes:

Guantánamo has just won the aptly named Three Percent prize* for translated foreign fiction, thanks to the midwifery of Soft Skull Press, a small New York publishing house specialising in controversial subjects, and Tim Mohr, staff editor at Playboy magazine. Mohr, previously known for pop reviews and parodies of Star Trek, seems an odd choice of translator, but he has excelled himself, rendering the prose pitch-perfect, poetically sprung, psychologically nuanced yet natural.

Hey, great. A review that includes actual biographical information on the translator - and praises his work. That's something to write home about. And look, Faber's done the same as me and googled Tim Mohr - to no great avail, translationwise. It looks like the book is his first ever translation - a huge success, I'd say.

Mohr seems to style himself as a bit of a lad-about-town, DJing in Berlin, reviewing rock bands, editing Playboy - and he's my top tip for the Wetlands translation (I have no idea who's doing it but they've already started, whoever it is). Apparently, his "scruffy baby cheeks give him the air of a hung-over Cupid" (New York Observer). It's all downright atypical for a translator - does the man not realise we're supposed to hide modestly in dark corners, not have interesting past career paths? Which is presumably what makes him an "odd choice". But he did graduate from Harvard, so that's OK then.

It's all just about as disgraceful as Germany's very own celebrity translator, Harry Rowohlt. Not only does the man have conspicuous facial hair - he appears in a soap opera, for goodness sake! What is the world coming to? Next they'll be wanting their names on the front covers...

*Not sure this prize actually benefited Dieckmann directly in any way, but it's nice to see it mentioned.