On Appreciating Translations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Translation Month 2016: an Introduction

Did you know that less than a third of all literary translations published in the UK and the US were originally written by women? Did you know that women writers win far fewer prizes for their translated books than male writers?

Women in Translation Month is all about appreciating the great women writers who do get translated – and of course the people who bring them to us, their translators and publishers. It’s an opportunity to join in a worldwide conversation about outstanding writing from all over the globe. Bookshops and libraries in the UK, US, Germany, France and New Zealand are highlighting translated books by women. Bloggers are sharing their impressions, the twitterati are pulling together under #WITMonth, and anyone can be part of it just by reading a book.

With only 30% of translated fiction being female-authored, it’s a safe bet that those books by women that do get translated are genuinely excellent. Women around the world are writing explicitly feminist fiction like Angélica Gorodischer from Argentina, bringing us family stories like France’s Marie NDiaye, exploring historical issues like Chinese writer Yan Geling or sexuality like Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay from India, or giving us intercultural crime novels like Finland’s Kati Hiekkapelto. Despite their relative rarity in English, translated women offer a wealth of diversity.

So why not join in August’s Women in Translation Month? Simply pick up a book and enjoy it – or you could go a step further and write a review on Amazon or Goodreads, keep an eye out for literary events, hold a WiT-themed reading group, invite friends to present their favourite foreign females at a party, learn a new language and travel the world in search of an undiscovered woman writer to translate, set up a publishing house… the sky’s the limit.

 If you're in Berlin, you could head for ocelot on Brunnenstraße. They've put together a fine selection of books written by women and translated into English – and German! Pop by and support your local bookshop and global women writers in one fell swoop. 

The picture at the top is part of an artwork by Heather Marie Scholl. If you are Heather Marie Scholl and you read this, thanks for the great work and I hope it's OK to use the picture totally out of context. If not, please let me know.
 

On Amazon, and Translation, and Heike Geißler

This week AmazonCrossing – the translation publishing section of the online retailer – announced that it would be investing ten million dollars in publishing translations over the coming five years, and that it now has a submissions form for people to suggest foreign-language titles for consideration. Reactions from translators have been cautiously optimistic to neutral; you can read a few in Thu-Huong Ha's piece at Quartz.

I think most of us agree that AmazonCrossing is doing a good thing by bringing genre fiction and eminently readable literature into English, breaking down the irrational fear of translations among the reading public. This move will make it even more of a dominant force in the translation publishing world. And that, I think, is what I find troubling.

I've spoken to a number of early-career translators who are working with Amazon. It seems to be a good way to get experience or to supplement more difficult translation projects that take more time. What I'm not aware of is translators who have made the leap – should they want to – from translating entirely for Amazon to translating for other publishers.

I translated two children's books for AmazonCrossing, back when they launched five years ago. I can't remember exactly what was covered by the infamous non-disclosure agreement but I've forgotten how much they paid anyway; signing it was, however, an intimidating experience. The commissioning and editing process was fine, no more friction with the outsourced editing and copy-editing than usual. The people I dealt with were perfectly nice and in some cases seemed genuinely interested in international literature. That was before they introduced the bidding system, though, under which translators say how much money they'd like and how much time they'd need to translate a particular book, send a short sample, and then someone picks one of them for the job. I strongly believe this is not the best way to find the right translator for a book. Nor do I recommend translators submit suggestions for books to be translated, as I presume that these titles, if picked up, would then have to go through the bidding process. Meaning one translator puts a lot of effort into getting a book she loves published and another one may well undercut her for the actual job. That happens elsewhere, of course, too.

I still get royalty statements for my two books, which are now sent anonymously (I'm not exactly getting rich on them, and they've since scrapped their line in translated children's books). I can't be sure because that non-disclosure agreement means it's all conjecture – according to that Quartz article, Amazon are considering doing without the NDA – but I believe they pay lower up-front fees than other publishers, coupled with higher royalties. Which probably worked out great for Lee Chadeayne, translator of mega-selling Oliver Pötzsch, but in my case shifted much of the risk from a multinational online retailer (albeit one apparently only just making a profit) to a single parent only just making the rent (plus shoes, etc.). Obviously that was my choice, as it is every translator's choice to work with a particular publisher, provided they'll take them. But let's just say I'm not going to do it again.

If I'm to venture into the realm of conspiracy theory, might I suggest that Amazon doesn't actually want to make a profit, at least on paper? And publishing translations, while being an idealistic venture that brings light into a lot of people's lives, is an expensive thing to do. A ten-million-dollar investment means ten million less on the books. Is that very cynical of me?

The main thing that makes AmazonCrossing not my ideal client, however, is the sheer size of the enterprise. As Alex Zucker points out in that Quartz piece (again), the new investment could add up to 833 book translations over five years. That's a lot of work to be managed. I assume the scale of the program is already the reason behind the bidding process, and the reason why the emails I now receive seem to have been sent by a robot. Remember that New York Times article about working conditions at head office? Now imagine you have to get 833 translations commissioned, edited and published in that place. Even a hundred a year, which they're already heading for, is a mammoth task that can only really be dealt with using a kind of conveyor-belt method. When I read about one individual translating thirteen titles in eighteen months (eight of them in a two-person team) – in the comments to my friend Lucy Renner-Jones's excellent piece from 2013 – I can't help but feel that quality is not the top priority here.

Amazon has proved very effective at using algorithms to sell things and streamlining processes to sell those things cheaply. I just don't think that algorithms and streamlining are best applied to literature or translations, or human beings in general.

Why am I writing all this? Because my translation of the first chapter of Heike Geißler's Saisonarbeit (Season's Greetings from Fulfillment) is up at n+1 today! Heike got a job at the Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, not as an undercover journalist but as a struggling writer who needed to pay off her overdraft. And then she wrote a book-length essay on how horrible it is that we have to perform paid labour at all, but especially how awful it is to perform paid labour at the Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, and how the company attempts to squeeze the humanity out of its employees and some of them even start identifying with it. There'll be another chapter up there soon so you can get even more of a taste of it. And/or read my review. So I figured Heike and I probably don't have a lot to lose on the Amazon front any more.

Some More Statistics on Translated Fiction

As you may know I'm part of a team trying to get a prize off the ground for fiction by women in translation. We've all noticed that books by women don't get translated as often as books by men, and we're still puzzling over why that is and what can be done about it. But in order to make our case more convincingly, we need some statistics. 

So for that purpose, I’ve done a count of books published in the UK and Ireland in 2013. I culled the main part from the British Library catalogue by searching with “translated by” and “translated from” and “2013”. Because we want to look at fiction in a fairly limited sense for our prize, I didn’t include children’s or YA books, poetry, plays, reprints/reissues or memoir/literary non-fiction (for example, Florian Illes’ 1913 is not included). I did include books published by houses based elsewhere but with a UK/Ire office (Seagull, Dalkey Archive, Europa Editions). It was immediately obvious that there were some titles missing, so I also looked at those catalogues I found online for 2013 from publishers that were already on the list, plus things like an English PEN blog piece featuring UK editors talking about the translations they were looking forward to publishing in 2013. I’m certain there are still gaps in the list, but here it is:

List of UK/Ireland-published translated fiction, 2013

There are now 307 books in total, 82 of them written by women (in the case of anthologies, they all included more men than women so I counted them as male). That gives us a figure of 27%.

I also went through the stats collected by Literature Across Frontiers, on translated literature published in the UK and Ireland in the years 2000 and 2008. This data is different to my list for a number of reasons: It includes children’s books, translated books on literature, poetry, plays, reissues and a few duplicates like large-print editions. For our purposes, I only listed each name once, even when a writer had several books out in one year, and I didn’t include writers where I was unable to establish via a quick search whether they were men or women. I also left out Latin, ancient Greek, Old Norse and Old English, because I figured women really couldn’t write in those days.

For both years, 24% of the authors whose books were translated into English were women.

Here are a few observations I’ve picked up along the way:

Women writers are better represented in translated children’s books and crime fiction.
Northern European women are better represented than women writers from other parts of the world.
In 2013, I found no translated fiction by Russian women but all three Greek writers I found were women.
In the literatures that are traditionally more heavily imported, 13 women were translated from German (out of 44), 12 from French (out of 52), 7 from Italian (out of 28) and 6 from Spanish (out of 25). Yay German!
Classics tend to be a male-only domain (no surprises there).

I haven’t found any international statistics on books originally published in the various languages. My assumption though is that the imbalance in part reflects that women are actually published less in certain cultures. However, they are also less recognized in most literary cultures (as in the Anglophone world), which adds to the imbalance.

I'd like to ask people, translators and publishing people especially, to take a look at my list via the first link above and check whether there are any books missing. You can let me know in the comments section. Many thanks - and enjoy browsing!

On Translation Copyright Rustling

When a translator translates a book, they create a new piece of work in a new language and they then hold copyright to their translation. In the front of the books I've translated there is a note that says something like this:

First published in German as Die Kältezentrale by Inka Parei
(c) Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2011
First published in English translation by Seagull Books, 2014
Translation (c) Katy Derbyshire

That means that if someone wants to use my translation for some other purpose – put part of it in an anthology, make a Broadway musical out of it, print it all out in tiny letters on a poster – they have to ask me for permission first. Then I can negotiate an appropriate fee or simply refuse, if I don't want them to use my work. I'm unlikely to refuse but I do want to have some control over what happens to my creative output, understandably.

However, some publishers don't work this way, and retain copyright to translations themselves. This seems to be particularly prevalent among university presses, as Wendell Ricketts has established in a study of US translations. It's well worth reading his report, as he names the good guys and the bad guys in the business, and also goes into some of the strange practices of simply not naming the translator anywhere except in small print in the book itself. He calls on publishers to stop "copyright rustling" in this way, and also on translators to stop putting up with it.

The website No Peanuts! for Translators has launched a petition against the practice. I have signed it because I agree that it is exploitative and wrong, but I feel a little uncomfortable about the way the site is happy to name and shame translators whose copyright gets taken away from them, but doesn't put author's names under its entries. So while you can read their informative and combative piece on copyright rustling, including brusque calls upon the various US translators' associations, you can't identity the "we" who is doing the asking. Perhaps I've missed something on the website, but the only names I find there are 542 "endorsers" who presumably haven't approved each article. And I could take a self-proclaimed "movement" more seriously if it wasn't effectively anonymous.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist

The 2015 longlist is out, and it's pretty pretty pretty!

• The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death 
• The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky 
• Bloodlines by Marcello Fois translated from the Italian by Silvester Mazzarella 
• In the Beginning Was the Sea by Tomás González translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
• The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
• F by Daniel Kehlmann translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway 
• Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
• By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar 
• The Investigation by Jung-Myung Lee translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim 
• While the Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent 
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
• The Giraffe's Neck by Judith Schalansky translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
• Tiger Milk by Stefanie de Velasco translated from the German by Tim Mohr
• Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch 
• The Last Lover by Can Xue translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

Four women writers, five German writers! What more can a feminist German book lover ask for?

I'm currently working on statistics about the proportion of translation fiction published in the UK and Ireland written by women. It's not going to be good news – four out of fifteen titles pretty much reflects the percentage as a whole, which is hovering somewhere around a quarter.

My favourite is Tiger Milk, in case you were wondering.

Literary Translation Adopted into Pantheon of Cool

So I've been observing for a few years now and noticing a change. Whereas the standard response to "I translate novels" about five years ago was, "No, I mean what do you do for a living?" it now seems to be a little more admiring. Maybe I'm moving in different circles now but actually I think translated fiction is becoming a thing. As in, it's slightly obscure in the best possible way, like bands not many people know; being aware of it makes you look impressive. Unfortunately for me, I think I'm aware of it in the wrong way, what with my sad obsession with German books meaning I'm just not up on the latest big thing from Korea or Iceland. I'm like one of those people fixated on The Wedding Present or something.

I digress; what I wanted to share was proof of literary translation's arrival in the mainstream of the non-mainstream, its acceptance by the cool kids. I like to think of the cultural world as one big sixth-form common room where all the kids hang out between classes – because surely we learn all we need to know in life at school? And there's a big clique of teenagers who are confident about their tastes and into whatever's easy enough to like at the moment, probably Breaking Bad, let's say, although that's probably hopelessly behind the times because I can't really be bothered with these TV series things. They're fine, these kids, they're happy on the sofas talking about who did what in episode twelve, and that's good. Then there's the thin layer of cool kids. They're not happy, I should think, but they probably don't want to be. They're the ones who know about cultural phenomena first, all kinds of things: films, bands, books; nowadays they'd be the first ones to post an internet meme. In my own story they're the ones who got in to see Blur play in Camden before Blur were famous and before the kids themselves were old enough to get into gigs. They have a particular table in the common room where they congregate; they probably smoke roll-ups.

And then there's the kids on the margins with their weird happy-making stuff. Maybe the religious ones or the ones with bizarre hobbies. They might flit from place to place in the common room, or maybe they have a little corner to themselves. It might smell a bit strange. Sometimes they mind not being cool or mainstream but usually it's fine; they have their little obsessions to keep them occupied. And that's where I'd put literary translators and literary translation readers, normally.

But look, the cool kids have reached out, or the oddballs have reached out, and now their worlds are touching! The London German-lit person Jen Calleja has her own column at The Quietus and it's about translated books! It's called Verfreundungseffekt! The first piece is about a gloriously obscure book, poems by a Finnish punk translated into English and published in Mexico! It's like the second-last scene in a John Hughes film, when everyone bonds unexpectedly and the world momentarily becomes a beautiful place. There's loud music playing and none of the translators/oddballs have ever heard it before, because they have been inducted into this new place, the pantheon of cool.

What will it be like? We shall see. My advice now, for literary translation people, is to pitch articles, reviews and the like to utterly cool publications. It may only be a passing fad, who knows, but we should milk it for all it's worth.

Amanda DeMarco Would Like to Review French and German Books

My friend Amanda DeMarco, the founder of Readux Books and general all-round impressive person, is looking to write more reviews in 2015. Here's what she wants to do, in her own words:

This year I've made a resolution to write 10-12 reviews of books translated from German and French. If you'd like to draw my attention to a forthcoming translation, here is the best way:

Please only send literary fiction and serious nonfiction, no genre literature (though I will gladly read literary sci-fi and noir)

2–6 months before the date of publication, send an email to defrbookreviews@gmail.com with Author/Title (DE or FR) in the subject line

Include the publication date, publisher, and description in the body

Attach the English manuscript as an epub or pdf

I am particularly interested in Berlin esp. in den 20s, and the development of technology in the early 20th century. If relevant, mention in subject line.

An example of the sort of review I am planning to write: lareviewofbooks.org/review/toward-incomparable-ways-of-speaking-gert-jonkes-languages-and-landscapes

The Love German Books Incredibly Short Seasonal Poetry Book List

A commenter pointed out that I hadn't recommended anything for poetry lovers. I know next to nothing about poetry, but here is a tiny list of books of poetry translated from German to English and published in 2014:

Rainer Brambach: Collected Poems (trans. Esther Kinsky)

Volker Braun: Rubble Flora (trans. David Constantine and Karen Leeder)

Bertolt Brecht: Love Poems (trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn)

Ernst Meister: Wallless Space (trans. Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick)

Farhad Showghi: End of the City Map (trans. Rosemarie Waldrop)

During the summer I saw an amazing performance of some of the Brecht poems, and some of Margarete Steffin's poems to him. You can watch the video at Modern Poetry in Translation. I cried. In fact I was still rather sniffly for the following hour or so. They're good translations.

The Love German Books Incredibly Long Seasonal Gift List

Yes, folks, it is once again time to shower your English-speaking friends and relatives with books translated out of German. You know they love you for it. To help you find the goodies, I have trawled the internet for suitable gifts. Think of me as a German book elf. All the books below were published in 2014. Links are to publishers' websites. I haven't read all of the titles personally, but neither have I included anything I think is likely to be crap. Incredibly, there are over thirty to choose from! You're welcome.

For artistic types or blackmailers: Herta Müller – Cristina and Her Double (trans. Geoffrey Mulligan)

For the whimsical: Jenny Erpenbeck – The End of Days (trans. Susan Bernofsky)

For diary writers: Walter Kempowski – Swansong 1945 (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

For starters-over: Julia Franck – West (trans. Anthea Bell)

For geniuses: Clemens J. Setz – Indigo (trans. Ross Benjamin)

For misshapen acolytes: Alina Bronsky – Just Call Me Superhero (trans. Tim Mohr)

For bird-lovers: Marjana Gaponenko – Who Is Martha? (trans. Arabella Spencer)

For the highly-educated: Joachim Fest – Not I (trans. Martin Chalmers)

For refusers-to-be-categorized: Olga Grjasnowa – All Russians Love Birch Trees (trans. Eva Bacon)

For ambulance-chasers: Wolf Haas – Come, Sweet Death! (trans. Annie Janusch)

For non-scaredy-cats: Zoran Drvenkar – You (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

For historical questioners: Malte Herwig – Post-War Lies. Germany and Hitler's Long Shadow (trans. Jamie Lee Searle and Shaun Whiteside)

For historical re-assessors: Bettina Stangneth – Eichmann Before Jerusalem (trans. Ruth Martin)

For the altruistic: Stefan Klein – Survival of the Nicest (trans. David Dollenmayer)

For adventurous teens and adults: Wolfgang Herrndorf – Why We Took the Car (trans. Tim Mohr)

For Susan fans and foes: Daniel Schreiber – Susan Sontag (trans. David Dollenmayer)

For those who don't mind laughing at Hitler: Timur Vermes – Look Who's Back (trans. Jamie Bulloch)

For dopeheads and beat fans: Jörg Fauser – Raw Material (trans. Jamie Bulloch)

For nasally sensitive e-readers: Andreas Maier – The Room (trans. Jamie Lee Searle)

For Depeche Mode fans: Dennis Burmeister & Sascha Lange – Depeche Mode: Monument (trans. Lucy Renner-Jones)

For the lost-for-words: Mario Giordano – 1000 Feelings for Which There Are No Names (trans. Isabel Fargo Cole)

For hoarders of dark secrets: Alois Hotschnig – Ludwig's Room (trans. Tess Lewis)

For fifties fans: Ingeborg Bachmann – The Radio Family (trans. Mike Mitchell)

For the young at heart: Christa Wolf – August (trans. Katy Derbyshire)

For Sebald fans: Alexander Kluge – Air Raid (trans. Martin Chalmers)

For open-minded satirists: Herbert Rosendorfer – Letters Back to Ancient China (trans. Mike Mitchell)

For city bankers: Jonas Lüscher – Barbarian Spring (trans. Peter Lewis)

For America fans: Alex Capus – Skidoo (trans. John Brownjohn)

For brave kids: Otfried Preussler – Krabat and the Sorcerer's Mill (trans. Anthea Bell)

For Wes Anderson fans: Stefan Zweig – The Society of Crossed Keys (trans. Anthea Bell)

For young twins: Erich Kästner – The Parent Trap (trans. Anthea Bell)

For Finnish crime lovers: Jan Costin Wagner – Light in a Dark House (trans. Anthea Bell)

For boxing (and graphic novel) fans: Reinhard Kleist – The Boxer (trans. Michael Waaler)

Hotlist Shortlist Announced for 2014

OK, they may have the world's dumbest ever name for an award, but the German indie publishers' Hotlist does everything else right. Today they announced their, erm, shortlist of ten, which is what they call the Hotlist. I love the way the headline proclaims confidently: Here are the ten best books of 2014!

They're books brought out by independent publishers, which means they are much more niche than the German Book Prize titles, as a rule. And the website features simple links to sample chapters from each book so that you can dip in. Here's the list with a tiny bit of extra information from me. This time I've included a line about the publishers because I think that's kind of interesting. The winning publisher (not the winning book) gets €5000 and there's also a second prize, a €4000 printing voucher. And hey, kids – the announcement happens at a party at the Frankfurt Book Fair on the 10th of October, and anyone can go along, and I am definitely going to. I really loved the last one I got to go to, in 2012.

Arco Verlag: James Hanley: Fearon

An English novel scandalized on original publication (as Boy, 1931) for its depictions of homosexuality. Translated by the writer and award-winning translator Joachim Kalka. The publishing house is based in Vienna, named after a Prague literary café, and has a focus on exiled writers and writers from Central Europe.

 

AvivA Verlag: Lili Grün: Mädchenhimmel!

Poems and short stories by a lesser-known woman writer in 1930s Berlin, whose work has been compared to Irmgard Keun and Kurt Tucholsky. The Berlin publisher specializes in rediscovering women writers.  

 

binooki: Emrah Serbes: junge verlierer

Contemporary short stories about boys translated from Turkish by my friend Oliver Kontny, theatre person and translator. binooki is a fairly new house set up by two sisters to publish translations of Turkish literature beyond the usual stereotypes.  

 

Droschl: Lydia Davis: Kanns nicht und wills nicht

Davis's Can't and Won't, short stories translated by the Austrian writer and translator Klaus Hoffer. Fun fact: my friend Isabel Cole is translating Klaus Hoffer's Bei den Bieresch for Seagull Books. The publisher is very literary indeed, based in Graz, Austria, and has a lot of highbrow gems and translations on its lists.

 

Eichenspinner Verlag: Günter Saalmann: Fiedlerin auf dem Dach

A novel by an award-winning YA author (and trombonist) about a Kazakh family with a violinist daughter who move to Germany. I find this interesting because YA authors often feel more comfortable assuming "ethnic drag" than other writers – perhaps because they're used to speaking in children's voices already? A teeny-tiny Chemnitz publishing house bringing out poetry, prose and rock music by four German writers and a two-man band.

Krug & Schadenberg: Emma Donoghue: Zarte Landung
Irishwoman-in-Canada Donoghue's novel Landing, translated by Adele Marx. The Berlin-based publisher does fiction, non-fiction and comics about all aspects of lesbian life.     

 

Lars Müller Publishers: Andri Pol: Menschen am CERN

Possibly the most unexpected book to find on a list like this, ever, this is a collection of photos of people who work in Switzerland's European Organization for Nuclear Research, accompanied by an essay by Swiss writer Peter Stamm. It can't possibly win though because Peter Stamm never wins anything, ever. The Zurich publishing house does beautiful books exclusively for the eyes.  

 

Reprodukt: Mawil: Kinderland

A graphic novel about a schoolboy in East Berlin, October 1989. I like the pictures a lot. Reprodukt publish graphic novels and comics for all ages out of Berlin-Wedding (including Tove Jansson), and may well be the coolest people in the world.  

 

Verbrecher Verlag: Sarah Schmidt: Eine Tonne für Frau Scholz

One of those novels I keep meaning to read because all the cool kids love it so, an amusing-yet-earnest family story set in the last unposh house in the hood. The Verbrecher Verlag are just all-round lovely and have the world's best logo, some top-class fiction authors including David Wagner and Nino Haratischwili, and a lot of interesting political and pop-cultural stuff too.  

 
Weidle Verlag: Carl Nixon: Settlers Creek 
Nixon's 2010 novel about the financial crisis and a family crisis in New Zealand, translated by the publisher Stefan Weidle. Who also named his publishing house after himself, it would appear. Originally concentrating on 1920s and 1930s writing, they now also do translations of contemporary fiction from far-flung places – and won last year's Hotlist prize for a rediscovered Russian book. 

David Wagner David Wagner David Wagner!

A triple-luscious serving of top German writer David Wagner today, on the occasion of it being Wednesday. There's my translation of his ode to the Mauerpark now online at Slow Travel Berlin, there's a piece taken from Berlin Triptych now online at Berfrois, and an exciting slice of news: David Wagner has won the super-duper-twenty-thousand-euro Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis, for generally being really good at writing (also my friend Deniz Utlu gets one of their three prizes for emerging writers, says the trade paper Börsenblatt).

I would say that Mr David Wagner owes me a drink. Happy Wagner Wednesday, everyone.

Two Interlocking Pieces by Annett Gröschner

Here are two pieces I've translated by the Berlin writer Annett Gröschner that I think go together. I also think they're excellent.

The first is a short story in a new journal out of Israel, Maaboret. If you fiddle around with the Reader Settings that pop up when you hover over the bottom right-hand corner, you can also find it in the original German and in Hebrew, translated by Gadi Goldberg.

And the second is an essay on a similar subject – gentrification in Berlin – at Slow Travel Berlin. If you ask me, I think you should read both.

Ross Benjamin on German-language Literature in English

At the Goethe Institut's US website, the translator Ross Benjamin has an interesting article on the state of play regarding German books in the English-language world. I agree with almost everything he says – that there have been some great books coming out, that they are each a tiny blow against parochialism, that it's hard to get translations published, and that when they are published some editors want them to be exactly like non-translated books so as to satisfy an imaginary lowest common denominator.

But there's one thing I see differently, and that's the reviews situation. Ross laments "the relative paucity of reviews or other media attention they manage to attract (due to the above-mentioned disadvantages plus the automatic ethnocentrism of Anglo-American literary culture) and the shortage of critics 'who can say something informed about the quality of the translation' (as David Dollenmayer notes). This set of circumstances seriously impedes the capacity of translated literature to gain a broad readership in the English-speaking world."

This may well be true of the US, but I think it's changing in the UK. Perhaps it's my personal social media bubble, but I'm seeing a lot of reviews of translated fiction in the British media. Three of the pieces in the latest London Review of Books cover translated books, and at least six of the books advertised in its pages are translations. The Guardian and the Independent regularly report on and review books not written in English. International writers are invited to the big literary festivals in Edinburgh and Hay. Prizes that include or focus on translated fiction get major coverage. I'm seeing bloggers and tweeters and critics who are no longer shying away from international fiction because they fear they can't say anything informed about it. Instead, they're embracing it and enjoying discovering and sharing it. I'm seeing macho-tinged hype about macho-tinged writers, but I'm also looking forward to a campaign about reading women in translation. Translated fiction, in certain circles, is hip. And being an incurable optimist, I don't think it's a passing fad either.

Yes, we have grounds for complaint, as Ross lays out in his article. But let's work to get our books the coverage they deserve in a positive way. I genuinely believe things are getting better on the media attention front, at least in the UK.  

The Oxford Weidenfeld Prize and Oxford Translation Day

My old friend and colleague Steph Morris just wired this in...

(Deputy Blog Agency reporting from the UK)

When Isabel Cole, my chum and fellow translator-and-writer, said she was on the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize shortlist for her rendering of Franz Fühmann’s Das Judenauto (The Jew Car, Seagull), couldn’t go to the prize ceremony, and had been asked to provide either a representative or a recording, I was flattered to be her preferred option – some US and Canadian translators on the shortlist sent entertaining video and audio messages. All I had to do was read from Isabel’s fine translation and introduce the book. The best bit was that not being Isabel I could also blow her trumpet. Which I did. Although I helped edit this translation, and saw it in an earlier draft, I was still mightily impressed by its fluidity and poetry. It was a joy to read. Isabel has earned this approbation after years of dedication to literature, with her many translations of fascinating (largely dead) authors for Seagull (hooray for them too). In the excitement I forgot to mention setting up No Mans Land, a huge achievement, but did mention the fact that she also writes – with a book out recently – a significant aspect, at least to me. (Isabel gave me some of the best feedback I received on my own manuscript and has a keen eye for fiction.) Having read The Jew Car in original too, I described what I think is special about the novel. The ironic voice on the one hand, evoking the perspectives both of naive young Nazi Franz and of post-war socialist Franz as he wrote, with humour as well as horror; and the un-heroic, anticlimactic dramatisation of ‘monumental’ events before, during and after the Second World War, with the focus on everyday, mundane details which makes the storytelling all the more convincing – refreshing and important in the context of the grotesque Schinken we’ve been subjected to recently: Nazi period dramas which buy into all the clichés and codes of Hollywood. Sorry rant over! (Well this is a blog...)

So, the winner was... not Isabel, it was Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s poems – and there were two other poetry collections in the shortlist, plus a novel partly written in verse. As I was at pains to stress to Isabel on the phone, shortly afterwards, the judges were at pains to stress that the shortlist was as important as the winner, demonstrating this by each enthusing on stage about the books they particularly liked. In fact Susan declined to say anything herself on receiving the prize, nor did Matthew, MC, jury head and prize organiser, so the ceremony was also somewhat un-heroic. Luckily the principle of St Anne’s college toasted her over dinner. Oh yes, there was dinner, and fine wine (thanks Isabel, thanks St Anne’s!).

Susan is a Bloodaxe poet, and a Faber author, when not translating; like everyone who was at the dinner she was clearly someone who loved words and takes them seriously. As someone whose first degree was in ‘colouring in’ I found dining with a posse of top academics surprisingly relaxing, conducive and not in the least threatening. But not only was there dinner, more enticing to a thinny like me was the Rahmenprogramm. The prize ceremony was the climax of ‘Oxford Translation Day’, a festival of workshops, readings and talks spread over, erm, two days which reminded me of the VdÜ’s Wolfenbüttel gathering. Readers of this blog will be familiar with what goes on there. I attended a workshop on poetry writing, my new medium, run by English PEN, using poems in translation as the inspiration. Check the programme. Ok back to your regular blogger, that’s all from me.

Book Translation Life Cycle

People sometimes ask me how a book ends up in translation, and it's sometimes hard to explain. So I was pleased to see Publishing Trendsetter's infographic on the lifecycle of a book in translation. It's focused more on books moving from the US to other languages, but it applies to some extent to books going from other languages into English. Plus they have a few interesting little videos with players in that cycle, including with German-English translator Marshall Yarbrough.

I'd say in the other direction, for example German to English, you can strike literary scouts out of the equation and put translators in their place, because part of our role is pointing editors to German books. Also, there's a big overlap between translators and the readers who write reports for editors.

Interestingly, the American writer Kristin Harmel talks about trying make sure her books have universal appeal - Tim Parks will be pleased - but also says the money she makes out of foreign rights sales varies widely and isn't all that big a factor for her.

Birgit Vanderbeke: The Mussel Feast

As you no doubt know, Birgit Vanderbeke’s novella The Mussel Feast is shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, in Jamie Bulloch’s translation. It was first published in German in 1990, and apparently can be read as an allegory for the collapse of the East German state. I know that because the text is standard reading at high-school level, so there is plenty of material available on it. Also, Lizzy’s Literary Life has interviews with the author, the translator and the publisher, Meike Ziervogel of Peirene Press, which I found very interesting.

I read the book in a couple of hours, and you should set aside an afternoon to read it in one go – although not more, as it’s only 100 pages long. The reason being that the outstanding thing about the novella is the way it builds tension. We begin with an apparently nondescript family awaiting the father’s return home from a business trip. What makes them stand out is that they’re originally from East Germany and left for the West – presumably before the border was closed in Berlin, although this wasn’t quite clear to me. And the mother makes mussels because that’s what the father likes best, although at the beginning neither mother nor daughter “much care for them”.

But the father doesn’t turn up and his wife, son and daughter end up criticizing first the mussels, which they admit to finding disgusting as the evening proceeds, and then the authoritarian father. The details of his iron rule emerge in a long monologue narrated by the 18-year-old daughter, and the tense atmosphere as they get drunk waiting for his dreaded return is wonderfully rendered. I admired the way Bulloch kept the weighty feeling of Vanderbeke’s original long sentences, without keeping quite all the length – that’s a tricky thing to do. I think there are times when it’s important to keep German sentences at their death-defying lengths in translations, but here readability came first. That seems like a wise choice.

In the end we witness a turning point, the kind that makes you jump because the tension is so high. Vanderbeke won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the piece, her debut. What troubled me, however, was that I found the characters rather one-dimensional. Perhaps more nuanced characters would weigh down a short text unnecessarily – or perhaps the allegory is something that requires one-dimensional characters. If it worked for Brecht, maybe it works for Vanderbeke too. The allegorical reading is rather imposed upon us by the jacket copy:

'I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.' Birgit Vanderbeke

Sadly, I found the story – or perhaps the comparison – rather too simple and almost patronising in the light of all we know about the complexities of the East German revolution, almost twenty-five years on. I think I'd have enjoyed it more at face value.

I certainly don’t regret reading the book, though, and I wish the team behind it well for the big prize.

Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize

The publishing house Harvill Secker runs an annual award for translators between the ages of 18 and 34, working from a different language every year. And this year it's German! The winner gets a mentorship from top translator Shaun Whiteside and a thousand pounds and what looks like a trip to a festival in Den Haag, which probably makes sense in a way I don't quite grasp.

Funnily enough, to enter you have to translate Julia Franck's short story "Der Hausfreund", which I once translated for fun back when I was (possibly) under 35. It's an inspired choice because it's really difficult. You don't seem to have to come from a particular country but you must not have previously translated more than one full-length work.

It's all pretty darn fantastic, so I expect all you whippersnappers to participate. 

Thomas Meinecke: Pale Blue

Thomas Meinecke says of himself that he's a male fag-hag. A gay friend of mine is a Thomas Meinecke-hag. His gender-bending novel Tomboy was apparently a very big deal for my friend. So I decided to read the other of his novels that has been translated into English, Pale Blue. Because I didn't want the pressure of wanting to like a novel because a friend of mine adores it so strongly. I can't explain my choice any better than that.

Pale Blue I can like on my own terms. It's sort of about a German man called Tillmann, a.k.a. Venus, who is writing a theoretical something about music and politics in North Carolina and gets together with a Jewish-American woman called Vermillion, who is writing a theoretical something about ultra-orthodox Jews in New York and femininity. I think. And there's a woman in Berlin called Cordula, who is co-writing the thing with Tillmann and likes deep-sea diving, and is his ex but is now with Heinrich, who is doing something else academic. And then there's Yolanda in Chicago, who's friends with them all and is sort of involved in a three-way exchange of music and discussion with the other two places. And the music is techno but also jazz, and sometimes the musicians are Black and sometimes they're Jewish and sometimes they're "Jewish white Negroes" and sometimes they're Mariah Carey who is Black but isn't. Some of the techno music is radically political underground techno and I don't understand very well how that works other than it's not on major labels and it has messages scratched into the vinyl. One of the jazz musicians is Slim Gaillard, who wrote a dictionary of jive language. My dad met him once. And there are lots of old German submarines sunk off the coast of North Carolina, which divers like to explore. And Ford employed forced labourers in Nazi Germany and ought to pay them compensation; those that survived.

That's what happens. Tillmann and Cordula and Yolanda do their thing and exchange emails and talk about cultural phenomena and Tillmann wears an African tunic that looks like a dress and there's a big storm and they go to visit Williamsburg and look at Jewish people and Cordula comes to visit and then George W. Bush probably gets elected and that's the end. It's hard to tell their voices apart and there's no tension whatsoever and I understood very little of the techno stuff, except for the part when a major label re-records a track in identical form using different musicians and tries to sell it and everyone gets angry. But I found the book totally absorbing. I dipped in most nights and even found I could read it a little bit drunk, which doesn't usually work, because there was no need to remember the plot. I read it very slowly indeed but it still worked.

It worked because I was really interested in the three-way conversation. I was fascinated by the concept of the "Jewish white Negro" in jazz, by white people – well, not "passing" but assimilating themselves into Black culture through music, and by the idea that after WWII, it was no longer Jews but other working-class white boys like Elvis and the Beatles who emulated Black music. And I enjoyed the gentle gender fun between Tillmann and Vermillion, who does his hair and gives him a girl's name and thinks about orthodox Jewish men who can't work because they're studying the Torah so their wives earn the family's living, wearing wigs.

And it worked because we have the internet. Because I could pick up the characters' leads and follow them and look up the music and listen to it at the same time as they did, in my head. Because I could look up the political subjects and see what's happened since 1999, when the book is set. That makes it dated; the characters are sending scans of articles and CDs and letters between each other, which feels almost archaic. I'd like the book to be electronic itself, with links to further reading and with the quotes – there are many, and they're long – highlighted more clearly, and with a soundtrack and pictures of submarines and beaches and New York and the Love Parade and the Robert Taylor Homes. I'd like to imagine the translator, Daniel Bowles, as the central point of an impossible circle of material, all those artefacts splayed out around him in mid-air as he researches the novel. Like a scene out of Matrix with that frozen time effect, only the other way around so that all the months of hard work are visualized in a single moment. I think he did a great job; the English feels fluid but never dull, never stilted but still non-conformist.

And I like the title, the way it resonates with Lou Reed and Rudolf Virchow's plain-speaking scientific proof of the 1880s that there are no differences between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans in terms of skin, hair and eye colour. And at the same time with the colour of Vermillion's jacket and the colour of the sea. And I like the way it picks up or maybe negates a lot of the novel's obsessions with skin colour and identity, making "race" a movable, subtle thing, a thing without a plot of its own, like gender seems to be here too at times. I remember a boy in my class at school whose parents came from Pakistan, and he had pale blue eyes, the very palest I've seen, and very long eyelashes.

So it's not, you know, a well-constructed novel. You don't want to give it to your auntie for Christmas. But you might like to read it yourself, the way you'd spend a rainy day moving from one thing to the next on the internet, coasting. You'd like that.

Momo Rediscovered

I missed this entirely when it was new, but McSweeney's have brought out a new translation of Michael Ende's forty-year-old children's classic, Momo. It's beautifully illustrated by Marcel Dzama, but what I like best about it is the backstory.

According to a piece in German trade mag Buchreport, 22-year-old Lucas Zwirner knew and loved the book because his German dad used to read it to him as a kid. So he sat down over the summer of 2009 and translated it. I'm not sure whether that means he was 18 when he did it. But either way it's delightful. Zwirner talks about what happened next in a very interesting interview on the McSweeney's website:

Marcel was amazing. I contacted him the summer I finished the translation and he agreed to read it. He liked it and said he would do drawings for it. Once he agreed, I got really excited about the project because it seemed like it might actually happen. Then (surprise, surprise) it took me almost three years to find a publisher. After a number of rejections, Marcel and I got McSweeney’s McMullens involved and despite the long delay, Marcel still agreed to do the drawings. Ende originally did drawings for the book, images that were built into the text. So there were a few drawings—the final drawing of the turtle and the drawing of the children with the posters—that Marcel had to put in because of how Ende wrote the book. But other than that, he had complete freedom. He drew whatever he found interesting or moving. And he did it in his own style, which is exactly what I was hoping for. He has given us a part of his own imaginative process in those images—what he saw when he read the book—and the results are captivating.

It sounds like it was a labour of love all round. My daughter loved the book too, read to her by her own German dad from a strange bootleg paperback from his own childhood. I know what it's about because they made a cartoon series of it that drove me round the bend several years ago. Momo, as far as I recall, turns up out of nowhere with a clever tortoise and makes the world a better place, except that these men in grey are out to make everything more efficient by stealing time. You can see how that might make for an annoying TV series, but I assume the book is less saccharine.

The German original has been re-released in a new hardcover and a retro edition – aimed squarely at parents who once loved it themselves. Michael Ende died in 1995 and is revered pretty much universally in Germany. He came from an artistic family and volunteered as a courier for the resistance in Munich as a teenager at the end of the war. Then he wrote political satire for cabarets and studied Brecht, which plunged him into a creative crisis. Someone asked him to write a picture book for children, which seemed like a good way to escape Brecht's doctrine, and the result turned into the two books Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer and Jim Knopf und die Wilde 13, published in 1960 and 1962. From then on he was a star, wrote plays and moved to Italy and then in 1979 published Die unendliche Geschichte – the film adaptation of which, The NeverEnding Story, was a defining moment in many an eighties childhood. I saw it twice, so it helps me to remember when my parents separated.

Jim Knopf has not aged well, in my opinion. Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver was last published in Anthea Bell's translation in 1990, as far as I can find out, and is now fetching about $300 for used editions. During the recent bust-up over racism and changing language in children's fiction in Germany, the books were held up as a shining example of how it's perfectly OK to use the N-word. Ende was indeed an anti-racist and the Jim Knopf stories are parables about how wrong Nazi racial ideology was, as Julia Voss wrote in an excellent FAZ article. Nevertheless, Ende was writing in the late 1950s, in a Germany that was very different to the way it is now, and the very fact that Jim is black and everyone else he meets is not must make the reading experience strange for today's children. Yes, Ende meant well, but he wrote about his abandoned black boy in the language of the 1950s, with all its attendant horrors. Or perhaps it was the dreadful cartoon series that put me off Jim Knopf too.

Whatever the case, I think it's very sweet that Ende's latest translator may well have been named after one of his characters, good old earthy Lukas the train driver.