Gewöhnliche Leute

Back when I was peniless, I had a bit of a thing about junkshop books. You can root out some wonderful things in those boxes of books that once belonged to unpopular relatives and haven't yet been snapped up by antiquarian booksellers. And there are still certain parts of East (and West) Berlin where junkshops thrive. I used to pass one on the way to work, and brought many a hardback home with me at the end of a long day. I have a beautiful collection of Anna Seghers' works, for example, all in different bindings and editions. I bet that surprised you.

Much of what you find is books once cherished, and then almost literally thrown away when their owner dies. And of course in East Berlin, that means revolutionary adventures, socialist realism and real-life espionage. Kim Philby, Ruth Werner, John Reed, Bruno Apitz, Dieter Noll... So I like to think I'm slightly acquainted with East German literature.

Now I earn a bit more than a pittance I can afford to buy new books, and being cooped up all day translating with not a junkshop in sight has put a stop to my mania (or that particular one at least). And then along came Werner Bräunig's Rummelplatz. This is an amazing book, a force to be reckoned with, and the sample text you can find under that link is the translation I am most proud of. Ever. Bräunig's voice is by turns angry and conciliatory, comparing the Baltic Sea with a paper manufacturing plant, describing drunken nights and hardworking days, an ambitious proto-feminist and a frustrated working-class hero. He veers between stream of consciousness and almost documentary descriptions of working processes, scattering in liberal doses of literary and cultural references. And it's all so gripping. Of course, it presses all the requisite buttons - the Bildungsroman with the bourgeois professor's son turning to Communism, the Youth Brigade's hard work for the young republic, etc. etc. But what's exciting about it is that Bräunig had the guts to express criticism of the system, albeit in some of his characters' ideas. Of course that, and the ostensibly negative portrayal of the working class, got the book banned before publication in 1965. It came out for the first time in 2007.

And now the publishers have brought out a volume of his short stories, Gewöhnliche Leute. It includes seven previously published stories (from 1969 and 1971) and five unpublished texts, plus a long and informative article on Bräunig's life and work after Rummelplatz was rejected. And it's not just interesting from a historical point of view, although that is one fascinating side to it. It's one of those books I had to read with a sharp pencil at hand to underline all the wonderful bits that made me laugh with joy, all the covert criticism and all the stuff that made me want to go back to university and write about "The Role of Women in..."

It starts with an absolutely beautiful, affectionate portrait of locals in a pub. This is the only piece where the author is "audibly" present, but relates to several of the other stories. Set in a suburb of Leipzig, the narrator muses on how important our own street is to us. I say "us" and I mean that, but on the other hand the whole of the book is at pains to address East Germans directly, which I found quite touching really. Ironically, this song of praise to a cobbled street and its close-knit residents is followed by stories about men and women building high-rise housing estates. Or moving to them, or both. The ordinary people of the title. Still well written, these struck me as slightly disappointing for their tone of contented resignment. Gone is the anger, gone the frustration, gone the ambition. The last published piece tells the story of a man grown old, a good Communist who decides to move out of the street from the opening and into the estate from the second story. Bräunig picks up the final question from his unpublished Rummelplatz -

What remains when a worker dies? His work, all that he created. And the children he brought up and cared for - not just his own. And also this land and the state he leaves it in.

One of the stories stands out - it takes place on the road, not on a building site or in a town. A traveller picks up a young woman standing by the road, and she tells her story. She is an idealist - after all, this is 1968 or thereabouts. She has left her lover and is making her own way around the republic in the pouring rain. The traveller sees parallels with his own life, but she remains an exotic flash of colour in his damp grey world. If you are of a very patient nature, you can read some of it in English here.

Of course the "value-added" is the unpublished material. You can compare various bits of writing that came before and after Rummelplatz and contain much of its material, and have a dark laugh with the author at political jargon. No doubt of much interest to Proper Germanists. But I have to admit I preferred the stories at the front of the book, which I might well have been able to buy at my old junkshop. Bräunig descended into alcoholism and personal crisis and died in 1976, aged 42. I can thoroughly recommend you read his writing, especially if, like me, you never experienced the GDR at first hand.

Exquisite Distraction

I think it's a bit cheap to pick up on things from other sites I admire and repeat them, but today I just can't help it. Three Percent points out a marvellous new invention, the World Literature Forum. A mine of information and opinion, as they say. Must ration my time spent exploring it to outside productive working hours. Must get down to work. Must not read through every single thread.

Mags

My real-life postbox was overflowing with goodies yesterday. Not one but two magazines about German books!

The first is the new New Books in German. It should be available online any day now too. If you don't know this wonderful institution I recommend you go there asap. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 pounds. For it is a magazine - as a the title suggests - all about new German books. In English. Great, eh?

What they do is, they send out loads and loads of books to readers. Not just any old Joe Blog(g)s though, they do select them beforehand. The readers write reports about whether the books are any good - and especially, whether they would work on the English-language market - and then the editors choose which books to feature in the magazine. So while it is run by the Goethe-Institut, which is of course a German institution, it is English-speakers who do the leg-work and much of the decision-making.

That means that the quality of the books featured in nbg is pretty much guaranteed, and several people have sat down and thought about their suitability for translation and publication in Britain or the US. I have heard complaints about a similar initiative from France, and the Literary Saloon points out the failings of a Japanese scheme throwing money at US publishers. The problem seems to be that native speakers of the language in question often can't tell all that well what other cultures value in literature, be it in terms of style or content. But nbg's system seems to work very well indeed - especially judging by the fact that around fifty of the featured titles have been translated into English in the past eleven years.

This issue has a beautiful new look and a new centre-page spread of recently published and forthcoming titles in English. There are about a zillion reviews, including one I'd have written very differently on Jan Böttcher's Nachglühen. I certainly wouldn't have put in the HUGE plot spoiler it contains, although I did come to the same conclusion. Don't read it if you want to actually enjoy the book, that's all I can say.

And the second treat is the German literary magazine Bücher. It's what they call "refreshingly unpretentious". That means not many people admit to reading it, I suspect. It features star authors, runs brief reviews, and is generally accessible without being too irreverent. It almost always contains a free audiobook, which I never get round to listening to. And it covers genre writing, children's books, film adaptations, and generally all those un-intellectual sides of the book world that are often neglected in other publications.

I really enjoy reading it, especially as it has lovely photos. Plus it gives me that buzz of feeling "down with the kids" - or down with the average bookshop customer. I once went to a talk on literary magazines given by an editor from a Berlin publishing house. I can't remember who she was now. Anyway, she didn't include it in her talk, as she said it was only on the market to push certain publishers' products. I'm not sure about that - and I certainly haven't done an analysis by publishing house and positivity of reviews - but it's certainly not afraid to trash the odd book now and then. This issue rips the piss out of Bernhard Schlink's new book and accuses Kirsten Fuchs of using cancer to make her boring story more interesting. Gulp.

I'll leave you with a few words from Rebecca K. Morrison's nbg editorial. She starts off listing the successes of German-language film and theatre in English: The Counterfeiters, The Edge of Heaven, Handke, Brecht and Frisch.

Is the same success paralleled in literature? Curiosity in one genre can go hand-in-hand with an increasing awareness in another and Guardian Hay Festival Director Peter Florence's statement would endorse that: 'It feels like a breakthrough year (for German literature in translation).'

Overly Excitable

I'm feeling tired and emotional after a weekend with too little sleep. Why? Because I decided to jet over to London for the amazing Free the Word! festival organised by International PEN this coming weekend. And that decision left me rather emotionally drained. But never fear - thanks to Grandma's Best Babysitting and School Collection Service (love ya mum!), my family will be in safe hands while I'm away.

What convinced me was the event featuring Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In conversation with the translator Maureen Freely and the writer Elif Shafak, no less. I have to admit, I've seen Ms Özdamar (or is it Ms Sevgi Özdamar - correct me if I'm wrong) reading in Berlin before. She's incredibly entertaining. An experienced actress, she knows how to keep an audience's attention. And she's one of those wonderful authors who have the guts to say, "Please don't take photos while I'm reading, I have a double chin and half-moon glasses. But you're welcome to take some of me posing nicely afterwards."

Her novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn is available in English from Serpent's Tail, translated by Martin Chalmers. She has been one of the few women writing on the "guest worker" experience that so many Turkish immigrants went through in the 1960s, although from an unusual perspective, as she comes from a more educated background than many of those who signed contracts for manual jobs in booming 60s and 70s Germany. And I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Unfortunately, I read it too long ago to tell you anything remotely relevant about it. But what I remember most is the way it captured West Berlin and named names, from the factory where both the protagonist and my mother-in-law worked to the road where the protagonist and my father-in-law lived. But the German and Turkish worlds in those days were so far apart that they almost certainly never met. In the first section, at least, Berlin is a cold, dark place with empty streets swathed in perpetual snow.

So I'll definitely be rereading it over the next few days. Oh, and I'll be going to a couple of seminars at the London Book Fair. But more on those after the fact.

Let's Read Together

I have to warn you: this is hardly new stuff, but I think it's very much worth reading.

My suggestion for this weekend's reading matter is the Supplement to Volume 4 Number 3 of Brunel University's EnterText - an interactive interdisciplinary e-journal for cultural and historical studies and creative work.

Now no chatting at the back there, for this is seriously translation-related. The supplement contains eight papers from the 2004 "Shelving Translation" conference, all about the role of the translated text in Britain today.

A lot of it is theoretical, from a comparison of reviews of translations in Spain, France and the UK to translating intertextuality. But if that's not your idea of fun, you'll find these papers are bracketed by items from translation practitioners: Anthea Bell and Christopher MacLehose, once at Harvill and now in charge of his own translation imprint at Quercus. He writes:

At Harvill I have tried to find a translator of seventy summers or more, scholars for whom high wires over the Niagara were a thing of the past. Why so senior? The translation of the mere language is presumably but a quarter of the work and the more experienced and more deeply read a translator is in the literature of the source language—as well as aware of the day-to-day ways and social and political history—the more readily he or she will recognise the landscape of literary and quotidian memory behind the language, the invisible veins beneath the surface of a text. Joan Tate, the exceptional ambassador for and tireless translator of a whole library of valuable books from Swedish, used to say that vocabulary was no more than a sixteenth part of translation. Guido Waldman, my colleague at Harvill, and himself a very good translator although only in his sixties, did not share all of my convictions about translators and was forever finding young, untried ones, and one after the other they won the best prizes.

Hmmph.

I haven't looked at any of the others yet, but I'll be thinking of you, dear readers, as I settle down to a good long read over the weekend. Enjoy.

Book-Writers' Bookshops

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

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

Cold Cream and Sympathy

Das Magazin is the best magazine in Germany. The women's mags are just as inane as their English-language counterparts, the news magazines are just as biased in various directions, and I don't much look at the top-shelf ones, although there are plenty of them. But Das Magazin stands out from the crowd, covering interesting subjects, showcasing interesting writers, and with the most fascinatingly addictive lonely hearts pages I've ever read.

Founded in 1924, it soon became Germany's most successful illustrated magazine, with Marlene Dietrich gracing the cover before she made it big. It kept going under the Nazis - although the Jewish founding editor was chucked out - by blanking out politics, but was shut down in 1941 "for war reasons". In 1954, Brecht allegedly suggested to the East German authorities that they reintroduce it, in reaction to the masses' apparent longing for glamour and luxury expressed in the 1953 demonstrations. Quite how a glossy magazine could lower the labour quotas, I'm not sure, but it became a great success, and its tradition of publishing nude photography (and the rest of the content) earned it a reputation as the most "sophisticated" East German mag.

After 1989 it kind of vegetated a bit, I have to say. I remember visiting Prague with a group of East German students in the early 1990s, and a blonde beauty read a slightly smutty story out loud from it, to the obvious pleasure of the only man in our group, who publicly sported purple underpants - in fact, either he had several identical pairs or he didn't change them all through the long weekend. But that's beside the point. It's now a very lively publication, and I can thoroughly recommend it. I particularly like the short relationship stories by Kirsten Fuchs, by the way.

This month's edition features an article about the literary translator Christa Schuenke (Shakespeare, John Banville, William Gibson...) by Sophie Diesselhorst. It's a very interesting and no doubt useful introduction to the pleasures and tortures of literary translation. Being an "Eastern" publication, the magazine makes much of her past history in the GDR - what was it like translating when one couldn't visit the countries in question, how did she survive the fall of the wall, etc. And, of course, Christa Schuenke gets a chance to raise the subject of decent pay for literary translators. She says she had thought about translating less "difficult" literature under a pseudonym to pay the rent. But she decided to use her own name, at the threat of spoiling her reputation - so that everybody knows that "you can't exist on what I do."

Good stuff. But the tone of the article does less for the translators' cause, I can't help feeling. The second sentence introduces Schuenke's physical suffering: "And now, after 30 years at her desk, her back is no longer playing along... It is only a matter of time, she says, until her shoulders can no longer bear the burden of responsibility for world literature. And then? What will Christa Schuenke do when she can no longer translate?" We then find out about her poky flat all full of books, her passion for her work, how she goes about it, how she got into it, what she finds fascinating about it - and then it's back to the suffering. Working hard every day of the week, never earning enough to feed a family or save for a pension. Campaigning for better working conditions. "Sacrificing one day a week, one seventh of her precious working time, for voluntary work on behalf of her trade."

I suppose the problem I see here is the way the article tugs at the reader's heartstrings. Of course Christa Schuenke does a great deal for the translators' cause, and as a prominent member of the VdÜ, she can get publicity - like this article - that others can't. And it's great that the translators' association and its work gets a mention too. Yet I can't help feeling that the sympathy vote is not the right way to go about achieving fair pay. Portraying literary translators as a kind of Dickensian clique of long-suffering artists - and thus suggesting we need rescuing by some kind benefactor? - is not exactly empowering, is it?

So while Das Magazin has countered the phenomenon of translator invisibility, it certainly hasn't shown us in entirely the light I would prefer. Despite the three beautiful photos and the attention paid to Christa Schuenke's great talent and experience, it makes much of her problems. The title "Kalte Sahne & Weltliteratur" refers to a not very flattering incident in which she translated "cold cream" rather too literally. And the closing lines are dripping with pathos: "Translators have always been on the short end of the stick. Christa Schuenke will fight on nevertheless - even though she herself will probably never benefit from the outcome of the battle."

What I wish they'd written is how Christa Schuenke deserves decent pay because she contributes to the success of the books she translates. That she is a creative writer and should be paid accordingly, including decent royalties. That book prices and pay in publishing have gone up over the years, but translation rates have remained at a stable and very low level. That the quality of literary translation in general - although not necessarily the work of extremely dedicated individuals like Schuenke - would benefit hugely from being better paid. There is no lack of good arguments - so why fall back on the sympathy vote?