Jessa Crispin and I discuss the above at Bookslut. The picture dictionary, just in case it gets you wondering, is the Duden-Oxford Bildwörterbuch (Mannheim, 1994) and is a very useful tool for translators with some fascinating illustrations of car engines, church architecture and the human body, all painstakingly labelled in two languages.
If you own a copy, I recommend a look at pp. 552-553 for the most hilarious drawings of a nightclub you'll ever see. My, how we laughed.
Friday, 7 May 2010
How Berlin Is That?
Thursday, 6 May 2010
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.
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.
Yes!
Loyal readers may have noticed I felt a certain affinity to Helene Hegemann's novel Axolotl Roadkill. And perhaps the odd person thought: Hey, she's a translator, she could put it into English so the rest of us can read it.
And yes! That's exactly what I'm going to do! I'm going to roll up my sleeves and confront those blackouts, sweaty T-shirts and ten different illegal drugs head on. I'm going to revel in the gorgeous language, feel my way into fucked-up Mifti like a first-class voyeur and - I hope - enjoy every minute of it.
By way of method translation, I shall continue to love my parents and dress in a stylish manner, as Hegemann recommends. I won't be going to Berghain because my body clock's all wrong for that kind of partying. But I've already started eavesdropping on conversations to find out how clubgoing people really talk - not that the book makes any claim to authenticity, which is one of the things I like about it. I'm also rather grateful for the detailed list of sources, something a translator usually has to use guesswork to get around.
Look out for the book in the UK next year from Constable & Robinson. US publishers have yet to take the bait, I believe.
It's a real privilege to translate a novel like this that I'm genuinely enthusiastic about, and I'm hugely excited about it. Feel free to congratulate me.
And yes! That's exactly what I'm going to do! I'm going to roll up my sleeves and confront those blackouts, sweaty T-shirts and ten different illegal drugs head on. I'm going to revel in the gorgeous language, feel my way into fucked-up Mifti like a first-class voyeur and - I hope - enjoy every minute of it.
By way of method translation, I shall continue to love my parents and dress in a stylish manner, as Hegemann recommends. I won't be going to Berghain because my body clock's all wrong for that kind of partying. But I've already started eavesdropping on conversations to find out how clubgoing people really talk - not that the book makes any claim to authenticity, which is one of the things I like about it. I'm also rather grateful for the detailed list of sources, something a translator usually has to use guesswork to get around.
Look out for the book in the UK next year from Constable & Robinson. US publishers have yet to take the bait, I believe.
It's a real privilege to translate a novel like this that I'm genuinely enthusiastic about, and I'm hugely excited about it. Feel free to congratulate me.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Alternative Entertainment on Election Night
If you're in London or thereabouts, you could do worse than heading to the Goethe Institut on Thursday. The British critic Erica Wagner (The Times) meets the German Christopher Bartmann (SZ, FAZ) in the first of an intriguing new series assessing the literary agenda in Britain and Germany and the changing role of the critic.
Details are here.
Details are here.
Passages on Translation
The Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia publishes the magazine passages, which you can download as a pdf here. The latest issue is all about the art of literary translation - including intelligent pieces on Robert Walser and other Swiss writers in the rest of the world, the difficulties of translating picture books between cultures, and how Coca Cola and chewing gum morphed into a glut of translations out of English - in an article that gets rather bleak as it goes on. And I rather like the photos acting out various sayings from around the world.
Monday, 3 May 2010
Helene Speaks
She's been hounded by the press, she's spawned her very own neologism for lifting pieces of text, she's cancelled appointments and appearances – and now she's written a long piece in DIE ZEIT addressed at her critics. I've read it once and the article is still languishing beside my bed, her face gazing reproachfully up at me every night until I get round to re-reading it.
Helene Hegemann's certainly not afraid to voice her emotions, and I'm struck once again by the way her words are so similar to the diction of the novel all the fuss has been about, Axolotl Roadkill. Here's what she says about the whole matter:
Something I never concealed – the fact that a number of sentences in my book – a number not unusual in literature over the past centuries – were once written in similar form elsewhere became a full-blown opportunity to 1. not take me seriously, 2. insult me and 3. parade the wildest speculations as proven facts. "A few sentences" blew up into "numerous passages" and in the end 90 percent of the book that I had allegedly copied from the internet. Many journalists I communicated with during this time refused – whether their articles were intended to attack me or defend me – to include what is actually the most important fact: that the passages referred to as plagiarism (not copied but modified and placed in an entirely different context) amount to approximately one single page out of 206.
It's well worth reading for a taste of Hegemann's inimitable style and a reminder that what she did was not a deadly sin - and that the reactions went well overboard. Oh, and why all kids don't have to hate their parents, and why all 18-year-olds aren't the same, and how to deal with people throwing darts at your photo.
Helene Hegemann's certainly not afraid to voice her emotions, and I'm struck once again by the way her words are so similar to the diction of the novel all the fuss has been about, Axolotl Roadkill. Here's what she says about the whole matter:
Something I never concealed – the fact that a number of sentences in my book – a number not unusual in literature over the past centuries – were once written in similar form elsewhere became a full-blown opportunity to 1. not take me seriously, 2. insult me and 3. parade the wildest speculations as proven facts. "A few sentences" blew up into "numerous passages" and in the end 90 percent of the book that I had allegedly copied from the internet. Many journalists I communicated with during this time refused – whether their articles were intended to attack me or defend me – to include what is actually the most important fact: that the passages referred to as plagiarism (not copied but modified and placed in an entirely different context) amount to approximately one single page out of 206.
It's well worth reading for a taste of Hegemann's inimitable style and a reminder that what she did was not a deadly sin - and that the reactions went well overboard. Oh, and why all kids don't have to hate their parents, and why all 18-year-olds aren't the same, and how to deal with people throwing darts at your photo.
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