Making of... The King of China

So I have a new book out (she says casually): The King of China by Tilman Rammstedt. We had a fabulous event to launch it, if I do say so myself, attended by very nearly fifty people. I certainly enjoyed it and I think some of the others did too.

As I've written before, I intend to write a little making-of piece here in lieu of a translator's note whenever a book I've translated comes out. It seems like a useful thing to make available on the internet. Please feel free to crib from it if you're writing a review. So here we go.

Tilman and I first met officially when we were both involved in a panel discussion in Berlin. It wasn't a very good panel discussion. It was about why so few German books get translated into English, and was one of those chest-beating occasions on which Germans blame the complexity of their literature for the fact that British and American publishers don't translate it. Whereby they are both a) misjudging the Anglophone market, as in fact German is the second-most translated language for novels, it's just that there's not much translation as a whole, and b) actually showing off about the complexity of their literature. Sadly, I was too nervous to say this in public at the time. What Tilman said on that panel, however, was that he didn't really want to be translated all that badly, didn't really care either way. When I mentioned this at our launch event on Saturday he commented that it sounded a terribly immature thing to say; but it was about four years ago, and it was one of the more interesting comments made on that panel. In any case, I read Der Kaiser von China in preparation for that panel and enjoyed it very much indeed.

What happened next was down to the foreign rights person at Tilman's publishing house DuMont, Judith Habermas. Like many of the people whose job is selling translation rights, Judith is a bit of a whirlwind, in the most charming way. Judith talked to the publisher I work with a lot, Seagull Books, and recommended Der Kaiser von China. Seagull liked the look of it and asked me about it and I was very enthusiastic about the idea, and the deal was practically done.

And so I sat down to translate the novel. There were two main challenges: the very special rhythm throughout the book and the travel-guide tone in the letters the protagonist Keith writes to his family, pretending to be in China. The latter was easily overcome because Tilman had used the Lonely Planet guide to China as a source, and simply lent me his English copy. At the beginning of the novel there are a couple of short phrases lifted verbatim, which I found with little difficulty and transcribed into my own version. As the plot moves on the letters become increasingly fictional, with more and more bizarre imaginary details, but having worked with the guidebook to begin with, I had found the tone by that point. Recreating the rhythm was a question of listening carefully to the original sentences, trying not to chop too many of them down to size, and being brave enough to allow my English versions to run on and on until they reached their sometimes punchline-like climax or anti-climax. Tilman disapproves of the word punchline in this context, I believe, but I think it fits if you don't take it too literally.

The last issue was the title. If you pay attention to such things you'll have noticed it's not a literal translation. The German Kaiser is of course an emperor, and of course that's what they had in China, not kings. There were several reasons why the title was changed, in the end. Firstly, it refers to a bit of wordplay that crops up in the plot, which I tried to rescue in English by tweaking it slightly. Having found a solution I could live with, it seemed to work rather well as a title because it reflected the main character's slapdash attitude to facts and also the book's all-round kookiness. And the other excuse I found was when talking to an American book rep, my friend George Carroll. He said it would be excellent to have a title that wasn't already taken, so that when people looked up the book they would find it immediately. And The King of China wasn't already taken. I told Tilman we'd changed the title when we were both a bit tired and emotional towards the end of the launch of his most recent novel, Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters. He nodded and seemed untroubled by the idea.

I hope you enjoy the book.

Drinking with... Thomas Meinecke

Last week I went out drinking with the unconventional German writer Thomas Meinecke, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Read about it here.

Isabel Cole on Surveillance

Regular readers will know that the writer and translator Isabel Cole is a long-standing partner in crime for me. We co-edit no man's land and co-host the no man's land literary translation lab, and we are often seen in cahoots over various other undertakings. She's been a great inspiration to me over the many years I've known her now.

So it's with a decent amount of pride and of course prejudice that I'd like to call your attention to two things Isabel has done recently. The first takes its starting point with a report in Words Without Borders on the genesis and progress of the writers' anti-surveillance appeal A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age. It's heartening to see so many writers and readers coming together behind an important issue, and I know Isabel and the other initiators have put in months and months of hard work towards it. Please read her article and sign the petition, if you haven't done so already.

The second thing ties in so well with the first that I can't let it go unmentioned. Isabel also has an ebook out with Mikrotext, Ungesichertes Gelände. It's an epistolary love novella set amongst political activists, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Informed – almost inevitably because she is his translator – by the work of East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, it is dark and wintry and heart-wrenching and quite the most intelligent and simultaneously beautiful and radical thing I've read in a long time. Isabel writes very precisely in German, not fulfilling that almost Orientalist cliché about exophonic writers adding "spice and sparkle" to their host language.

I can't write a proper review because I'm too biased, but the novella costs less than three euros so you can judge for yourself at the drop of a hat. Please do.

The International Jo Lendle Appreciation Society

A number of my female friends and I have founded an International Jo Lendle Appreciation Society. We meet up to discuss writer and publisher extraordinaire Jo Lendle, including his wit and humour, his intelligent charm and politeness, his attractive physique and his all-round cuteness. It is a little-known fact that writer and publisher extraordinaire Jo Lendle was once voted second-most attractive editor in the German publishing world. We are thinking of campaigning for a recount. We also exchange devotional items such as locks of hair, napkins used by writer and publisher Jo Lendle, and signed notes.

Although our organization has hitherto been of a strictly underground nature, the newspapers appear to have got wind of it. The FAZ has kindly provided us with a four-page interview, in which writer and publisher extraordinaire Jo Lendle says, among many other wise things, that he will publish more books by women in his new post as head of Hanser Verlag. Also, he likes to read blogs and thinks they should be taken more seriously. Next time, FAZ, we want more photos.

I think we can all agree that Hanser have made an excellent choice. Now all they need to do is relocate to one of the cities represented in the International Jo Lendle Appreciation Society, and at least one of our members will be very happy indeed. The others will try very hard not to scratch her eyes out.

Update: Jo Lendle did that thing at Fünfbücher.de where you have to name your five favourite books. And would you look at that: they're all by women. If the list was part of an online dating profile, the International Jo Lendle Appreciation Society would snap him up straight away.

Reading Boosts Your Brain? No Thanks.

People keep drawing my attention to the idea that books are in some way good for you. The latest is this Independent piece on how reading books "may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory." The suggestion being that reading fiction can "transport you into the body of the protagonist."

Two things, briefly: Firstly, if that's what happens when you merely read a novel, imagine what happens when you translate it. Translators spend several months inside the bodies of their protagonists – and pity the poor authors, who may spend years trapped in there. Maybe this explains why I like translating sex scenes so much, but also why translating books with profoundly gloomy protagonists may be less fun than chick-lit, for instance. We're suffering for our art.

And secondly but more importantly: Can we not just read novels because we enjoy it? Can we not do it without becoming better, more intelligent, more empathetic people? Must I always be giving my brain some kind of a workout? Can literature please be about pleasure rather than self-improvement in specific terms?

I may come back to these thoughts.

 

Lilo, Nelly und ich

Last year I translated Christa Wolf's final short story, "August". During and after the translation process, I wrote about it in English, and then I offered the piece to the German magazine Merkur and they took it. My friend Ina Pfitzner translated it into German, and now you can read it in the print edition or in fact download my essay for free. I hope it'll be somewhere in English at some point. The book comes out in February.

Our Survey* Says: Men Will Not Admit to Reading Books by Women

So there's this, erm, dating website, which, you know, a friend of mine signed up to. And you set up a profile - I mean, my friend set up a profile - and you can include all kinds of stuff but one of the things is what books, films, music, etc. you like. And what kind of food, which I find a bit odd but maybe it's to prevent cucumber-haters falling for cucumber-lovers, because nobody wants that, do they?

Anyway, I have been thinking about the whole men-not-reading-women thing and the women-not-getting-reviewed thing (which I suspect are related phenomena), especially in the light of Matt Jakubowski's resolution to only read books by women. A cursory Monday-evening web search has not turned up any reliable statistics on the extent to which men don't read women, but I do rather like this piece on the W&N blog looking at what the reasons might be.

So while I my friend was browsing the catalogue of single, straight men in Berlin aged between 35 and 45, I my friend was focusing quite closely on what books the men listed in their profiles. For obvious reasons but also with an eye on the gender of the writers. Now I have no idea how many of the damn things I she went through but one thing became clear very, very quickly: single, straight men in Berlin aged between 35 and 45 are damn well not going to admit to reading books by women.

Here are the women writers listed by the study sample:
Sylvia Plath
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Toni Morrison
Virginia Woolf
Angela Carter 
Ursula LeGuin (twice)
JK Rowling (twice, although the subjects actually referred to her character, but let's try not to judge)

Here are the male writers listed by the study sample:
Graham Greene 
TC Boyle
Stanislav Lem
Thomas Bernhard
Max Frisch
Philip Roth
Sven Regener
Javier Marias
Henrik Ibsen
Walter Benjamin
JD Salinger
Marcel Proust
Stefan Zweig
George Orwell
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Theodor Adorno
Jack Kerouac
Mikhail Bulgakov
Rainald Goetz
Neil Gaiman
David Foster Wallace
Chuck Palahniuk
Michel Houellebecq
Raymond Carver
Oscar Wilde
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Albert Camus
Anton Chekhov
Charles Bukowski (twice)
Hermann Hesse (twice)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (twice)
Miguel de Cervantes (twice)
Haruki Murakami (twice)
Milan Kundera (twice)
Paulo Coelho (twice)
Franz Kafka (three mentions)

Now listen, I'm aware that people don't tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on online dating profiles. And you wouldn't want to put down some totally obscure writer because  nobody likes a clever dick. And maybe non-single men or men in other cities and other age groups or with other sexualities are all digging into Jane Austen and Judith Butler like crazy. But isn't it fascinating? Only nine out of shitloads of men admit to reading books by women!

I hope the study sample doesn't read this en masse and get upset. I mean, guys, read whatever you like, even Coelho. The solution, it seems to me, is for the women of Berlin to bombard their (straight, single) male friends and acquaintances (in Berlin, between 35 and 45) with books written by women, so that a) they read them in the first place and b) they get a tacit message that women find books by women sexy. Thank you. 

*Not strictly scientific

Update: my friend has left the dating site. She found it troubling to "rate" people out of five, especially based on a very limited self-description that tended to make everyone, herself no doubt included, seem either utterly banal and uninteresting or borderline psychiatric cases. Plus the men she liked didn't like her back, and the algorithm suggested she ought to make contact with someone who listed Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book. And don't say 'At least it's by a woman'.