Teenage Kicks on Video

You may recall me making a big song and dance in advance of an event I co-hosted with Slow Travel Berlin. And then it went rather quite afterwards. I hope you didn't think it was a flop because it wasn't – I was elated by how well it went, almost everything went smoothly and I and my on-stage guests Brittani Sonnenberg and Christiane Neudecker all had a great evening. The lovely ACUD Club was packed to the rafters and ran out of chairs, the music was great and I think people had a good night all round.

It's just that it took ages for us to get this video sorted out, not least because it and the whole event involved six people donating their time and effort for free. I'm applying for funding to make it a regular fixture in 2015, so cross your fingers and toes that the people with the money would like to support a salon where German-speaking and English-speaking writers share a stage with me. If it works out it will be called Parallel Lines (so that I can channel Debbie Harry) – a name kindly suggested by someone in the audience.

In the meantime, enjoy. The video's not perfect because our budget was zero. But it should give you an idea of what happened – and just imagine what we could do if we had some money!

A Women's Prize for Translated Books

Since the panel asking "Where are the women in translation?" at this spring's London Book Fair, I have been thinking about how to raise awareness of women writers in translation. Significantly more books by men get translated into English than books by women, and at International Translation Day we held a session to start doing something about that. You can read chair Sophie Mayer's excellent briefing about it on the Free Word website.

There are lots of things we can do. We can review books written by women to help redress the imbalance in review coverage; reviewing books by women in translation will also, ideally, improve translator visibility. We can address funding issues so that translation grants are more evenly distributed, and a working group was formed to do just that. We can look at best practice and acknowledge those publishers who are doing it right. We can address gatekeepers – many of whom, as another working group established, are women: teachers, booksellers, translators, readers, editors. There are already grassroots initiatives promoting writing by women on Twitter, for instance.

What I wanted to do was to establish a prize for women's books in translation. I'm pleased to say that the idea was popular and we formed a working group at the end of the session to try and make it a reality. So let me outline my idea in more detail here and share some of what we talked about on Friday.

I'll start with what Sophie Mayer points out in her briefing notes:

Since its inaugural award in 1996, the Orange Award (now the Bailey’s Women’s Prize) has shown an unerring ability to celebrate and promote emerging writers who are now fixtures in the literary heavens. According to The Bookseller, the Orange Prize is a  proven driver of sales, and libraries that promote the prize reported a reader survey in which 48% of respondents said that they had tried new writers as a result of the promotion, and 42% said that they would try other books by the new authors they had read.

Yet, from its inception, the Award has been controversial, losing its first sponsor (Mitsubishi) and courting criticism from its own judges as well as reviewers and authors. AS Byatt called it ‘sexist… The Orange prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter – which I don't believe in’, although the award does not stipulate gendered subject matter, and has rewarded historical epics, crime thrillers and experimental writing, genres often associated with male writers.

With awards to Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (and to Diane Evans and Irene Sabatini in the short-lived Orange Award for New Writers), Orange juries have also been more attentive to the multiethnic and transnational diversity of Anglophone writing than more established UK literary prizes.  That raises the intriguing possibility of replacing the Orange New Writers award with a Bailey’s Writing in Translation award that continues to extend the prize’s global awareness.

What I am interested in setting up is not a translation prize especially for women writers (or indeed translators); it would not be a sub-category of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which should continue to be awarded to the translated book judged to be the best of the year. The IFFP has never yet been awarded to a woman, almost certainly reflecting the imbalance in submissions. In my view, however, it must continue to consider quality above all other criteria while ensuring that the judges are a balanced mix.

What I want is a women's prize for translated fiction; a little sister to the Bailey's Prize, for instance. It would raise awareness for great women's writing from the non-Anglophone world rather than for great non-Anglophone writing by women. I know that's a subtle distinction but I think it's an important one.

The Bailey's Prize prompts debate every year through its mere existence, and every year people point out that women are still at a disadvantage in publishing. A women's prize for translated books would use exactly the same arguments – except that the translation stage actually amplifies this disadvantage, meaning that significantly fewer books by women are available in translation than books by men. In 2013, about 25-35% of new translated fiction published in the USA (the only figures we have) was written by women.

A women's prize for translated books would highlight those books that do make it through. It would give booksellers, journalists, reviewers, bloggers, tweeters and interested readers a hook and get them arguing and help them to discover diverse writing by women. It would celebrate the work of women writers and their translators. It would reward those publishers who do bring out books by women in translation. I suspect it would even be possible, at this point, to publish a preliminary list of all the books written by women published in translation in the UK in a particular year, before drawing up a longlist and a shortlist. Almost everyone loves a list these days, and book prizes are a useful way of exploiting that mental laziness we all share.

So it's a fairly simple idea because we have a precedent. Now all we have to do is put it into practice. We can do it. And the awards ceremony will be amazing.

Swiss Book Prize Shortlist

It's that time of year again, the day when I realize which German writers are actually Swiss. Nationalities are all nonsense anyway, surely?

Here's the list of five (pardon the bullet points, I seem to be incapable of deleting them):

• Lukas Bärfuss: Koala - man reflects on brother's death and marsupials 
• Dorothee Elmiger: Schlafgänger - group reflects on refugees and borders
• Heinz Helle: Der beruhigende Klang von explodierendem Kerosin - man reflects on philosophy, unhappiness and sex in New York
• Guy Krneta: Unger üs  - man reflects on family in Swiss German dialect
• Gertrud Leutenegger: Panischer Frühling - woman reflects on London and loss in London.
•  
•  
• Jesus, I can't get rid of these bloody bullet points. Anyway,
• (I've decided to embrace them)
• the winner is announced on
• 9 November and gets 
• 40,000 Swiss Francs. 
• That's € 33,000
• or £ 26,000.
•  
•  
• The Helle book and the Elmiger book will both be available in English translation at some point. Elmiger's my favourite, obviously, but I'm a fan of Helle too.   

Olga Grjasnowa: Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe

Here is a novel written exactly and deliberately the way you’re not supposed to write a novel. And yet, or maybe for that very reason, it works, and it had me racing through it at breakneck speed, twice over. Which is why I wrote ages and ages ago that I couldn’t wait to review it and then made you wait all this time – because after first reading it I knew I wanted to read it again so I didn’t write any notes. And now I’ve read it again and yes, it still does everything wrong but there seems to be a little more system to it, and yes, it still works.

I’m most delighted, of course, by a scene very reminiscent of my evening out with Olga Grjasnowa while she was working on the novel. Chapter minus twenty-nine, in case you’re interested. But regardless of that, this is very possibly one of those books that you have to read if you’re interested in the future of writing or indeed non-heteronormative sexuality in Azerbaijan. Because as the title suggests (it translates as: the legal blurriness of a marriage) it’s about relationships, mainly between Leyla and her husband Altay but also between Leyla, Altay and Leyla’s girlfriend Jonoun in Berlin. And then a little bit between Altay and another man in Baku, Farid.

Now look at me avoiding certain words. Those words are: Muslim, Jewish, ex-Soviet, American, Israeli, Azerbaijani, gay, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual, love. The words are contained in the book but the characters don’t apply them to themselves.

Leyla is a ballet dancer from Baku. Altay is a psychologist from Baku. They get married in Moscow because they get along well and they want to get their parents off their backs. Then they move to Berlin to get Moscow off their backs – Leyla the pressure of the Bolshoi, Altay the pressure of his homophobic colleagues. Jonoun comes from all over the place, would like to be an artist, and works behind a bar in Berlin. Normally, it’s the reviewer’s task to compile this type of pithy plot and character descriptions, but in this book the author does it for us. Grjasnowa’s prose is swarming with short, sharp psychological characterizations and one-liners. She tells more than she shows, and her omniscient narrator has a dark, cynical sense of humour.

But she gets away with all that because there are things she shows, and those things are less about her characters than about the world around them. The novel is cleverly structured around a central episode, chapter zero, which is placed at the beginning of the book. Leyla has been arrested in Baku for illegal car racing and is tortured by the police. It’s a scary thing to start with, and the device of singling out that chapter rather than letting it stand for itself might seem heavy-handed if it weren’t for the fact that half of this book is about a thoroughly corrupt and oppressive regime. If you’re going to write a novel set partly in Azerbaijan there’s not much point in being delicate about it.

So before chapter zero, chronologically, comes the countdown to it, the story of Leyla growing up and to some extent Jonoun and Altay too, and the story of Leyla and Jonoun meeting and Jonoun moving in and moving out again, and Leyla going away on her own. We look at their messy lives from the relative stability of Berlin. And after that fulcrum comes the Baku half, which is just as messy and involves a road trip during which Leyla and Jonoun fall thoroughly out of love, leaving Altay to fall for a golden boy who’s built a nest for himself in the regime’s comfortable closet. And then comes the jaded fairytale ending, which Grjasnowa gives away rather with her choice of quote for the second half. And the best thing is: she does it deliberately, I’m sure of it, her narrator being cynical for so many understandable reasons. Really, the only possible reaction on closing the book is a tired laugh, a Woody Allen kind of laugh at how crap the world is. Allen, incidentally, delivers the novel’s first prefacing quote.

There are a few leitmotifs here that don’t quite come to the fore – more birds, some folklore elements that might be more prominent in a different novel or if Grjasnowa’s characters didn’t wave them off with amused disinterest. I almost didn’t notice them on my first reading, so I do wonder if they’re even necessary or don’t just muddy the waters. The way I read Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe, though, is that Grjasnowa is writing against norms and classifications. Her characters are neither bad nor good, neither fish nor flesh, not passionate about much at all, and not really classifiable in society’s preferred terms when it comes to sexuality either (neither Berlin’s preferred terms nor Baku’s, incidentally – there’s an amusing scene when Farid berates Altay for being gay in a Western way, interested in art and film and culture, and shudders at the thought of a gay pride parade).

And it seems to me that Olga Grjasnowa is trying to achieve the same effect with her writing, rebelling against much-repeated creative writing programme wisdoms like “show, don’t tell”. And if you read it like that then it’s funny, despite the depressing subject matter. Like Woody Allen. I assume he, too, is in there to make us feel slightly uncomfortable about sexuality and the family. It works for me.

Franz Friedrich: Die Meisen von Uusimaa singen nicht mehr

Another impressive first novel, this time with a complex structure. And more birds. Are birds as important in other literatures? I can think of four recent or forthcoming German books off the top of my head in which birds are essential to the plot. In this case, it’s the grey-headed chickadee, which debut author Franz Friedrich transfers to a Finnish island (a place I don't think exists in our world). The Uusimaa chickadees no longer sing, you see. And the authorities are concerned this means something has gone wrong, so they evacuate the island and turn it over to ornithologists. At which point a German filmmaker goes to visit in 1997 and makes a nature documentary. We also see a bumbling younger German man, a film student who accidentally destroys the last copy of that film and then leaves a future “Core Europe” in 2017 to travel to Uusimaa himself, and an American academic escaped to Berlin from the hell that is a bankrupt USA. In 2007.

The action skips to and fro like the documentary itself, which is screened, if you like, in the first chapter. Chronological order is for dullards. But we gradually get a patchy impression of what happens in the three characters’ lives and in the world around them. There’s a sense of threat that perhaps looms larger because we don’t quite know how to understand Franz Friedrich’s fictional world; a heavy police presence, accidents, freak weather conditions, strikes and riots, things going missing from archives, people who don’t quite get along. And there’s a lot of exquisite description. At times that slows the novel’s momentum, but I assume that’s deliberate. Taken together, all this does mean you have to concentrate quite hard.

Perhaps because I read it during the Scottish independence referendum campaign, one of the aspects that stood out most to me was the way Friedrich plays with politics and nationality. In the novel’s world, Berlin is expelling foreigners from poorer nations in 2007. That’s nothing new, but the scene in which a bureaucrat tells the American Monika that she’s going to be deported is all the more chilling because we don’t expect the USA to be one of those undesirable countries of origin:

The situation in your country’s bad, I know that, I can even understand you. Do you think I’d want to live in any other country than this one? But the boss is on my back, there are statistics. If I don’t tot up a certain number of returns I’ll lose my job. I have a son, my husband’s severely disabled due to an accident, and I’m supposed to put my existence on the line because your homeland lived above its means for decades?

Later in the book’s chronology, the Germans are the ones in a bad place by dint of their passports, because “Core Europe” has introduced something akin to a basic subsistence payment for all its citizens, who are then free to work voluntarily rather than for wages. And there are other utopias: a summer spent in a hut in a forest, an island that rises from the ocean, stories from the early days of the Soviet Union. But all of them are tainted in some way. Either they’re unsustainable over the winter or they require evacuating or heavy policing; “Core Europe” works because it keeps others out, as far as I understand.

Obliquely, then, Franz Friedrich tells tales that do come together at the last moment. We know from an early point that those birds will start singing again, and he leaves us with at least a moment of hope. I’m very impressed by this novel, which is experimental in all the ways I consider right, but also eminently readable and thought-provoking. And the judges at the Jürgen Ponto Foundation were also impressed, awarding him their €15,000 prize for debut novels.

On Visibility

Something has been niggling away at me from Friday's symposium. One of the panels was on "Translators' Status and Visibility", and was composed of a newspaper book critic, a publishing house editor and a literary translator. And of course the whole room was full of disgruntled translators, who seemed to feel that critics and editors are to blame for translators' lack of status and visibility in Germany. So that made for a rather difficult discussion, I thought. Because yes, as the critic pointed out, there is less and less space for reviews because, as the editor pointed out, fewer and fewer people are reading literature.

So there were a couple of things that irritated me. The first was the assumption in the room that print critics and editors are the only people with any influence over the public's awareness of translators. As I tried to point out but maybe didn't quite manage, there are other people out there, especially on the internet, who are aware of translators' existence and our work. I'm very grateful to the bloggers and online magazine people and tweeters and all those other people on the (Anglophone) internet who help spread the word about our work. There are too many to mention, and I hope the same thing is or will soon be happening in German. And part b of this section of my complaint is that we translators can also do things ourselves to make ourselves more visible, like the Love Your Translator people and Authors and Translators and all the blogging, tweeting, tumblring individual translators out there. Not just that – we can write translator's notes and articles and essays and we can help publicize our books, we can accompany our writers when they read in our countries, and so on. And these things are happening, much more now than ever before, and we are becoming more visible, in Germany and elsewhere, because we're putting ourselves out there, like with the Weltlesebühne and with translation slams and the Bridge Series and other events revolving around just us.

Having said that, I would like to pick holes in a couple of things the panellists said too, seeing as they can't defend themselves. Except maybe in the comments section.

So the critic said, newspapers don't commission reviews of translated books from non-critics, for example Sinologists for Chinese books, because they want critics to be generalists who can build a bridge to the reader. And that means that most reviewers don't feel qualified to comment on translation quality. And I was just sitting there and thinking, well – as the translator on the panel pointed out – online publications don't have spatial limitations, so if I was running a newspaper (let's call it the Utopian Times) I would commission several reviews of the same book (with my unlimited budget): one by a generalist critic, and others by people who know something specific so they can talk about non-general aspects such as translation, plausibility, etc. The same way they get other authors to write fiction reviews, or cardiologists to review non-fiction books about the heart. I might even commission translators to critique translations, if they were very brave. And in fact I don't see any reason why newspaper editors couldn't do exactly the same thing right now, other than "we don't do it that way". Because there are books that get huge long critiques, those event-type books, and why can't you split that half-page review up into two quarter-pages?

But what really got me worked up was what the publishing house editor said about why they don't put translators' names on book covers very often. The reason, she said, was that readers of genre fiction don't care who translated their book. She justified this statement with the example of a German crime writer with a fake French name and biography but obviously no translator's name in the front of the book, because there wasn't a translator. And she said that nobody noticed, ergo: readers don't care. Now first of all, that's a rather speculative assumption, and there was a suggestion from the critic that devoted readers of crime and fantasy actually are interested in their books' translators. But more importantly: even if readers don't care, why should it bother them if you print the translator's name more prominently? You'd make the translators happier, you might even make us take more pride in our work, and you wouldn't bother the readers because they don't care either way, allegedly.

Anyway, that's been preying on my mind for a couple of days and I haven't had any adult company to unload it on since, so here it is. Things are getting better, most publishers and some reviewers are helping translators to become more visible, which can only improve our status, and most importantly we're becoming more confident in ourselves. Hooray for us.

Update: I ought to point out, this fine Monday morning, that the symposium was very good, and in itself evidence that our status as literary translators is on the up. Firstly because the European Commission asked us to hold a whole symposium at their expense, and secondly because it was very well organized and very interesting.

Stefanie de Velasco: Tiger Milk

A teenage narrator shares her recipe for a good time:

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

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

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

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

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