February 2016
I have just
submitted my translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar. It’s the best book I’ve translated so far, has stretched me the
most and required the most drastic approaches. I feel tearful. For added bathos
– and this is a book with a lot of bathos – my email got an out-of-office reply
from the publisher.
I’ve been
following the novel since 2008, when Clemens first published what became the
final chapter as a short story in an anthology. It was even filthier than the
present version. He read it at an event that was recorded for radio, checking
nervously with his editor if it was really OK to put it on record. Last week I
read from that final chapter myself, blushing, and was pleased that other
people liked it too.
It took a
long time to find a publisher willing to take a risk on this novel, which was
originally published in German in 2013. It is long, which means my translation
has been expensive. And it’s a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist,
Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution
market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and
diversification in the present day. Not everybody’s cup of tea.
Translating
it was all-consuming. It required a great deal of research because I wasn’t directly
familiar with the sex industry before working on it. But it was also
emotionally draining because of the intensity of the writing. Translators are
used to immersing ourselves in writers’ work but this book – and Clemens’s
writing in general – is so unflinching that it affected me more than ever
before.
***
Most
translation requires us to explain the source culture to some extent. In this
case, though, the legal situation with regard to prostitution in Germany is
completely different to that in the UK and the US, even Nevada. Since 2001,
German law has enabled prostitutes to work under regular employment contracts,
explicitly stating that prostitution is no longer an unconscionable act. Sex work
is legal and widely accepted – although the area is not free from moral
judgement – and sexual services are advertised plainly. That means the language
around it is different.
I started
out by looking for British ads for sexual services. They do exist but they are
so euphemistic as to be no use to me; the language in Bricks and Mortar is very much to the point. Meyer plays on the
codes used in small ads, abbreviations and cute phrases, and I needed an
equivalent that made sense. Thankfully, there are internet forums where punters
rate ‘adult service providers’, and one of them provides a glossary containing
exactly what I needed. I also read the Feminist Press’s very useful $pread:
The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media
Revolution for a sense
of how people in the US sex industry talk about their work, and many articles
in the British press. TV dramas were also helpful for a sense of how readers
might expect sex workers to talk, especially the excellent Band of Gold.
Another key
difference between the cultures is that a lot of prostitution in Germany takes
place in apartments in normal buildings; I once lived above one, in fact, which
closed down after a shooting. Street prostitution exists but is unsafe, like
anywhere else, and only comes up on the margins of the novel. Again, that makes
the language different. Where British and American sex workers speak of
“clients”, I preferred to stick to the German “guests” with its suggestion of
hospitality, an issue several characters raise.
And once I started
creating my own language for the novel’s unique situation, I felt I could take
that approach even further. So readers will come across two neologisms – “in
the Zone” and “after the Wall”. I hope this is the kind of novel in which
readers can deal with new phrases. I’m very pleased with “in the Zone” because
it sounds aptly science-fictional, referring simply to East Germany in
communist days. And “after the Wall” is shorthand for “after the fall of the
Iron Curtain”. Where German has the succinct “Wende” for the turning point in
its late-20th-century history, a sailing metaphor, English struggles with all
sorts of long-winded explanations. Meyer writes very rhythmically and it was
important to me to cut anything that interrupted the flow – although that flow
is sometimes jagged and abrupt, sometimes smooth and colloquial.
Emboldened,
I then did something translators of “serious literature” are not supposed to
do. I changed a character’s name. A hard-punning punter by the name of Ecki – a
quiet homage to Hubert Fichte’s Jäcki in Die
Palette – has an internet radio show called Eckis Edelkirsch, named after a
cheap cherry liqueur. But that reference wasn’t strong enough for me, or not
strong enough for a character who’s anything but subtle. I wanted the crass
“cherry”, the overtly sexual title for an overtly sexual show, not something
foreign and unpronounceable. And so Ecki became Jerry and his show became
Jerry’s Cherry Pie, inspired by a sex shop in West Ealing. Meyer gave me
permission for the change – and Jerry is still not far from Jäcki. Jerry’s two
chapters were a joy to translate, punning and rhyming and getting almost
psychedelic.
My
favourite chapter, though, is now called ‘My Huckleberry Friend’. Meyer,
knowing I was so keen on it, gave me the first page of the chapter from the
first galley proof – in a frame – for my fortieth birthday. It’s typical of his
writing, interweaving two women’s voices and never making it quite clear
whether what’s happening is really happening. The German title – like many
chapter titles in the book – is a song, a slow waltz in fact. The two sex
workers may or may not end up dancing to the song, which isn’t mentioned by
name other than in the melancholy title, a song about saying goodbye: ‘Sag beim
Abschied leise Servus’. Although the direct reference to parting is lost, I
hope my new title conjures up Audrey Hepburn’s yearning for glamour in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film I’m sure
the two characters might watch together. And ‘Moon River’ is a slow waltz that
many readers can probably hum, keeping that essential rhythmic element intact.
***
July 2016
As of the
4th of July, the Commons inquiry into prostitution
has recommended legalizing brothels and soliciting as quickly as possible in
the UK. Bricks and Mortar may give British
readers an idea of what might happen once sex workers are allowed to work in
greater safety. First and foremost, though, I hope readers will value it as much
as I do, as a novel that makes no apologies as it pushes back the boundaries of
what literature can do. ‘A journey into the night, brutal, dark,
somnambulistic, surreal and often cruelly precise. A book about Germany, today’
wrote the critic Volker Weidermann in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. He was right.
***
17
October 2016
Bricks
and Mortar is published in the UK today by Fitcarraldo Editions. My copies should
arrive on Wednesday.
