After a nail-biting wait, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced its very long longlist. The 152 books have been selected by librarians around the world and include 41 translations. Here are the ones from German:
Marcel Beyer: Kaltenburg, trans. Alan Bance
Alex Capus: Léon and Louise, trans. John Brownjohn
Helene Hegemann: Axolotl Roadkill, trans. Katy Derbyshire (me)
Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel, trans. Philip Boehm
Benjamin Stein: The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen
Alissa Walser: Mesmerized, trans. Jamie Bulloch
Juli Zeh: The Method, trans. Sally-Ann Spencer
The shortlist is announced on 9 April 2014 and the winner on 12 June. I am very very excited indeed about this.
Showing posts with label helene hegemann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label helene hegemann. Show all posts
Monday, 11 November 2013
Friday, 20 April 2012
Fantasy Marketing
I sometimes think I should work in book marketing, only I do love translation rather too much to give it up in the foreseeable future. But I have lots and lots of ideas about how to market my translations. When I suggest these things to the publishers their eyes glaze over as they mentally tot up the costs, then they look at their watches and ask me if I'm going anywhere nice on holiday.
So I'll just write them down here instead. My latest idea came to me just now - why not get Caitlin Moran to interview Helene Hegemann at a fantastic event full of balloons? I say this because I just read Moran's inspiring book and found that she went to something she refers to as a "sex club" in Berlin. With Lady Gaga. And seeing there are several sex clubs in Helene Hegemann's forthcoming book Axolotl Roadkill, translated by me, they'd get on like a house on fire. Also Helene's totally into Madonna and Patti Smith, just like Moran - and they're both really funny. And people would attend because they've actually heard of Caitlin Moran. Actually they should go on tour of the whole of the UK, maybe playing in Bingo halls or massage parlours or something a bit louche like that.
Right now I'm working on Simon Urban's Plan D, which is set in a modern-day GDR. For that one, there has to be a big flashy website like Urban's German one, only with more information about things Anglophone readers don't know, like German history. And there should be a launch party at the former East German embassy on Belgrave Square with mock-ups of Urban's imaginary products. And there should be Trabis, actually Simon - and I - should arrive in a Trabi and walk up a red carpet to the event, with a crowd waving East German flags at us. There should be nibbles, obviously, inspired by the novel: currywurst and scallops. And beer.
There's another one I can't talk about quite yet, for which there has to be a huge version of FSG's Nerd Jeopardy. Touring the UK and the US, and Germany for good measure. The prizes will be heavy metal T-shirts.
So I'll just write them down here instead. My latest idea came to me just now - why not get Caitlin Moran to interview Helene Hegemann at a fantastic event full of balloons? I say this because I just read Moran's inspiring book and found that she went to something she refers to as a "sex club" in Berlin. With Lady Gaga. And seeing there are several sex clubs in Helene Hegemann's forthcoming book Axolotl Roadkill, translated by me, they'd get on like a house on fire. Also Helene's totally into Madonna and Patti Smith, just like Moran - and they're both really funny. And people would attend because they've actually heard of Caitlin Moran. Actually they should go on tour of the whole of the UK, maybe playing in Bingo halls or massage parlours or something a bit louche like that.
Right now I'm working on Simon Urban's Plan D, which is set in a modern-day GDR. For that one, there has to be a big flashy website like Urban's German one, only with more information about things Anglophone readers don't know, like German history. And there should be a launch party at the former East German embassy on Belgrave Square with mock-ups of Urban's imaginary products. And there should be Trabis, actually Simon - and I - should arrive in a Trabi and walk up a red carpet to the event, with a crowd waving East German flags at us. There should be nibbles, obviously, inspired by the novel: currywurst and scallops. And beer.
There's another one I can't talk about quite yet, for which there has to be a huge version of FSG's Nerd Jeopardy. Touring the UK and the US, and Germany for good measure. The prizes will be heavy metal T-shirts.
Friday, 25 November 2011
Axolotl Blockbuster
So as various newspapers reported yesterday, Helene Hegemann is making a film of her fantastic and wonderful novel Axolotl Roadkill. Regular readers will know that I loved the book so much I bought the company translated it. The English version should be out next year from Constable & Robinson in the UK. Actually, I've known for some time about the film project, but being a very discreet kind of person I didn't let on. One reason I knew about it is that a less discreet person, the critic and chair of the jury for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair Verena Auffermann, announced the fact on stage at the awards ceremony last spring. But obviously no one else was listening.
Anyway, another thing I know is that it's going to be an excellent film, slightly less dark than the novel, and again playing on Hegemann's collage technique inspired by Kathy Acker. And it's going to have an amazing soundtrack. According to the press, the production company Vandertastic Productions have received a public funding injection of €50,000.
Little Miss Hegemann (19) has just staged her first play as well, by the name of Lyrics. I'm not quite sure exactly what it's about (except that it's entirely unrelated to Axolotl Roadkill and she was mentored by René Pollesch and it's what they call "anti-narrative") but it premiered in Düsseldorf and it's coming to Berlin in January. You can also watch her debut film Torpedo, which she made when she was about eight and which you could see as a kind of prequel to Axolotl Blockbuster. And I believe there was a puppet show version of the novel too, but that went too far even for me.
I'm taking a deep breath and reminding myself that I was having a great time at the age of 19 myself. Just in a different way.
Anyway, another thing I know is that it's going to be an excellent film, slightly less dark than the novel, and again playing on Hegemann's collage technique inspired by Kathy Acker. And it's going to have an amazing soundtrack. According to the press, the production company Vandertastic Productions have received a public funding injection of €50,000.
Little Miss Hegemann (19) has just staged her first play as well, by the name of Lyrics. I'm not quite sure exactly what it's about (except that it's entirely unrelated to Axolotl Roadkill and she was mentored by René Pollesch and it's what they call "anti-narrative") but it premiered in Düsseldorf and it's coming to Berlin in January. You can also watch her debut film Torpedo, which she made when she was about eight and which you could see as a kind of prequel to Axolotl Blockbuster. And I believe there was a puppet show version of the novel too, but that went too far even for me.
I'm taking a deep breath and reminding myself that I was having a great time at the age of 19 myself. Just in a different way.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Anna Blumbach: Kurze Nächte
The Anais imprint does literary jazz mags for girls. I looked at the Amazon reviews for Anna Blumbach’s Kurze Nächte and realised that nobody wants to admit that. They all talk about the character development and the language – which is very much a factor, and I’ll come to it, don’t get me wrong – but what they don’t say is: “This book turned me on.” So to get it over with, yes, this is an effective piece of erotica. It does what it says on the tin.
I was given the book by the author (Anna Blumbach is a pseudonym) because I’d been talking about translating sex scenes. It makes me feel awkward, and I’ve written about it before I think, because in order to translate sex you do have to visualise what’s going on very precisely. If it’s not well written that’s difficult, and if it is it’s titillating and distracts you from translating. I work in a large open office space, and always have to translate sex scenes at home. The sex scenes in Kurze Nächte – and there are many – mean you probably shouldn’t read it in public. I even felt slightly exposed reading it on my balcony. I wouldn't want to translate it.
What worried me to begin with was that the narrator Eva is in exactly the same position as me: what’s called a “semi-single parent” in her late 30s in Berlin. Reading about her life in between her sexual exploits was disturbing because I recognised so many of her emotions. The maternal guilt, the comfort and love a child can give, the frustration, missing your child when it’s not there and resenting it when it is. The fear of aging, the body-related insecurities, all that stuff about having had a child and what it does to you. And that made it hard not to identify with Eva to an extent I didn’t want to go to. On the other hand, it felt so true that the rest of the book seemed searingly honest too. I don’t know whether it is or not.
Plot? Yes, it has a plot, to go along with that cliché about women and porn. But it’s the kind of rambling Berlin-novel plot about bohemians and creative types getting drunk that I don’t particularly enjoy, as a rule. Only with more sex scenes to make up for it. Eva loves Wolf (poet) but he doesn’t love her back, or not properly, not the way she wants him to. So she leaves him but she’s heartbroken. She starts a thing with Tom (DJ), becoming a sort of permanent bit on the side. And then there’s Kolja (Russian artist), an infatuation and one-night-stand who keeps popping up again and rubbing her up the wrong way. In between, Eva struggles with the benefits office and philosophises about how crap life is when you’re expected to combine full-time work with bringing up a child but refuse to do so.
As the Amazon reviewers point out in their own sweet way, Kurze Nächte is a Bildungsroman of sorts. Eva starts off insecure and unhappy but by finding a passion of her own (a miniature architectural project), she grows more confident and finds it easier to deal with the men in her life too. It’s work, then, which ultimately sets her free, to put it cynically. Anna Blumbach seems to have tried to add a political dimension to the lit-jazz-mag format. The message appears to be that a self-determined work life makes for a fulfilling life all round, including sexually. But her narrator Eva veers between describing her own inadequacies and raging against the system – a credible enough character trait – which dilutes that message somewhat. And I’m not sure it doesn’t get lost entirely along the way.
It’s certainly literary enough. I loved the language. I loved the occasional Berlinerisms and sillinesses, interrupting what’s otherwise a plain enough style common to a lot of contemporary German writing. I loved the sex scenes, the feelings of inadequacy gradually making way for more relaxed encounters. I loved the laugh-out-loud “What the…?” moments when the narrator gets up to even more nonsense than usual. It’s very much a novel of now – Eva is not a put-upon ex-housewife or a young girl just discovering her sexuality, she knows very well what she’s doing. I loved the way Blumbach often uses the phrase “as best I can” in the saucier moments, summing up her Eva very nicely.
It made me think about how men and women write about sex in German literary fiction, actually. Maybe it’s just my choice of reading matter, but I’ve a feeling that women writers tend not to bother, or if they do venture an attempt it’s almost always about bad sex, traumatic experiences. In fact I’m struggling to come up with a single example of genuinely erotic writing by women in the genre. A while back I bought a women’s magazine solely because it claimed to feature erotica by biggish names, including Sibylle Berg and Alina Bronsky. It was a big disappointment. Whereas men seem happy to include explicit descriptions of good and bad sex and average sex and frustrating sex and just plain sex sex in their literary novels. Ralf Rothmann, Peter Stamm, Rainer Merkel, Thomas Pletzinger, Selim Özdogan, Finn-Ole Heinrich, Michael Lentz, Jan Böttcher, Helmut Krausser – they all get taken seriously nonetheless.
So are women writers shy about it? Would we… would we still really think they were sluts? Is that why the few exceptions cause such a fuss? Think Charlotte Roche of course, but also Helene Hegemann, although you could argue that in both cases the sex they describe has a traumatic edge to it. Anna Blumbach takes what seems like a more open and honest approach. Although the last sex bit (actually incredibly well done) would fit well into the traumatic category, her protagonist usually enjoys sex, but looks too at what she wants from it, often confirmation and comfort and – oh yes – love.
If there’s one thing I always find fascinating and infinitely puzzling, it’s how on earth other people in a similar situation to me lead their lives. You know the way everyone else seems to be having much, much more fun, no matter how much fun you yourself may or may not be having? I took this fictional example with a pinch of salt, but it was a genuine pleasure to read. And it does for Kaffee Burger what Axolotl Roadkill does for Berghain.
I was given the book by the author (Anna Blumbach is a pseudonym) because I’d been talking about translating sex scenes. It makes me feel awkward, and I’ve written about it before I think, because in order to translate sex you do have to visualise what’s going on very precisely. If it’s not well written that’s difficult, and if it is it’s titillating and distracts you from translating. I work in a large open office space, and always have to translate sex scenes at home. The sex scenes in Kurze Nächte – and there are many – mean you probably shouldn’t read it in public. I even felt slightly exposed reading it on my balcony. I wouldn't want to translate it.
What worried me to begin with was that the narrator Eva is in exactly the same position as me: what’s called a “semi-single parent” in her late 30s in Berlin. Reading about her life in between her sexual exploits was disturbing because I recognised so many of her emotions. The maternal guilt, the comfort and love a child can give, the frustration, missing your child when it’s not there and resenting it when it is. The fear of aging, the body-related insecurities, all that stuff about having had a child and what it does to you. And that made it hard not to identify with Eva to an extent I didn’t want to go to. On the other hand, it felt so true that the rest of the book seemed searingly honest too. I don’t know whether it is or not.
Plot? Yes, it has a plot, to go along with that cliché about women and porn. But it’s the kind of rambling Berlin-novel plot about bohemians and creative types getting drunk that I don’t particularly enjoy, as a rule. Only with more sex scenes to make up for it. Eva loves Wolf (poet) but he doesn’t love her back, or not properly, not the way she wants him to. So she leaves him but she’s heartbroken. She starts a thing with Tom (DJ), becoming a sort of permanent bit on the side. And then there’s Kolja (Russian artist), an infatuation and one-night-stand who keeps popping up again and rubbing her up the wrong way. In between, Eva struggles with the benefits office and philosophises about how crap life is when you’re expected to combine full-time work with bringing up a child but refuse to do so.
As the Amazon reviewers point out in their own sweet way, Kurze Nächte is a Bildungsroman of sorts. Eva starts off insecure and unhappy but by finding a passion of her own (a miniature architectural project), she grows more confident and finds it easier to deal with the men in her life too. It’s work, then, which ultimately sets her free, to put it cynically. Anna Blumbach seems to have tried to add a political dimension to the lit-jazz-mag format. The message appears to be that a self-determined work life makes for a fulfilling life all round, including sexually. But her narrator Eva veers between describing her own inadequacies and raging against the system – a credible enough character trait – which dilutes that message somewhat. And I’m not sure it doesn’t get lost entirely along the way.
It’s certainly literary enough. I loved the language. I loved the occasional Berlinerisms and sillinesses, interrupting what’s otherwise a plain enough style common to a lot of contemporary German writing. I loved the sex scenes, the feelings of inadequacy gradually making way for more relaxed encounters. I loved the laugh-out-loud “What the…?” moments when the narrator gets up to even more nonsense than usual. It’s very much a novel of now – Eva is not a put-upon ex-housewife or a young girl just discovering her sexuality, she knows very well what she’s doing. I loved the way Blumbach often uses the phrase “as best I can” in the saucier moments, summing up her Eva very nicely.
It made me think about how men and women write about sex in German literary fiction, actually. Maybe it’s just my choice of reading matter, but I’ve a feeling that women writers tend not to bother, or if they do venture an attempt it’s almost always about bad sex, traumatic experiences. In fact I’m struggling to come up with a single example of genuinely erotic writing by women in the genre. A while back I bought a women’s magazine solely because it claimed to feature erotica by biggish names, including Sibylle Berg and Alina Bronsky. It was a big disappointment. Whereas men seem happy to include explicit descriptions of good and bad sex and average sex and frustrating sex and just plain sex sex in their literary novels. Ralf Rothmann, Peter Stamm, Rainer Merkel, Thomas Pletzinger, Selim Özdogan, Finn-Ole Heinrich, Michael Lentz, Jan Böttcher, Helmut Krausser – they all get taken seriously nonetheless.
So are women writers shy about it? Would we… would we still really think they were sluts? Is that why the few exceptions cause such a fuss? Think Charlotte Roche of course, but also Helene Hegemann, although you could argue that in both cases the sex they describe has a traumatic edge to it. Anna Blumbach takes what seems like a more open and honest approach. Although the last sex bit (actually incredibly well done) would fit well into the traumatic category, her protagonist usually enjoys sex, but looks too at what she wants from it, often confirmation and comfort and – oh yes – love.
If there’s one thing I always find fascinating and infinitely puzzling, it’s how on earth other people in a similar situation to me lead their lives. You know the way everyone else seems to be having much, much more fun, no matter how much fun you yourself may or may not be having? I took this fictional example with a pinch of salt, but it was a genuine pleasure to read. And it does for Kaffee Burger what Axolotl Roadkill does for Berghain.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Things I Am Looking Forward To in 2011
One of my favourite German rituals is the New Year's Eve tradition of "lead-pouring". You take little plugs of lead (actually aluminium these days), melt them down over a candle, and then pour them into cold water to see what shape they make and predict your fate for the coming year. Of course it's all in the interpretation, but this year I got a saxophone. Make of that what you will. I also had a fortune cookie that told me to "be patient and optimistic" - and chose not to apply that to my love life.
There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.
Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.
Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.
And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.
On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.
Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.
Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.
So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.
There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.
Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.
Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.
And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.
On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.
Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.
Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.
So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
On Translating Hegemann: III
So after the cries of horror on Friday, I have withdrawn into myself and consulted with my editor, and we're sticking with the replacement celebrities. Not in every case (Ann Summers is out, thanks to your mystified feedback), and subject to approval from the author, but still. English-language readers are not used to glossaries and Axolotl Roadkill is not the book to introduce them with. Where German readers of international fiction are apparently happy to be confronted with Betty Drapers and Baal Shem Tovs, British readers are already exploring new territory by reading a translated book. And I want them to get the jokes, not reach for the encyclopedia every few pages.
But rest assured, there are plenty of culturally specific references left in the translation. There are obscure German documentary filmmakers, three-minute vacations in the Teutoburg Forest while leaning out of the window, wealthy and down-at-heel corners of Berlin. There's Nutella and Berghain and Franz Beckenbauer. And it's crucially important that the book is set in today's Berlin, so I'm taking care not to wipe out anything that's not absolutely incomprehensible.
As an aside, a few people expressed wonderment over the fact that the target audience is British. The translation rights have been sold to a British publisher, Constable & Robinson. Usually, English-language rights are sold separately for Britain (sometimes including the Commonwealth) and the USA. Publishers with international distribution possibilities will sometimes buy rights for the whole of the English-speaking world, but that's not the case here. What often happens is that a British publisher and an American publisher will buy rights to the same book and commission a single translation, effectively halving their costs. Then that translation will be reworked for the respective other market. The changes can be fairly drastic, going beyond spelling and punctuation to those bizarre words Americans use for their clothing; you know, pants and vests and the like.
So if and when an American publishing house realises the error of its ways and decides to buy the US rights to Axolotl Roadkill, they'll be editing my text all over again anyway. Or maybe it'll be decades on and they'll commission a brand new translation of this now classic work, rather than using my ham-fisted attempt at rendering Helene Hegemann in the English of 2010.
But rest assured, there are plenty of culturally specific references left in the translation. There are obscure German documentary filmmakers, three-minute vacations in the Teutoburg Forest while leaning out of the window, wealthy and down-at-heel corners of Berlin. There's Nutella and Berghain and Franz Beckenbauer. And it's crucially important that the book is set in today's Berlin, so I'm taking care not to wipe out anything that's not absolutely incomprehensible.
As an aside, a few people expressed wonderment over the fact that the target audience is British. The translation rights have been sold to a British publisher, Constable & Robinson. Usually, English-language rights are sold separately for Britain (sometimes including the Commonwealth) and the USA. Publishers with international distribution possibilities will sometimes buy rights for the whole of the English-speaking world, but that's not the case here. What often happens is that a British publisher and an American publisher will buy rights to the same book and commission a single translation, effectively halving their costs. Then that translation will be reworked for the respective other market. The changes can be fairly drastic, going beyond spelling and punctuation to those bizarre words Americans use for their clothing; you know, pants and vests and the like.
So if and when an American publishing house realises the error of its ways and decides to buy the US rights to Axolotl Roadkill, they'll be editing my text all over again anyway. Or maybe it'll be decades on and they'll commission a brand new translation of this now classic work, rather than using my ham-fisted attempt at rendering Helene Hegemann in the English of 2010.
Friday, 6 August 2010
On Translating Hegemann: II
Four literary translators in a beer garden. And what do they talk about? Well, the significance of the year 1866 in German history, why on earth anyone would want to drink Berliner Weisse, children and grandchildren, books - and translation issues.
And quite a controversial discussion ensued. There's one issue in my translation of Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill that's causing me a few headaches. Fairly often, the narrator or other characters will namedrop German celebrities. And the choice I face then is to leave them "in the original" or to replace them with some other, more international celebrity. So far, I've come up against Beate Uhse, Alice Schwarzer, Uschi Obermaier and Rudi Carell. And possibly others who I can't think of right now. Hegemann uses them as a kind of shorthand - all her German readers will understand what narrator Mifti means when she describes her sister as a blend of Beate Uhse, Alice Schwarzer and Mother Theresa. But will anybody else?
On the other hand, the novel is very much tied in to its Berlin setting. The characters are Germans and their cultural framework is German - although of course, this being 2010, there are huge overlaps, with other famous people cropping up including Madonna, Brian Wilson and Bryan Ferry - just to list a few off the top of my head. So would it not seem odd if the celebrities scattered in didn't include any Germans, for local colour if you like?
Things get really tough when you go deeper into the moral and philosophical side of translation. With whom do my loyalties lie - the writer or the reader, the original or the translation? Is it disrespectful to Hegemann to replace her celebrities with people British readers would be more familiar with - or am I doing the readers of the translation a disservice if I don't help them to get the joke? Because in the case of Rudi Carrell, for example, it's hugely funny that someone would get a tattoo of a deceased Dutch entertainer who once came second-to-last in the Eurovision Song Contest.
In a certain kind of book, translators can work around this issue. Translator's notes, footnotes, building in three-word explanations - there are various options. But when characters are talking crap on Class-A drugs, the translator really can't slip in a quick bit of background detail on Uschi Obermaier. Or at least this translator's not going to. And there's always that tricky question of who's going to read the book in English - what level of knowledge about German society can I assume in the target audience? Who is the target audience? Am I being patronising or dumbing down the text?
I'm fairly convinced I really do have to come up with replacements. So far, so good - but who are the equivalents? Here's what I've come up with to date (bear in mind the translation is for the British market, and it's not finished yet):
Beate Uhse: Ann Summers
Alice Schwarzer: Germaine Greer
Uschi Obermaier: Bianca Jagger
Rudi Carrell: OMG, I have no idea. Terry Wogan? Bruce Forsyth? Dudley Moore? Actually, none of these will work very well - because why would a German taxi-driver get a tattoo of a British television personality? Oh, drat.
Any suggestions gratefully received, while I continue to lie awake at night wrestling with my translatorly conscience over the issue of intervention.
And quite a controversial discussion ensued. There's one issue in my translation of Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill that's causing me a few headaches. Fairly often, the narrator or other characters will namedrop German celebrities. And the choice I face then is to leave them "in the original" or to replace them with some other, more international celebrity. So far, I've come up against Beate Uhse, Alice Schwarzer, Uschi Obermaier and Rudi Carell. And possibly others who I can't think of right now. Hegemann uses them as a kind of shorthand - all her German readers will understand what narrator Mifti means when she describes her sister as a blend of Beate Uhse, Alice Schwarzer and Mother Theresa. But will anybody else?
On the other hand, the novel is very much tied in to its Berlin setting. The characters are Germans and their cultural framework is German - although of course, this being 2010, there are huge overlaps, with other famous people cropping up including Madonna, Brian Wilson and Bryan Ferry - just to list a few off the top of my head. So would it not seem odd if the celebrities scattered in didn't include any Germans, for local colour if you like?
Things get really tough when you go deeper into the moral and philosophical side of translation. With whom do my loyalties lie - the writer or the reader, the original or the translation? Is it disrespectful to Hegemann to replace her celebrities with people British readers would be more familiar with - or am I doing the readers of the translation a disservice if I don't help them to get the joke? Because in the case of Rudi Carrell, for example, it's hugely funny that someone would get a tattoo of a deceased Dutch entertainer who once came second-to-last in the Eurovision Song Contest.
In a certain kind of book, translators can work around this issue. Translator's notes, footnotes, building in three-word explanations - there are various options. But when characters are talking crap on Class-A drugs, the translator really can't slip in a quick bit of background detail on Uschi Obermaier. Or at least this translator's not going to. And there's always that tricky question of who's going to read the book in English - what level of knowledge about German society can I assume in the target audience? Who is the target audience? Am I being patronising or dumbing down the text?
I'm fairly convinced I really do have to come up with replacements. So far, so good - but who are the equivalents? Here's what I've come up with to date (bear in mind the translation is for the British market, and it's not finished yet):
Beate Uhse: Ann Summers
Alice Schwarzer: Germaine Greer
Uschi Obermaier: Bianca Jagger
Rudi Carrell: OMG, I have no idea. Terry Wogan? Bruce Forsyth? Dudley Moore? Actually, none of these will work very well - because why would a German taxi-driver get a tattoo of a British television personality? Oh, drat.
Any suggestions gratefully received, while I continue to lie awake at night wrestling with my translatorly conscience over the issue of intervention.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
On Translating Hegemann (I)
There are things you just don't want to translate at the office. And it's not like the people I share my office with look over my shoulder every ten minutes. But still, I worry they might pick up from my face or something what exactly I'm working on. I mean, they know it's Axolotl Roadkill and are duly impressed, in a head-shaking, oh I met her once, that must be a challenge kind of way. But they haven't read the book.
Today's been one of those days. When you translate, you get closer to a text than ever before. You research those references you probably just skipped over when you read the book first or second time round. You deconstruct the sentences to establish exactly who's doing what, when, where and why. And then you have to find a way to tell the readers in your language what exactly's going on on the page.
So today there's a reference to a film. Sounds harmless enough, could be a documentary about street kids or something. OK, fairly standard procedure, I look it up on imdb.com and can't find it with the German title. So I google it and get eight hits. One of them has been removed after a complaint under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Another is an interview with one of the actors, which informs me about the innovative use of vegetables in the work. That's all I'm saying. The photos were fun, nice pair of cowboy boots. Thankfully, nobody looked over my shoulder at that moment.
So now I know an actor and the English name and I find it on imdb, but the English title gives you not even the slightest intimation of the content, unlike the German which – once you know what kind of film it is – is pretty clear. Right now, I've added the director's name ('XY's film Way Down') but I'm not sure whether that's enough. It's not like the guy has a long list of illustrious works to his name. Should I go the whole hog and add a gloss on the content of the film? No, because your average German reader won't necessarily pick up on it either. Should I choose another film English readers will be more likely to know? But then I'm taking away from the whole Berlin feeling - it's not set in Soho, after all. Plus I'd have to trawl through dubious databases to find an equivalent.
I'm still pondering. And why am I telling you all this? Because I've got to a point in the book I'm embarrassed to translate, at least while my child's still awake in the next room and might come in. Not that she looks over my shoulder every ten minutes. But still, as fucked-up Mifti would say: this is blogging as a permanent displacement activity.
But rather at home of an evening than at the office.
Today's been one of those days. When you translate, you get closer to a text than ever before. You research those references you probably just skipped over when you read the book first or second time round. You deconstruct the sentences to establish exactly who's doing what, when, where and why. And then you have to find a way to tell the readers in your language what exactly's going on on the page.
So today there's a reference to a film. Sounds harmless enough, could be a documentary about street kids or something. OK, fairly standard procedure, I look it up on imdb.com and can't find it with the German title. So I google it and get eight hits. One of them has been removed after a complaint under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Another is an interview with one of the actors, which informs me about the innovative use of vegetables in the work. That's all I'm saying. The photos were fun, nice pair of cowboy boots. Thankfully, nobody looked over my shoulder at that moment.
So now I know an actor and the English name and I find it on imdb, but the English title gives you not even the slightest intimation of the content, unlike the German which – once you know what kind of film it is – is pretty clear. Right now, I've added the director's name ('XY's film Way Down') but I'm not sure whether that's enough. It's not like the guy has a long list of illustrious works to his name. Should I go the whole hog and add a gloss on the content of the film? No, because your average German reader won't necessarily pick up on it either. Should I choose another film English readers will be more likely to know? But then I'm taking away from the whole Berlin feeling - it's not set in Soho, after all. Plus I'd have to trawl through dubious databases to find an equivalent.
I'm still pondering. And why am I telling you all this? Because I've got to a point in the book I'm embarrassed to translate, at least while my child's still awake in the next room and might come in. Not that she looks over my shoulder every ten minutes. But still, as fucked-up Mifti would say: this is blogging as a permanent displacement activity.
But rather at home of an evening than at the office.
Friday, 7 May 2010
How Berlin Is That?
Thursday, 6 May 2010
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.
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.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Happy Birthday Helene
I know I said it was my last word, but I'm obsessed, OK? Every single newspaper has run a story on Friday's big party for Helene Hegemann's eighteenth birthday and belated book launch, in the former technoland legend Tresor.
Cinderella here wasn't invited, despite having listened in on at least two excited conversations about it beforehand. But, you know, that's OK, I went to Tresor once in the 90s and it was kind of underwhelming. I probably would have just ignored the pink-and-black invitation proclaiming which movie stars and theatre directors were going to be DJing anyway. And who wants to stand in a queue in the rain with hundreds of journos and publishing folk? Let alone eat candyfloss under a giant papier-maché axolotl or try and make out what the writer and her friend read on stage over all the malicious gossip in the background.
At least I can revel in the illusion that I'm just too damn underground to get an invite.
Cinderella here wasn't invited, despite having listened in on at least two excited conversations about it beforehand. But, you know, that's OK, I went to Tresor once in the 90s and it was kind of underwhelming. I probably would have just ignored the pink-and-black invitation proclaiming which movie stars and theatre directors were going to be DJing anyway. And who wants to stand in a queue in the rain with hundreds of journos and publishing folk? Let alone eat candyfloss under a giant papier-maché axolotl or try and make out what the writer and her friend read on stage over all the malicious gossip in the background.
At least I can revel in the illusion that I'm just too damn underground to get an invite.
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Axolotl Roadkill: My Final Word
Yesterday the publishers Ullstein sent out a list of Helene Hegemann's sources for Axolotl Roadkill. And the magazine Bücher went and put them online (scroll down to pdf). So now's your chance to make up your mind. According to Ullstein the poached bits make up less than half a percent of the book. What's clear, though, is that much of the sections on Berghain and heroin consumption is closely inspired by and modified from reformed blogger Airen's book Strobo.
My final word is this:
There are two separate issues at stake here. The first is that Hegemann shouldn't have lifted from other people's work without crediting them. She got caught, she owned up, and now they're credited. I know I'm going to get more anonymous comments on this, but she didn't harm anyone. She didn't put a bomb under anyone's car, she didn't steal anyone's boyfriend, she didn't give anyone a Chinese burn in the playground. To put it bluntly, I don't understand why such a wave of hate has descended upon her. Unless, of course, people don't like seeing young women being successful in such a spectacular way.
The second issue is the quality of the book now that we know exactly which words are Hegemann's and which are other people's. Because I for one am not prepared to dismiss the novel out of hand because of the way it was written. And I stand by my opinion that Axolotl Roadkill is a good book, tackling much more than just heroin and Berghain, featuring genuine linguistic invention and capturing the spirit of Berlin as it is now. Above all, it paints a picture of a severely disturbed narrator who doesn't in fact come of age - instead refusing to do so like all those around her, living the lives of hedonistic teenagers well into their 40s.
And that, for all those clamouring for authenticity, is the real thing.
My final word is this:
There are two separate issues at stake here. The first is that Hegemann shouldn't have lifted from other people's work without crediting them. She got caught, she owned up, and now they're credited. I know I'm going to get more anonymous comments on this, but she didn't harm anyone. She didn't put a bomb under anyone's car, she didn't steal anyone's boyfriend, she didn't give anyone a Chinese burn in the playground. To put it bluntly, I don't understand why such a wave of hate has descended upon her. Unless, of course, people don't like seeing young women being successful in such a spectacular way.
The second issue is the quality of the book now that we know exactly which words are Hegemann's and which are other people's. Because I for one am not prepared to dismiss the novel out of hand because of the way it was written. And I stand by my opinion that Axolotl Roadkill is a good book, tackling much more than just heroin and Berghain, featuring genuine linguistic invention and capturing the spirit of Berlin as it is now. Above all, it paints a picture of a severely disturbed narrator who doesn't in fact come of age - instead refusing to do so like all those around her, living the lives of hedonistic teenagers well into their 40s.
And that, for all those clamouring for authenticity, is the real thing.
Friday, 12 February 2010
Harald Schmidt vs. Helene Hegemann, Rüther vs. Airen
I've never cared for Harald Schmidt. He's a talkshow guy not unlike a German Jonathan Ross, only he was never remotely attractive. I find him verging on the racist and well into smug territory - and he makes jokes I don't understand about football. But last night I sat through his show to catch Helene Hegemann's appearance, hoping for a little insight into the whole Axolotl Roadkill collage/sampling/plagiarism issue.
More fool me. What we got was Harald and Helene chatting about their good buddy "René" - presumably Pollesch - and how Helene has lost all faith in the media. And although the whole world has been mouthing off about how she can't possibly have been to techno club Berghain at her age, she explained the phenomenon adequately enough for the old fogies in front of their TV sets.
A brief aside: Since when have underage girls not been able to get into clubs? Bouncers aren't actually there to keep pretty girls out. Their job is stopping large groups of unattractive men and other uncool undesirables from getting in. Not that I've been anywhere with a bouncer in the past ten years, but I'm guessing this hasn't changed since my day.
I digress. Basically Schmidt kidded around a bit with Hegemann but skirted the issue everyone's talking about. At one point she couldn't remember a particular passage he referred to, and commented, "It's probably not by me, that's why." Sweet. Schmidt left that comment hanging like a worm on a hook and changed the subject to talk about her hair. There's nothing like taking the yoof seriously, eh?
Luckily, we have Tobias Rüther, my favourite intellectual heavyweight. He managed to get an interview with the "damaged party", blogger Airen, which is coupled with a decent list of the bits Hegemann lifted from his book. There are quite a number of them, although few of them are word for word and if you ask me, Hegemann has improved on his prose. Airen talks about authenticity in a rather pathos-laden manner and tells us he thinks Hegemann's book is cool.
Meanwhile, the chattering classes are fixating on her nomination for the Leipzig prize. She's not going to win, they say, and the jury couldn't back out on its choice. But chairwoman Verena Auffermann told Deutschlandradio Kultur they'd discussed the matter at length and taken a majority decision - and went on to defend the book for a lot of good reasons.
Otherwise, the discussion seems to have split into two camps: people who've read the book and can now appreciate it for what it is, a work of imagination drawing on other people's experiences at points; and people who haven't read the book and think it's all appalling. Now that Hegemann's apologised we've entered the reflective stage: what have the big bad media done to the poor wee lass, first hyping her like there was no tomorrow and then cussing her for providing them with all-too-easy opportunities for puff pieces. Nicholas Kulish sums it up nicely in the New York Times, in fact.
What's getting lost is the book. I'm more than relieved it was still nominated - because that gives me official sanction not to eat my words.
Axolotl Roadkill, people, is good.
More fool me. What we got was Harald and Helene chatting about their good buddy "René" - presumably Pollesch - and how Helene has lost all faith in the media. And although the whole world has been mouthing off about how she can't possibly have been to techno club Berghain at her age, she explained the phenomenon adequately enough for the old fogies in front of their TV sets.
A brief aside: Since when have underage girls not been able to get into clubs? Bouncers aren't actually there to keep pretty girls out. Their job is stopping large groups of unattractive men and other uncool undesirables from getting in. Not that I've been anywhere with a bouncer in the past ten years, but I'm guessing this hasn't changed since my day.
I digress. Basically Schmidt kidded around a bit with Hegemann but skirted the issue everyone's talking about. At one point she couldn't remember a particular passage he referred to, and commented, "It's probably not by me, that's why." Sweet. Schmidt left that comment hanging like a worm on a hook and changed the subject to talk about her hair. There's nothing like taking the yoof seriously, eh?
Luckily, we have Tobias Rüther, my favourite intellectual heavyweight. He managed to get an interview with the "damaged party", blogger Airen, which is coupled with a decent list of the bits Hegemann lifted from his book. There are quite a number of them, although few of them are word for word and if you ask me, Hegemann has improved on his prose. Airen talks about authenticity in a rather pathos-laden manner and tells us he thinks Hegemann's book is cool.
Meanwhile, the chattering classes are fixating on her nomination for the Leipzig prize. She's not going to win, they say, and the jury couldn't back out on its choice. But chairwoman Verena Auffermann told Deutschlandradio Kultur they'd discussed the matter at length and taken a majority decision - and went on to defend the book for a lot of good reasons.
Otherwise, the discussion seems to have split into two camps: people who've read the book and can now appreciate it for what it is, a work of imagination drawing on other people's experiences at points; and people who haven't read the book and think it's all appalling. Now that Hegemann's apologised we've entered the reflective stage: what have the big bad media done to the poor wee lass, first hyping her like there was no tomorrow and then cussing her for providing them with all-too-easy opportunities for puff pieces. Nicholas Kulish sums it up nicely in the New York Times, in fact.
What's getting lost is the book. I'm more than relieved it was still nominated - because that gives me official sanction not to eat my words.
Axolotl Roadkill, people, is good.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Plagiarism?
32 of the past 45 Google searches bringing people here featured the words "Helene Hegemann". It would appear people are interested in the whole Axolotl Roadkill plagiarism issue.
So here it is in a nutshell. 17-year-old Helene wrote a book (see my very brief review plus a couple of comments on the issue) set in Berlin. The 16-year-old narrator takes drugs and goes to clubs in Berlin, among other depraved activities. Over the weekend the blogger Deef Pirmasens pointed out the many similarities between Hegemann's portrayal of drug-taking at Berghain and the portrayal in a previously neglected book, Strobo, by another blogger called Airen. And yesterday Hegemann admitted she hadn't actually credited Airen as one of her many sources and inspirations, for a book that rather comes across as a collage of ideas, images and pop-cultural references. She talks about an online culture of sampling and remixing and comments:
Although I stand entirely behind my text and my principle, I apologise for not having mentioned all the people whose ideas and texts helped me from the very beginning.
According to a sympathetic Felicitas von Lovenberg in the FAZ, the novel was at least going to be shortlisted for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. We'll have to wait until Thursday for the dust to settle and the shortlist to come out. But of course everyone has an opinion right now.
Want to know mine? I don't care. I still think it's a good book, owing much more to Kathy Acker's techniques than to Airen's description of the Berghain toilets. Yes, it's downright disrespectful to credit David Foster Wallace and not "some blogger" as he's referred to in the text. Yes, even a 17-year-old should know better, especially one as apparently media-savvy as Helene Hegemann. But no, the publishers don't have a duty to check every word in every book for plagiarism. And no, there's so much more to Axolotl Roadkill than the few pages in question.
Whatever people wanted to believe about the book - and I'll admit I'm far from immune myself, with the intruiging narrator and the impossibly glam writer exerting a certain pull over me too - it is a work of fiction and should stand alone as such, not as a factual account of underage depravity in noughties Berlin.
I hope the HH phenomenon doesn't prove to be a house of cards. Because then I'd have to eat my words - but I don't think that's going to happen.
Update: According to Jürgen Kaube in the FAZ, Hegemann has compiled a list of sources:
There's now a list of writers whom Helene Hegemann hadn't thanked for using their works word for word or almost word for word. (...) The list ranges from Malcolm Lowry – for the book's first sentence – and David Foster Wallace through Rainald Goetz and the blogger Airen to Kathy Acker. It comes from Hegemann herself; the publishers Ullstein Verlag intend to make it available soon.
And yes, and yes, it's still a good book. It ought to have been clear from the beginning - had we cared to look! - that Hegemann was "sampling", as she puts it; all those snatches of lyrics ought to have been a bit of a giveaway. But I'm fascinated by the reactions, which vary from plain insults and abuse tainted with obvious envy to fierce defences of the poor little baby writer.
If you read German, that FAZ article is well worth a look, reflecting as many have been over the past few days on our expectations as readers of "young literature". We want it to be real, dripping with pathos, we want young writers to run straight home from the darkroom and spill their guts into their laptops. We want to live a vicarious wild youth - but it has to be genuine misery memoir to get our pulses racing.
I'm waiting for that list before I eat any words. And I can be very stubborn.
Update update: There's more evidence of Hegemann's, ummm, naive approach to other people's intellectual property at Viceland. In this case she wrote a short story dangerously close to a film, which was based on a short story, which of course is rather similar to her version. I'm still not eating those words yet though.
So here it is in a nutshell. 17-year-old Helene wrote a book (see my very brief review plus a couple of comments on the issue) set in Berlin. The 16-year-old narrator takes drugs and goes to clubs in Berlin, among other depraved activities. Over the weekend the blogger Deef Pirmasens pointed out the many similarities between Hegemann's portrayal of drug-taking at Berghain and the portrayal in a previously neglected book, Strobo, by another blogger called Airen. And yesterday Hegemann admitted she hadn't actually credited Airen as one of her many sources and inspirations, for a book that rather comes across as a collage of ideas, images and pop-cultural references. She talks about an online culture of sampling and remixing and comments:
Although I stand entirely behind my text and my principle, I apologise for not having mentioned all the people whose ideas and texts helped me from the very beginning.
According to a sympathetic Felicitas von Lovenberg in the FAZ, the novel was at least going to be shortlisted for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. We'll have to wait until Thursday for the dust to settle and the shortlist to come out. But of course everyone has an opinion right now.
Want to know mine? I don't care. I still think it's a good book, owing much more to Kathy Acker's techniques than to Airen's description of the Berghain toilets. Yes, it's downright disrespectful to credit David Foster Wallace and not "some blogger" as he's referred to in the text. Yes, even a 17-year-old should know better, especially one as apparently media-savvy as Helene Hegemann. But no, the publishers don't have a duty to check every word in every book for plagiarism. And no, there's so much more to Axolotl Roadkill than the few pages in question.
Whatever people wanted to believe about the book - and I'll admit I'm far from immune myself, with the intruiging narrator and the impossibly glam writer exerting a certain pull over me too - it is a work of fiction and should stand alone as such, not as a factual account of underage depravity in noughties Berlin.
I hope the HH phenomenon doesn't prove to be a house of cards. Because then I'd have to eat my words - but I don't think that's going to happen.
Update: According to Jürgen Kaube in the FAZ, Hegemann has compiled a list of sources:
There's now a list of writers whom Helene Hegemann hadn't thanked for using their works word for word or almost word for word. (...) The list ranges from Malcolm Lowry – for the book's first sentence – and David Foster Wallace through Rainald Goetz and the blogger Airen to Kathy Acker. It comes from Hegemann herself; the publishers Ullstein Verlag intend to make it available soon.
And yes, and yes, it's still a good book. It ought to have been clear from the beginning - had we cared to look! - that Hegemann was "sampling", as she puts it; all those snatches of lyrics ought to have been a bit of a giveaway. But I'm fascinated by the reactions, which vary from plain insults and abuse tainted with obvious envy to fierce defences of the poor little baby writer.
If you read German, that FAZ article is well worth a look, reflecting as many have been over the past few days on our expectations as readers of "young literature". We want it to be real, dripping with pathos, we want young writers to run straight home from the darkroom and spill their guts into their laptops. We want to live a vicarious wild youth - but it has to be genuine misery memoir to get our pulses racing.
I'm waiting for that list before I eat any words. And I can be very stubborn.
Update update: There's more evidence of Hegemann's, ummm, naive approach to other people's intellectual property at Viceland. In this case she wrote a short story dangerously close to a film, which was based on a short story, which of course is rather similar to her version. I'm still not eating those words yet though.
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Helene Hegemann: Axolotl Roadkill
What is it about January? Last year everyone was raving about Daniel Kehlmann's Ruhm. And this year it's Helene Hegemann's turn in the spotlight. It's like people need a bit of literary excitement in their lives to brighten up the cold, dull days.
And Axolotl Roadkill certainly gives us that. Just look at all the euphoric press reviews behind that link. So here's the hype: the writer is a 17-year-old filmmaker. It's about rich kids kicking around in today's Berlin. They take truckloads of drugs and go to clubs and parties and have dirty sex. Narrator Mifti is utterly fucked-up but refuses to get help. And there's no happy ending.
What's the big deal? The big deal is, it's really good. You can read it as a critique of a society that refuses to grow up - hence the axolotl of the title, which never emerges from adolescence. You can read it as a psychological portrait of an emotionally abused kid. You can take it as a pop-cultural definition of Berlin right now, Berghain and ketamin and all. Or you can just sit back and enjoy the language, which has already seeped into my vocabulary (sheetrock palace for a converted loft space, I'm loving it).
I've kind of shot my wad on the subject elsewhere, but I didn't want to ignore the book here. So this is just me saying: Watch the trailer. Believe the hype. Read the book.
Update: See this entry for more information and opinion on the plagiarism issue.
Update update: For my final word, go here.
And Axolotl Roadkill certainly gives us that. Just look at all the euphoric press reviews behind that link. So here's the hype: the writer is a 17-year-old filmmaker. It's about rich kids kicking around in today's Berlin. They take truckloads of drugs and go to clubs and parties and have dirty sex. Narrator Mifti is utterly fucked-up but refuses to get help. And there's no happy ending.
What's the big deal? The big deal is, it's really good. You can read it as a critique of a society that refuses to grow up - hence the axolotl of the title, which never emerges from adolescence. You can read it as a psychological portrait of an emotionally abused kid. You can take it as a pop-cultural definition of Berlin right now, Berghain and ketamin and all. Or you can just sit back and enjoy the language, which has already seeped into my vocabulary (sheetrock palace for a converted loft space, I'm loving it).
I've kind of shot my wad on the subject elsewhere, but I didn't want to ignore the book here. So this is just me saying: Watch the trailer. Believe the hype. Read the book.
Update: See this entry for more information and opinion on the plagiarism issue.
Update update: For my final word, go here.
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