A Little Bit of Politics

A while ago, the German press was getting all het up about writers ignoring politics. They had forgotten Ulrich Peltzer's Teil der Lösung.

It is an excellent book, although I found it slightly too long. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember a vivid description of eyes meeting at a party that literally took my breath away. If I'd been wired up to a machine as I read, it would have been beeping frantically. It's a story about a romance between a journalist and a younger student. The journalist is one of Berlin's prominent "urbane Penner" - creative types living on the brink of poverty with very visible shared offices in Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. The student leads a double life as a left-wing activist. And then there are the people around them - the university lecturer who provides the link between them, the activists, the intelligence officers locked in in-fighting. Lots of insight into the way their relationships work.

I found it a very good portrait of Berlin - say two or three years ago, before G8 in Heiligendamm. Gallery parties, anti-surveillance campaigns, Kastanienallee, Becks Gold. Actually, I'm not sure whether anyone really does drink Becks Gold in the book, it's just a vague feeling. The book was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, but Clemens Meyer won, as you may know. But Peltzer did win this year's Berliner Literaturpreis for "lifetime achievement", worth even more money and securing him a semester as a guest professor at the FU.

You can read an extract, translated by Martin Chalmers, at Litrix. I have no idea whether this is the kind of thing that interests English-language readers (and publishers), but I really liked it. I hope you do too.

Prizewinning Zaimoglu Translation

"Inspired" by three percent, I see that three American PhD students, Kristin Dickinson, Robin Ellis and Priscilla Layne, have won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation - for their as-yet unpublished version of Feridun Zaimoglu's Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft. The website describes the book as presenting "the fictionalized voices of 26 women of Turkish heritage living in Germany... Koppstoff challenges readers to rethink conventions of religion, nationalism and femininity, and is globally significant for its contribution to debates on immigration, assimilation and discrimination–issues that resonate far beyond Germany’s borders."

A Jungle World review closes: "The rage is deep-seated. The language is wild, dense, associative, poetic. It describes the situation in accordance with the different professions, characters and temperaments: the good German is enjoying building up his hell again." What I find interesting is that the book is already ten years old, and as such reflects what was going on back then - the birth of a movement, perhaps, that I vaguely followed at the time. Back then, Zaimoglu was still moving in activist circles, and was in at the beginning of the "transethnic activist network" Kanak Attak. I'd say the claim on the Susan Sontag website that he founded it all on his ownsome is sightly exaggerated, to say the least. But the group's manifesto dates back to November 1998 - so was probably written around the same time as Koppstoff.

What struck me at the time was that people - like me, in fact - were beginning to reject the demands for assimilation or even "integration" and say: Why should we fit in with your society? And I think that's probably reflected in Koppstoff. From Jungle World again, a quote from the book:

Mihriban, 30, greengrocer: "If you live in a house and make sure the fridge is always full, keep on going shopping like a good girl, but people look daggers at you every time you want to open the fridge and take out something to eat, can you feel at home?"

Zaimoglu seems to have mellowed with age. His latest novel, Liebesbrand, is about an amour fou, a man obsessed by a woman who helps him after a coach crash in Turkey. I had to put it aside, it just didn't stoke my boiler. And the people at Kanak Attak have gone rather quiet too - their latest project seems to be a set of T-shirts. Of course, things have changed hugely since 1998 - 9/11 has shifted the focus to religion rather than ethnicity, and Germany has changed its citizenship and immigration laws (although not nearly to the extent being called for at the time). The media people work in have shifted too - there's Kanak-TV now and Zaimoglu is a critical member of the government's Islam Conference. His 2006 play Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins) was a collection of monologues based on interviews with neo-Muslim women - perhaps a continuation of the Koppstoff theme, but not as ground-breaking as it was ten years ago.

So, an interesting choice. As I see it, the book is almost a historical document - of a very exciting time. I wish the translators luck for getting it published, and will be fascinated to read it. If you'd like to read Zaimoglu's more recent fiction in English, try Margot Bettauer Dembo's translations on Words Without Borders.

Zickenkrieg

I was going to provide something very sensible for your weekend delectation, but then this came along. It's from Germany's most-read "newspaper" - although they're not allowed to call themselves that as they don't run enough news stories - Bild. And it's a piece about the ubiquitous Feuchtgebiete/Wetlands author Charlotte Roche and her book. Usually, I suspect, the literary section is small to non-existent. But this story is filed under "Star-News".

One of my least favourite German actresses/lecturers/provocative she-rappers, Lady Bitch Ray, has apparently slagged old Charlotte off. She says: "If anyone's allowed to talk about fucking in Germany, then it has to be me! She just wants to hitch a ride on my vagina style with her book. She's just a bad copy of me."

Now then, obviously LBR is not quite as stupid as she pretends to be, seeing as she is currently writing her PhD (the semiotics of the clothes in the Bild photos are fairly clear, I'd say). But surely she realises that writing a book and making a film are two different things. And I would like to hope that more than one person in Germany is allowed to talk about fucking, actually.

Anyway, I had a good laugh at this piece, especially the moralising video that bleeps out all sorts of words in various red-faced readings from the book - the first one, in case you were wondering, is "tampon".

Zickenkrieg, by the way, translates literally as "war of the nanny goats". Alas, German is no better than English when it comes to referring to women by animal names. But that presumably doesn't worry someone who calls herself a dog.

Ms Roche declined to comment.

Let's Read Together

I have to warn you: this is hardly new stuff, but I think it's very much worth reading.

My suggestion for this weekend's reading matter is the Supplement to Volume 4 Number 3 of Brunel University's EnterText - an interactive interdisciplinary e-journal for cultural and historical studies and creative work.

Now no chatting at the back there, for this is seriously translation-related. The supplement contains eight papers from the 2004 "Shelving Translation" conference, all about the role of the translated text in Britain today.

A lot of it is theoretical, from a comparison of reviews of translations in Spain, France and the UK to translating intertextuality. But if that's not your idea of fun, you'll find these papers are bracketed by items from translation practitioners: Anthea Bell and Christopher MacLehose, once at Harvill and now in charge of his own translation imprint at Quercus. He writes:

At Harvill I have tried to find a translator of seventy summers or more, scholars for whom high wires over the Niagara were a thing of the past. Why so senior? The translation of the mere language is presumably but a quarter of the work and the more experienced and more deeply read a translator is in the literature of the source language—as well as aware of the day-to-day ways and social and political history—the more readily he or she will recognise the landscape of literary and quotidian memory behind the language, the invisible veins beneath the surface of a text. Joan Tate, the exceptional ambassador for and tireless translator of a whole library of valuable books from Swedish, used to say that vocabulary was no more than a sixteenth part of translation. Guido Waldman, my colleague at Harvill, and himself a very good translator although only in his sixties, did not share all of my convictions about translators and was forever finding young, untried ones, and one after the other they won the best prizes.

Hmmph.

I haven't looked at any of the others yet, but I'll be thinking of you, dear readers, as I settle down to a good long read over the weekend. Enjoy.

Kaminer for the Weekend

A couple of people on the Guardian piece about German books have recommended Wladimir Kaminer. Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion I might know who one of them is. My inner jury is very much out on the whole Kaminer phenomenon. I really enjoyed his first book, Russian Disco, but since then he's been so in-your-face, at least in Berlin, that I've kind of had enough.

According to Literary Rapture, the English translation of Russian Disco prevented it from doing all that well. But you can read two stories by the man himself, translated by Liesl Schillinger, on Words without Borders. Enjoy.

Buying Rights

I read yesterday (embedded deeply in this article) that Piper have sold the rights to Hape Kerkeling's mega-bestseller Ich bin dann mal weg to the USA. Now before I let loose I have to admit that I haven't read the book. It's an autobiographical account of a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by a popular German comedian.

And it had sold about 2.7 million copies by January of this year, apparently - making it Germany's highest-selling non-fiction book ever.

So here's how the system seems to work: one country's publishers present their bestsellers to US/UK/Egyptian/Slovenian publishers. Because the books have sold well in the country of origin, the foreign publishers assume this will be the case in their country too. That means they have a vague guarantee that it won't be a flop. See Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Bernard Schlink, Umberto Eco, etc.

But sometimes this system just doesn't work. Take, for example, the British book Is it Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? This is a fairly amusing compendium of things that are shit. The classic "bathroom book" for dipping into every now and then. Only the things that are shit are very British. Very British indeed. As I recall, they're things like the Daily Mail newspaper, Lemsip or the Mitford girls. But it was a Christmas hit (my dad got two copies in various stockings) and sold by the bucket-load.

So the German publishers Goldmann bought the rights and had it translated, by Elvira Willems. Apparently, she had a fairly wide brief to just make up German things that are comparatively shit to minor British royalty and brand-name products. And let's face it, there are plenty of shit things in Germany as well. But its Amazon site paints a sorry picture: five customer reviews, all with one star (I don't think you can award zero). Here's a little taste, proving my point:

There really are far too many annoying things in the world, and a few of them have found their way into this book. For example, Che Guevara merchandising, Big Brother videos, comedy clubs, film warnings, etc....There are a few things in this book that I can nod my head to. But then there are very many entries - things, brands, people, media - that are simply typically British and that nobody knows here. But that's hardly the authors' fault, seeing as they are British. It's still a shame. Or have you ever heard of Vernon Kay, Boris Johnson or Philipp Green? Unfortunately, there are far too many of them in this book, so that only about half of the content makes sense to the average German consumer.

Which brings us back to Hape Kerkeling. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but his is a celebrity book. It sold well because everybody loves him and is interested in his personal mixture of Buddhism and Christianity, what he ate on the road, how his feet felt at the end of each day and the strange people he met along the way. And again, correct me if I'm wrong, but a celebrity book by someone you've never heard of is, er, missing the point ever so slightly.

Plus, the subject has already been done to death in English. There's Tim Moore's Travels with my Donkey for the comedy take and Shirley Maclaine's The Camino: A Pilgrimage of Courage. And even that is only at number 30,112 in the Amazon US book sales charts. And Shirley Maclaine is really famous.

So despite being happy that another book has made its way across the pond, I can't help feeling someone might have made a bit of a mistake here. But judge for yourself. Here's a pdf extract (in German).

Something for the Long Weekend

If you're condemned to stay at your desk over the weekend rather than rollicking at book fairs, here are a few consolations:

Dedalus, the British publisher nearly wiped out by the Arts Council, has been saved in the nick of time and will be bringing out lots of lovely translations. Here's a sample from Markus Orth's The Staff Room - translated by Mike Mitchell. Via the amazing Three Percent.

And the German publisher Rowohlt is celebrating its 100th anniversary, with much "tamtam" as the Germans say. Here's an entertaining article (in German) from the Hannoverscher Allgemeine Zeitung about how they used to edit their translations (with croché). Via the Complete Review.

Plus a short but sweet review of Irmard Keun's Child of all Nations (translator Michael Hofmann) in the New Statesman. I'm ordering it now.

I'll be back next week.

Selim Özdogan Double-Whammy

To start off your weekend (and mine), a link to a translation from Die Tochter des Schmieds and my translation of a text Selim read recently in Kreuzberg, with many thanks to the author. I promise to shut up about him for a while after this. Probably.

Enjoy!
No better or worse, just different

There are people who think literature is about prizes: Bachmann, Büchner, Booker, Nobel and all the rest of them. There are people who think literature is about education, about reading the classics and referring back to them, that part of the creative process is a question of using one’s memory. There are people who think writers have to have a command of the language, have to master it, to put on a show like a lion tamer. Masterful, they call some writers, as if it were a question of power and authority. There are people who think the writer’s task is to explain the world and its conditions, society and its crises. Who think writers are capable of saying profound things about the problems of our times. Who lay greater store by the opinion of a respected scrivener than by that of someone else who happens to have a different profession. There are people who think literature is about being a somebody somewhere, becoming or being a factor, marking oneself off from the rest. There are people who think the point of literature is to change the world.


No doubt they are all right in their own way. Yet to me, these people seem to be in the majority, and they seem to have some kind of sovereignty over defining what literature is.


When you’ve reached the end of your tether, when you have no idea what’s going on in this world and why you’re here, when it looks like you understand even less than everyone else, when every day poses new riddles, when there seems to be no way out, when all your paths lead uphill and they all come to dead ends, when desperation and loneliness blend together so well that you can’t tell them apart any more, when you feel like you’re separated off from everyone else, by a wall that seems no thicker than a rizla, but you can’t break through, when you can’t manage to tell anyone what you really think, and when the only thing you find that helps is words, that’s when literature can come about as well. When you say, fuck it, I’ve got nothing to lose anyway, I’ll just hammer it all out. When you say, I don’t care about anything else, I’ll live or die with this shit, when you say, this is the only way I want to end it all, when there’s nothing else left, nothing at all, that’s when you don’t even think about mastering language, that’s when it’s your way out, no matter how thorny, steep and rocky, no matter how dead the end may be.


That doesn’t mean what you write is necessarily any good, far from it. But it does mean you’ve got a bum deal out of life, because you’ve ended up in a business where it’s the others who make up the rules.