On Appreciating Translations

As translators demand and gain increased recognition, our greater visibility has both pros and cons. It means that while some critics acknowledge our existence with a swift and not unwelcome "smoothly translated by" that might previously have been cut by an editor, others seek to engage with our work but in a negative way, pointing out its flaws. At which point other translators leap to our defence. This week, Emma Ramadan published the first part of a year-long diary at the Quarterly Conversation. Among other very interesting things, she addresses this issue, asking:

Why is it that anyone who dares write a negative review of a popular translation becomes a target? This is a problem. Or is it? Should we only positively review translations so that we lift the boat of translations in general? Should we all form a pact to refrain from reviewing translations we don’t like? Shouldn’t translations be able to stand up to the same criticism as books originally written in English?

For a while, I tried to organize a workshop bringing together critics (paid and unpaid) and translators, with the aim of talking about what makes a good translation, what makes a good review, and what makes a good review of a translation. I'm too far away from the UK, though, so it came to nothing. Maybe I'll try again some time. But for now, I'll gather my thoughts about it here.

I hope that translations are able to stand up to the same criticism as books originally written in English. Emma writes about abandoning a review because she disliked the book, and I know others who have done the same. In fact, back when I was reviewing books regularly here, unpaid, I usually chose not to bother finishing books I disliked – why prolong my misery and then write about it? (Part of this is probably because like many women, I want people to like me, I want to be nice.)

What I would also like, though, is for critics to deal fairly with translations, not treat them like country cousins. That would mean taking them seriously and making an attempt to critique different aspects: plot, style, language and translation. At the moment, critiquing the translator's work often takes one of two approaches, as I mentioned above: the single-adverb compliment – robustly, smoothly, adeptly, elegantly, etc. – and the find-the-flaw game, in which the reviewer points out misunderstandings and poor word choices. In her fascinating book on translation, This Little Art, Kate Briggs addresses this mistake-spotting with reference to two much-criticized (women) translators:

It has to be possible, in other words, for someone, for the critic, for the philosopher, for the harder-working translator, to identify and correct the translator's mistakes. Doing so can be a means of alerting readers to the fact of translation (...) and of preparing the ground for retranslation. It has to be possible to continue this inexhaustible work together: to query and vary each other's decisions, holding to or elaborating alternative measures of precision and care, without quarrelling, necessarily, or policing. And without shaming? This, it seems, is less clear.

My answer would be this: when we write about translations, we should bear in mind that they've been written by fallible human beings – as have all books. Translation is difficult. So is writing. It is hard to move a literary text between languages that don't overlap in terms of semantics, sounds, traditions. It is also hard to write descriptions of things that exist without words, thinks like sex, music, fields of daffodils. Literary criticism assesses how well those difficult things have been achieved.

I think I'm not alone in feeling that negative criticism of translators' work would be easier to stomach if it were accompanied by positive, in-depth appreciation of the occasions when we do well. On Twitter last week, I suggested a short list of positive attributes I look out for in translations, and others, including Frank Wynne – double-nominated for the Man Booker International Prize only hours later – added some more. Here are many of them:

Maintaining a rhythm
Creative word choices
Preserving oddities
Finding (new) ways to bring across cultural specifics
Playful approaches
(Re)creating a viable and distinct voice, authorial or character-driven
Taking chances, intervening more than usual
Recreating humour
Preserving a sense of place/period
Imaginatively dealing with dialect/slang, making them sound natural
Reproducing a sense of cadence
Using calque to good effect
Reproducing the uniqueness of a voice rather than smoothing it out
Recovering rare words
Maintaining linguistic resonances through consistent word choice
Preserving alliteration and aptonyms

I realize it's difficult to spot some of these things if you don't speak the original language and so can't compare, particularly with word choice issues. And I admit that not every translation has to tackle all these difficulties; some writing is simply smooth, so the translator's task is to render it smoothly. But I think we can pick up on many of these positive achievements regardless of our knowledge of the original. I'm currently judging an award for international literature translated into German, reading books translated from many different languages into a language that isn't my native tongue. I find myself quite capable of spotting in these translations both flaws – inconsistency, bumpy rhythm, unconvincing voices – and achievements – language patina, a sense of urgency, rescued humour, successfully solved linguistic sudoku.

And at our monthly translation lab in Berlin, we occasionally take the time to appreciate a specific translation. We compare it to the original and focus only on all its many positives, all the things we might emulate in our work. Sure, there are always things we might have done differently and it's hard to resist pointing them out. But I think if we only have negative role models, we end up aiming only for an impossible notion of flawlessness.

Kate Briggs has a gorgeous, reassuring parenthesis on page 86:

(If you don't want to make mistakes, don't do translations, I was once told – an enabling dictum that I keep close to my heart.)

So instead of pretending there can ever be a flawless translation, let's take translators seriously, celebrate what we do well and find ways to criticize without policing. When we review translated literature, let's aim to review all aspects of it. I'm a big fan of the translation reviews at the Glasgow Review of Books, by the way, because that's what they do.

Fantasy Publishing House

Seeking solace, I have been daydreaming about my ideal job. So here it is: I'd like to be the person who commissions translations in a fantasy publishing house where money is no object. Obviously I'd only do that half the time; the rest of my time would still be spent translating fabulous books from German. And travelling around in my chauffeur-driven Sunbeam Alpine (see above). Well-paid staff would do the other, more gruelling parts of the publishing work: accounting, editing, production, publicity, distribution...

My translator friends would come to me with impeccable recommendations for books to publish, and I would say yes, of course, if you love the book then it must be wonderful. Let's do it. And critics will snatch them out of our hands and fight over who gets to review them. But there'd be no need to argue because it's fine to have several reviews of any particular book, even in one publication, each pointing out in a supportive manner what delightful aspects the previous reviewer couldn't find room to mention. Although probably column inches wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

My first list, on the German side of things, would consist of the following titles:

Non-fiction
Heike Geißler: Saisonarbeit/Season's Greetings from Fulfillment
Carolin Emcke: Gegen den Hass/Against Hate

Fiction
Julya Rabinowich: Krötenliebe/Toads and Tempest
Antje Rávic Strubel: In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens/Into the Woods of the Human Heart
Senthuran Varatharajah: Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen/Before the Signs Mount Up
Rasha Khayat: Weil wir längst woanders sind/Because We're Elsewhere Now

Children/YA
Finn-Ole Heinrich: Die erstaunlichen Abenteuer der Maulina Schmitt/The Amazing and Astonishing Adventures of Maulina Schmitt
Kirsten Fuchs: Mädchenmeute/Girl Gang

I might be too busy being driven onto beaches to do all the translations myself. If you have unlimited funds and would like to give me a part-time job doing exactly this, feel free to contact me. I understand if you'd rather invest your unlimited funds in getting rid of reactionary world leaders, though, so if I don't hear from you I'll know that's where your priorities lie. That's fine.

My Feelings about My Writers and Your Feelings about David Bowie

I had been puzzled by how strongly people feel about David Bowie's death – the street renamings, the pilgrimages and flowers, the deep sadness, the need to share the tiny encounters or the life-changing effects of particular songs or Top of the Pops appearances. I have a different feeling about death to many people anyway, as a fourth-generation atheist, and have struggled to understand people's reactions in the past. A lot of them felt to me as though people thought the dead person was looking down at them and checking they were behaving suitably. Maybe they did think that, I don't know. When you've never entertained the idea of an afterlife that's hard to relate to. But I have at least learned something about the comforting power of ritual and sharing of grief.

So I had been idly reading various people's responses and it began to dawn on me that I had in fact felt something similar to that one-way devotion to someone who is unaware of your existence. And that's the feeling I have about my writers. I spend months or years mentally immersed in their creative work in a similar way to that time spent listening to favourite songs, poring over lyrics, interpreting their meaning, internalizing the rhythm, singing along at the top of your voice, imagining the song is all about you. Such a joyful teenagerly activity, best performed on a single bed with headphones and spots. I know you don't have to be a teenager to do it; here's the last song that did that to me.

And that's very like what happens to me when I'm translating a novel. It's a work of art that's been created entirely independently of me and even if I know the writer personally, which I usually do but not always, I will always know far more about their work than they do about mine. I will always think I know them far better than they know me – and yes, I know that's wrong thinking. But it's still a joyful activity, wallowing in the writing to create my literary cover versions. Sometimes translators do get romantically involved with their writers. I don't know about that really; it's always a secret yearning, I think, but could it ever be a balanced relationship?

None of my writers has died since I started working on them. It will be devastating, I expect. So now I understand the David Bowie sadness better.

So, So Sad about Ocelot

I'm really, really sad. My favourite ever bookshop is closing down in mid-March. Ocelot on Brunnenstraße is a beautiful big space full of well chosen books. They also sell coffee and really good cake. They host events and cooperate with a radio station and they run a blog and sell print and e-books online. They have quirky things like a sofa by the YA titles and a weird Japanese cube made of glass and electricity. Like all German bookshops, they will order any book you like and it will be there the next day. They will be really helpful and friendly about it too, and if you're me they'll ask you your name and you'll start spelling it and then they'll say, "Oh, right, I know!" If you're not on first-name terms already, that is.

You can go in with a friend and wander around for a very long time, recommending books for his dad's birthday present. And there'll be lots of good ones to choose from, of course. You can go in after two generous Mai Thais on their long night of book shopping before Christmas, and be too drunk to buy anything but have a really nice time just admiring the really expensive titles. Or you can go there to sit at the long table and drink a Diet Coke and talk to a journalist who's writing your friend's obituary. If your book happens to be mentioned in the London Review of Books you can tell them and they'll lend you their copy, because they're just sweet like that. You can pop in on a Saturday and run into a friend and tell her what a stinking bad mood you're in and feel instantly slightly better. Or you might run into a local writer looking at the recommendations, who will discourage you from buying anything because it's all rubbish, apparently, not like his books. You might go in there once with a friend and then find they're stocking her book in the YA section at a later date, and when you tell her she'll be really pleased. They might even ask you to moderate a reading by a top British writer, and then either they or the publisher will buy you a Wiener Schnitzel afterwards.

I wasn't sure whether to write anything; it feels a little tactless after their campaign to Save the Ocelot. And I know all us Ocelot fans had been hoping the Christmas season would pull them back out of insolvency. I think it went well; just not well enough. I think there was a miscalculation somewhere along the line, as there will almost inevitably be when you do something big and brave like opening a gorgeous bookshop in a large space. And it makes me sad that this ambitious project, which has captured hearts and minds and launched a million style pieces, hasn't managed to stay afloat. I know that's not for lack of enthusiasm.

I feel sort of pleased to have experienced this place, a book shop the way I think book shops ought to be, never patronising to its customers, always welcoming and involved with the publishing and literary world, a place to feel comfortable about loving books but never anonymous. I can't imagine there'll be anything to match up with it any time soon. The insolvency administrator is hopeful someone will buy the place outright and continue to run it. I sincerely hope so. If you happen to be rich, you should really think about it. If I was rich I know I would.

Martin Chalmers, 1948-2014

Martin Chalmers was buried today at the Alter Matthäus Cemetery in Berlin, in the same ground as the Brothers Grimm, the poet May Ayim, the musician Rio Reiser and many other Berliners ordinary and extraordinary in their own ways. It was his favourite cemetery. Martin's fellow translator and writer Iain Galbraith read Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" by the grave. 

I didn’t know Martin well but our paths crossed a few times here in Berlin, all of them memorable. The first was on a long evening of eating, drinking and talking with writers and translators at the Literary Colloquium, followed by a boozy train ride back into the city. It was a good way to meet someone I’d admired – anything but formal – and I remember him talking very knowledgably about Berlin history in a voice that was occasionally too quiet, and also about becoming a grandfather. The most recent occasion was in April of last year, when Martin had already been diagnosed with cancer but agreed to talk on a panel at a workshop for young translators. Although I cringe to ask people to do things for free, Martin was perfectly happy to pass on some of his experience and seemed to enjoy discovering an obscure corner of Neukölln; his bio states that he lived in Rixdorf, the old name for the borough or the lesser-known name of a very small part of it. That strikes me as typical of him – a winking eye for historical detail as expressed in words.

Martin was originally a historian but became a translator when he’d “run out of money”, as he said in an interview for New Books in German. He grew up in Glasgow; his mother was German and he spent a lot of time as a child with his German oma, who looked after him but had no English. At the funeral, his friend Robert Lumley said he’d gone to the pictures with her and whispered translations into her ear. I understand he recently found the place in East Prussia, now Poland, where she grew up. You can read some of Martin’s contemplative writing about his family, and other things, on his website.

Martin translated a whole swathe of German-language writers, mainly twentieth-century and contemporary, acting very much as a champion for them: Bertolt Brecht, Hubert Fichte, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Erich Fried, Herta Müller, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Joachim Fest, Sherko Fatah, Alexander Kluge, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Erich Hackl, and his partner Esther Kinsky. He was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 2004 for his translation of Viktor Klemperer’s I Shall Bear Witness – three volumes for which he also wrote the introductions. He taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school; our mutual friend Stefan Tobler was one of his students, bitten by Martin’s bug several years before he set up And Other Stories. 

At the funeral, friends spoke of Martin Chalmers as a pacifist with a huge amount of empathy and a great walker, a man who loved exploring cities on foot and talking on the go. The Seagull Books publisher Naveen Kishore tells a story about Martin and Esther taking him on a very long walk in the Berlin snow; I think they ended up at the cemetery where he’s now buried. He loved music and poetry and the ceremony reflected that beautifully – anecdotes about punk gigs, a story of Martin’s after which we attempted to sing his favourite hymn, a song by the graveside, Brecht and Arnold and Johannes Bobrowski. I will miss his occasional kind emails correcting things I got wrong on my blog and proffering his own opinions, his dry sense of humour and his taste in German literature, which was different to mine. 

I will think of him, always an inspiring man, and I will try to be as good a translator and advocate as he was and as active a walker and a thinker.

A Thing I Hated at the Book Fair

You're at the Frankfurter Hof. The entire front garden and lobby of this large hotel are seething with publishers, scouts, agents and editors. You're not a publisher or a scout or an agent or even an editor. You're there with friends who are also none of the above. Most importantly – or at least it begins to feel increasingly important as the evening goes on – you're a woman. Here are the things that happen:

First your friends take a photo of your shoes, which are hot. You are a complicit party to this embarrassment because yes, your shoes are hot and you're proud you can walk in them. Next you get a ridiculously overpriced drink, avoiding the main bar at the back of the overheated lobby because you remember it being kind of creepy last time you were here. You stand outside the door in a crush of people, some of whom you know and like. You spot an internet phenomenon looking awkward and decide it would be just plain embarrassing to say hello like some kind of fangirl. You wonder why the internet phenomenon has made such a public fuss in advance about being here and then you notice he is flanked by aggressive-looking men with name-tags proclaiming them to be agents. It appears to be some kind of industry meet 'n' greet in advance of a rights auction. You wonder whether the internet phenomenon is complicit in his own moral bankruptcy – although aren't we all? – and whether he is deliberately here so he can tell stories about how morally bankrupt he and the publishing industry are. You wonder why you are here. Your braver/drunker friend does go over and tells you later that the internet phenomenon seemed genuinely nice and actually listened to what she had to say, which makes you feel happy and sad for the internet phenomenon at the same time.

You wander inside to get another overpriced drink and refuse to tip the bartender because you object to the hideous price policy of making everything cost one euro short of a banknote in a transparent attempt to wash more cash into the coffers of the Steigenberger hotel chain. Although of course if you were working here you'd want to fleece the punters for all you could get and probably the Steigenberger hotel chain is not paying these people all that well, so you probably ought to tip them because it's hardly their fault. You spot someone else you know and she introduces you to someone and you don't catch the name of his publishing house but he asks you to recommend something and you do but it has to be the blandest book you can think of because of course you have no idea what he's looking for, but that seems OK because it's not like he notes it down or anything. You head outside again once your new acquaintance starts talking about "good schools", which is a subject that instantly raises your hackles and you really don't want to punch anyone.

On your way through the crowd you pick up several glances that seem – to you, at least – to be saying: "I am an important man and have looked your body up and down and am herewith granting my official approval. You should be grateful." It's not the first time this has happened in your life and not the first time it's happened at this fair. You ignore the glances. What would be the desired response? How would you like to respond? You don't even know.

Back outside, a man with a very loud voice and a whisky large enough to have been very expensive indeed is telling the assembled company that the bar at the back of the overheated lobby is "actual hell". It is crowded with old men and young women and guess which ones have the money, he says. An old man stretched his arm around the shoulders of the man with the very loud voice in order to paw a young woman and ask her what she wanted to drink, and that was what convinced him the place was "actual hell". You realize – and remember from the last time you were here – that the man with the very loud voice is absolutely right but you hate him for scoring points by saying it, especially because he is over thirty and this seems to be the first time he's been pawed by an old man.

People you have genuinely liked in other situations are now beginning to morph into apparently odious human beings. There is the usual abandonment in favour of more important conversation partners. There is a young man telling you that having a baby is easy, which freaks you out because your hackles are well and truly up now and you can't countenance the idea that it may be a joke, and you respond with passive aggression by telling a third party that men who say things like that can fucking fuck off and come back to you when they're tried it out themselves. There is a suggestion to call a publisher whom you and presumably everyone else knows to be a horrible person so that he can buy a round of drinks. He doesn't answer his phone though and people joke that he's having a party in his hotel room with his unpaid interns.

You're beginning to positively despise everyone here with their stinking hypocrisy. You wonder whether any of them are actually enjoying themselves and why they are here in the first place. You begin to hate your friends. You wonder whether you are actually enjoying yourself. You clearly aren't. You begin to hate yourself for being here. You go to the ladies' for a little mental space because by now you really do want to punch someone. There's no toilet paper. Fourteen euros for a bland gin and tonic and no toilet paper in the ladies'. You stalk back out through the crowd of braying jackals in dark blue suits to a taxi. You do tip the taxi driver because no, none of it is his fault and you can't very well walk home in your hot shoes.  

Ten Books I Would Like to Translate

I got tagged, and seeing as I've been obsessively reading and then totally judging everyone by their lists of ten books that changed their lives or whatever it is – jeez, did you stop reading at fifteen; if I hate that book must I now hate you; would you please stop posturing and admit to reading trash now and then; OMG, Jeffrey Archer changed your life, really? – I thought I just wouldn't expose myself to the imagined ridicule of it all. But then I felt bad, so here is my personal cop-out: ten books I would like to translate. Some of them are books that lots of other people would like to translate as well, but I figured this is like fantasy football league, right, so you can just go for ridiculously unlikely things. I know that me translating many of these books, in real life, would piss off other translators, but this isn't real life. Most of the links are to my own reviews.

1. Clemens Meyer: Im Stein
It's just not going away. There's a reason it's at the top of the list.

2. Dorothee Elmiger: Schlafgänger
Actually, if all goes well I will be translating this one.

3. Annett Gröschner: Walpurgistag
Hundreds of voices on one day in Berlin.

4. David Wagner: Leben
Neither fish nor flesh, gorgeously written.

5. Lutz Seiler: Kruso
Except it would be really, really hard.

6. Teresa Präauer: Für den Herrscher aus Übersee
This one has a lot of admirers though, like the Seiler book.

7. Daniela Dröscher: Pola
I'd dress up in evening gowns every day.

8. Anna Seghers: Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen
Surprise! A dead white woman.

9. Selim Özdogan: Die Tochter des Schmieds
An old favourite.

10. Sven Regener: Magical Mystery
Because I translated a sample earlier this year and it was great fun and a real challenge to get the tone right. I saved it up to translate on my birthday. I don't think that's sad, or no sadder than a lot of other things.

If you'd like to join in the melancholy fun, you too could make a list of ten books you'd like to translate. You could put it online and post a link in the comments section. It might go viral and everyone who speaks two or more languages would be doing it.

Magazines

Dear editors,

I have loads of stuff here, translations of amazing writers who are doing great stuff in Germany, winning prizes, gaining respect, pushing boundaries, all that kind of thing. Instead of me submitting it to you with a begging letter and you ignoring it for months on end and then possibly deigning to send a nebulous response about how it's not right for your magazine, why don't you just get in touch with me if you want something?

Thanks,

Katy

***

Actually, I do realize magazine editors have better things to do. One of the reasons I'm glad I'm not a writer is that I get offended too easily. Imagine if it was my own writing I was submitting to magazines. I'd be really really unhappy all the time.

But here's the thing: in the past, I've encouraged emerging translators to submit to literary magazines as a way of building up a résumé, like an unpublished writer might do. And one of the things I've said is to submit to magazines that don't focus on translation as well as the ones that do. Partly, this is a translation politics thing, because I think we should try and get out there and shout about non-Anglophone writers all over the place and not just in the usual venues. And partly it's because I think more people read them, and getting these pieces read is all I'm interested in. It's not like anyone's paying for them.

But while I've had excellent and encouraging experiences, on the whole, with journals that focus on translation, submitting to just plain literary journals has mainly been one big merry-go-round of frustration. The disturbing thing is, the things I send in are not by nobodies. They're by published writers, they've been edited and printed and reviewed positively and then I've translated them and usually also had someone edit the translation for me. Some of these writers have won major literary prizes here in Germany. And then as soon as they leave the country: nothing.

It makes me wonder about a few things: are there national tastes? Is that the problem, that British and American editors prefer a different kind of writing to German readers? That feels kind of unlikely to me, judging by the amount of fiction that gets translated from English to German. Then again, I bought The New Yorker's Twenty Under Forty and was distinctly underwhelmed. The other hazy thing is about writers having made names for themselves. Does the fact that German readers have heard of these authors make them think their writing is better than if it were a kind of blind tasting? So that, when I submit a translation to a British journal, say, the editors are reading it in a less biased way because they're not swayed by the name? If so, what does that say about me? Does it mean I'm subject to the same dazzle-factor? Probably, at least to some extent.

I'll probably keep on plugging away, at least on good days. I'll probably keep trying to come up with modest but enthusiastic cover letters to try and explain why I'm crazy about these superb pieces of writing. But if you happen to be a magazine editor and you've been thinking, hey, why do we have so few outstanding stories and essays translated from German, something needs to be done about this! - then do get in touch.

Spanking Sibylle

The author-translator relationship has always been a tricky thing, for me. A translator reads so intimately, spending months inside the very guts of each book, that it can feel as though we know the writers rather than their work. We don’t, of course, because the writers aren’t involved in the process, only their words. It’s a huge disparity, this imbalance of knowledge. 

I’ve written about it before, based on this quote from Richard Howard:

The relationship of the translator to the writer is an erotic relationship always, and you learn something about the person that you’re working with in an almost plastic, physical way that you can almost never learn about your friends.

Yet what Howard doesn’t mention is that the relationship is almost entirely one-way, unrequited. There are writers I've been translating for a long time (not necessarily for publication), who feel like beloved old spouses whose tics I've grown accustomed to, there are some who I've fallen out of love with, most I delight in, and every new writer comes with a frisson of excitement. And those first meetings! Every single time, such high expectations and then such aching disappointment, like a bad date.

One of the worst moments is when they don’t seem grateful enough. A German book in English is unlikely to make anyone rich, but it will get the writer invited to exotic and desirable locations. It will also frequently get the writer’s book translated into other languages, which is no doubt also good for the ego and the travel anecdote collection. Of course writers may be unaware of how much effort translators put into getting certain books published, or they may assume that publishers the world over were already aware of their work and would have snapped it up regardless. Translators are prone to a kind of petulance at being overlooked and underappreciated, I think, and I am no exception.

I was telling a friend about the difficulties as I see them, and she commented that it all sounded rather Downton Abbey. With me as the below-stairs staff and the writers as the upstairs lords and ladies. In the most extreme cases, I have all this intimate knowledge about people who are only peripherally aware of my existence. I make my living by providing a service, something that takes years to learn and skill to perform, but that is sometimes taken for granted by the people I serve. I am exaggerating, but that’s how it feels at times.

I told a writer I’ve translated about the Downton Abbey comparison and she sympathized. But, she pointed out, her mother had always responded to being dismissed as a housewife with a Goethe quote:

Dienen lerne beizeiten das Weib nach ihrer Bestimmung!
Denn durch Dienen allein gelangt sie endlich zum Herrschen,
Zu der verdienten Gewalt, die doch ihr im Hause gehöret.

Ellen Frothingham rendered it as:

Early a woman should learn to serve, for that is her calling;
Since through service alone she finally comes to the headship,
Comes to the due command that is hers of right in the household.

At the time it comforted me; perhaps the servants and housewives of the world, through serving, do have power over others. But now it’s not helping matters. I don’t want to be a conniving, scheming, unhappy Miss O’Brien. Not that I want to be above stairs either, but still. It all ties in with Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation, as far as I remember, in which the translator is eternally connotated as female because of her invisible, serving role.

But there it is. Although in my case they’re the exception, there are author-translator relationships that really don’t deserve the term “relationship”. And yet, my name is tied to their names and when I read their names I am interested in what they have to say. So when a writer I have translated comments publicly that copulation is something that ought to happen between men and women for the purpose of procreation and that it would be wise to ban masturbation and that she is inclined to consider children created by artificial insemination “semi-creatures”, “half human, half artificial I don’t know what”, especially if they’re born to lesbian mothers, and in the same speech compares the Nazi Lebensborn programme favourably with artificial insemination – when that happens, I am as ashamed as I would be if that writer were a relation of mine. Of course, every right-minded reader in Germany is up in arms that an award-winning writer could push such a fundamentalist agenda, and the kindest conclusion is that the writer herself is not in her right mind. Perhaps the only consolation, for me, is that said writer is one of the few of those I’ve translated who probably doesn’t even remember my name.

So this is my way of stepping discreetly out from below-stairs and distancing myself. I don't know if it's the right way to go about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Not strictly scientific

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

Culture Vultures Internet Dating

Here is what I want to exist: an internet dating site for people who read books. As in: a lot of books. Or for people who make art, or write, or make music, or appreciate art and writing and music in a way that has becoming a defining factor in their lives.

It would have a multilingual interface, where you have to enter the languages you speak and the books/art/music you love. Maybe write something about yourself that would illustrate your individuality, wit and intelligence. It would have people in places all over the world, from places all over the world, but a decent number of them would be in Berlin so I would get to go on dates. As in: dates with men who don't think it's crazy to read a lot of books and are not intimidated by women who do so. Who can talk about books but also about other things like favourite ice cream flavours or whatever. In a halfway intelligent manner, you know.

I don't have the time or the technical wherewithal to invent this site, so I've simply come up with a name (see above) in the hope that someone will be inspired. I've never done internet dating but I hear it's quite good if you know what you want. Obviously, I don't.

Wholly Compensated? Scratch That.

So there's me feeling all warm inside about enjoying the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize festivities at a distance, adored by my many fans and all that. And then comes this - Wolfgang Hörner, winner Peter Wawerzinek's publisher, on what he did in Klagenfurt. Jeez. Don't read it. You'll melt out of sheer envy.

The Problem With Panels

The problem with public appearances is the fear. The days of low-level anxiety beforehand over what to wear - no, those shoes just won't do, and that dress is too much - until you start to feel like a character in a Noel Streatfield novel and long for a plucky Nanny to run you up a little something out of the drawing room curtains. Then the eight hours of concentrated fear beforehand, in which you worry about what on earth to say. The inability to eat, combined with the fact that you know you need to keep your blood sugar up so you keep nibbling at things and then discarding them like some spoilt kid in a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel.

Followed by half an hour of outright irrational terror as you stand around politely with your fellow panel people and assure each other you all have no idea what you're talking about. And then you're up there and everyone's looking at you and yes, you are the token woman, and people take your photo and your mind goes blank as soon as any question refers back to a previous comment because you're operating on pure adrenaline and charm and you're smiling and nodding and thinking, how on earth can I phrase this completely erudite thought in fucking German, so you have a two-minute delay operating and by the time you've worked it out the conversation's moved on and you make your entire profession look like a bunch of monosyllabic morons with fixed grins.

And then it's over, and being a well brought-up kind of girl who wants to be good and kind like in a Susan Coolidge novel, you stick around and smile a bit more. And presumably you've managed to appear not entirely terrified, because nobody reassures you that you were great, or you were fine, or you were better than the guy on the right, or your shoes looked nice. At which point the post-panel paranoia kicks in, presumably an after-effect of the adrenaline, and yes, that guy's ignoring you, and no, nobody important wants to talk to you, and yes, that other guy really did just ask your fellow panel person standing two feet to the left of you to join them all in a restaurant and looked straight through you.

And then you join them in a restaurant even though you'd rather either curl up in a ball in bed or go on a raging drunken tour of strip clubs and karaoke bars and pick up Mormons on the street and seduce them. And a collossal bad mood creeps up on you, unsurprisingly seeing as you haven't eaten in hours, but the thought of food turns your stomach and you're trying to talk to the two people you genuinely like at the table without revealing the extent of your foul temper like in a Louisa May Alcott novel - shit, probably not like in a Louisa May Alcott novel, but at this point who cares?

And you leave and walk home and write angry adrenaline-fuelled emails and can't sleep because you keep sitting up in bed and shouting. Which doesn't happen in any of the books you read as a child so you don't have a frame of reference to deal with it.

Shit, if I did this all the time I'd have a heroin habit.

Update: There is photographic evidence. I'm the one with the nice shoes.

Translators' Centres: One Down, One To Go

The news has been out for a while now but there's been surprisingly little fuss: due to cuts in public funding for culture under Germany's conservative-liberal coalition, there won't be a Translators' Centre at the next Frankfurt Book Fair. The cuts also affect the Goethe Institut's various translation funding programmes to the tune of 7%, so watch out for fewer books being translated out of German in the years to come.

The Translators' Centre was a wonderful invention, organised by Antje te Brake (who knows how to shake a leg on the dancefloor) in conjunction with the two professional organisations for translators in Germany, the BDÜ and the VdÜ. It was a place to meet colleagues and relax in a relatively calm atmosphere, it offered translators a stage of their own, it displayed a wonderful range of translated titles, it was a place where prizes were awarded and contacts were made. And although the Book Fair says translation-related events will still take place in the International Centre, I know I won't be the only person to miss it.

Bucking the trend though, London's come through this year: its new Literary Translation Centre will "bring together the publishing and translation communities to stimulate, inspire and raise the profile of literary translation in the UK," with a modest programme of events (but the London Book Fair is more modest than Frankfurt all round, and that's not all a bad thing). Top-notch movers and shakers like Anne McLean, David Constantine, Amanda Hopkinson and EJ Van Lanen will talk about the ins and outs of translation, bringing foreign literature to Britain and the US and why on earth it all matters.

I can't go.

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.