I have two things for you to read today:
Rory MacLean on Tilman Rammstedt (because it's about one of my favourite translations)
and
Florian Duijsens on Kafka (because he does a very clever trick that shows you how powerful the translator's perception can be).
Showing posts with label tilman rammstedt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tilman rammstedt. Show all posts
Thursday, 15 May 2014
Tuesday, 14 January 2014
Making of... The King of China
So I have a new book out (she says casually): The King of China by Tilman Rammstedt. We had a fabulous event to launch it, if I do say so myself, attended by very nearly fifty people. I certainly enjoyed it and I think some of the others did too.
As I've written before, I intend to write a little making-of piece here in lieu of a translator's note whenever a book I've translated comes out. It seems like a useful thing to make available on the internet. Please feel free to crib from it if you're writing a review. So here we go.
Tilman and I first met officially when we were both involved in a panel discussion in Berlin. It wasn't a very good panel discussion. It was about why so few German books get translated into English, and was one of those chest-beating occasions on which Germans blame the complexity of their literature for the fact that British and American publishers don't translate it. Whereby they are both a) misjudging the Anglophone market, as in fact German is the second-most translated language for novels, it's just that there's not much translation as a whole, and b) actually showing off about the complexity of their literature. Sadly, I was too nervous to say this in public at the time. What Tilman said on that panel, however, was that he didn't really want to be translated all that badly, didn't really care either way. When I mentioned this at our launch event on Saturday he commented that it sounded a terribly immature thing to say; but it was about four years ago, and it was one of the more interesting comments made on that panel. In any case, I read Der Kaiser von China in preparation for that panel and enjoyed it very much indeed.
What happened next was down to the foreign rights person at Tilman's publishing house DuMont, Judith Habermas. Like many of the people whose job is selling translation rights, Judith is a bit of a whirlwind, in the most charming way. Judith talked to the publisher I work with a lot, Seagull Books, and recommended Der Kaiser von China. Seagull liked the look of it and asked me about it and I was very enthusiastic about the idea, and the deal was practically done.
And so I sat down to translate the novel. There were two main challenges: the very special rhythm throughout the book and the travel-guide tone in the letters the protagonist Keith writes to his family, pretending to be in China. The latter was easily overcome because Tilman had used the Lonely Planet guide to China as a source, and simply lent me his English copy. At the beginning of the novel there are a couple of short phrases lifted verbatim, which I found with little difficulty and transcribed into my own version. As the plot moves on the letters become increasingly fictional, with more and more bizarre imaginary details, but having worked with the guidebook to begin with, I had found the tone by that point. Recreating the rhythm was a question of listening carefully to the original sentences, trying not to chop too many of them down to size, and being brave enough to allow my English versions to run on and on until they reached their sometimes punchline-like climax or anti-climax. Tilman disapproves of the word punchline in this context, I believe, but I think it fits if you don't take it too literally.
The last issue was the title. If you pay attention to such things you'll have noticed it's not a literal translation. The German Kaiser is of course an emperor, and of course that's what they had in China, not kings. There were several reasons why the title was changed, in the end. Firstly, it refers to a bit of wordplay that crops up in the plot, which I tried to rescue in English by tweaking it slightly. Having found a solution I could live with, it seemed to work rather well as a title because it reflected the main character's slapdash attitude to facts and also the book's all-round kookiness. And the other excuse I found was when talking to an American book rep, my friend George Carroll. He said it would be excellent to have a title that wasn't already taken, so that when people looked up the book they would find it immediately. And The King of China wasn't already taken. I told Tilman we'd changed the title when we were both a bit tired and emotional towards the end of the launch of his most recent novel, Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters. He nodded and seemed untroubled by the idea.
I hope you enjoy the book.
As I've written before, I intend to write a little making-of piece here in lieu of a translator's note whenever a book I've translated comes out. It seems like a useful thing to make available on the internet. Please feel free to crib from it if you're writing a review. So here we go.
Tilman and I first met officially when we were both involved in a panel discussion in Berlin. It wasn't a very good panel discussion. It was about why so few German books get translated into English, and was one of those chest-beating occasions on which Germans blame the complexity of their literature for the fact that British and American publishers don't translate it. Whereby they are both a) misjudging the Anglophone market, as in fact German is the second-most translated language for novels, it's just that there's not much translation as a whole, and b) actually showing off about the complexity of their literature. Sadly, I was too nervous to say this in public at the time. What Tilman said on that panel, however, was that he didn't really want to be translated all that badly, didn't really care either way. When I mentioned this at our launch event on Saturday he commented that it sounded a terribly immature thing to say; but it was about four years ago, and it was one of the more interesting comments made on that panel. In any case, I read Der Kaiser von China in preparation for that panel and enjoyed it very much indeed.
What happened next was down to the foreign rights person at Tilman's publishing house DuMont, Judith Habermas. Like many of the people whose job is selling translation rights, Judith is a bit of a whirlwind, in the most charming way. Judith talked to the publisher I work with a lot, Seagull Books, and recommended Der Kaiser von China. Seagull liked the look of it and asked me about it and I was very enthusiastic about the idea, and the deal was practically done.
And so I sat down to translate the novel. There were two main challenges: the very special rhythm throughout the book and the travel-guide tone in the letters the protagonist Keith writes to his family, pretending to be in China. The latter was easily overcome because Tilman had used the Lonely Planet guide to China as a source, and simply lent me his English copy. At the beginning of the novel there are a couple of short phrases lifted verbatim, which I found with little difficulty and transcribed into my own version. As the plot moves on the letters become increasingly fictional, with more and more bizarre imaginary details, but having worked with the guidebook to begin with, I had found the tone by that point. Recreating the rhythm was a question of listening carefully to the original sentences, trying not to chop too many of them down to size, and being brave enough to allow my English versions to run on and on until they reached their sometimes punchline-like climax or anti-climax. Tilman disapproves of the word punchline in this context, I believe, but I think it fits if you don't take it too literally.
The last issue was the title. If you pay attention to such things you'll have noticed it's not a literal translation. The German Kaiser is of course an emperor, and of course that's what they had in China, not kings. There were several reasons why the title was changed, in the end. Firstly, it refers to a bit of wordplay that crops up in the plot, which I tried to rescue in English by tweaking it slightly. Having found a solution I could live with, it seemed to work rather well as a title because it reflected the main character's slapdash attitude to facts and also the book's all-round kookiness. And the other excuse I found was when talking to an American book rep, my friend George Carroll. He said it would be excellent to have a title that wasn't already taken, so that when people looked up the book they would find it immediately. And The King of China wasn't already taken. I told Tilman we'd changed the title when we were both a bit tired and emotional towards the end of the launch of his most recent novel, Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters. He nodded and seemed untroubled by the idea.
I hope you enjoy the book.
Sunday, 15 December 2013
Adler & Söhne presents: An Evening with the King of China
Dear readers,Please join us to celebrate the launch of The King of China - Tilman Rammstedt's rambunctious novel, now available in my English translation. Rammstedt and I will present the shiny new book and talk about the writing and translation process, China, grandfathers, narrators and other fascinating things. Feel free to attend in traditional Chinese dress. Books will be on sale and we hope you'll help us wet the baby's head at the bar after the ceremony. They do great Flaming Mai Tais.
Where? Soupanova, Stargarder Straße 24, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
When? Saturday, 11 January 2014, 8 p.m.
Why? Because January needs a good party.
We hope to see you there!
Katy Derbyshire
About the book:
We meet Keith Stapperpfennig under his desk, his knees padded with washing-up sponges. He’s supposed to be holidaying in China with his eccentric grandfather but that didn’t quite work out, so he’s gone into hiding. And now Keith gets a call telling him his grandfather is dead—and not in China either. Trouble looms on all sides; his brothers and sisters will be angry, his fiancée will be furious. They simply must not find out.
With the aid of a guidebook, Keith writes a series of letters home to his brothers and sisters, detailing their imaginary travels and the bizarre sights they see. All this develops into a heart-warming love story between his grandfather and the fattest woman in the world, while we learn of Keith’s own amorous adventures gone awry and his rather unusual upbringing. Plus of course there’s the real trip to identify the body.
Funny, fast-paced, touching, Chinese—or perhaps not Chinese—Tilman Rammstedt’s novel won him the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2008 and sealed his fame as one of Germany’s most fabulous liars. Mo Yan would love it.
“This novel is like a film by the Coen brothers. . . uplifting in a way unusual in German literature. An entertaining book, not shallow, not smutty, not know-it-all. Simply great entertainment.” Kulturspiegel
"An enjoyable bit of (unusual) escapism." The Complete Review
Friday, 30 August 2013
Berlin Reads - and We Join in
Berlin's International Literature Festival opens on Wednesday, 4 September. It features the usual festival-type smorgasbord of writers from around the world, with a couple of interesting themes such as cultures of aging and women's sexuality on paper.
Anyway, the festival has had a slightly controversial reputation in the past. One of the ways it manages to survive on its budget is by tapping into readers' raw enthusiasm. So they had a programme which consisted of normal Berliners looking after the visiting writers in exchange for free tickets, for example, and of course the seemingly inevitable army of unpaid interns. This year (and I believe last year as well) they have a special pre-festival section called "Berlin liest".
Again, the thing consists of people doing something for free. But we're doing it anyway because we're like that (and let's face it, most of the readings I've ever done have been for free). We'll be reading at 4 p.m. on 4 September at St George's Bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg. Other people (see the link above) are reading out in the open in public places, but that was a step too far for me, frankly.
Here's our particular agenda:
Isabel Cole will be reading from Annemarie Schwarzenbach's All the Roads Are Open.
Karen Margolis will be reading two classical Chinese poems from The Land of the Five Flavours.
I'll be reading from Tilman Rammstedt's The King of China.
Lucy Renner-Jones will be reading from Silke Scheuermann's "Lisa and the Heavenly Bodies".
The translations are all our own work. Mine is a sneak preview, as the book's not quite out yet.
Anyway, the festival has had a slightly controversial reputation in the past. One of the ways it manages to survive on its budget is by tapping into readers' raw enthusiasm. So they had a programme which consisted of normal Berliners looking after the visiting writers in exchange for free tickets, for example, and of course the seemingly inevitable army of unpaid interns. This year (and I believe last year as well) they have a special pre-festival section called "Berlin liest".
Again, the thing consists of people doing something for free. But we're doing it anyway because we're like that (and let's face it, most of the readings I've ever done have been for free). We'll be reading at 4 p.m. on 4 September at St George's Bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg. Other people (see the link above) are reading out in the open in public places, but that was a step too far for me, frankly.
Here's our particular agenda:
Isabel Cole will be reading from Annemarie Schwarzenbach's All the Roads Are Open.
Karen Margolis will be reading two classical Chinese poems from The Land of the Five Flavours.
I'll be reading from Tilman Rammstedt's The King of China.
Lucy Renner-Jones will be reading from Silke Scheuermann's "Lisa and the Heavenly Bodies".
The translations are all our own work. Mine is a sneak preview, as the book's not quite out yet.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
Tilman Rammstedt: Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters
It's been a little while since I read Tilman Rammstedt's new novel Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters, so I don't want to tell you much about the plot. Basically, Tilmann Rammstedt is having trouble writing a novel and so turns to Bruce Willis (via email), whom he needs as a character in order to get his former adviser at the bank out of trouble. The bank guy is a bit of an odd fellow and now Tilmann Rammstedt wants Bruce to play his part in the novel and give him a bit of oomph, a bit more of a grubby-vest aesthetic. Adventures ensue. Terribly gripping adventures.
The resulting meta-novel is an action movie for writers. Money troubles, editor breathing down your neck, writer's block - who wouldn't turn to Bruce Willis for help? Rammstedt tells his story through his emails to Willis (will he ever answer?), recounting all the action Willis gets up to as a character alongside Tilman himself on the pages of the novel. He uses all his powers of persuasion to prompt the Bruce Willis of his imagination to get up to all kinds of shenanigans, several of them physically impossible, while assuming that the Bruce Willis of his imagination is extremely reluctant to do so.
This first, main strand is accompanied by a melancholy little story about the actual guy from the bank, who does some strange enough things in the book's second strand even before stepping up to the novel's next level. I hope I'm making this clear.
What compounded my confusion - and hence delight - was that I actually know Tilman Rammstedt vaguely and I'm currently translating his previous novel, Der Kaiser von China, a book that also gets up to a bit of nonsense with those narrative levels. Anyway, every time I saw Tilman Rammstedt over the past few months I'd ask him, So, how's the new book coming along?* And he'd say, Oh, not very well, I don't think I'll get it done on time. And he'd look a bit green about the gills as he said it.
So imagine my surprise to find the whole book was about how Tilman Rammstedt is having trouble getting his novel done on time. Imagine! My surprise! It messed with my head, let me tell you. Because either Tilman Rammstedt was telling the truth on both levels - in real life, plus in the novel about how he's having trouble writing a novel - or it was all an elaborate piece of performance art-slash-literature, in which the writer Tilman Rammstedt pretends to be having trouble writing a novel on two different levels. I can't decide which I would prefer.
Certainly, if the real-life Tilman Rammstedt was telling the truth, the writing hasn't suffered for being put down in a mad and desperate dash under daily duress from his editor, wife and bank adviser. No, wait, those three were fictional. Although one of them is a real person, with an email address given in the novel. I just sent a mail to see if it was a real address. I shall update you if I ever find out. Probably I should have sent it during office hours, right?**
I digress. But form follows function, so it's fine to digress in order to give you an idea of what this book might do to you. What I was saying was that the writing is good. Tilman has a great laconic style in the second strand, all matter-of-fact narrator. And he contrasts that with his highly emotive begging letters to Bruce Willis. Nicely done.
If I had to make a comparison, I'd say Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters is the book version of Being John Malkovich. All writers with a sense of humour will like it. And there's a cat on the cover.
*Sorry, Tilman. I now realise this is probably the second-awfullest question you can ever ask a writer. At least I didn't ask what it was about.
**It is. My head hurts. Don't send the poor guy any more manuscripts.
The resulting meta-novel is an action movie for writers. Money troubles, editor breathing down your neck, writer's block - who wouldn't turn to Bruce Willis for help? Rammstedt tells his story through his emails to Willis (will he ever answer?), recounting all the action Willis gets up to as a character alongside Tilman himself on the pages of the novel. He uses all his powers of persuasion to prompt the Bruce Willis of his imagination to get up to all kinds of shenanigans, several of them physically impossible, while assuming that the Bruce Willis of his imagination is extremely reluctant to do so.
This first, main strand is accompanied by a melancholy little story about the actual guy from the bank, who does some strange enough things in the book's second strand even before stepping up to the novel's next level. I hope I'm making this clear.
What compounded my confusion - and hence delight - was that I actually know Tilman Rammstedt vaguely and I'm currently translating his previous novel, Der Kaiser von China, a book that also gets up to a bit of nonsense with those narrative levels. Anyway, every time I saw Tilman Rammstedt over the past few months I'd ask him, So, how's the new book coming along?* And he'd say, Oh, not very well, I don't think I'll get it done on time. And he'd look a bit green about the gills as he said it.
So imagine my surprise to find the whole book was about how Tilman Rammstedt is having trouble getting his novel done on time. Imagine! My surprise! It messed with my head, let me tell you. Because either Tilman Rammstedt was telling the truth on both levels - in real life, plus in the novel about how he's having trouble writing a novel - or it was all an elaborate piece of performance art-slash-literature, in which the writer Tilman Rammstedt pretends to be having trouble writing a novel on two different levels. I can't decide which I would prefer.
Certainly, if the real-life Tilman Rammstedt was telling the truth, the writing hasn't suffered for being put down in a mad and desperate dash under daily duress from his editor, wife and bank adviser. No, wait, those three were fictional. Although one of them is a real person, with an email address given in the novel. I just sent a mail to see if it was a real address. I shall update you if I ever find out. Probably I should have sent it during office hours, right?**
I digress. But form follows function, so it's fine to digress in order to give you an idea of what this book might do to you. What I was saying was that the writing is good. Tilman has a great laconic style in the second strand, all matter-of-fact narrator. And he contrasts that with his highly emotive begging letters to Bruce Willis. Nicely done.
If I had to make a comparison, I'd say Die Abenteuer meines ehemaligen Bankberaters is the book version of Being John Malkovich. All writers with a sense of humour will like it. And there's a cat on the cover.
*Sorry, Tilman. I now realise this is probably the second-awfullest question you can ever ask a writer. At least I didn't ask what it was about.
**It is. My head hurts. Don't send the poor guy any more manuscripts.
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
Tilman Rammstedt: Der Kaiser von China
There were various reasons why I read this book. First of all, I’m going through a very forgiving phase in which I seem to be overcoming all sorts of irrational prejudices, and I just didn’t get the extract from the novel (trans. Martin Chalmers) that won Rammstedt the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize a couple of years ago. Secondly, I’m on a panel with the writer on Thursday so I thought I’d better swot up on what he does. And thirdly, I’ve met him and he was quite a nice chap and seemed not at all fazed by my drunken ramblings on said occasion. Oh and fourthly, everyone I know who’s read the book really loved it.
And what’s not to love? It’s light and fluffy on the surface and rich on the inside, like an inverted Milky Way. It makes you laugh once you get your head around the quietly bizarre humour. And it’s a joyful caper all the way through, with two completely odd but good sex scenes to lift it out of the good clean fun segment.
The title, sadly, doesn’t work in translation. Meaning literally “the emperor of China”, it’s what people say when something sounds highly unlikely, as we use “then I’m the king of Siam!” in English. So the book is about unlikelihoods, on two different levels.
First we have the unlikely narrator Keith Stapperpfennig, poor guy. He and his brothers and sisters live with their grandfather, a ladies’ man and control freak who has decided he can’t treat them all equally so will simply lavish all his attention on Keith. Grandfather decides he’s going on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to China with Keith – only unfortunately Keith loses all the money for the holiday in a casino after accidentally proposing to his grandfather’s girlfriend, with whom he’s having a clandestine affair. The novel opens with Keith hiding under his desk, pretending to be in China, as he finds out his grandfather has gone and died while also pretending to be in China a few miles down the road.
Meanwhile Keith has been writing letters to his family from an imaginary China culled from the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook. These start off harmless enough, written in the slightly stilted tone of tourist guides. But then he starts adding bizarre details – non-stop dental hygiene shows on the TV, dog vaccinations at the post office – and the letters get longer and longer. And he begins weaving a second (or third, or fourth?) fiction, a long-lost tragic love story between his grandfather and a Chinese circus fat lady. Eventually, he concocts a story that covers up the unexpected death and may even get him out of getting married.
I can understand that it might sound a tad odd. And it is, and more than a tad. But that’s all part of the appeal. At one point Rammstedt himself tricks us with a tiny cruel plot twist of the “Murder, She Wrote” type – you know when Angela Lansbury discovers some key fact about a suspect right at the end and you feel slightly cheated because you could never have guessed? Well it’s like that. Only it’s so blatantly in character with the book that it makes you laugh out loud.
I liked it. A lot. I liked suspending my disbelief for Keith's sections and reinstating it for the letters. I liked the variation in the language between the two formats. I liked the hopeless loser Keith, reluctant to deal with his grandfather's inconvenient death. I liked the sex scenes (did I mention that?). I had fun. And I know what you're going to say... German humour? But no, it really works here, it's almost Pythonesque in its scurrility. So go ahead, it won't bite.
And what’s not to love? It’s light and fluffy on the surface and rich on the inside, like an inverted Milky Way. It makes you laugh once you get your head around the quietly bizarre humour. And it’s a joyful caper all the way through, with two completely odd but good sex scenes to lift it out of the good clean fun segment.
The title, sadly, doesn’t work in translation. Meaning literally “the emperor of China”, it’s what people say when something sounds highly unlikely, as we use “then I’m the king of Siam!” in English. So the book is about unlikelihoods, on two different levels.
First we have the unlikely narrator Keith Stapperpfennig, poor guy. He and his brothers and sisters live with their grandfather, a ladies’ man and control freak who has decided he can’t treat them all equally so will simply lavish all his attention on Keith. Grandfather decides he’s going on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to China with Keith – only unfortunately Keith loses all the money for the holiday in a casino after accidentally proposing to his grandfather’s girlfriend, with whom he’s having a clandestine affair. The novel opens with Keith hiding under his desk, pretending to be in China, as he finds out his grandfather has gone and died while also pretending to be in China a few miles down the road.
Meanwhile Keith has been writing letters to his family from an imaginary China culled from the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook. These start off harmless enough, written in the slightly stilted tone of tourist guides. But then he starts adding bizarre details – non-stop dental hygiene shows on the TV, dog vaccinations at the post office – and the letters get longer and longer. And he begins weaving a second (or third, or fourth?) fiction, a long-lost tragic love story between his grandfather and a Chinese circus fat lady. Eventually, he concocts a story that covers up the unexpected death and may even get him out of getting married.
I can understand that it might sound a tad odd. And it is, and more than a tad. But that’s all part of the appeal. At one point Rammstedt himself tricks us with a tiny cruel plot twist of the “Murder, She Wrote” type – you know when Angela Lansbury discovers some key fact about a suspect right at the end and you feel slightly cheated because you could never have guessed? Well it’s like that. Only it’s so blatantly in character with the book that it makes you laugh out loud.
I liked it. A lot. I liked suspending my disbelief for Keith's sections and reinstating it for the letters. I liked the variation in the language between the two formats. I liked the hopeless loser Keith, reluctant to deal with his grandfather's inconvenient death. I liked the sex scenes (did I mention that?). I had fun. And I know what you're going to say... German humour? But no, it really works here, it's almost Pythonesque in its scurrility. So go ahead, it won't bite.
Sunday, 29 June 2008
After Klagenfurt
This weekend, Klagenfurt had a lot going on. Never mind CSD in Berlin and the small matter of a football match - it was literature all the way in Carinthia. In case you don't know, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize is "one of the most important awards for Germanophone literature" (Wikipedia). It takes place once a year in Klagenfurt, Austria, and is accompanied by all sorts of goings-on. And what no English-language sources seem to tell you is that it's more for up-and-coming writers than for the established greats. Being "invited to Klagenfurt" is a big, big deal for a young writer, and the past winners are all very impressive.
I had planned to watch at least some of the competition on TV, but then life sort of took over. I did catch the live judging ceremony though - and it really wasn't good television. Lots of critics and authors fumbling with touchscreens and reading prepared statements that just sounded pretentious rather than anything else. The cameras didn't linger long enough on the nervous competitors for my taste as they sweated under the studio lights; instead there were long explanations of the voting process from a lawyer - albeit in a charming Austrian accent that I'm unable to place any more closely.
And of course I'm not entirely agreed with the results. I'm disappointed that no one was particularly impressed by Thorsten Palzhoff's text, Livia, which I thought had the most interesting narration and subject matter. And my personal winner would definitely have been Patrick Findeis, with his No Land More Lovely extract promising a great, oppressive novel about village life colliding with modern reality. The title (Kein schöner Land) is a play on a German folk song, by the way, and a cheesy TV show featuring Volksmusik mimed in front of rural landscapes. Findeis did win one of the prizes, though not the most financially valuable actual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Tilman Rammstedt won that, plus the audience award, reaping in a total of € 31,000. Not bad, eh? His text, The Emperor of China, is nothing to sniff at but I found it strangely uncompelling - an extract from a novel that didn't make me want to read the book (apart from the charming idea of someone crawling around with kitchen sponges on their knees, that is). It seems fairly conventional, with only the Roald Dahl-ish grandfather character to write home about. Markus Orths won the quasi-second prize for The Chambermaid, which I did enjoy. A chambermaid gets up to all sorts of odd things in hotel rooms, although the extract didn't really tell us why or work up enough interest on my part to want to find out. I also find it tragically flawed by the fact that no chambermaid would have time to do all those strange things during her shift without getting fired within a week. But maybe nobody on the jury realised that - or maybe it just doesn't matter.
But who's asking me, anyway? What I'm really pleased about is the fact that the Bachmann Prize has "gone Europe", as they say. The website has the chuzpe to assume that everyone in the world knows what this award is, but otherwise a lot of work has gone into making it multilingual. It must have been a huge task to coordinate the translations of the fourteen texts and all the little reports over the past few weeks, plus the more frequent updates over the weekend. And those translations were into six languages - no mean feat. I must say I found the English versions very good, although the punctuation was sometimes slightly skewiff.
I'd be interested to find out how the whole thing has gone down in the non-German-speaking world, so I hope they'll publish some kind of audience figures at some point. At the very least, they've provided an opportunity for writers in German to reach readers of Czech, English, French, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish. And that's a great achievement.
I had planned to watch at least some of the competition on TV, but then life sort of took over. I did catch the live judging ceremony though - and it really wasn't good television. Lots of critics and authors fumbling with touchscreens and reading prepared statements that just sounded pretentious rather than anything else. The cameras didn't linger long enough on the nervous competitors for my taste as they sweated under the studio lights; instead there were long explanations of the voting process from a lawyer - albeit in a charming Austrian accent that I'm unable to place any more closely.
And of course I'm not entirely agreed with the results. I'm disappointed that no one was particularly impressed by Thorsten Palzhoff's text, Livia, which I thought had the most interesting narration and subject matter. And my personal winner would definitely have been Patrick Findeis, with his No Land More Lovely extract promising a great, oppressive novel about village life colliding with modern reality. The title (Kein schöner Land) is a play on a German folk song, by the way, and a cheesy TV show featuring Volksmusik mimed in front of rural landscapes. Findeis did win one of the prizes, though not the most financially valuable actual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Tilman Rammstedt won that, plus the audience award, reaping in a total of € 31,000. Not bad, eh? His text, The Emperor of China, is nothing to sniff at but I found it strangely uncompelling - an extract from a novel that didn't make me want to read the book (apart from the charming idea of someone crawling around with kitchen sponges on their knees, that is). It seems fairly conventional, with only the Roald Dahl-ish grandfather character to write home about. Markus Orths won the quasi-second prize for The Chambermaid, which I did enjoy. A chambermaid gets up to all sorts of odd things in hotel rooms, although the extract didn't really tell us why or work up enough interest on my part to want to find out. I also find it tragically flawed by the fact that no chambermaid would have time to do all those strange things during her shift without getting fired within a week. But maybe nobody on the jury realised that - or maybe it just doesn't matter.
But who's asking me, anyway? What I'm really pleased about is the fact that the Bachmann Prize has "gone Europe", as they say. The website has the chuzpe to assume that everyone in the world knows what this award is, but otherwise a lot of work has gone into making it multilingual. It must have been a huge task to coordinate the translations of the fourteen texts and all the little reports over the past few weeks, plus the more frequent updates over the weekend. And those translations were into six languages - no mean feat. I must say I found the English versions very good, although the punctuation was sometimes slightly skewiff.
I'd be interested to find out how the whole thing has gone down in the non-German-speaking world, so I hope they'll publish some kind of audience figures at some point. At the very least, they've provided an opportunity for writers in German to reach readers of Czech, English, French, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish. And that's a great achievement.
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