How Are Translators Chosen?

A reader asks:

I just heard a report on Deutsche Welle about Tellkamp meeting his translators and had to wonder about how they are chosen.

I suggest that translators who are willing to be interviewed by the "German World Service" and complain that they don't really understand a lot of the GDR references (the exasperated question "what is Pittiplatch?" was one of my favourites - even Wikipedia in English supplies the answer to that one, though I think it was the Spanish translator who was feeling a bit lost) was on and that makes it all too complicated need

- a bit more cultural education;
- to learn to use google;
- to consider whether they are translating the right kind of books;
- to consider what they say into a microphone as this could affect how people see their competence.

So: how do translators get picked? Is it often a coincidence?

I'd like to answer KMS's question in more detail. And to call your attention to a related Deutsche Welle article here, which looks at some of the difficulties involved with translating Der Turm.

Translators get picked, essentially and to my modest knowledge, by the publisher that buys the translation rights to the book. In some cases writers have their own translators who work on all their books, for example Ingo Schulze is translated by John E. Woods. But others, like Günter Grass, have been translated by all manner of different talented people: Breon Mitchell, Michael Henry Heim, Krishna Winston, Michael Hamburger, Ralph Manheim.

In this case, though, Uwe Tellkamp pretty much shot out of nowhere, so there was probably nobody out there with experience of translating him, which would presumably have helped matters. So I assume the publishers started asking around for translators. If a publishing house is experienced with translations they'll have people they've worked with before, who they know and trust. And they'll be the first people they turn to. With an award-winning book like Der Turm there's probably a certain amount of time pressure involved to get it out within a decent interval, so if their regular translator from German is tied up they'll keep asking around until they find someone else.

I can't comment about Spain or Bulgaria, but in Germany literary translators often specialise in a certain field, for example Latin American literature or books by young writers or chick lit or books with lots of equestrian terminology in them or the Beat Generation. In Britain and the States that's not so much the case, as so few translations are published. So you get someone like Ross Benjamin, who's translated Hölderlin and Vennemann and is working on Joseph Roth and Thomas Pletzinger, a fairly eclectic smorgasbord of German-language literature. Or indeed Michael Henry Heim, who translates out of about fifteen different languages.

In other cases, translators will tout titles they'd like to translate to publishers, and I'd say that this, when it works, is the ideal case as the translator will be extremely familiar with and passionate about the book. Some people are reluctant to do this though, especially if they're not very established themselves, because they fear the publishers will say, "Thanks, great idea, we'll get X to do it for us!" But that's just the risk you have to run. In most cases when I've done this, I've been happy to get even a rejection letter, but I do hope there are others out there who do the same, as a kind of Chinese water torture method of infiltrating the publishing market.

The short answer, then, is: yes, there's a certain amount of coincidence involved.

The other point I want to make is in specific defence of the poor Spanish translator...

Not everyone has the fortune to live in Berlin, where Pittiplatsch is an everyday sight and an eternally boring subject of conversation (you know those conversations Brits get into about children's TV shows as soon as two people of the same generation are in one room? Pittiplatsch is the East German equivalent to Mister Ben in that context, only odder). So not knowing a fairly obscure thing like that is something translators come up against every day. She probably did google him, but does Wikipedia give you a true idea of all the associations a certain character or term conjures up in the (East) German reader's mind?

I wouldn't want to question her ability on the basis of this one question, no matter how it appears to reflect on her competence. But of course translators are notoriously bad at blowing their own trumpets. I bet none of them turned up at the workshop in Straelen saying, "Actually, I didn't find it that difficult, as I'm an expert on the bourgeoisie in 1980s Dresden, and my medicine degree and military training came in handy for all the specialist terminology too..."

Uwe Tellkamp Meets His Translators

Twice a year, Germany's translators' centre in Straelen plays host to a German writer and his or her translators, meeting up to collaborate on their translations. This time around, it's the 2008 German Book Prize winner Uwe Tellkamp, with translators into Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Czech and Hungarian.

Can you spot the missing language? Yes, we can assume there is no English-language publisher daring enough to translate the "German Booker-winner". Called "a monumental panorama of the declining East Germany" and "the great pre-89 novel", it won't be available to English readers. Could this be anything to do with the fact that it's over 900 pages long?

Interestingly enough, this confirms a bit of a trend. So far, the English-speaking world has only picked up the German Book Prize winners written by women. Perhaps we're scared of German (and Austrian) men? Perhaps the judges could kindly take this into account this time around, providing a nice unthreatening lady winner to woo British and American publishers.

More information on the book at The Complete Review and on the workshop at EUK Straelen.

Anthology Anthology (I)

I’ve mentioned the really rather good Das Magazin here before. It’s generally very active in promoting writers and literature, and this month the literary editor, Wiebke Poromba, has a wee rant. It’s not against a particularly difficult target though – she complains that young German-language writers don’t have much to say for themselves. Schluss mit dem ganzen Larifari, she proclaims – perhaps deliberately (mis-)quoting Berlin’s hot pop sensation, Peter Fox – enough of the folderol! All these clean-cut young men going straight from school to writing careers, so polite and sober and unexcited. Her two examples are Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Lebert, who she says were pressed into literary contracts at such an impressionable age that they didn’t have time to experience life proper before they started churning out novels. Her suggestion is vodka rations for young writers – and reading more women.

Aside from the cliché-ridden argumentation, I only agree with Poromba to a certain extent. I’ve just finished a mammoth young-writer-athon and I found plenty to get me excited, although there were also authors I too found rather soporific. In our recent interview, Claudius Nießen mentioned the anthology Turboprop – Beste Stories, which he edited along with Christoph Graeber last year. And this year I brought another anthology back with me from Leipzig, Zeit der Witze – Texte junger Autoren. And because they both feature young(ish) German-language writers, it made sense to me to review them together.

Starting with what I find the better of the two, just to rob you of any sense of tension, Turboprop. It’s a collection of stories by the editors’ favourite guests from the reading series of the same name.

And it kicks in with a piece by one of my favourites, Clemens Meyer. Never one to shy away from “real life” issues, Meyer has turned to prostitution. This is a slightly rambling monologue by a not-quite-so-young prostitute about her punters, how she got into it, and her secret dreams. I learnt a lot, so it may well be meticulously researched. I think he’s written better – but you can’t accuse him of wanting to please any mothers-in-law with this story. And the next piece too stands out a mile – Anke Stelling, a youngish woman writing about Claudia, who has two young kids with Heiner the rebel, thought she was doing everything differently – and hates her life. With an ironically distanced narrator who tells us, “Oh, you know what, just to make it simpler, I’LL be Claudia.” And gives us the classic line: “Heiner wanted to be cheated on, there was no other explanation for his absences, so Claudia went to bed with the midwife.” I think I may have shouted for joy when I read that.

Then we get Tobias Hülswitt regaling tales of drug-taking in the Middle East, which I did find slightly yawnsome but which you can hardly claim is clean-cut. Annette Mingels has a solid relationship story, followed by an absolutely awesome piece by Guy Helminger mingling friendship, dream and gritty realism. Paul Brodowsky I personally find slightly difficult, and here he experiments to the point of becoming just plain uninteresting, with little to say but unusual ways of putting it.

Selim Özdogan, another of my personal faves, has contributed what he does very well – a short short story about friends, which captures the essence of being a young man (poor things) with his characteristic melancholy. Philip Meinhold does the same, also very well, against a backdrop that seems suspiciously like 90s Friedrichshain. In between them, Jochen Schmidt, a consummate comedian, made me laugh with a childhood story I think I’ve heard him read live, which had us rolling in the aisles. And Sasa Stanisic closes the anthology with a false-bottomed box of a political story, as reflective as his novel How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone but firmly set in Germany. Excellent stuff.

Zeit der Witze is a little more patchy, I have to admit. Book-ended by two big names – Uwe Tellkamp and Clemens Meyer – are sixteen young authors, mainly from the Leipzig creative writing programme. And I’d have to say that some of them confirm Poromba’s prejudices against young writers’ “gepflegte Langeweile” – cultivated boredom. But some of them are surprisingly good – or at least surprising.

One of the exiting things about creative writing programmes, I guess, is that students have a sounding board for experiments. A few of the short stories in this compilation read rather like attempts to try something new at all cost, playing with perspectives, narratives and characters. In a sense, it’s worth having the book on the shelf in the same way as buying art by young talents may mean you later own something by a recognised genius. Or it may not.

I enjoyed Johanna Hemkentokrax’s confusing tale of suburban antifascism, Christopher Kloeble’s extreme slow-motion twenty seconds of mathematics, Sebastian Brock’s thoroughly dislikeable hero, Katharina Schwanbeck’s painful coming-of-age story, and Marie T. Martin’s dystopian vision.

Tellingly though, what stood out for me in Zeit der Witze was the slightly more established authors. Clemens Meyer, again with a prostitute’s monologue, adds the grit that the others do rather lack. Uwe Tellkamp adds wry humour and experience with an account of his first book and how it came about. And Finn-Ole Heinrich adds searing honesty, with a narrator explaining his guilt at no longer fancying his girlfriend after an emergency amputation, in a very strong story that rightly gives the book its title.

Read one after the other like this, Turboprop clearly trumps Zeit der Witze. But it’s an unfair competition, with experienced authors pitted up against newcomers. Given a few years, I suspect some of the younger writers just coming out of creative writing programmes will be producing outstanding work – provided they do manage to gather the odd experience or two outside of academia. For those in Berlin, you can catch a couple of representatives of the Leipzig programme at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus on 24 April.

Der Turm

So, Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm has won the German Book Prize. I am slightly nonplussed, although it was no great surprise. My "impressionistic dismissal" of it based on the extract available (trans. Rebecca Morrison) was: "Everybody's raving. I'm snoring." And while I do appreciate that it's well written, I still can't summon up any enthusiasm for the book.

But - and this is a big "but" - I think it would be wonderful to see Der Turm translated. The subject-matter is something we insular Anglo-Americans really haven't bothered with in the past: everyday life in East Germany. Billed as a Buddenbrooks of the GDR, it's about that class that people from the West think didn't exist there - bourgeois intellectuals. And although the Stasi presumably plays some kind of a role in the 900-odd pages, the book is neither a sensationalist look at repression nor an example of Ostalgie. While we still source many of our ideas about the GDR from films like The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin, Der Turm is a more reflective, insider's view.

It has certainly garnered plenty of critical praise (see the Complete Review for an overview), although much of it has been along the lines of "so true to life, just as I remember it" - which won't work for readers from other cultures. But I for one hope it might just open the gates for other books by East German writers, from Clemens Meyer to Wolfgang Hilbig. I won't have time to read it though.

You can watch a charming little interview with Uwe Tellkamp at the FAZ lounge thing.