Michelle Woods on Re-Translating Kafka

The other day I linked to Daniel Kehlmann's speech in praise of his translator, Carol Brown Janeway. I did so mainly because it's wonderful to see translators lauded in public, especially by such a high-profile writer. However, there was one part of the speech I actually objected to, and that was this:

Academic translating means, more or less, translating in order to make it sound bad. I am not joking. For quite a while now some of the more important University departments for translation have taught their students to stay as close to a text’s original syntax as possible, in order to make the reader never forget that he or she is reading a translation.

Now, I am not party to what goes on in university departments for translation - important or not - although I do have a modest insight into what happens in more practice-oriented translation workshops. But I do think Kehlmann missed the point with this comment. What I hope is going on is that translators are learning to find their own fine line between fidelity and betrayal, and also to question the notions in the first place. There are many times, in my opinion and indeed in my work, when I too think it's wise to retain a semblance of German syntax in English, but there are others when I feel it's asking too much of readers. There are times when I do in fact want them to remember they're reading a translation and times when I want to give rhythm priority over content, or whatever.

One of the places where I think and talk about translation in a practical way is the no man's land translation lab in Berlin. Literary translators, either professional or amateur, old hands, beginners or even those still thinking about trying it out, can come along and bring texts they're working on for us to go through in the group. A while ago one of us was translating Kafka fragments, so we were looking at how on earth to put Kafka into English, with the added difficulty that this was unedited, unfinished Kafka. What on earth did he mean by that, what might that word have meant in 1914 Prague, and just how important is that modal particle? In this case, most of us agreed that the translator Ina Pfitzner needed to stay pretty close to the original syntax most of the time. But there are other Kafka translations - for other purposes - that veer further away, for instance Michael Hofmann's excellent version of "A Country Doctor". What Hofmann does is embellish ever so slightly, teasing out the gruesome humour. Whereas Joyce Crick's translation of the same story is closer to the original and therefore more useful for scholarly readers. Neither of the two is objectively better for an imaginary universal reader.

Anyway, there is a fascinating interview with Michelle Woods - someone who does teach translation theory - at World Literature Today, in which she talks about her forthcoming book on re-translating Kafka.

Inger-Maria Mahlke: Rechnung offen

 Rechnung offen is Inger-Maria Mahlke’s second novel, and an extract from the book won her the Ernst-Willner-Preis at Klagenfurt. I liked the extract and - spoiler alert! - I enjoyed the rest of it too.

The book centres on an apartment building in Berlin-Neukölln, the up-and-coming neighbourhood of the moment. The narration alternates between characters living in the flats and their family members. Analyst Claas owns the building but moves into a vacant apartment when his marriage collapses – he is a shopping addict and has spent all his money on porcelain. His wife Teresa’s long-term lover has rejected her on retirement and she throws Claas out of their comfortable family home. Their daughter Ebba now lives above him but rarely leaves the flat, apart from to blackmail the African dealers crowded into the ground-floor apartment into giving her skunk. Her parents are blissfully unaware that she’s stopped going to her training scheme.

Elsa has lived in the building since the war, the last of the old tenants. Gradually losing her grip on reality, she is paid regular visits by Nicolai, who claims to be her grandson. Except she never had a child, at least officially. Nicolai, meanwhile, gets a girl of his own into trouble, a Mexican waitress-cum-artist working on a series of photos of her own menstrual blood. And then there’s Lucas, a compulsively neat boy whose only pleasure is video games. We never learn his mother’s name but we do find out that she quits her job in a bakery to work as a dominatrix.

As the temperatures fall towards Christmas, all the stories spiral towards disaster. One of the dealers has a road accident but can’t go to hospital, not having official papers. Ebba pretends to have passed her exams, Elsa waits and waits for Nicolai to come, the teacups gathering dust on the table and her memories with them, while he has family issues to deal with. Lucas’s mother loses her new job – her regular client loses interest – and walks out on her son, who has to cope on his own. And Claas starts hassling his tenants to get rid of them and charge more rent in this suddenly popular area – and gets obsessed with the ground-floor flat, which is sublet and has no heating.

A fire, a corpse, a flight, an ambulance, a policewoman and a stepfather change matters substantially for all concerned – along with Claas’ insurance policy on the building. In a strange way, Mahlke gives us closure for most of her characters, but the novel’s ending is more cynical than happy. In a good way, obviously.

The sections dealing with Lucas’ mother are particularly striking. Written in the second person, they were oddly affecting. I felt automatically closer to the character, which was disturbing as her life is plainly depressing and hopeless. We follow her nervous start as a dominatrix and her desperation when her new-found false confidence comes to an end. The story doesn't close well for her, and I shared that shock through Mahlke’s unusual narration, while another part of me felt self-righteous satisfaction at the character getting her just desserts. Mahlke’s prose varies its focus, moving comfortably between close-ups of doughnuts on a plate and global issues.

This is quite an unusual novel, I felt. In her debut Silberfischchen, Inger-Maria Mahlke looked at two underdogs thrown together when an old man lets an illegal Polish woman stay on his sofa. Here, Mahlke has again focused on the darker side of life and the kind of characters fiction writers often ignore: the working poor, illegal immigrants, penniless artists, old women and losers in general. Even those who are financially more comfortable – Nicolai, Claas, Ebba – have manoeuvred themselves into desperate situations. So while the structure is reminiscent of other novels revolving around buildings (Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, Alaa-al-Aswany’s Yacoubian Building, Nicole Krauss’ Great House...), I found it darker and more interesting.

Rechnung offen has a finger on the pulse of the unebbing debates on gentrification in Berlin (and elsewhere). The backdrop to the stories is the changes in the neighbourhood, new shops and bars opening up, new people moving in. Through the landlord’s perspective, we see how and why rents are raised, and we see how that affects the tenants too. We learn Elsa’s story of surviving the end of the war as a teenage orphan, meeting the presumably lesbian Erika and working in a silk flowers company from 1945 until it goes bankrupt under pressure from Asian manufacturing. The illegal immigrants also place the novel in a global context, while Ebba, Nicolai and his girlfriend embody the more fortunate of Neukölln’s recent arrivals. 

Well worth reading for fans of Berlin literature and underbelly books. 

Note: This is a slightly altered version of a report for New Books in German.

Four American Things

Here are four top things from America:

There's my lovely friend George Carroll talking to Chad Post (also lovely) in the Three Percent podcast - about Seagull Books, Mo Yan, Inka Parei, and how cool they both are.

There's my other lovely friend Shelley Frisch on translation at Words Without Borders' Translator Relay.

There's Daniel Kehlmann, whom I don't know personally, on his translator Carol Brown Janeway, whom I don't know either, at Publishing Perspectives.

And there's something top from Germany about something not so top about America, and that is a story by Francis Nenik to mark Bradley Manning's 1000 days in prison. The story is under a creative commons license, and I'm told that translations are definitely desired. In case anyone was looking for something excellent to translate.

David Wagner: Leben

Regular readers may be aware that I'm a fan of David Wagner's writing and that I'd been looking forward to his new book, Leben. Well, I had and I hadn't - because I was worried it might be a rather upsetting read. A friend who knew the beginning had warned me it was rather dark and I'd also got the impression, talking to the author, that the writing process had been quite heavy-going. It's a book - a novel, an essay, a collection of miniatures, autobiographical writing? no matter - a book narrated by a man who gets a liver transplant.

Now allow me to get the cliché out of the way: the Germans are quite fascinated by illnesses, their own and other people's. Don't ask after a German's health if you're afraid of an honest answer. Outside of bathroom fittings, pharmacy frequency and the like, that's manifested in literature too. Kathrin Schmidt won the German Book Prize a few years ago with Du stirbst nicht, a semi-autobiographical account of a woman recovering from an aneurysm. Georg Diez described his mother's cancer in Der Tod meiner Mutter. Arno Geiger wrote about his father's Alzheimer's in Der alte König in seinem Exil. Wolfgang Herrndorf is detailing his life with a brain tumour pretty much in real time on his blog Arbeit und Struktur. All of the above are examples of excellent writing that confronts us with mortality. I'm not sure whether that's still a taboo, but it certainly doesn't make for light reading.

And so to Leben. Did I want to read something like that when I actually vaguely know the writer? I did. But I've been having difficulties writing about the experience.

The book opens with a short sharp shock: the narrator comes home late one night, eats a little something and suddenly starts bringing up blood. He calls an ambulance and goes into intensive care, knowing this means he has to go back on the waiting list for a new liver. What follows is a series of 277 miniatures about his time in hospital and in rehab, before and after the transplant. The narrator, and with him David Wagner, has an autoimmune disease whereby his body rejects his liver. He has been on medication since the age of twelve but has lived a fairly normal life, having fun, travelling, fathering a child. And now, well, he's confronted with his own mortality.

Wagner's narrator shares his thoughts and emotions, veering from suicidal to joyous and including how he deals with the unknown donor, throughout the process. These are hard enough to deal with. What made matters worse for me was that the state he is in often seemed degrading. Helplessness, hopelessness, boredom, ridiculous hospital-imposed routines, pain. Raised testosterone levels mean he has a bit of a one-track mind, presumably awkward when you're bed-bound. Or maybe the guy always has a one-track mind, what do I know? At times I found myself teetering between pity and admiration for exposing himself so honestly. That wasn't something I wanted to feel about this book, specifically about its author.

And then I read this piece in the FAZ, in which Wagner talks about how it's not quite autobiographical, or not entirely, or not in a straight-forward way. He worked on the book for five years, using his notes from his time in hospital but always with the benefit of hindsight, and always selecting what he wanted to use and what he wanted to cut away. Whereas his narrator speaks to us in his personal present tense, out of the very moment he describes - with all the immediacy and strength of emotion that entails.

There are other factors that make the book not just readable without crying, but thoroughly enjoyable. There's the writing, as witty and insightful and compact as usual. Then there's the humour. The book pokes gentle fun at the hospital and the people in it, the liver patients with their entertaining life stories and the nurses with their routine friendliness. What delighted me most was probably the narrator's memories as he lies in bed, of his previous lovers especially. I'm a sucker for that shit. And there's the form. Between the miniatures - does their length reflect the attention span of a sick man? - there are two special treats, a macabre prose-poetry list of bizarre deaths culled from newspaper reports and a collection of even shorter texts on the subject of tiredness. Are they personal aphorisms? I'm not sure what to call them but they include the following:

Tiredness is isolating; I'm tired all on my own.

Sex is tiring too. Post-coital falling asleep is easy, but not always desired.

So now to the niggle. It may well be a very personal issue or a personal reaction to the text. What I wanted from Leben was cynicism, intelligence, melancholy, a survival account, searing honesty, a radical rejection of pity. To some extent that was all there. But I also found another thing that made me feel uncomfortable, and that was the way the narrator rediscovers his will to live for the sake of his daughter. Being a parent, I realise we all think this way at times, making grand gestures and sacrifices, being strong and holding out for our children. Talking and writing about it, however, seems difficult without pathos coming into it. And while Leben is remarkably and delightfully low on pathos for the most part, where the narrator's daughter is concerned I felt it shining through more than I wanted. Which is something I didn't notice in Wagner's book about his daughter, Spricht das Kind (see my review).

Nonetheless, this is definitely my book of the season and I'll be truly upset if it doesn't win the Leipzig book prize. 

Speaking of pathos, you can order a nice plastic organ donor card here (in Germany) and you can sign up to the NHS's organ donor register here (in the UK). If you want to donate in the USA you can register by state here. It would be good if you did because I might one day need a new right eye. Thank you.

LBF Literary Translation Centre

Most of the programme for the Literary Translation Centre at the London Book Fair is now online. I want to go to every single event. I'll be talking about becoming a literary translator with Jamie Lee Searle, Tom Bunstead and Anna Kelly on the 16th of April, which also happens to be my fortieth birthday. I can't think of a better way to celebrate.

The centre is a marvellous place full of fantastic people. See you all there.

Eva Menasse: Quasikristalle

Last night saw the launch of the Berlin-based Austrian author Eva Menasse's third book of fiction, following the novel Vienna (trans. Anthea Bell) and the short stories Lässliche Todsünden. The new novel is called Quasikristalle, named for a type of crystals that make up an orderly pattern of different shapes and forms, although that pattern never repeats itself exactly. Which is kind of what the book does too.

Menasse tells the story of a woman's life from thirteen different perspectives, taking her from childhood to old age. Yes, she told us last night, she was very influenced by Sherwood Anderson, but no, she didn't have specific models for the novel. I won't give you the full summary because that would take up rather a lot of space. Suffice to say that we see the Austrian protagonist Xane Molin through the eyes of childhood and adult friends, would-be lovers, professional contacts, children and step-children, her father, her doctor, her landlord, a stranger - and in the middle, herself. The observers reveal as much about themselves as they do about Xane, if not more. And each chapter encapsulates a story of its own.

There are stand-out parts, however. For me, the second chapter was what won me over to the book - and how. A historian focuses his gaze on Xane during a tour around Auschwitz, narrated as almost all the others from an over-the-shoulder perspective in the third person. Everything goes wrong on the tour, including his advances to the much younger woman. His indirect voice is wonderfully cynical, addressing the ways in which we confront the Holocaust and veering grotesquely between the horror of the concentration camp and his flirtation. Another of my favourites comes at the end, told by Xane's now adult son. A warm and affectionate epistolary chapter that leaves us with hope for the future.

The structure is neatly hinged around three central chapters set in the middle of Xane's life, a time of self-doubt and near-crisis. Now married to an academic and relocated to Berlin, she feels drawn to a much older man and begins to question her decisions in life. We see a single incident from the man, Nelson's perspective, then from her own and then through the eyes of her rebellious step-daughter. Menasse read from the sole first-person chapter last night, saying she'd chosen it because it's quite funny. It is - but then again it isn't. Deep black humour features heavily in the novel, and here Xane thinks about what happens to women as we get older. The audience started off laughing together and gradually a gender divide opened up, with the women's lips getting more and more pursed and brows getting more and more furrowed. We were working on our own demise, engraving our wrinkles even deeper. A very nice man next to me carried on laughing but I was unable to observe what the suddenly quiet women were doing because I was feeling far too dejected about the fate that awaits me.

After that point the novel moves into the future, where Menasse addresses social questions such as overpopulation and aging, yet without ever getting so specific as to be full-out science fiction. As a whole, it uses a wide range of styles to suit the respective characters, showcasing Menasse's talent as a writer. She raises a whole battery of issues too, from domestic violence to Austria's role under fascism to reproduction rights to the meaning of friendship. And she seems to understand human nature and capture it on the page very well.

I was going to tell you what I thought Xane was like but the author said she didn't know herself. I'm sceptical about that actually, because I think even the oblique views we get of her reveal something about her, which the writer must have been aware of. But then people say things at readings and mean something other than what comes across. Or I understand something other than what they mean. So in fact, let me tell you that I enjoyed the novel very much as a portrait of a strong woman who clings to her naivety against all odds. I admired her a great deal, actually. And let me add that the novel would work very well in English. 

Friedrich Ulfers Prize to Carol Brown Janeway

As the German Book Office has announced, the first ever Friedrich Ulfers Prize is to be awarded to translator and editor Carol Brown Janeway. The award "was created to award outstanding individuals who have championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States." 

Ms. Janeway gets $5,000 and a sparkly trophy, handed over by Daniel Kehlmann, who she introduced to American readers in her translation. Other authors she's translated include Bernhard Schlink, Ferdinand von Schirach, Elke Schmitter, Benjamin Lebert and Thomas Bernhard. Congratulations!