Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize to Jean M. Snook

The news isn't up in English yet, but if you speak German you can read all about Jean M. Snook and her award-winning translation of Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound.

The Helen and Kurt Wolff prize is the most prestigious award for German-English translation, and comes with a stay in Berlin. I do like the way they praise Gert Jonke (1946-2009) as a great contemporary writer - alongside Thomas Bernhard and Arno Schmidt, who have been dead since 1989 and 1979 respectively.

I'm very pleased that it's gone to a woman this time, only the sixth in sixteen years. And not just any woman! I really respect Jean Snook's work as very conscientious and empathetic - as the judges say, she makes translation look easy. The prize will be awarded in Chicago on 13 June - I'm sure the deserving winner will have fun with the $10,000 cheque.

Thomas and Ross Hit Rochester

Watch Thomas Pletzinger and Ross Benjamin at a Reading the World event in Rochester, NY. You get a lovely view of both their shoes while they present Funeral for a Dog. I'm not sure whether Ross is wearing socks or not.

German Book Club Reads Clemens Meyer

Well, looky here! The New York Goethe Institut's book club is reading Clemens Meyer's Die Nacht, Die Lichter in June.

Now obviously there is never any time like the present to read Clemens Meyer's mind-blowing short stories. I've just finished translating them for And Other Stories, a fact I may have mentioned a few times previously. They'll be available in the UK under the title All the Lights from And Other Stories - but US rights are still available, as far as I'm aware. If you're a US publisher, you should buy them right now. If you're not a US publisher, you should set up a publishing house right away and buy them.

Go on, you know you want to.

And thanks to my supergrass Jamie Lee Searle (again) for the tip-off.

Gutekunst Prize to Kári Driscoll

The Goethe Institut in New York announced the winner of the inaugural Gutekunst Translation Prize, which is one of a crop of new awards going to emerging translators. All the applicants translated a passage from Martin Mosebach's linguistically challenging novel Was davor geschah. And the winner is a graduate student by the name of Kári Driscoll, who is pictured looking young and attractive. I bet he sent in a fake photo, because everybody knows all translators are old and wizened.

They tell us: "The winning entry impressed the judges (Mark Anderson of Columbia University, Susan Bernofsky, scholar and translator, and Liesl Schillinger, book critic) for its flowing, eloquent prose, its admirable accuracy, and its inventive rendering of Mr. Mosebach's lyrical passages and natural imagery." You can download his translation behind the link, should you be so inclined. Mr. Driscoll gets $2500 and a trip to Chicago for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Symposium.

Speaking of which, I seem to have read on Facebook who's actually won the prestigious Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize this year, but I can't find confirmation anywhere at all. I'm very pleased though...

Clemens Meyer and the Literary Tattoo

Tattoos are a funny thing, don't you think? When I was a kid there was one tattoo parlour round our way, which was a source of great fear and trepidation. In my childish imagination it was a den of iniquity frequented by sailors, bikers and jailbirds. And now we're surrounded by the things. The nearest tattoo shop to me in Berlin even has a kiddies' corner where the nippers can sit down and draw a nice picture while mummy and daddy get inked up.

And now mare Buchverlag - who do books with a tie-in to the sea - have brought out an anthology of tattoo stories, Das Herz auf der Haut. To make up for that very silly article the other day, Der Freitag has a report by Sebastian Kretz on a Berlin event where the writer Clemens Meyer presented the book, having written the foreword. Disappointingly for me, most of the pieces are translated from English, but it does promise a story by the young German writer Franziska Gerstenberg (who I once heard reading a story about shaving that made me wince, in a good way).

Meyer, of course, is predestined to present a literary anthology about tattoos, seeing as he has many himself. I haven't seen them all but I can testify to there being plenty of them. When he first started out he was marketed as "Germany's first fully tattooed writer" - but nowadays you're more likely to see him in long sleeves. I also know a woman writer with a sun on her back and a publishing person with a Pynchonesque post horn on his arm. Of course there are limits to the number of publishing people I've seen with their clothes off, so maybe literally everybody out there is all covered in tattoos underneath.

I'm imagining Günter Grass with a petite dolphin on his left ankle, Julia Franck with a portrait of her cat on one breast (life-size), Rainald Goetz no doubt has red and back skulls all up the back of both calves, Katja Lange-Müller has A.C.A.B. inside her lower lip, and I bet Martin Walser has a big fat 47 tattooed on his chest. In courier typeface.

I don't have any - I have freckles. But you could go to The Word Made Flesh and look at literary tattoos to bide the time while you're waiting for Meyer's own short stories All the Lights to come out in my translation. There's a tattoo in one of them as well.

Arno Schmidt on the Watering Can Spout

I know a few Arno Schmidt fans out there read love german books occasionally, so I wanted to point their way to this fascinating TAZ article by Gerhard Henschel, about 6 newly released CDs of the great writer and translator singing popular songs drunk one New Year's Eve.

Apparently they feature Schmidt's renditions of Blue Suede Shoes, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Der Tag, als Conny Kramer starb, and many more. The writer used the spout of a watering can for added amplification and finished off with the tune to Bonanza on the mouth organ.

Henschel writes:

But how did the recording come about? According to the editorial team, Schmidt's wife Alice found a tape recorder in a skip in the late autumn of 1977, brought it home and repaired it. A handwritten note dates the recording to New Year's Eve 1977/78, which was apparently a rather "jolly" evening. The tapes were subsequently deposited in a kitchen drawer, the key to which was lost at some point, only to turn up this spring.

It's such a shame the piece isn't strictly true.

Reading - Not for Everybody?

In Der Freitag, Magnus Klaue criticises what he calls infantilism in promoting literature. He finds it appalling that the public is being encouraged to read books for the usefulness or pleasure of the exercise, rather than for the aesthetic experience. The piece got me so angry I signed up as a community user and tried to boil my criticism down to a pithy response in German.

Here's what I think: reading is something anybody can do, provided they are literate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it being either a useful or pleasurable activity, and if libraries, publishers, booksellers and cultural institutions want to encourage people to do it then it's perfectly legitimate for them to target people who want to use their time usefully or pleasurably. In fact, I imagine a PR campaign that said, "Hey people, books are great, you should try them some time for the aesthetic experience" might backfire.

OK, so maybe the writer himself doesn't refer to himself as a bookworm, a term he takes exception to in his piece. But that doesn't make him any better or worse than people who do (although his vocal exception to the term might make him an intellectual snob).

And while it hurts my soul to hold up an article in the FAZ over a piece in Der Freitag, I just can't help it. Joseph Hanimann wrote there a couple of weeks ago about the Schüler-Literaturpreis der Euroregio Maas-Rhein, a literary prize awarded by school students in the border region encompassing Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. This year's award went to the Flemish writer Stefan Brijs for his The Angel Maker (published by Penguin in Hester Velmans' translation). Although more surprised than he ought to be, Hanimann tells us how open the students were for "sophisticated" literature and how heated the debates were.

Is it just me, or is this proof that you don't need a PhD to be a passionate reader? Reading is indeed a pleasure, and at times a useful one too. Surely it's a good thing to encourage more people - from all walks of life and with all vocabulary levels - to read books? Klaue's attitude reminds me of indie music fans who would deny anyone they don't approve of from listening to the bands they discovered first. Luckily, that doesn't work either.