...And it's live

Featuring fiction by Christian Helm, Johanna Hemkentokrax, Kemal Kurt, Clemens J. Setz, Thomas Stangl, Thomas von Steinaecker, Antje Rávic Strubel, Steven Uhly, and poetry by Sylvia Geist, Dagmara Kraus, Arne Rautenberg, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Katharina Schultens, Lutz Seiler, Judith Zander, and members of the g13 poetry collective: no man's land issue #7.

Thanks to everyone who came along to our launch last night.

Speaking of no man's land

We're launching issue #7 tonight! Everybody come along.

no man's land # 7 launch reading

with Sylvia Geist, Katharina Schultens, Lutz Seiler and Antje Rávic Strubel. November 5, 2012, 8 p.m. Saint Georges Bookshop Wörther Str. 27 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg The bilingual launch of no man's land Issue # 7 features authors Sylvia Geist, Katharina Schultens, Lutz Seiler and Antje Rávic Strubel with their translators Catherine Hales, Bradley Schmidt and Zaia Alexander. Award-winning poet Sylvia Geist's Periodic Song reflects her background in chemistry, while her up-and-coming colleague Katharina Schultens offers a very different fusion of scientific and poetic language. Antje Rávic Strubel will read via Skype from her novel When Days Plunge Into Night, a dark love story long-listed for the German Book Prize. And Bachmann-Prize-winning Lutz Seiler will read from his latest short story collection, The Balance of Time. Issue # 7 will appear early November at www.no-mans-land.org, with fiction by Christian Helm, Johanna Hemkentokrax, Kemal Kurt, Clemens J. Setz, Thomas Stangl, Thomas von Steinaecker, Antje Rávic Strubel, Steven Uhly, and poetry by Sylvia Geist, Dagmara Kraus, Arne Rautenberg, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Katharina Schultens, Lutz Seiler, Judith Zander, and members of the g13 poetry collective. As usual, drinks will be available from the Saint Georges bar, and we hope you'll linger to chat and celebrate with us after the reading!

Translator Under Thirty?

Are you a translator under thirty? Would you like to be? Wouldn't we all?

The Berlin-based literary journal SAND is holding a translation competition, in conjunction with Youth in Action - hence the age limit.

Here's what they say:

The Rules: Submit an original English translation of another work (you must have permission from the author and/or publisher). The original piece may be in any language, from Urdu to Russian to Chinese. Our panel of judges will be basing their decision on the quality of your translation. Because we’re working with Youth in Action, you do need to be under the age of 30 to be eligible for the competition. (However, if you are over 30, you are still free to submit works under the regular submission guidelines.)
The Reward: There will be two winners, one for poetry and one for prose. Each winner will receive 150€ as well as publication in SAND.
The Workshop: Both winners and 8 runners up will be selected to participate in a translation workshop held in Berlin.* In the workshop, we’ll talk about the art of translation, your own translation and what it means to write, speak and live in multiple languages. The workshop will be led by some of our jurors and/or experts in the field and will be held in English. Of course it’s not all work – we promise a Berlin-style party with translation themed cocktails. (We don’t know what that means yet, but we’ll think of something good…)
*If you’re coming from outside the city, SAND will cover travel expenses up to a certain point.

Just a wee pointer from me: If you've never done this kind of thing before, take a look at the "Translators' Tips" at no man's land, where Isabel Cole has some useful advice about obtaining permissions.

German Hits Fifty

As I learned at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Goethe Institut reserves 15% of its literary translation funding for supporting translations into English. The idea, I assume, is that when a book makes it into English it can serve as a bridge to other languages. Also for some reason, English is often considered a prestigious language so making it into English suggests a book is really good, at least to people who subscribe to the language hierarchy view. I'd guess it would also suggest to publishers that a book could be a commercial success, seeing as English-language publishing is a pretty cut-throat business. Whatever the case, 2011 was the first year in which they spent all that 15% budget. Hooray!

And you can see why at Three Percent: There are fifty first-time translations from German being published in the USA in 2012, up from 39 last year. Why? That's trickier. One reason is Seagull Books with their German and Swiss lists, but that only accounts for five extra books. AmazonCrossing has also done eleven titles from German rather than ten last year, mainly genre fiction I believe. There's also been a 4% increase in total translations published, suggesting to this eternal optimist right here that US publishers are becoming more daring. Possibly it's all down to the huge numbers of Americans in Berlin right now, only a fraction of whom actually speak German (anecdotal evidence only). Maybe everyone in US publishing has a friend in the city and their trips to the Panorama Bar make them more disposed to commission translations of German books.

The Ideal Digital Reading Situation

The British Council runs an international programme supporting upcoming "cultural leaders", rather a big term for youngish movers and shakers in the arts. This year the participant from Germany is Nikola Richter. Nikola has a lot of energy and ideas and projects to do with writing in the here and now, and is also a great person. I'm toning my praise down a bit because I'm going to see her again this evening and there's nothing quite as embarrassing as meeting someone you've just gushed about.

So as part of the programme, Nikola organised a kind of mini conference with the above title, inviting a room full of people from Germany, the UK, Sweden, Holland and Argentina to talk about reading and publishing and bookselling in the digital age. It was fabulous and I'm still rather inspired and rather wish it could have gone on another day. By nature of the occasion, we didn't reach any conclusions at all, but we did (or I did) think a great deal about things like how to get books (digital and print) to people, how the Internet brings readers together and changes literary form, piracy and ownership, real and virtual discussion culture, and many other things.

I talked for five minutes about "collaborative reading" and thought it might be good to put my thoughts down in a more coherent form here, for the participants and for anyone else who might be interested. Our talks were kind of slo-mo pecha cucha, five minutes using five pictures, but I won't include my pictures here for various reasons.

1. (Picture of my dad reading sleeve notes in the early 1960s)
Collaborative reading is a term I made up, meaning joint social reading for a particular purpose beyond showing off sharing your library. Here, my dad is enjoying a lost multimedia experience, reading about music while listening to it, and he's already reading for a particular purpose - to enhance his enjoyment and understanding of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Of course he may also have been showing off his record collection - although he looks immersed in his reading material, we don't know how posed the photo was and he certainly looks quite the wannabe beatnik.

2. (Picture of an And Other Stories reading group meeting in Berlin)
The AOS reading groups project is an example of collaborative reading enabled by the internet. We read (in our case) German-language books with a view to recommending one of them for translation and publication by AOS. Of course the internet has brought together the otherwise isolated English-speaking freaks interested in and capable of reading foreign-language writing, and here we're trying to harness that by crowdsourcing the book selection process, if you like. You can read more about the nitty-gritty in Amanda DaMarco's article for PP. Essentially though, in a first attempt via LibraryThing we found that a purely digital discussion didn't work for us – no conversation ensued, people felt no pressure to read the books and so comparisons didn't work. What did work was a mix of real-life meetings in Berlin and London, partially linked via Skype, and internet comments on the individual titles via the website. And of course digital reading is ideal as pdfs or epubs remove the difficulties of distributing books to the ten to twenty people involved.

Other examples that fit my definition of collaborative reading are pepysdiary.com and tailoredtexts.com, where readers help each other to understand difficult (foreign-language) texts via virtual margin notes.

3. (Picture of 50 Shades cover)
The British Centre for Literary Translation is also now testing out a platform for collaborative translation via newwriting.net. And for me, translation is an act of reading, interpreting and re-rendering. It's difficult to do as a group, but it is possible and can be very rewarding. That formula of reading/watching, interpreting and re-rendering also applies to fan fiction à la 50 Shades.

4. (Picture of China Miéville)
At the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, China Miéville picked up that fanfiction topic in his talk on the future of the novel. He spoke about books becoming less closed than ever, with readers being able to take an active approach to them. Two quotes: "Anyone who wants to shove their hands into a book and grub about in its innards, add to and subtract from it, and pass it on, will, in this age of distributed text, be able to do so without much difficulty, and some are already starting." ... and ... "The worst anxiety is not that the interfering public will ruin your work if they muck about with it, or that they'll write a terrible novel, but that they'll improve it, or write a great one. And once in a rare while, some of them will. How wonderful that will be."

5. (Picture of Star Trek communicator)
I think China Miéville's "fanfication of fiction" - besides being a tongue-twister that gets very embarrassing in a room full of German-speakers - is a phenomenon still very much in China Miéville's head, but I do hope that life will imitate fiction, rather in the way that mobile phones were developed and designed partly to help us imitate Captain Kirk. What I hope is that through collaborative reading, translation and writing processes, we as readers can get creatively involved with texts and arrive at even greater diversity in the literary world.

Thomas Meyer: Wolkenbruchs wunderliche Reise in die Arme einer Schickse

As you know, I went to Switzerland. So obviously I had to read a Swiss book while I was there, if only out of mere respect. It turned out to be Wolkenbruchs wunderliche Reise in die Arme einer Schickse by Thomas Meyer, which is nominated for the Swiss Book Prize. The winner's announced on 11 November, by the way. I bought the book in Switzerland, so I can report that the end of fixed book prices there hasn't made books cheaper. Unless they were incredibly expensive beforehand.

The novel is narrated by Motti Wolkenbruch, an orthodox Jewish student in Zurich. His mother is trying to find a wife for him, but unfortunately all the young ladies she introduces him to are rather like her. Whereas Motti's rather keener on his Goyish fellow student Laura. Adventures ensue.

What I loved about the book is Motti's voice, for two reasons. Firstly, he's a great character with a wry sense of humour, and secondly Thomas Meyer gives him a language that code-switches between German and Yiddish. Now I don't know Yiddish but you can figure it out as you go along, especially when you speak German. There's a glossary at the back of the book - a very nice edition, incidentally - but of course I only found that at the end.

So you get fantastic observations about other characters, my favourite being Herr Hagelschlag the insurance expert with his ever-present paper bag from the kosher bakery:

Herr Hagelschlag machte grojse ojgn in die Tüte hinein, rief: "Einer hot kejn apetit zim essn, der anderer hot kejn essn zim apetit!", erhob sich und verschwand, um mit neuem nasch zurikkzukehren.

(Meaning something like: Herr Hagelschlag made big eyes into the paper bag, exclaimed "One man has no appetite for his food, the other has no food for his appetite!" got to his feet and disappeared, only to return with new snacks. Only of course if you were going to translate it, you'd have to decide whether to leave all the Yiddish in the original or at least how much of it you could get away with.)

So the linguist in me was rubbing her little hands in glee, while the sense of humour representative was kept busy too. Also, later in the book, my libido enjoyed a couple of very charming sex scenes. But something was nagging away at me. I managed to ignore it while reading, no doubt a good sign. But sitting down to write this review*, I did think: Is it OK to write about orthodox Jews when you're not one yourself? Ah, my political conscience.

Thomas Meyer addresses the issue head-on in this interview:

Your book is a comedy that laughs at Jewish reality, to some extent. Aren't you afraid you might be accused of anti-Semitism?
I'm convinced that will happen, in fact. As soon as anyone deals with it (Jewish life) in any way that accusation comes from somewhere. The more religious people are, the less humour they have.
Could a non-Jew have written the same book?
No. The Jewish comedian Oliver Pollack says "I'm allowed, I'm Jewish" – the same goes for my novel. A Jew making jokes about Jews is funny. If a non-Jew starts playing with   clichés you instantly ask yourself whether he might think they're true.

So he's not orthodox but he seems to have done his homework. According to a Zurich-based translator acquaintance, all the details are true to life - the right make of car bought from the right car dealer, and so on. And he seems to take a respectful approach, although I might see that differently if I was a religious person. As it is, I know next to nothing about orthodox Judaism - which is not terribly visible in Berlin, for obvious reasons, although things are changing here with immigration from Russia, for the main part. I learned a great deal from Motti Wolkenbruch, which can't be a bad thing. I'm pleased to say, however, that that wasn't the reason I enjoyed the book.

Whatever. Read it and see for yourself. Apropos of nothing, Thomas Meyer seems like a fun guy. Here he is doing the punctuation police thing, and here's a startling collection of postcards he designed, which will come in handy for all your stalking needs ("Here's proof of me thinking about you all the time" made my fingers itch. A lot.).

*The term review is used loosely here.

Looren Post Mortem

So my first trip to Switzerland prompted a bit of a mindfuck, if you'll pardon me saying so. First of all - surprise! - Switzerland is totally different to Germany. I guess I'd thought it'd be like the difference between Ireland and England. Different state, sort of similar culture, some difficulties but you can more or less get by. But no! First of all they do things totally differently. They put coffee in their alcohol and not the other way around, for one thing. And then I got to Zurich airport and couldn't understand a word people said to me. Apparently I have a Berlin accent when I speak German, but I found Swiss German totally incomprehensible. Different vocabulary, different structures, totally different pronunciation. People did make an effort when speaking to me directly but there were plenty of moments when I just stood there looking blank, clutching at contextual straws to figure out what they might have said. And on public transport I just relaxed entirely, letting other people's dialect conversations - otherwise a tad annoying, you might agree - wash over me in ignorant bliss.

The occasion was a translation workshop at the Translation House at Looren. Five German-to-English translators, five English-to-German translators and two very experienced and lovely workshop leaders got together to work closely on our texts. That meant devoting two hours to the respective four pages or so each of us had submitted as part of the application. Pretty gut-wrenching stuff. I arrived thinking I was fairly alright at my job and was plunged into a pit of self-doubt as my colleagues and I picked vulture-like over the carcasses of our craft. You'd be amazed at how many things there are to talk about in four pages of literary translation.

Back at my desk, however, I'm very glad I took part. I learned, at least, that all of us are in a constant learning process. Just as there is no perfect piece of writing, so there is no perfect translation. As my friend Isabel Cole pointed out, if translation weren't impossible we wouldn't enjoy attempting it. It's important for us to question what we do - phrases like "I tend to..." are poison for our creativity. And especially for those of us working with editors who don't read the original language, it's incredibly useful to have native speakers look over our translations. One of the most fascinating things was that all of us accused writers in our "opposite" languages of exactly the same crimes: using sloppy tenses, long sentences, comma splices and too many nouns. I'm now collecting long sentences in English writing - Paul Auster has a great one about his mother in Granta 117. Just to stop me giving a shit about leaving sentences long in my translations - when I don't think they'd work better shorter, that is. Because maybe sometimes you come out of things with your mantras confirmed, no matter how much the things mess with your head. And I'd still say, the only rule I want to abide by for my translations is that there are no rules.

Between, during and around the workshop sessions we also talked about other stuff. How to help reviewers remember we exist, how to cope with flawed originals and old translations, what to read alongside our work, what to do about all different people having translated extracts from one book. All rather inspiring, and you'll hear more about some of it here in future, no doubt. We also had a visit from Swiss writer Urs Widmer, who was utterly charming and delightful. To my shame, I haven't yet read his books, but I will. In My Father's Book, he writes about his father's obsession with translation and about his acquaintance, the farmer-cum-publisher whose house was converted to the Translation House. It was wonderful to hear him reading about the man and his books in the beautiful building where he once lived.

Translators! If you get a chance to apply for one of these Vice Versa workshops, which are run in various language combinations with German in various places by the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, please do. It will be painful but incredibly good for you. And the food - at least in Looren - is delicious.