Seven German Titles on 2014 Impac Longlist

After a nail-biting wait, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced its very long longlist. The 152 books have been selected by librarians around the world and include 41 translations. Here are the ones from German:

Marcel Beyer: Kaltenburg, trans. Alan Bance

Alex Capus: Léon and Louise, trans. John Brownjohn

Helene Hegemann: Axolotl Roadkill, trans. Katy Derbyshire (me)

Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel, trans. Philip Boehm

Benjamin Stein: The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen

Alissa Walser: Mesmerized, trans. Jamie Bulloch

Juli Zeh: The Method, trans. Sally-Ann Spencer

The shortlist is announced on 9 April 2014 and the winner on 12 June. I am very very excited indeed about this.

It Ain't What You Do, It's the Way that You Do It

My lovely journalist and fashion consultant friend Susan Stone has written all about Translation Idol for Deutsche Welle. Enjoy. I know I did. If you'd like to read all the different versions of Deniz Utlu's text they're online too at no man's land (click on the link on the right).

Typographical Translation Award

If I had a list of things that don't matter terribly much in life, the GoodReads Choice Awards would be on it. But they seem to matter to other people, presumably as a large award in lots of categories, voted on by the public. People seemed to be getting piqued that there wasn't a separate category for translations. I mean, I didn't check how the whole thing worked but presumably you could just nominate translated books in the existing categories, if you were that way inclined. But never mind.

I say never mind because it turns out something I do find exciting has resulted from all the hoo-ha. A new grass-roots award for translated titles first published in the USA in 2013, at Typographical Era. Isn't that nice? You can vote at the 2013 Typographical Translation Award page. And yes, that is my friend Isabel's book on the list.

Yoko Tawada/Chantal Wright: Portrait of a Tongue

I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.

This is the Nabokov quote (from "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English") with which Chantal Wright prefaces her introductory chapter on translating Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue. Her book is billed as an "experimental translation" and yes, that's what it is. She has divided the pages into two and given us both a translation in the left-hand column and a wealth of annotations on the right, a "translation-with-commentary". There are different types of comments: firstly, what Wright calls "linguistic facilitating" – i.e. explaining what words and issues that crop up might mean in an objective way – then giving citations from other texts (or films, or cultural artefacts) referenced or perhaps referenced or not at all directly referenced in the translation, and thirdly, personal anecdotes. Wright tells us:

Despite the inclusion of this personal response, the translation was never intended to be an exercise in narcissm. Rather, it aims to be a protocol of how a translator encounters a text.

The story itself is a complicated musing on language and culture and customs, narrated by a rather opaque character who is neither German nor American but speaks German and is visiting America. There she meets P, or invents P, a German woman living in America. And she tells us all sorts of things about P – how she behaves in the shower at the swimming pool, the way she phrases certain things, words she teaches the narrator (sometimes forgotten in the meantime, sometimes only alluded to), stories she tells. There's a great deal of comparison of the two languages, something German readers can deal with because they tend to read English well, whereas English readers need more help. As such, it's the ideal text for Wright's exciting project. It's the kind of writing people think of when they use the word "untranslatable", I suspect. And Wright goes right ahead and totally owns it.

Because of course it's an exercise in visible translation. As we read the text on the left, the layout guides us smoothly on to the translator's thoughts on the right, after every few sentences. There is plenty of space on the pages, with paragraph breaks marked separately. It really does feel like you're inside the translator's head as she explains her reading of Yoko Tawada.

Here's one example I find particularly pertinent. I will attempt to explain it afterwards, from my point of view, because I'd like to play Wright's game here just for the fun of it:

P showed me the famous Widener Library. 
We met a friend of P’s there, an American.           

[einen Bekannten]  There is a clear difference between Bekannte(r) [acquaintance] and Freund(in) [friend] in German that is difficult to uphold in English. The English word “acquaintance” is rarely used these days, whereas Bekannte(r) is used a great deal in German. The English word “friend" can express a variety of degrees of acquaintance, perhaps therefore doing away with the need for other terms. K, a German acquaintance of mine, once introduced his mistress at a party as “meine Bekannte". All parties at the party were party to the deceit.

(I'm afraid I can't reproduce the layout here.)

The reason this is pertinent is that Chantal Wright is a friend of mine. In blogging language we call what I am doing here a full disclosure. I have saved it up for this point for various reasons, including to encourage readers to take this review more seriously than they might have done, had they known about our connection from the beginning.

I met Chantal when she was living in Berlin and I can't remember how, but I think it was about ten years ago. We have been in sporadic contact since then. If I had to describe our relationship in German, I'm not sure which word I would choose. She feels more than a Bekannte and not quite a Freundin. Perhaps I would call her a befreundete Kollegin - a colleague I am friends with. Because of interference from English, I am quicker than many Germans to call people Freunde. Sometimes this makes me expect more of people than they are willing to give.

Later in Tawada's text, the author herself comes back to the subject of words for friends in English and German. She writes:

But in German there is no neue Freundin – at least not for adults – unless it involves a relationship that is both sexual and serious. So if a friend is new, you can't yet know if she really is a friend. That's why there are only old friends in Germany.

Do you see how it all interweaves and reflects back and each side adds something to the other? You may be aware of another, more famous annotated translation making waves at the moment. I've read Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project and reviewed it for another publication, which isn't out yet. And although he never mentions Nabokov, Franzen seems to have taken his remark about towering footnotes to heart. The problem is, though, that Franzen's footnotes distract from the translated text. Partly due to the conservative format, the multiple-page anecdotes and explanations accompanying Kraus's essays interrupt the flow to such an extent that they sometimes make them harder to understand rather than elucidating, as I think Nabokov intended. Yes, they call attention to Franzen as the translator – but that high-viz jacket is not terribly advantageous to the reading of Karl Kraus (although the reading experience as a whole is still interesting). To labour that metaphor a little more, Franzen becomes a railway worker standing by the tracks, his bright yellow outfit distracting the train driver from the signals coming up. Does that make sense? I hope so.

Chantal, in contrast, helps the driver (that makes the reader the train driver and the story the train itself, right?) by climbing into the cab and pointing out sights along the way, other trains up ahead, level crossings to slow down for, and so on. Portrait of a Tongue is a rare thing, a genuinely readable exercise in putting translation theory into practice. If you are interested in translation or languages, I urge you to read it.  

Another Idea for Emerging Translators

I was talking to someone yesterday about how to get a foot in the door of literary translation. It's not an easy thing to do and requires a lot of patience and persistence. One of the things that has hugely benefited me is our "translation lab" in Berlin. I've written about it before but just to recap: a group of people interested in literary translation from German to English meet up once a month, in our case in a room above a pub, to help each other with our translations. Anyone can come along and bring a page or so of their work (10-12 copies of the original and the translation) for us to go through in the group. Or just come along and join in the conversation. We sit around a big table and eat and drink and indulge in super-nerdy translation talk. Recently, we've also started looking at published translations for purely admirational purposes. I love this part of the evening, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, when someone brings a translation that knocks their socks off and we all say wow. It's an easy way to remind ourselves not to be 100% critical and negative about each others' work, and a great way to learn new tricks.

I've found that talking to other translators about my work is always very very good for the quality of my translations. And that's one of the hard things about emerging - getting practice and experience and getting good at translating. So I'd strongly recommend setting up a similar arrangement wherever you are. It costs nothing except a bit of time, and the rewards are huge. If you want to start your own lab, you could try contacting the cultural institute of the country whose language you translate from. The Goethe Institut, for instance, should be happy to help you, perhaps by providing a room or by sending out an email to people who might be interested.

I'm very pleased that there's now an English-to-German translation lab in Berlin, the Übersetzerstudio, which meets every third Tuesday of the month. There's also a Dublin Literary Translation Lab, which meets on the first Wednesday of the month, 5pm to 7pm, in the Goethe-Institut - and plans are underway for a Glasgow group as of next year.

The no man's land Translation Lab in Berlin meets up on the first Tuesday of the month at Max & Moritz, 8 pm.

Wilhelm Raabe Prize to Marion Poschmann

I might have written about the shortlist, I'm not sure. But anyway, they've announced the winner of another prestigious German literary prize, the Wilhelm Raabe Prize, and the winner is Marion Poschmann for her novel Die Sonnenposition. The book was also shortlisted for the German Book Prize. I read a good chunk of it and appreciated the beautiful language, but the story didn't get me hooked.

Help with Emerging

I'm pleased to hear there's now a network for emerging literary translators in the USA, ELTNA. Inspired by the very active British equivalent, ETN, it's an informal group of people who want to get into literary translation but can't yet join a professional association because they haven't yet published a book-length translation. I know a couple of the people behind the ETN and it seems to be a wonderful and mutually supportive thing. It didn't exist when I was at that stage of my career, plus I was in the wrong country, so my informal networks were even more informal. But I wish it had, because talking to other translators has always been key to improving my work and finding out about opportunities.

There are also some more institutional programmes on offer for translators-to-be. The one I imagine to be most awesome is the British Centre for Literary Translation's mentorship programme, pairing translators "with promise rather than experience" with translators with experience and contacts. The application deadline is 11 November. Also in the UK, New Books in German runs its own Emerging Translators Programme, commissioning translations from German from upcoming talents, coupled with a workshop, editing and mutual support. You can also sign up for summer schools at the BCLT and Birkbeck College, which I think are well worth the fees.

Prizes are another good way to pimp your CV - and also give you essential practice at working to a deadline and just plain translating. Practice is what makes you better. Hopefully continuing every two years, there's the German Embassy Translation Award for British translators, which comes with a month's stay in Berlin. The Gutekunst Translation Prize is a similar initiative in the States - although it's only open to under-35s, which I think is a shame because literary translation is something people often get into once they're more mature and have the language skills required. The Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize does the same (open to 18-34-year-olds with any country of residence) but from a different language each year. British residents or citizens of any age can enter poems in translation for the Times Stephen Spender Prize, with a deadline in May. You've missed the 1 September deadline for the Asymptote translation prize Close Approximations, but maybe they'll do it again. But you have until 14 February to submit unpublished translations into English for the John Dryden Translation Prize, no matter who you are.

Sometimes established translators seem to worry that we're encouraging too much competition in a situation where there's not much work to go around. I think that as long as we're realistic about how glamorous literary translation actually is - i.e. not terribly - more people with a passion for it can only be a good thing. I don't think it's a coincidence that the tiny increase in published translations comes with an increase in people enthusing about international literature and our work. In Germany, young translators are few and far between and you can sometimes tell that a book has been translated by someone significantly older than its author. I hope that building a more diverse pool of translators can only benefit the quality of translations, which in turn benefits us all.