Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Alfred Döblin singled out the young Viennese cultural activist Robert Müller (1887-1924) as a “dazzling wordsmith.” Yet for over half a century after his suicide, this remarkable Expressionist writer was forgotten. Only in 1990 did his major novel Tropics: The Myth of Travel (1915) reappear in print, and only in the last decade or two have Germanist academics and critics begun to give serious attention to his writings. (The collected works now cover 14 volumes!)
Tropics is an extraordinary tour de force. Ostensibly a report from a German engineer about an expedition by three white men (Slim the Yankee, Van den Dusen the Dutch colonial officer, and Brandlberger the German) to the upper Amazon in search of lost Conquistador gold, it quickly blossoms into increasingly manic disquisitions on “civilisation” vs. “barbarism, ”European “normality” vs. the life-ways of “primitives,” Freudianism vs. “healthy instincts,” benevolent imperialism vs. murderous plunder, reason vs. mysticism, reality vs. illusion. It draws heavily on reports from the Amazon by the German anthropological explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), only to subvert their subtext of western superiority.
This excerpt occurs about halfway through the novel, when the three westerners have spent long enough in an Indian village to lose their aura of superiority, and have become figures of some scorn to the Indians.
- C D Godwin
Austria | German | Short Fiction
January, 2020Robert Müller (1887-1924) was a many-sided cultural activist in early 20th-century Vienna–Expressionist writer, editor, critic, publisher, and promoter (he organised Karl May’s last public appearance in 1912).
Still in his early 20s, Müller spent the years 1909-11 traveling. For several months he worked for a German-language newspaper in New York, but his other whereabouts are poorly attested. (He claimed, among other activities, to have worked on ships between North and South America, and as a gaucho in Mexico.)
"Manhattan Girl" (written around 1920) presents New York through an Expressionistic consciousness, imbued with Müller’s career-long interest in questions of race, gender, and identity.
- C D Godwin
Austria | Drama (excerpt) | German
November, 2019I prepared this translation for a student production I directed at Knox College in October 2018, which allowed me to refine the text during the rehearsal process. I had previously translated three other plays by this acclaimed Austrian playwright, who is known for a stylized approach to language and a storytelling technique that often presents a significant challenge to audience-members. Before Sunrise—which premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 2017—is based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s groundbreaking 1889 Naturalist play of the same title, Vor Sonnenaufgang. Palmetshofer retained much of the story told by Hauptmann, and dramatized his updated version in a more straightforward manner than is characteristic of his plays. Palmetshofer’s 2007 play hamlet is dead. no gravity, for instance, also revolves around events happening within a family; but those events are told in retrospect, requiring the audience to piece together the story from fragments.
This scene is the last of several between two men who were close friends as university students, but have evolved in contrasting directions. The play takes place in the house of Hoffmann, who has taken over his in-laws’ business, and is now running for the local council on a conservative platform; Loth has sought him out in order to write about him for a left-wing journal, and has begun a relationship with Hoffmann’s sister Helene.
Palmetshofer’s plays typically feature dialogue in which the characters leave many sentences unfinished, and monologues in which single sentences can go on for half a page at a time. The lacunae in the dialogue often pose a challenge to me as the translator since I have to guess how each unfinished sentence might have continued; being able to confer directly with Ewald has been invaluable. And of course, English syntax frequently doesn’t allow me to simply keep the same word order as in the German. For the most part, there were fewer such difficulties with Before Sunrise than in the other plays I’ve translated by Palmetshofer. But the shape of the sentences in the original departs from standard usage, and it was important for me to carry that over into the English. For example, in this excerpt, Loth says: “what’s up with that, Thomas? / tell me / is it a habit? / a reflex? / to assume the worst of others / but of yourself of course / somehow / not at all.” In part, such lines reflect the way people actually talk, yet Palmetshofer aims less to capture the rhythms of everyday speech than to create a kind of musicality in the theatrical language. By laying out his dialogue in short lines like verse, and (extensively in this case) incorporating dashes to indicate silence, Palmetshofer formats the text like a score.
In a note he wrote for our production of Before Sunrise at Knox, Palmetshofer wrote: “I believe theatre’s task is to pose questions and to open up a space in which both thoughts and feelings are generated.” Even in this unusually conventional family drama, he pursues that aim by means of carefully crafted language, and I’ve striven to retain that flavor and texture in the English version.
- Neil Blackadder
Vladimir Vertlib’s play on the current refugee crisis ÜBERALL NIRGENDS lauert die Zukunft ("The Future Lurks Everywhere and Nowhere") was first performed in April 2016 to sold-out houses in Salzburg and Hallein, Austria. In this drama, Vertlib connects the plight of the displaced Jews at the end of World War II with the refugee crisis that is unfolding in Europe. Himself a migrant, Vertlib followed his parents from country to country for ten years; what is happening now has had a deep emotional impact on him.
He volunteered from September 2015 to February 2016, at the height of the crisis, to assist the waves of refugees that came over the border into Salzburg, only to continue their journey to Germany and other Northern European countries. Besides publishing a diary of his experiences at the border in the anthology Europa im Wort. Eine literarische Seismographie in sechzehn Aufzeichnungen, he also wrote a novel based on his volunteer experience called Viktor hilft, and this drama, in which refugees themselves, among other professional actors, portray their plight on stage.
In the play, David, a survivor of the Holocaust who currently lives in Israel, comes back to an unnamed city somewhere in Germany or Austria. He is looking for the displaced persons’ camp where his lover Hanna died of starvation shortly after the war. He had promised her he would bring her bones home to Palestine and arrives in the city to fulfill this promise. David is disoriented because he encounters the displaced persons of today in the very camp where he and Hanna were waiting for placement. Refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan enter into a dialogue with David, with the lyrical voice of the dead Hanna coming in over the loudspeakers. Other players in the drama are the mayor of the town; the head of a right-wing political movement, based on PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), which is opposed to these newcomers in society and perceives them as a threat; busybody volunteers who are looking out more for themselves than their protégées; and the general population, which wants to benefit from cheap undocumented labor.
The play addresses highly relevant topics that are under current discussion not only in Europe but also in the United States, and it examines questions relating to national memory and individual and collective guilt. It suggests a way forward to resolving long-held animosities between groups of peoples, and illuminates the human qualities that we share and that can help us find peace with the past.
- Julie Winter
Albania | Albanian | Austria | Bulgaria | Bulgarian | Danish | Denmark | German | Germany | Novel (excerpts) | Poland | Polish | Reportage (excerpt) | Romania | Romanian | Short Fiction
November, 2015InTranslation is pleased to be collaborating for the fifth time with the New Literature from Europe (NLE) Festival, which took place November 6-9 in New York. Our November issues in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 were likewise dedicated to the festival and its participating authors.
Our current issue features translations of fiction and nonfiction prose by this year's authors from Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Romania.
For more information about the festival, its events, and its partners, visit: http://newlitfromeurope.org.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2015When I first read Bernhard Aichner’s Austrian crime novel Woman of the Dead, I found it a real page-turner. He sets up his heroine, Blum, so that she looks like a villain at first, avenging herself on the parents who adopted her solely so that she could carry on their family business, and who never understood a child’s need for affection. Then, once the happiness she has found in family life is destroyed by the murder of her police officer husband Mark, the reader comes to sympathize with her more and more. She finds a purpose in taking on the case that led to his death, continuing his unofficial investigations into a particularly sadistic group of killers and rapists exploiting Eastern European immigrants, and the storyline ingeniously unravels.
By the end I was rooting for her. Bernhard’s narrative skill shows in all kinds of ways, such as the practical details of an undertaker’s work, which he learned firsthand for this book. Most of all, however, its sheer readability lies in the heroine’s sense of natural justice. Her quarry includes such pillars of the community as a priest, a fashionable photographer, and a local politician. But Blum takes out only the truly guilty. One of those three, for instance, is a thoroughly unpleasant man, but not in fact a core member of the group she is pursuing, and she lets him go.
Then, in translating, I had the chance to appreciate Bernhard’s writing all over again. I like translating dialogue, and there is plenty of it here: short, snappy exchanges in between the passages of straight narrative. Those are in the historic present tense, which I also like for its immediacy. Bernhard uses it for most of the story, with occasional flashbacks in the ordinary past tense.
I admit that I was surprised when I found out that Woman of the Dead was the first of a trilogy, and wondered how, with so many main characters dead by the end of it, the story could continue. But Bernhard gave me a copy of the second novel, fresh off the press, when we met in London in June this year, and all I can say is that you’d be surprised--I was.
- Anthea Bell
Austria | German | Short Fiction
September, 2014Author Elias Schneitter masters quite supremely the dramatic art of portraying the overlooked and the apparently petty and trivial. This is particularly true of Schneitter's anthology of short narratives entitled Karl: A Thousand Years of Austria. The story featured here is all about "Judge Georgie" who in a very revealing monologue points the accusatory finger at the world, complaining about everything in general and Austria (otherwise referred to in Austria as Karl), foreigners, the government, and the slugs in his garden. He is not a judge by profession but rather a notorious grumbler who never minces words and freely gives vent to his many blind prejudices. He always blames others for the unfortunate twists and turns his life has taken, never questioning his own decisions or views. The story of Judge Georgie is one of self-deception and self-justification. It is just one of several internal monologues that make up Schneitter's anthology, which also features "Ernst," who reflects on his former career on a cruise liner, and "Walter," a hippie in military uniform. Schneitter is very much interested in the "man on the street" and the contradictions that define him. He describes his characters with laconic wit, but always treats them with respect and empathy.
Elias Schneitter was born and grew up in Zirl in Tyrol, Austria. After completing his schooling in Stams, he had a variety of jobs including office clerk, canoeing teacher in Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota, project manager for Ho-Ruck, and employee for the Austrian social security system. Today, he works as a freelance author. He is co-founder of the international literature festival Sprachsalz in Hall, Tyrol and head of the small publishing house Edition-baes.
Schneitter's first publications started appearing in 1974, mainly in literary magazines (Fenster, Rampe, wespennest, protokolle, projektil) and as radio plays. His first book, Geflügelte worte, was published in 1979. In 2014, he will be presented with the Kathy Acker Award for his commitment to promoting international literature, above all between the USA and the German-speaking world.
- Isabelle Esser
Austria | German | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2012Lily's Impatience is a family story. Lily, a 24-year-old student, leaps to her death from a bridge. Her father, architect Sebastian Zinnwald, stops working and ensconces himself in his farmhouse in Switzerland. He breaks off all contact with the outer world. In a psychotic crisis, he loses his ability to speak.
Zinnwald also breaks off his relationship to his older daughter Veronika, single mother of two sons and a successful pediatrician in Berlin. Veronika suffers under her father's silence. She wants to be able to speak with him about Lily and the circumstances leading to her death, but he rejects her.
Zinnwald had once been quite successful as a painter, and in his solitude he begins to paint again. Again and again he paints Lily's dead body as he saw her lying on a gurney in the department of forensic medicine. A gallery owner who had exhibited Zinnwald's paintings in the past plans to include these new pictures in a major retrospective exhibition.
Twelve years after Lily's death, Zinnwald, now 71 years old, asks his daughter Veronika to visit him. Veronika travels from Berlin to Switzerland. But their conversations end in mutual accusations: grief has made both of them lonely and callous. It turns out that, above all, Zinnwald needs Veronika to participate in his exhibition. Veronika is doubly disappointed.
During a visit by a journalist who is gathering material about Zinnwald's paintings, a bitter argument about art arises. Zinnwald delivers a monologue about portrayals of sorrow in Christian iconography. He laments the fact that, in contrast to the numerous portraits of the grieving Mary, there exist no portraits of grieving fathers.
The story reaches its climax some months later in the Dinosaur Halls of the Museum of Natural History in New York.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpts)
June, 2012The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges, Josef Winkler's sixth book, is an episodic record of the author's travels through Italy. A blend of memoir, fiction, and reportage, it inaugurates an iconological approach to experience that would gain increasing importance in the works that followed it, according to which observations and anecdotes drawn from newspapers and literature serve as codices for the decipherment of the traumatic events of the past.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2011On a beautiful day in May, Lemming is strolling the streets of Vienna with his heavily pregnant partner Klara. Suddenly her contractions begin, and with no time to get to the hospital, they must accept the help of a stranger, Angela, to deliver the baby. Soon, Angela becomes Klara's best friend and tiny Ben's babysitter. Then, on Christmas Eve, Lemming finds Angela dead.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).