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
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Ulrike Draesner is one of Germany’s most prominent authors. She is particularly interested in societal and scientific discourses, multilingualism, and the inner tensions of the modern human subject. I communicated with her throughout this translation project.
This extract is the final chapter of her novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Seven Leaps from the Edge of the World, 2014), which deals with the forced migration and expulsion of Germans from, and Poles to, Silesia in 1945, and the trauma inherited and expressed by subsequent generations. It is a multi-narrator novel told from nine different first-person perspectives. Its main focus is a German family evacuated from the small town of Oels near Breslau in Silesia. Lilly and her sons, Eustachius (14) and Emil (23), flee from Oels in January 1945 in the direction of Bavaria. Their father has to remain in Breslau and fight for the Wehrmacht. Emil, who is fascinated by the SS, has learning and speech difficulties and a clubfoot, but his parents have managed to evade the authorities and prevent his euthanasia as part of the Nazi eugenics programme. His forced sterilisation is alluded to but not explicitly narrated. He goes missing on the night of April 8-9, 1945 during the family’s flight to the West as they are trying to get through Sondershausen, a town in Thuringia in Germany, which is undergoing severe aerial bombardment. He is presumed dead, although his disappearance is unresolved and unnarratable. None of the characters who were with him that night are able to articulate what happened. This loss is the central trauma in the novel, a blind spot symbolic of the many refugees who lost their lives, the trauma of expulsion, and the loss of homeland. Emil appears only indirectly, reflected and refracted through the other characters’ narratives, until here in the final chapter we hear his voice–the gap and silence he represents is performed in the form of a prose poem, a letter he writes to his father from the bombed-out streets of Sondershausen, on the night he goes missing.
His letter marks a shift from prose to something that looks like poetry. The lines extend and retract, sometimes flowing, sometimes erupting into monosyllabic stuttering. The shape is unsettling and strange. I had to resist the temptation to clarify the punctuation: sentences are running together, coming quickly, not bound by rules. Emil has a learning disability–he is different; he represents a challenge to his family, society, the orderly, homogeneous National Socialist worldview, and the reader.
Another temptation was to abstract the vocabulary or make it more coherent. My first translation of “auf den Straßen passierte ein Massenungeheuer” was “There was a mass atrocity on the streets.” In the end, I went for something more literal and physical and kept the oddness of the verb: “A mass monster happened on the streets.” The line is now more bodily, disconcerting, and harrowing; it is this concreteness and urgency, I believe, that draws readers to Draesner’s work.
- Marielle Sutherland
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
German | Germany | Short Fiction
February, 2019Friedrich Nicolai’s "The Joys of Young Werther" is a fascinating contemporary response to Goethe’s bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rejecting the uncontrolled passion that leads the hero to commit suicide in Goethe’s novel, Nicolai’s text promotes a more measured and rational approach to life as being more conducive to happiness (albeit possibly less likely to produce a literary hit!). I was asked to produce a translation of the novella by Tze Ping Lim, Visiting Researcher at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, who was investigating the copyright ownership of fictional characters and wished to include Nicolai’s parody in her research (this was recently published as the article “Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea-Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters” in the Fall 2018 issue of the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law). As I knew the translation and the German original would be read and worked on in parallel, I sought to stay as close as possible to the German text while still producing a readable–perhaps even enjoyable!–English version. The project was generously funded by the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Lucerne, for which both Ping and I would like to extend our thanks.
- Margaret Hiley
Epic Novel (excerpt) | German | Germany
August, 2018Döblin’s epic novels of South America, later united as the Amazonas Trilogy, were written in Parisian exile and published in 1937-38 by an émigré firm just before the outbreak of war. So their reception was severely limited (after 1933 Döblin’s books were banned in Germany), and even after the war it took almost three decades before decent editions began to appear. Since the 1980s, Amazonas has attracted more critical attention than any other epics (apart, of course, from Berlin Alexanderplatz).
The theme of Amazonas is not so much South America (although Döblin’s imaginative powers, first revealed in The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, his "Chinese novel" of 1916, are still playing at full strength here, as the excerpt shows). Rather, Europe is the theme, and the guiding impulse: the Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.
The trilogy lays out a remarkable and multifaceted critique of Europeans and their history since the 16th century age of conquests: a critique at odds with the Eurocentric schoolroom dogma of "progress" and "enlightenment" that for so long treated the world’s "people without history" as resources for exploitation and extermination.
The prose, as in so many of Döblin’s books, is vivid and direct, conjuring almost cinematically scene after varied scene, with many voices and changing moods. It is unfortunate that the linguistic pyrotechnics of Berlin Alexanderplatz have for so long overshadowed those other epics where the linguistic virtuosity works in more reader-friendly ways. (Check out the several Döblin excerpts already published by the Rail, in its print edition and here at InTranslation.)
The excerpt featured here, the beginning of the trilogy, presents Amazonian communities as yet untouched by Europe. The search for the "land without death" is a counterpart, in terms of human yearning, to the crazed European search for El Dorado which will be so powerfully depicted in later sections.
- Chris Godwin
German | Novel (excerpt) | Switzerland
August, 2018Quarter Past Never (Original title: Viertel Nach Handgelenk) began as a series of blog posts written while the author was in rehab. First published in 2008, it became a cult success, selling out its first printing. It now stands as a document of not-so-carefree youth in the mid-2000s, a chronicle of excess set against the incongruous backdrop of sleepy Switzerland. The sheer exuberance of Wigglesworth's prose masks in an artful manner the deep melancholy of the novel as the narrator, Pippin, spirals further and further into addiction. David Foster Wallace once wrote that “one of the saddest times...is the invisible pivot when the party ends.” Quarter Past Never turns on that pivot.
- Marshall Yarbrough
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017I first encountered the work of Ödön Von Horváth one pleasant summer afternoon in Berlin, on an outdoor remainder table. I was looking for some light reading, and an old-fashioned paperback anthology of short pieces on the theme “Autumn” seemed exactly to fit the bill. Goethe, Fontane, Brecht—and a little piece by someone named Von Horváth, dating from the 1920s, that I found unexpectedly moving and well written. It had an unreliable and increasingly hapless narrator through whose distorted lens we can see truths about his motivation and feelings towards women that he tries, but fails, to understand.
I had been looking for a lyrical, even sentimental writer, and instead found a political one. Passionately antifascist, Von Horváth sought in his plays and prose to explore the complacency and indifference that made possible the Nazi victory of the 1930s. His subject is the struggle between consciousness and the unconscious, and its manifestation in the cruelty of men towards women in a patriarchal society.
“A human being only comes alive in speech,” he once said. Rejecting the convention that German literature could only be written in “high German,” he imitated the speech of characters low on the social scale. Rendering this speech in an English appropriate to its time was one of the translation challenges of “A Family Saved,” also from the 1920s. A second challenge was doing justice to Von Horváth’s stated aim of creating a “synthesis of irony and realism.” Like other works, “A Family Saved” seeks to do this in depicting a post-World War I Austria in which societal trust, once destroyed, cannot be restored.
Like all major writers in German of his generation, Von Horváth was forced into exile, where he died. I find it noteworthy and timely that he emphatically rejected the Nazi definition of a German as a person of German blood. For Von Horváth, who was partly Hungarian, being German was a matter of identifying with German culture. Nietzsche, he pointed out, was half Polish; Dürer, half Hungarian.
- Linda Frazee Baker
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017“Window in Flames” is the titular story of a volume of short stories Carmen-Francesca Banciu wrote during the height of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the stories in this volume resulted in a publication ban for Banciu in 1985 because of the way in which the author took aim at the abject poverty and indignities that characterized the Ceaușescu government. That same story was also awarded the International Arnsberg Prize and brought Banciu international acclaim. My English translation of this story, “The Beaming Ghetto,” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. The volume was first published in Germany with the title of “Fenster in Flammen” in 1992.
I was drawn to this story because of its chilling and complex portrait of a female survivor of a grotesque dictatorship. Physical and emotional abuse, psychological torture, and authoritarian deceit populate the canvas of cruelty that the narrative’s young female protagonist, La ventana en llamas, inhabits. Implementing surrealistic visual imagery and rich literary symbolism, Banciu foregrounds these powerful themes in an evocative dreamlike narrative. The recurrent window, Banciu’s locus of choice here, is also worth considering, for it plays a key role in Banciu’s literary imaginary. Windows invoke the possibility of passage into a different reality, a boundary crossing. A keen preoccupation with borders and boundaries has permeated, and continues to permeate, much of Banciu’s work. Contemplating separate yet simultaneous realities and perspectives is one of her hallmark themes. In her 2002 collection of short stories, Berlin Is My Paris, she explores the ideals as well as the everyday realities that differentiated Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and German Reunification. Here the window represents a transparent border between La ventana en llamas’s perceived struggle with the threats that vex her from her real-life oppressors in the outside world and her own inner demons. Haunted by enduring trauma and the ongoing menacing violence of party tactics and party-sympathizing patriarchs, the protagonist learns to transform intense emotional wounds and psychological scarring into a life-affirming agency.
- Elena Mancini
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).