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
Germany | Kurdish | Northern Kurdistan | Poetry
January, 2020On October 13, just four days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted his announcement of his pending invasion of Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, under the vilely euphemistic name Operation Peace Spring, I received an invitation to edit a new Google document from my friend and colleague Jiyar Homer, with whom I have been co-translating the short stories of the Kurdish polymath Farhad Pirbal. The note that accompanied the invitation was to the point: “Urgent translation.” Over the following days, we workshopped our translation of “The Tale of Hungry Dogs,” a short poem by the Ferîd Xan, a Kurd born in present-day Turkey. The poem, first published in 2006, seems as fresh as if it had been written that week. Indeed, the oppression and statelessness faced by the Kurdish people is not a new phenomenon—this is merely the latest chapter in a history of centuries of persecution and survival, as Xan suggests, “like a dog.” It’s our hope that this translation from the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, spoken in both Rojava and Southern Turkey, contributes toward a collective remembrance of what continues to unfold in Rojava, now that the relentless news ticker has moved on. With over 150 civilians killed and over 300,000 displaced, the plight of the Kurds and Rojava’s other residents remains an urgent humanitarian crisis, and US betrayal of the predominately Kurdish peshmerga who served on the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State feels like just the latest kick to a gaunt but proud dog’s ribs.
- David Shook
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 | 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
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
May, 2017In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens (Into the Woods of the Human Heart) (2016) follows a number of women (and a couple of men) as they travel throughout Europe and to the American West Coast. The oscillation between countries and sexes sparks a wild curiosity between the lovers and friends, while the book stages a larger exploration of borders--between nations, people, and sexes.
Woven through their travels are discoveries of new sexualities, dissolutions of classical ideas of love and gender, and encounters with the majesty of the natural world, the beauty of another person, and the exquisiteness of true self-discovery. This masterful, global novel is a powerful portrait of matters of the heart.
- Festival Neue Literatur Reader
Epic Novel (excerpt) | German | Germany
December, 2016This excerpt presents to English readers for the first time Alfred Döblin’s dystopian epic of the future Berge Meere und Giganten ("Mountains Oceans Giants"), written in 1921-23 and published in Berlin in 1924.
In 1921, the lifelong city-dweller Döblin became seized by an overwhelming sense of Nature: “The Earth fetched me…I experienced Nature as a secret…as the World Being: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly mingled and criss-crossed… I often became frightened, physically frightened, giddy in the face of these things--and sometimes, I confess, even now I feel uneasy” (Die neue Rundschau, June 1924).
For the first time in his writing career, he took a break from his day job as a neurologist to give expression to this feeling. The result was a monstrous 500-page vision of the next seven centuries, as humanity continues to give technology free rein regardless of adverse consequences for humanity and the world.
H. G. Wells, meet Hieronymous Bosch! Wells the Fabian, in The Shape of Things to Come, saw the solution to humanity’s problems in World Government and a better sort of committee. Döblin’s darker view is a literary counterpart to Bosch’s dark and powerful imagery. Try reading it with Bosch’s The Last Judgment at hand!
Mountains Oceans Giants explores themes relevant to our times: globalisation, consumerism, wealth concentration, mass migration, murderous elites, lust for power, headlong technological “progress” that often makes life worse for its supposed beneficiaries and the natural world.
The excerpt describes the development of synthetic food, marking a radical break between humans and their natural and social worlds.
- Chris Godwin
The following versions of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems are covers in the popular music tradition. Singing them I hope to discover an elasticity in the German that can almost, if not quite, cover my English.
The arc of the life so briefly described in the biography provided here reminds me of the arcs of the lives of so many blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll artists of the American 20th century—great musicians who made huge contributions to the sounds of the century through their own writing and playing and through their influences upon other artists, but who, for various reasons, including passionate temperaments, fell off the success tracks and were immediately or slowly left behind by their friends and colleagues, perhaps to spend decades in quiet towers writing and singing mainly to themselves, much as Hölderlin did.
The three poems presented here are from the initial phase of a project to compose a (book or) album of cover versions of short Hölderlin poems. The project has two principal goals: to please myself (I have fun composing these versions—it’s like singing Aretha or Zeppelin or Queen in the shower); and to do something to bring Hölderlin’s life and work to the attention of readers who have not yet heard of him. I love the Janus-like gaze of cover versions of music, songs that deliberately read past works and yet might, if they give pleasure, take an active part in conversations to come.
- Daniel Bosch
Epic Verse Novel | German | Germany
April, 2016Manas is an epic novel in free verse and a mashup of two different cultures: Hindu mythology and Existential philosophy from 20th-century Europe.
This excerpt from Manas includes the first 350 or so of the 13,000 lines of the epic. War-hero Manas returns victorious to Udaipur, but broken by his existential awareness of Death. He insists on going to the source of this sorrow: Shiva’s Field of the Dead in the high Himalaya.
Encounters with human souls and demons render Manas unconscious. Demons hijack his body, hoping to use it to go down to Earth. Puto is tricked into "killing" the body, and Manas’ soul wafts back onto the Field. Puto hauls the body down to Udaipur.
Manas’ wife Savitri refuses to believe that he is dead. She sets out on an arduous quest to find him, eventually coming to the Field, where she encounters Manas’ soul. Their coupling leads to Manas’ re-embodiment. Shiva makes contact with Savitri, now revealed as the universal principle of Love. She rejoins Shiva on Kailas.
Manas rejoices in his restored body, but is unsure of his individuality and shows no empathy for other humans. He captures the three demons who caused his earlier "death" and returns with them to Earth. Holy men declare that he and the three demons together make up one new and terrible personality. Shiva comes down to retrieve the demons, but Manas challenges him with his new-found Ego, receives Shiva’s blessing, and becomes a benign spirit facilitating the transmigration of souls.
These bare bones of the tale are wrapped in scene after intriguing scene of action, comedy, pathos, and lyrical description, which leave the reader wondering, "Gosh, whatever next?"
- Chris Godwin
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).