These sonnets were written in 1918-1919, amidst the chaos of a defeated Germany. In them, Benjamin recalled his closest friend, Christoph Friedrich Heinle. In 1914, at the age of nineteen, Heinle had committed suicide, along with his girlfriend, to protest the start of the Great War. Heinle had believed that the world was descending into barbarity, from which it would never emerge, and he'd chosen to live in it no longer. His death shattered Benjamin, for not only was Heinle his childhood friend, but also his closest intellectual companion. Benjamin never got over this loss and returned to it again and again in his personal and intellectual life. He gathered Heinle’s few poems and tried unsuccessfully to have them published. He also expressed his loss in a series of polished sonnets (seventy-three in all), in which a tangle of ideas merges into a biblical lamentation--death, tumult, confusion, friendship, immortality, salvation, and the mysticism of the word. The sonnets were first published in 1986, and this selection is the first English translation.
- Nirmal Dass
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.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2015Bettina Suleiman's debut novel Auswilderung (in my English translation: Back to the Wild) takes the relationship between a female human and a male gorilla as its main focus. It explores an interesting and productive question—whether animals ought to have something akin to human rights.
Auswilderung is narrated by Marina, an academic specialized in sign language. She tells the story—not in linear form; that would be far less interesting—of research projects she's been involved with in Leipzig, essentially investigating whether gorillas can live as humans and whether they have personalities that would entitle them to rights. One particular subject, as the animals are called by the researchers, is Yeh-teh, the male in this extract.
Like in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but deeper—Suleiman being a philosopher by training—the animals live with human families and are treated like human children. Eventually the study is abandoned and the next project is to return the gorillas to the wild. Not such an easy task, it turns out. So Marina is brought back on board to persuade Yeh-teh that moving to an island with a bunch of female gorillas he doesn't much like is a good idea. She manages, using lies and manipulation on both sides. Marina and a small team move to the island to get the subjects settled in.
The plot is great; edge-of-the-seat stuff at times, and things come to a head on the island. But one of the things I find most exciting about Auswilderung is not the storyline, but the characters. Marina is one of those people who has trouble with other human beings and works things out using theory and self-help books. And Suleiman's depiction of Yeh-teh proves—within its fictional universe at least—that he does indeed have a personality, and, on a different level, that a writer can create an animal character as believable as a human one. The act of creating an animal character is a statement in itself.
Translating the extract proved more challenging than I’d expected; Suleiman gives her narrator a naïve voice that was difficult to get right. I wanted it to read smoothly but not be too polished, because Marina is a character with jagged edges. I was aided, however, by having translated Bettina Suleiman’s essay "Lessons from the Human Zoo" for Words without Borders. This extract and that piece make good partners. I hope you enjoy reading them and thinking about all the questions they prompt.
- Katy Derbyshire
German | Germany | Poetry (excerpts) | Polish
September, 2015Do others sneak their words to our lips? Is it confiscated at customs, or will it suit our own angles of approach? These questions of language are ones that Uljana Wolf never poses directly in her debut collection kochanie i bought bread, published by kookbooks in 2005. Wolf’s ear is tuned to what happens at the porous borders between literary cultures, everyday experience, and national history, engaging a poetics in which this dissonance is galvanized into a vibration that rattles us. That we feel unsettled and seduced in this border dance, where “strophe by strophe / the guest is better versed,” alerts us to how we incessantly draw and contest borders through the particularities of language. For Wolf, born in East Berlin in 1979, the complex historical strata of Germany--the ineradicable shadow of the war, the East-West dissonance, the multilingual melting pot of Berlin--offer a site of intercultural contact, her poems brimming with multilingual and historical variances that provoke and kaleidoscope her homeland’s murky inheritance.
Wolf is equal parts inventor and dementor of language, and each poem shimmers with the possibility of what ordinary object or utterance might undergo metamorphosis. A phrase in “postscript to the dogs of kreisau” describes much of Wolf’s wordplay and my approach as a translator: “lautrausch,” or “sonic intoxication.” The semantic and aural qualities of words are not distinct categories in kochanie, but ones that infect each other.
- Greg Nissan
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2014Endlich Stille ("Silence at Last") is the story told by an unnamed professor of philosophy who allows a man he meets accidentally while traveling to invade and disrupt his life to an ever-greater extent until only the most radical of solutions appears viable. In the excerpt at hand, Friedrich Grävenich, who first addressed the narrator in front of the Strasbourg railway station after the narrator had alighted there to spend a single night, has been living in the narrator's apartment in Basel's old town for several weeks; while the narrator wishes to have his apartment, and his existence, to himself again, he is unable to put his foot down and demand that Friedrich take his suitcases and go. The narrator, who was originally willing to give Friedrich the benefit of the doubt, no longer finds Friedrich's claims about his past life or future plans to be necessarily credible. Far from indicating that he is about to depart, Friedrich is behaving in an increasingly, and presumably intentionally, provocative manner. Major themes in Endlich Stille are morality, power, and control in human relationships; the tension between the desire for intimacy and commitment on the one hand and the desire for solitude and independence on the other hand; and the instability of identity.
Ott's text is characterized by sentences that tend to be very long and syntactically complex; the novel takes the form of a long reminiscence by the narrator during and, in terms of the novel's structure, framed by his solitary journey home to Basel from Liechtenstein. It appeared important to me that these long sentences for the most part be maintained in translation because they reflect the narrator's thought processes; specifically, he is--with one notable exception--indecisive and irresolute, and he tends to keep turning possible courses of action over in his mind rather than realizing any one of these possible courses of action. The narrator's paralysis, his inability to produce a solution to the central dilemma of how to rid himself of his unofficial roommate, is reflected in the length of the sentences he uses in his recollection of his time with Friedrich. While these sentences constitute narration well after the fact--when the novel begins, Friedrich has already fallen, presumably to his death, from a mountain trail in the vicinity of Vaduz--their length and structure, not least their many parallel constructions, are generally indicative of the narrator's personality and specifically reflect his mental state during the period of his enforced togetherness with Friedrich (a period during which the two men consumed large amounts of alcohol daily, mostly in the Crooked Tower, a smoke-filled bar in working-class Kleinbasel).
Like Hiroshi, Mr. Grandstetter, to whose encounter with the narrator and Friedrich the excerpt presented here makes reference, is a colleague of the narrator's in the philosophy department at the University of Basel. Friedrich's addressing the Grandstetters as "Mr. and Mrs. Pepe" is inspired by an anecdote related earlier by the narrator involving a small child who had once addressed Mr. Grandstetter as "Pepe," a presumably embarrassing incident.
- Peter Sean Woltemade
German | Germany | Memoir (excerpt)
September, 2014Write Nothing about Politics: The Life of Hans Bernd von Haeften is Barbara von Haeften's account of the life of her husband, a lawyer, diplomat, and member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group in Nazi Germany. The Kreisau Circle--led by Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and Helmuth von Moltke--participated in the assassination attempt of Hitler on July 20, 1944, carried out by Claus von Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften, the brother of Hans Bernd von Haeften. The Kreisau Circle had also developed extensive plans for a new government to be put into place after the removal of Hitler. Barbara von Haeften's biography describes the life and political activity of her husband, who was executed after the failed assassination attempt. It furthermore sheds light on her own knowledge of and participation in the resistance movement.
The featured excerpt describes Hans Bernd von Haeften's last days from the point of Helmuth von Moltke's arrest until von Haeften was executed by the Nazis.
- Julie Winter
"Prometheus and the Primitive" was written while Alfred Döblin was working on the Amazonas Trilogy. Published in 1938 in a short-lived bimonthly journal of German exile literature founded by Thomas Mann, Maß und Wert, the essay offers a succinct and trenchant historico-philosophical overview of the concerns that permeate Amazonas: the will to power and death-wish of Europeans, culminating (at that point) in the rise of the Nazis; the floundering of the Christian Church in the face of colonial atrocities and the wars of religion; and the organic world of the native tribes, in which natural and supernatural are equally real.
The essay analyses Western history in terms of a sharp divide between the Promethean impulse, which sets Man above Nature and isolates him from it, and the mystical sense of connectedness with Nature that Döblin labels "the Primitive." He notes the ambivalent account in Genesis, and sets the emergence of Christianity in the context of a highly Promethean Roman state offering no satisfactions to those dispossessed by Roman civilisation.
But over time the Church, with its own hostility towards Nature, succumbs to a Prometheanism of its own and accommodates to worldly power. Just as the mystical sense is fading, Europe embarks on its age of discovery (a.k.a. conquest and subjugation). Nature, and Man, are viewed as a machine. The scientific enterprise, bent on quantifying everything, drains the world of qualities. The rise of mass societies after the French Revolution sees mysticism incorporated into the Promethean state. Prometheanism benefits only small elites. The yearning for a human society, a connectedness of human to human, human to Nature, is perverted into state-sponsored suspicion, the policing of thought, and the pseudo-connectedness of social classes and mass rallies. The result is barbarism and the degenerate mysticism that is nationalism.
The only way out, says Döblin, is to "reset this power whose grasp is now awry, whose pivot is the domination of Nature by Man--and to accommodate to the mystical realm." But he is not optimistic.
- Chris Godwin
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2014Forschungsbericht, at less than 40,000 words, is perhaps the most immediately accessible of Fichte’s ethnographic novels: set in the coastal Belizean city of Dangriga over the course of a two-week visit in February 1980, it depicts the attempts of Fichte’s alter ego, the writer Jäcki, and his companion Irma, the alter ego of Fichte’s long-time companion, the photographer Leonore Mau, to investigate the religious practices of the Black Carib (or Garifuna) community in Belize. The centerpiece of the novel is Fichte’s unsuccessful attempt to observe the dugu, the Garifuna feast for dead ancestors, which is presided over by the local buyei, or shaman, to placate the departed.
Forschungsbericht serves as an excellent point of entry into Fichte’s ethnographic writing, as meditation on both the consciousness of the writer and the creative process, and as illustration of the epistemological problem of knowing anything outside oneself, especially the foreign. Fichte, who originally meant his life’s work to be regarded as a history of tourism in the latter half of the twentieth century (and who might best be thought of as a French writer who wrote in German, a cross between Proust and Lévi-Strauss), is a crucial figure in that century’s literature, and deserves to be more widely known outside the German-speaking world.
- Adam Siegel
Apotheosis of the Dance is a six-part surrealist verse cycle, originally composed in 1973, which attacks totalitarianism and government-sanctioned violence through absurd humor. This can be best seen in the second poem, "Stalin at the Crossroads," where the tyrant is declawed through his absurd presentation as a sentimental poet, and later as a prima ballerina. The absurdly comical situations imagined by Wirpsza in his cycle highlight the tragic absurdities of the systems of totalitarian repression, the unnaturalness of which is underscored in verse five, "Dante Apprenticed." There, the man who was able to imagine the torments of Hell turns out to be a bad fit for a torturer's academy, as "what was to be painless [...] was torture at his hands, and what was to be painful / [...] was, on the contrary, / ineffective." Like the "idiot" in verse three, "Knights at an Assumption," Dante escapes the organs of the state, who pursue him in a vain attempt to remake the human individual into a cog in the machine of judicial murder. The cycle comes to an end in poem six, "Can-can," in which the bloody, yet bewilderingly comical, world resolves in an apokatastasis, which may be unsatisfying--although it cannot be said that the guilty get off totally scot-free in Wirpsza's agnostic Comedy.
Arabic | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
April, 2014Zuhdi Al-Dahoodi is a Kurdish Iraqi who writes in Arabic and German and lives currently in Germany. He was born in Tuz Khormato, Iraq, in 1940. In 1956, he was forced to move to Kirkuk to continue his education after leading a student strike in his hometown against the Tri-Partite Aggression. He attended a Teacher Training Institute in Kirkuk from 1957 to 1959, and then taught in the village of Mama near Kirkuk. He was imprisoned in Kirkuk, Baquba, Ramadi, and Hilla from 1964-66, and then studied at the University of Leipzig, Germany, from 1967 to 1972. He received his doctorate from that university in 1976. Between 1976 and 2005, he taught in universities in Iraq, Libya, and Germany.
He began publishing in 1954 in newspapers and youth journals, and at one time coedited a clandestine newspaper called Sada al-Wa'i ("Echo of the Attentive"). "Two Friends" was included in his first short story collection, which was published in Arabic in 1962. He has published numerous other collections of short stories--including al-Zanabiq allati la Tamut ("Lilies that Do Not Die"; 1978). The novella Usturat Mamlakat al-Sayyid ("The Legend of the Master's Kingdom") was published in 1990.
His Arabic novels include Rajul fi kull Makan ("A Man Everywhere"; 1974), Atwal 'Am ("The Longest Year"; 1994), Zaman al-Hurub ("Time of Flight"; 1998), Wada'an Ninawa (Farewell Ninevah, 2004), Tahawwulat ("Changes"; 2007), Firdaws Qaryat al-Ashbah ("Paradise of the Village of Specters"; 2007), and Dhakirat Madina Munqarida ("Memory of a Dead Village"; 2010).
His books in German, which represent both original works and translations of his own novels, include: Die Kurden (1987), Tollwut Kurdische Erzählungen (1991), Das Längste Jahr (1993), and Abschied von Ninive (2000).
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