Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Contemporary German Stories Friederike Mayröcker and Others by A. Leslie Wills Gisela Elsner. Gisela Elsner was born in 1937 in Nuremberg into a wealthy family. Her father was a member of the executive board of Siemens, and Elsner was chauffeured to the convent school she attended. Before finishing school she left her family home to live with Klaus Roehler, who was later to become an author and editor, and whose bohemian student lifestyle seemed to offer Elsner the freedom missing in her bourgeois family. Her parents were strictly opposed to the relationship and even turned to the police in order to end it. The correspondence between Elsner and Röhler documenting the struggle with her family was edited and published as Wespen im Schnee (2002). Around this time, in 1955, Klaus Röhler made his début at a meeting of the Gruppe 47 and, one year later, Elsner and Roehler published Triboll (1956), a collection of surrealist prose miniatures. After finishing school, Elsner studied , Philosophy and Theatre studies in Vienna for two years. During this time she continued living with Röhler, whom she married in 1958. When she gave birth to their son, Oskar, she left university without a degree. The relationship did not last and, in 1962 after Elsner had left her husband and their three year-old son, the marriage ended in divorce. In the same year she read an extract from the novel she was working on at one of the Gruppe 47 meetings. The piece received very mixed praise, but attracted the attention of the copy-editor of the renowned Rowohlt publishing house where it appeared as Die Riesenzwerge. Ein Beitrag in 1964. The grotesque novel is an enquiry into the life of the lower middle-classes in post-war Germany as viewed through the eyes of a child. With uncanny precision little Lothar Leinlein registers the brutality lurking behind the façade of conventionalism and petty bourgeois decorum, exposing the world and everyday routines of the adults surrounding him as full of monstrosities. At the time it was published the novel created a stir in the media and was even classified as harmful to minors in Austria. Yet it was received favourably by literary critics, translated into twelve languages and Elsner was awarded the prestigious prix Formentor for it. Even if Die Riesenzwerge in many respects set the tone for much of Elsner's later writing, it remained her only critical and commercial success. In the following decades she published various novels which, in characteristically complicated and over-long sentences, dealt with the collective amnesia of West-German society with regard to the Nazi past and the terrors of family life. Although a critical examination of gender relations is a recurring theme in her novels, in particular in her modern-day Madame Bovary adaptation Abseits (1982) and the 1984 novel Die Zähmung , Elsner gained no popularity among the emerging German women's movement, arguably due to the fact that contemporary ‘Frauenliteratur’ consisted mostly of heartfelt confessional literature while Elsner's highly artificial language rendered an identificatory reading impossible. In addition, her texts put an emphasis on women's complicity in their own oppression, a notion which was at odds with the predominantly radical feminist theory which informed much of the German women's movement of the time. Another theme to be found in many of Elsner's writings is that of class relations. From the 1960s on, Elsner had attended the meetings of the Dortmunder Gruppe 61, a group of writers who sought to engage with industrial production in a different way than the Bitterfelder Weg had in the GDR. Elsner herself publicly voiced her sympathies for the GDR in several interviews and joined the West-German Communist Party (DKP) in 1972, but she never subscribed to the aesthetics of socialist realism in her writing. Much like her female characters, the blue- and white-collar workers appearing in texts like Das Windei (1987) and Otto der Großaktionär (published posthumously in 2008) are mere negative mirror-images of their oppressors and provide no positive role model. In the late 1980s her publishing house cancelled her contract because her works were no longer commercially viable. Elsner was not able to attract the interest of a new publisher, leaving her feeling artistically isolated and powerless. Moreover, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the GDR, Elsner lost her hope of a social alternative to capitalism. She committed suicide in 1992. While Elsner has often been termed 'Jelinek's older sister' for her merciless satirical style and choice of subjects, there is very little research on her works. In 2000, Oskar Roehler, Elsner's son, directed a film, Die Unberührbare , based on his mother's last years. Although the film was a success, it did not heighten interest in Elsner's writing. Only recently, Verbrecher Verlag, a small publishing house in Berlin, has begun re-editing Elsner's writing, among them works which have never before been published. Compiled by Anja Henebury (Leeds) Bibliography. Fiction. Triboll: Lebenslauf eines erstaunlichen Mannes , with Klaus Roehler [short-stories] (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1956) Die Riesenzwerge: Ein Beitrag [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964) Der Nachwuchs [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968) Das Berührungsverbot (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970; Berlin: Verbrecher, 2006) Herr Leiselheimer und weitere Versuche, die Wirklichkeit zu bewältigen [short-stories] (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1973) Der Punktsieg [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977) Die Zerreißprobe [short-stories] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980) Abseits [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982) Die Zähmung: Chronik einer Ehe [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984/Berlin: Verbrecher, 2002) Das Windei [novel] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,1987) Friedenssaison , with music by Christof Herzog [opera] (Hamburg: Poststskriptum, 1988) Fliegeralarm [novel] (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1989/Berlin: Verbrecher, 2009) Heilig Blut [novel] (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2007) Otto, der Grossaktionär [novel] (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2008) Versuche, die Wirklichkeit zu bewältigen: Gesammelte Erzählungen I , ed. by Christine Künzel [short-stories] (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2013) Zerreißproben - Gesammelte Erzählungen 2 , ed. by Christine Künzel [short-stories] (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2013) Non-Fiction. Gefahrensphären [essays] (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1988) Wespen im Schnee : 99 Briefe und ein Tagebuch [letters between Elsner and Klaus Roehler] (Berlin: Aufbau 2001) Flüche einer Verfluchten - Kritische Schriften I , ed. by Christine Künzel [essays] (Berlin: Verbrecher 2011) Im literarischen Ghetto - Kritische Schriften II , ed. by Christine Künzel [essays] (Berlin: Verbrecher 2011) English Translations. The Giant Dwarfs: A Contribution [Translation of Die Riesenzwerge: Ein Beitrag by Joel Carmichael] (New York: Grove Press, 1965) Offside [Translation of Abseits by Anthea Bell] (London: Virago, 1985) ‘The Engagement’ [Translation of ‘Die Verlobung’ from Die Zerreißprobe (pp. 143-66) by Minetta Altgelt Goyne] in Contemporary German Stories: Peter Handke, Friederike Mayröcker, Uwe Timm, and Others , ed. by A. Leslie Wilson (New York: Continuum, 1998, pp. 72-86) Criticism. Jeremiah, Emily: Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s (Leeds: MHRA, 2003) Künzel, Christine: ‘Make-up als Mimikry: Die Gesichter der Autorin Gisela Elsner (1937-1992)’ in Gesichter auftragen: Argumente zum Schminken , ed. by Christian Janecke (Marburg: Jonas, 2006, pp. 155-173) —: ‘Eine “schreibende Kleopatra”: Autorschaft und Maskerade bei Gisela Elsner’ in Autorinszenierungen: Autorschaft und literarisches Werk im Kontext der Medien , ed. by Christine Künzel and Jörg Schönert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, pp. 177-190) — : ‘Leben und Sterben in der “Wirtschaftswunder-Plunderwelt”: Wirtschafts- und Kapitalismuskritik bei Gisela Elsner’ in ‘Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?’: Literatur und Wirtschaft , ed. by Dirk Hempel and Christine Künzel (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 169-192) — [ed.]: Die letzte Kommunistin: Texte zu Gisela Elsner (Hamburg: Konkret, 2009) —: ‘Satire und Groteske als Mittel der Dekonstruktion (klein-)bürgerlicher Rituale und Mythen: Gisela Elsner’ in Brüche und Umbrüche: Frauen, Literatur und soziale Bewegungen , ed. by Margrid Bircken, Marianne Lüdecke and Helmut Peitsch (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2010, pp. 403-425) —: ‘The Most Dangerous Presumption: Women Authors and the Problems of Writing Satire’ ( Gender Forum 35, 2011) available online at http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-humour-ii/the-most-dangerous-presumption/ —: ‘Ich bin eine schmutzige Satirikerin’: Zum Werk Gisela Elsners (1937-1992) (Sulzbach: Helmer, 2012) —: ‘Der Fluch der Herkunft: Gisela Elsners Versuche, sich mit der Arbeitswelt auseinanderzusetzen’ in Schreibarbeiten an den Rändern der Literatur: Die Dortmunder Gruppe 61 , ed. by Ute Gerhard and Hanneliese Palm (Essen: Klartext, 2012, pp. 159-172) Mindt, Carsten: Verfremdung des Vertrauten: zur literarischen Ethnografie der "Bundesdeutschen" im Werk Gisela Elsners (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009) Smith-Prei, Carrie: ​‘Satirizing the Private as Political: 1968 and Postmillennial Family Narratives’ ( Women in German Yearbook 25, 2009, pp. 76-99) —: Revolting Families : ​ Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) Lorenz, Dagmar C. G.: ‘Humor bei zeitgenössischen Autorinnen’ ( The Germanic Review 62.1, 1987, pp. 28-36) Opitz-Wiemers, Carola: ‘“Vom Heulen der Wölfe und des Windes”: Gisela Elsners postum erschienener Roman Heilig Blut’ in Zwischen Globalisierungen und Regionalisierungen: Zur Darstellung von Zeitgeschichte in deutschsprachiger Gegenwartsliteratur , vol 5, ed. by Martin Hellström and Edgar Platen (Munich: Iudicium [Perspektiven: Nordeuropäische Studien zur Deutschsprachigen Literatur und Kultur 4], 2008, pp. 166-176) Weder, Christine: ‘“Im Reich von “König Sex”: Vom Zwang zur Freiheit in Theorie und Literatur um 1968’ in Bann der Gewalt: Studien zur Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte , ed. by Maximilian Bergengruen and Roland Borgards (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009, pp. 543-582) Interviews. ‘Es ist nicht meine Absicht, zu schockieren!’ [radio interview, 19 September 1971], reprinted in the brochure for the film Die Unberührbare , available online at http://cplush.de/cplush_2/Scrapbook_Seite_21_files/Die_Unberuehrbare.pdf. ‘Vereinfacher haben es nicht leicht: Ein Gesprä ch mit der Autorin der Romane “Riesenzwerge” und “Punktsieg”', reprinted in Im literarischen Ghetto: kritische Schriften , ed. by Christine Künzel (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2011, pp. 33-40) Altenburg, Matthias: ‘“Schreibprobleme müssen vom Autor gelöst, aber nicht beschrieben warden”: Gespräch mit Gisela Elsner’ in Fremde Mütter, fremde Väter, fremdes Land , ed. by Matthias Altenburg (Hamburg: Konkret, 1985, pp. 134-151) Ekkerhart, Rudolph: ‘Gisela Elsner’ in Protokoll zur Person: Autoren über sich und ihr Werk (Munich: List, 1971, pp. 45-58) Hoffmeister, Donna L.: ‘Gespräch mit Gisela Elsner’ in Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle: Gespräche mit Schriftstellern über Arbeit in der Literatur , ed. by Donna L. Hoffmeister (Bonn: Bouvier [Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft 382], 1989, pp. 103-119) Serke, Jürgen: Frauen schreiben: ein neues Kapitel deutschsprachiger Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979) Starkmann, Alfred: ‘Keine Zeit für Sympathie: Neue Definition des Riesenzwergs – Ein Gespräch mit Gisela Elsner’ ( Die Welt , 9 September 1965) Mahmoud Hosseini Zad answers our Proust Questionnaire. There are many. Mainly the characters that are more similar to myself in the ways they live and think. Who was your first favorite writer, and how old were you when you discovered him or her? Perhaps in my teens, when I was 13 or 14, my favorite writers were John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ebrahim Golestan, Forough Farrokhzad, and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. What is your favorite word in any language? What word do you find most difficult to translate? For me, language in general – both Farsi and German – is a living being. A friend and a feud. It’s my colleague in thinking and writing. I cannot say which part of a human being that I love is better – her hands or her eyes – and neither can I say it about words. I have thought a lot about it before, but never came to a conclusion. I face the totality of what is called language; I either fight with it or compromise. What five books would you want if you were stranded on a desert island? If I have read the books, they will be of no use any more. If haven’t read them, then I’ll have no idea which ones are better. I prefer to keep the good memory of my favorite books with me, review the lines I love any time I wish. For instance, parts and moments from One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), Le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), Le Rouge et le Noir (Stendhal), Alice (Judith Hermann), Agnes (Peter Stamm), Der Richter und sein Henker (Friedrich Dürrenmatt), history by Abul-Fazl Bayhaqī, Rumi’s Dīvān-e Šhams , and my own books! Which under-translated author do you think deserves wider worldwide recognition? I have recently done an ordered translation for a job out of my area of expertise. I translated Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy of Oresteia from German to Farsi, and what a brave new world I had been unaware of! Instead of the under-translated writers, I prefer to read fine and precise translations of the well-known (unfortunately Persian translations are not generally satisfactory) writers, from Greek and French to Russian and British classics, to renowned 20 th -century writers like Hemingway, Woolf, Alice Munro, Faulkner, and others. Do you have a translation philosophy that guides your work? Translation for me is like balancing a weighing scale. That is, both scales should be balanced by gradually adding and removing little masses from the pans until both pans weigh equally when I am done with the translation. Which of the translations that you’ve worked on was most challenging? Why? The plays of , as I had to find a solution for the language and poetic diction of Brecht. I was also emotionally pressed when translating Peter Stamm’s Agnes and Judith Hermann’s Alice. How did you learn your foreign language? How did you begin working as a literary translator? After graduating from high school, I travelled to Germany to continue my studies, and there I learnt German. Language played a major role, as I mainly studied human sciences. Years later, I received the Goethe-Institut’s German Language Diploma in Munich. I started translating while I was a university student in Germany. My debut translation was a play by Brecht. If you weren’t a translator, what profession would you like to have tried? I have always been a translator in addition to other professions: I have been a university professor, I’ve worked at the National Broadcasting Organization, I’ve worked at the German embassy, and been a translator! Mahmoud Hosseini Zad is the most significant Persian translator of contemporary German-language literature. Following studies in Germany in the late 1960s, he was a lecturer of German language and literature in . He translated Brecht, as well as novels by Dürrenmatt, into Persian. Since 2000, Mahmoud Hosseini Zad has mainly translated contemporary German literature. Due to his efforts in particular, authors such as Judith Hermann, lngo Schulze, Uwe Timm, Peter Stamm, and Julia Franck are accessible to Iranian readers. Many of his translations have received prizes and have been published in multiple editions (extraordinary in the Iranian book market). In lectures and readings, he often discusses contemporary German-language films and plays. He is also a writer and has published three collections of short stories that are being translated into English. Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of Kruso by Lutz Seiler. If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance. Today, we’ve partnered with Scribe Books to introduce the majestic German Book Prize winner Der Spiegel calls “ the first worthy successor to ’s Magic Mountain to appear in contemporary German literature.” It is also the debut novel of Lutz Seiler, a major German poet we’ve published in our pages before. In the novel excerpt below, our protagonist has just arrived at a seaside town after an unspeakable tragedy. The true subject of this chapter is revealed to be Ed’s unsettled inner state—dive in and read all the way up to its heart-stopping end. He smelled the sea even before he got off the train. From his childhood (memories of their only trip to the Baltic Sea), he remembered the Hotel am Bahnhof. It lay directly across from the station, a big, beautiful attraction with oriels built as round towers, and weather vanes in which the numerals of the years crumbled. He let a few cars pass and hesitated. It wouldn’t be wise, he thought, especially as far as money was concerned. On the other hand, there was no point in arriving on the island in the afternoon, since there probably wouldn’t be enough time left to find a place to stay—if he could find one at all. He had about 150 marks on him; if he were careful, he could make it last for three, maybe even four weeks. He had left ninety marks in his bank account for rent transfers, enough until September. If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance. He could have fallen ill. Summer holidays would begin in three weeks. He had written his parents a card. They believed he was in Poland, in Katowice, for the so-called International Student Summer, as he had been the year before. The reception desk was built unusually high and looked as if it had been swept clean, no papers, no keys; but what did Ed know about hotels? At the very last moment, the heads of three women appeared, rising like the pistons of a four-stroke motor in which the fourth spark plug has failed to ignite. Impossible to discern from exactly which depths the receptionists had suddenly surfaced; maybe the high shelf of the desk was connected to a back room, or maybe over the years the women had simply got used to staying under cover as long as possible, quiet and still, behind their dark veneered barrier. ‘Good afternoon, I …’ His voice sounded weary. Alone in the compartment, he had once again been unable to sleep. A military patrol, probably some kind of advance border security, had confiscated his map of the Baltic coast. The train had stopped for a long time in Anklam: the patrol must have got on there. He regretted that nothing more intelligent had occurred to him than claiming that it wasn’t actually his own map… As a result, he had no way of knowing why particular places were underlined and particular sections of the coast line were traced in ink… His voice had suddenly failed, and in its place was the murmuring in his brain—Brockes, Eichendor, and, as always, Trakl, who echoed most relentlessly with his verses of foliage and brown—that made Ed grab his head. A sudden move: in reflex, one of the soldiers raised his machine gun. In the end, Ed could consider himself lucky that they left him alone. ‘Odd duck,’ the Kalashnikov-wielding soldier murmured out in the corridor. Ed’s forehead was covered with sweat. Fields flashed by, black grass along the railroad embankment. ‘Do you have a reservation?’ Ed was taking a room for the first time in his life. The amazing thing was, it was working. They gave him a long form on dull paper and asked for identification. As he lifted his elbows onto the high surface of the desk with some effort and filled out the form with a stiff wrist, the receptionists took turns leafing through his pass booklet. For one absurd instant, Ed feared his secret departure might have automatically been registered in one of the very last, empty pages in his pass, under ‘Visa and Travel’. Unauthorised displacement —from the days of his military, he remembered this fateful stamp that incurred a wide variety of penalties. ‘I beg your pardon, this is my first time,’ Ed said. ‘What?’ asked the concierge. Ed raised his head and tried to smile, but his attempt to bridge the gap fell flat. He was given a key from which a varnished wooden cube dangled on a short string. He closed his fist around the cube and knew his room number. The number was neatly burnt into the wood. He briefly pictured the hotel caretaker in his basement workroom, bent over an endless row of little blocks sawed to the proper size and sanded, onto which he placed the glowing rod of his soldering iron—number after number, room by room. Ed had once been a labourer, too, and part of him was still at home in workshops, in the caves of the working class , those side rooms of the world, in which things asserted their definite, tangible outlines. ‘Second floor, stairs on the left, young man.’ The word Moccastube shimmered above a brass-studded door next to the staircase. On the first landing, Ed looked back again; two of the three women’s heads had disappeared, while the third woman was speaking on the telephone and following him with her eyes. When he woke, it was already after four in the afternoon. A wardrobe stood at the foot of the double bed. In the corner, a television stood on a chrome-plated stand. Above the toilet hung a cast-iron flushing tank, coated with a film of condensation. The tank must have dated from a much earlier era. The lever for the flushing mechanism imitated two leaping dolphins. While the animals sedately returned to their initial position, an endless stream of water gushed out. Ed liked the sound of the water, and felt like the dolphins were his friends. That you could go into a hotel, ask for a room, and get one (rather straightforwardly) had to be counted as one of the few wonders of the world that had survived—‘for a’ that an’ a’ that,’ Ed gurgled into the stream of water from the showerhead. Over time, you simply forgot that such things still existed; fundamentally, you didn’t believe in them anymore, yes, you forgot what life could be good for. Ed’s thoughts ran along those lines. He wanted to masturbate, but couldn’t muster enough concentration. To the right of the hotel was a lake with a fountain that regularly rose into the sky, collapsed in on itself, and disappeared for several seconds. A couple in a pedal boat glided slowly up to the water feature. Ed was suddenly overcome with a good feeling as he crossed the road towards the lake. All this was the beginning of something. Someone who’d been through a fair amount showed himself capable of … With that, his sentence ended. It was clear to him that his departure was overdue. He felt the pain, as if he were only now awakening from anaesthesia, millimetre by millimetre. A cobblestone street that turned to the left was named An den Bleichen. He passed a few run-down villas with conservatories, courtyards, and garages. He walked up to the nameplate near the door of one to have a look at the house’s travel itinerary until now. The small, brave lighted doorbell plate also preserved the legibility of some of the names that had been pasted for some time, perhaps for years now. As he passed, Ed tried to capture their rhythm: Schiele, Dahme, Glambeck, Krieger… His muttering formed a bridge across the lake, and his steps on the wood were a kind of metronome. ‘All-of-those-who-died-al-ready…’ whispered Ed, and he automatically covered his face with his hands, ‘see everything in a new way?’ The old city wall appeared, then an archway and a café called ‘Torschliesserhaus’, the Gatekeeper’s House. He crossed the old city to the port and checked the ferry departure times. In the kiosk of the White Fleet, he bought a crossing for the following day. The sight of the boat put him in a euphoric mood. The steps to the dock, of light-grey cement, and then: the sea. To eat cheaply, Ed returned to the train station. He felt rested, and gauged his chances. A hide-out in the sea, hidden sea, Hiddensee… He knew the stories. Continuous whispers washed around the island. Ed chewed deliberately and drank his coffee in tiny sips. First, it wouldn’t be easy getting onto one of the boats. Then it would be almost impossible to find a place to stay, but another goal was not conceivable inside the border . Certainly, he had heard the experts who claimed that Hiddensee actually lay outside the border, that it was exterritorial, an island of the blessed, of dreamers and idealists, of failures and rejects. Others called it the Capri of the North, booked-up for decades. In Halle, Ed had met a historian who’d worked winters as a waiter in the Offenbach Stuben, a wine restaurant where he and G. had occasionally sat at the bar. Every spring, at the opening of the season, the historian (that’s what everyone called him, after all) returned to the island. ‘At last, at last!’ he liked to call out to his customers, who nodded indulgently when he started in on one of his eulogies, which he usually began by addressing his audience in the Offenbach Stuben with ‘Dear friends!’ ‘The island, dear friends, has all I need, all I’ve ever searched for. As soon as it surfaces on the horizon, seen from the deck of the steamboat, its slender, delicate form, its fine outline, and behind it, the mainland’s last grey cockscomb, Stralsund with its towers, the entire hinterland with its filth, you know what I mean, dear friends, the island appears and suddenly you forget it all, because now, before you, something new is beginning, yes, dear friends, right there on the steamboat!’ the man rhapsodised. Grey-haired and in his mid-forties, he had left his position at the university—voluntarily, it was said—and was therefore all the more deeply immersed in dreams. As many of the country’s thinkers did, he wore a beard like Marx’s. ‘Freedom, dear friends, is essentially a matter of writing one’s own laws within the framework of existing laws, of being simultaneously the object and the subject of legislation, that is an essential characteristic of life up there, in the north.’ That’s how the historian of the Offenbach Stuben summed it up, holding a tray as round as a bass drum and full of bottles in front of his chest. For Ed, the most important piece of information was that places could suddenly free-up even in season. From one day to the next, waiters were needed, or dishwashers, kitchen-help. There were seasonal workers who disappeared overnight for a wide variety of reasons. Usually, those telling such stories would stop abruptly at that point and throw a glance at the listener—and then, depending on the situation, would continue in one of the possible or impossible directions: ‘Of course, there are people who give up and return to the mainland, who just aren’t cut out for it.’ Or: ‘You know, an exit visa is suddenly authorised, in the middle of the summer …’ Or: ‘Sure, it’s hard to believe, fifty kilometres, but there have always been strong swimmers …’ After every conversation, Hiddensee seemed like a narrow strip of land of mythical splendour, the last, the only place, an island that was constantly floating away, always outside the field of vision—you’d have to hurry if you wanted to reach it. After eating, Ed returned to the hotel. Someone had been through his things, but nothing was missing. He stood at the window and looked across at the train station. In bed, he began to call for Matthew—a regression. But he only called quietly, and really just to hear his voice again before going to sleep. No, he had not jumped. Kruso by Lutz Seiler, translated by Tess Lewis, is published by Scribe (£16.99). Lutz Seiler was born in 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin and Stockholm. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Literary Prize 2014, and the German Book Prize 2014. Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Philippe Jaccottet. She has won a number of awards including the 2015 ACFNY Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review . Her website can be found here. Gisela Elsner. Biografia [ modifica | modifica wikitesto ] Studiò letteratura, filosofia e teatro all'Università di Vienna, e in seguito lavorò come scrittrice freelance. [1] Fece parte del Gruppo 61 e del Gruppo 47. [1] Ottenne notorietà internazionale con il romanzo d'esordio, I nani giganti ( Der Riesenzwerge , 1964), una satira radicale e corrosiva della classe borghese; il libro fu tradotto in 14 lingue [2] e vinse il prestigioso Premio Formentor. [1] Fu anche autrice di drammi radiofonici e librettista per un'opera di Christof Herzog. [1] Gli ultimi anni di vita furono contraddistinti da forti delusioni professionali e personali: rimasta senza casa editrice dal 1988 e sostanzialmente dimenticata, a causa delle sue idee leniniste visse con forte travaglio interiore la riunificazione tedesca e la conseguente dissoluzione ideologica. Si suicidò nel maggio 1992, a soli 55 anni. [3] Nel 2000 la sua figura ritornò al centro dell'attenzione come protagonista del film Hanna Flanders , diretto dal figlio Oskar Roehler. [3] Weekly News Roundup, 28th November 2014: Happy Thanksgiving, Shakespeare in France. Happy (belated) Thanksgiving to our American readers—and to all non-Americans, happy Friday! Anglophones certainly have something to be thankful for: one of William Shakespeare’s treasured First Folios has been uncovered, practically untouched, in a small chapel in France, where it is reported to have lain for over two hundred years. And any literature lover or archivist from the University of Texas might be feeling extra- thankful this week, as the complete archive of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez has been donated to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. And at the Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Maloney opines that the proliferation of paperback books helped win World War II for the Americans. This week in book buzz: British/Indian author Arundhati Roy is following up her 1997-Booker Prizewinning God of Small Things , at long last, after a period dedicated to political activism. Here’s a profile. You can look forward to more than that, what with an upcoming translation of German counterculture icon Jörg Fauser’s novel, Raw Material. Irish phenomenon and inspiration to all pining novelists Eimear McBride has snagged another award for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, which has already won the Goldsmiths and the Bailey’s Prizes, among others. The biggest international book prize, the IMPAC Dublin award, has announced its glorious longlist, and you might recognize a few titles (the list includes a title translated by Alex Zucker, blog contributor!). If you’re a skeptic to the prospect of awards in general, you might enjoy this look back at the National Book Awards, proving that even the most venerated intellectual institutions are subject to whim and fashion. French existentialists, philosophers, and novelists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre didn’t end on the best of terms, but a forgotten letter from better times has reemerged. Same goes for American beats Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady: a letter from Cassady to Kerouac inspiring Jack’s iconic On the Road is set to be auctioned off. Every get a 2-AM book craving? (We know you do). In Taiwan, the 24-hour bookstore is a welcome respite for weary clubbers and bookworms alike. Contributor: ; Tags: , , , , , , , , What We’re Reading in November. Emma Jacobs on Syrian writer Osama Alomar’s uncanny short fiction, and Erin Gilbert on solitude in three seminal works including “Tristana” Emma Jacobs (assistant editor): I’ve been reading really haphazardly this month, dipping in and out of essays, short stories, and poetry. I tend to think of this as a bad habit, a symptom of my cyber-skewed hyper-active millennial-generation attention span, yadayadayada, but actually there’s something so rich about this chaotic way of reading and the unexpected connections that it sparks between very different books. Looking over some of my favourite reads from November, I notice that each one meditates in some way on the lightness of the ephemeral moment. This is particularly prominent in Photographs Not Taken , a collection of essays by photographers reflecting on the most memorable images they never captured. These scenes went unphotographed for a variety of reasons, but most often it was because an elusive and overpowering feeling made the photographer hesitate just a second too long. What’s left is a collage of imaginary negatives, moments that are tangible only in their absence. But rather than reading like a catalogue of regrets, the book chips away at the mythology that surrounds the act of “taking” a photo in the first place. As each photographer considers the images that passed them by, they tackle questions of where the documentarian impulse comes from and how the existence of a photo changes our memory of the event itself. The quality of the writing is a little up and down, but there are many pockets of prose that crystallise the moment of perception in surprising ways. Contributors: , ; Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Enrique Sacerio-Garí. “We turn our faces / And feel the states / of this doubling: / Two Earths / Two Worlds / Night and day” Multiple Places …greater poverty than yours shall you see. “Exemplo X,” El conde Lucanor. Neruda taught us To see two worlds On Earth And to enter the atom With a telescope To open the door Of the elements And to reveal paths Of green fire. The faded maps Suffer the external debt Of the changes imposed By the globalizers Of the steel shovel… And there is no heaven Of peace and joy Or mothers without the scourge Of war but rather the bitter fortitude of Evaristo Estenoz, the external debt we all owe to color the segregation that obscures the stars buried in our breast. Contributor: ; Writer: ; Tags: , , , , , , From the 2014 “Words Without Borders” Gala. On education initiatives, honoring Carol Brown Janeway, and who owns the English language at this remarkable annual event. On October 28, a crowd of more than 200 came out for Words Without Borders’ annual gala to celebrate the publication’s 11-year history of publishing and promoting international literature. With a crowd from across the New York literary world, the evening was hosted by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. True to Words Without Borders form, the evening featured bilingual readings in English and from Belarusian, Chinese, and Sinhala by Valzhyna Mort, Yiyun Li, and Ru Freeman. Emphasizing the importance of translation to cultivate conversation across time and place, Li read two poems from Liu Xia, the wife of imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, herself under house arrest. Freeman drew a parallel between translation and the Sistine Chapel, suggesting translation is like Michelangelo’s depiction of the hands of God and Saint Michael, not quite touching yet still beautiful. READ MORE… Contributor: ; Place: ; Writer: ; Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Weekly News Roundup, 21st November 2014: National Translation Awards, Mapped-Out Languages. This week's literary highlights from across the world. The interwebs’ hullabaloo around the recently-awarded (American) National Book Awards occupied much of the literary chitchat this week, but those of us in translation-conscious circles simply mourn that the Awards no longer carve a space for translation prizes. Also this past week: the American Literary Translation Association conference celebrated its largest award, the National Translation Award, given to Matlei Yankeivich and Asymptote -contributor Eugene Ostashevsky’s translation of Russian -language An Invitation for me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky. And the Korea Times announced its modern Korean literature in translation awards this week, too. Contributor: ; Tags: , , , , , , In Review: “The Tower” by Uwe Tellkamp. An impressive and occasionally surreal collage of scenes and character studies from a country that is not mourned but most certainly vanished. The Tower , by Uwe Tellkamp, may appear to be a monolithic, singularly heroic literary act by a surgeon and survivor of the indignities of the German Democratic Republic. This man, who lived to tell the tale, so to speak, penned an epic about a bourgeois family which has retreated into a kind of inner emigration in the crumbling but stately villas of the posh Weißer Hirsch neighborhood in Dresden. But The Tower is much more complex than that, and intellectually rich. The story, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks , focuses on three men of various ages and various levels of complicity with the putrefying system of 1980s GDR, and it is now (finally!) available in print in English translation. Who are these three men? Christian is a pimply and ambitious young student who dreams of following his father, Richard, into the field of medicine; he ultimately signs up for three years of military service in the hopes of securing a spot as a medical student. His efforts to mimic Party loyalty are largely successful until his collapse as a soldier. His father Richard’s 50th birthday party opens the novel and initially Richard appears equally eloquent and morally blameless. However, numerous affairs and a secret second family make him a pawn in the hands of the Stasi. Finally, Meno, Christian’s maternal uncle—something of a mentor to the teenage boy, and a former botanist—works as an editor at one of the GDR’s few high- quality imprints that frequently ran short on paper, rounding out the trio of protagonists. Contributor: ; Tags: , , , , , , , Octavio Paz New York Centennial: Perpetually Creating Rhythm. A dispatch honoring one of Mexico's most celebrated poets. From October 1st to the 8th, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York paid tribute to the centennial of Octavio Paz’s birth with a series of discussions, readings, concerts, and film screenings. A prolific poet, essayist, intellectual, translator, editor, publisher, and diplomat, Paz published his first poetry collection, Luna Silvestre ( Wild Moon , 1933) at 19 years old, penning over 26 volumes of poetry until his death in 1998. Paz was also an accomplished essayist: his 1950 treatise on Mexican identity, El laberinto de la soledad ( The Labyrinth of Solitude ) is considered a seminal work of literature. The recipient of the Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, Paz founded three literary magazines, Taller , Plural , and Vuelta ; Vuelta is still published as Letras Libres . Now that we’ve gotten that dry but necessary introduction out of the way, let me truly begin. The centennial celebration was a sumptuous banquet I wanted to gorge myself on until I developed gout, like those rich men of old. I eagerly chased Paz throughout New York City, from the second-floor gallery of the Mexican Consulate in Midtown to the ornate ballroom of the Americas Society in the Upper East Side, and finally to where the river meets the city, the “navel of the poetic universe,” as Paz’s translator Eliot Weinberger playfully referred to the Poets House in TriBeCa. Contributor: ; Language: ; Places: , ; Writer: ; Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Say Ayotzinapa. A special feature in 20 languages: presenting David Huerta’s “Ayotzinapa” with an introduction by Faces in the Crowd -author Valeria Luiselli. David Huerta wrote “Ayotzinapa” on November 2, 2014, “in anger, outrage, and horror.” It has already formed an installation at the Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Art, been printed by Juan Nicanor Pascoe’s letterpress, and been read and excerpted in protest banners from Berlin to Xalapa. When I read it two weeks ago, I realised there was a very practical way for Asymptote , as a journal of international literature, to communicate Mexico’s rallying cry for change and justice in multiple languages. Juana Adcock’s English translation was the first in a chain that now stretches from Mexico to Scotland, China, Romania, Israel, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, and beyond. Asymptote ’s global “Ayotzinapa” has become a poetic event, an audible coming-together, which is one constructive way of responsibly renewing the word Ayotzinapa , as Valeria Luiselli suggests we must do in her introduction to the poem. All of the translations begin with the same, untouched word, Ayotzinapa; like David, all of our translators took pains to get across—rephrasing the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy—what these Ayotzinapas mean. Below you can read and listen to David Huerta’s original Spanish-language poem. You can also use the drop-down menu like a map to read translations of his poem in 20 languages. Listen, too, to our translators’ audio recordings, and particularly to their pronunciation of the unchanged title, “Ayotzinapa.” Above all, this global translation is about resisting the state of speechlessness that is easy to fall into when what you are witnessing is beyond imagination; about learning how to say Ayotzinapa ; about stopping the word Ayotzinapa from being a strange, unrelated Mexican sound. #WeAreAllAyotzinapa #WritersWithAyotzinapa — Sophie Hughes, Editor-at-large, Mexico. Contributors: , ; Language: ; Place: ; Writer: ; Tags: , , , , , , , , , The Tiff: What Makes a Bad Translation? A sound-off between two translation heavyweights Susan Bernofsky and Suzanne Jill Levine. Susan Bernofsky, Translationista + director of literary translation at Columbia University. Translating well is pretty difficult, so it stands to reason that a certain number of the translations you find out in the world are going to stink. And lousy translations can be of as many different types as Tolstoy’s unhappy families—or at least it might seem so at first blush. But when it really comes down to it, most translations that fail to live up to their potential sin in one of two fundamental ways. In the first case, the translator just doesn’t know what he’s doing. This can mean that he fails to master the original language he’s translating from to the point of being able to understand everything the author is up to, whether it’s stylistically, tonally or even on the basic level of plot (of stories, of sentences). Let’s face it: if you don’t know a language well enough to unpack a syntactically knotty sentence or recognize slang expressions and figures of speech, it’s pretty hopeless. If you read in a translation from the English about someone refusing to donate the posterior of a rodent when it’s really just a rat’s ass he’s not giving, well, that’s a nifty example of lost in translation. Or maybe the translator knows the language pretty well, but the writer has set the work in a milieu where the translator doesn’t know his way around enough to decipher the signposts that show whether a bit of dialogue is to be read as sarcastic or heartfelt, aggressive or shy. Or he’s never eaten that particular sort of food and doesn’t know how to find the words for it. Or he’s lazy and hasn’t bothered to study the work he’s translating carefully enough to really see how it ticks. Or or or. That’s the first set of things that can go wrong. These are all eminently fixable. The translator can do research, or ask for help, or get a work ethic, or plot to spend time in a place that will provide him with the cultural literacy he lacks. This mediocre translator might still be on his way to becoming a good one. The second category of ills is more dire. These are problems that arise when the translator just isn’t a good writer in English. And that’s a hard one to remedy. Why should translators be any less prone to Tin Ear than writers of other sorts? We’ve all encountered sentences that sound like something large and heavy being dragged downstairs. Occasionally a writer does this on purpose, for effect, but usually not. And the dirty secret of translation is that the very activity of translating tends to turn elegant writers into awkward ones. It’s because when you’re translating (especially if you’re fairly new to the activity), you’re likely to spend too much time hanging out in the part of your brain that learns foreign languages, makes rational decisions and does math. Look, I’m not a neuroscientist. But remember all those exercises your creative writing teachers used to throw at you? (Here’s six words, make a sestina right now, go!) They were mostly designed to trick you into switching off the rational part of your brain long enough for you to be able to write something. Good writing is most likely to come into being not by force of will but by relaxing into a sort of loose focus that lets the wiser part of your brain (the part where flashes of insight strike) take control. And it’s really hard to make simultaneous use of the writerly and rational parts of your brain, as brilliant translation requires. This is my private explanation for why so many translations fall short of delightfulness. Ideally, a translation of a literary work should be a work of literature in its own right, displaying a sense of style, tone, rhythm, voice and language succulent enough to make you want to read it all over again. And if the translator can’t really write well, that’s not going to happen. Still, there’s a bit of hope left. Like other sorts of writers, translators can get better at what they do by reading a lot of well-written books and thinking and talking about what they read. I’m not convinced that taste and a sense of style can be taught, but I’m pretty sure they can be learned. READ MORE…