October 17, 2018 On Uwe Johnson Uwe Johnson: Not This But That By Damion Searls This week marks the publication in English of Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. This is the third of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen In the previous installment, I discussed some tricky words to translate, but the process and art of translation isn’t primarily about words. It’s about doing in your language, as a whole, what the original writer is doing in his or her language as a whole—and sometimes about reconsidering, or reimagining, what that language is. For example, in German it’s much more common and normal to say “not this but that” than it is in English. In English, you’d say “I want a whiskey, not a beer”; in German you’d say the equivalent of “I want not beer but a whiskey.” You’d say, “The train leaves at not six but five thirty.” This feels like a maddening little detour in English, but in German it feels like an earnest commitment to accuracy—you sort of slowly home in on the true situation because you care enough to keep pursuing it. In English, though, we tend to cut to the chase and say how things are, then give further details if necessary: “The train’s leaving at five thirty! Not six, like you thought, so now we’re running late.” Read More
October 16, 2018 On Uwe Johnson On Uwe Johnson: The Hardest Book I’ve Ever Translated By Damion Searls This week marks the publication in English of Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. This is the second of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen There are 367 chapters of Anniversaries. It spans a year, from 1967 to 1968, with two August 20s, and 1968 had a leap day. This adds up to a long book, almost seventeen hundred pages in the new translation. It is nothing short of incredible how much of a page-turner the book manages to be, because of the three different levels (German past, New York present, current-events news) and Johnson’s ability to set up a different way of bouncing between them in every chapter. A chapter might open with a Times report on the traffic, shift to the weather in Riverside Park outside the Cresspahls’ window, then move to the playground in the park where Gesine, a recently arrived German immigrant, and her daughter, Marie, made their first friends in America. Since this is the Upper West Side in the sixties, these are, naturally, a Holocaust survivor and her daughter. The chapter shows us Gesine’s guilt when they first meet, covers their shifting relationship over the years, and ends with Marie in the present running errands for her friend’s Orthodox family on the Sabbath, because this is a Saturday chapter. Four or five short pages, another jigsaw piece of the Cresspahls’ life and its anniversaries, and then on to the next chapter, which opens in 1931. I find that when I’m reading about Germany, I’m eager to get back to the New York story; when I’m reading about New York I want to find out what’s happening with Gesine’s family in Germany, on and on and on. Every few hundred pages, the Holocaust survivor and her daughter show up in the neighborhood. Read More
October 15, 2018 On Uwe Johnson On Uwe Johnson: Poet of Both Germanys By Damion Searls This week marks the publication in English of one of the great novels of New York City, and of the twentieth century: Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, by the German writer Uwe Johnson. This is the first of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily, on the book, its author, and what it means to translate a foreign book about your hometown. In 1961, the heads of six leading publishers—French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and American—created the International Publishers’ Prize, “meant to single out writers who were actively transforming the world literary landscape, and to rival the Nobel Prize in prestige,” in the words of J. M. Coetzee. That inaugural year, the prize was shared by two writers everyone has heard of: Jorge Luis Borges, whose international career it launched, and Samuel Beckett. In its second year it went to a twenty-seven-year-old German named Uwe Johnson. Speculations About Jakob had been published when Johnson was twenty-five, in 1959—the same year as the other canonical postwar pre-sixties German novel, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. It wasn’t Johnson’s first novel: he had started another in his teens, and in 1956 sent it to the legendary Peter Suhrkamp, publisher of Brecht and Hesse and so many others. The reader’s report read, in part: “Well, Theodor Fontane [the German realist master, comparable to Flaubert] is alive, he’s 23 years old, and he lives on the other side!” The East. Suhrkamp met with Johnson, encouraged him, but turned down his first effort as being too regional, too firmly locked in to the experience of Mecklenburg, northeast Germany: there was too much Plattdeutsch dialect, too much local color. Limited scope was not a problem Johnson would ever have again. Read More