{"id":130092,"date":"2018-10-16T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T13:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130092"},"modified":"2018-10-16T10:46:48","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T14:46:48","slug":"on-uwe-johnson-the-hardest-book-ive-ever-translated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/16\/on-uwe-johnson-the-hardest-book-ive-ever-translated\/","title":{"rendered":"On Uwe Johnson: The Hardest Book I\u2019ve Ever Translated"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week marks the publication in English of Uwe Johnson\u2019s <\/em>Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. This is the second of three essays<\/a> by the translator, Damion Searls, a <\/em>Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the <\/u><\/a><\/em>Daily<\/u><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Original illustration by Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

There are 367 chapters of Anniversaries<\/em>. 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\u2019s ability to set up a different way of bouncing between them in every chapter.<\/p>\n

A chapter might open with a Times<\/em> report on the traffic, shift to the weather in Riverside Park outside the Cresspahls\u2019 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\u2019s guilt when they first meet, covers their shifting relationship over the years, and ends with Marie in the present running errands for her friend\u2019s Orthodox family on the Sabbath, because this is a Saturday chapter. Four or five short pages, another jigsaw piece of the Cresspahls\u2019 life and its anniversaries, and then on to the next chapter, which opens in 1931. I find that when I\u2019m reading about Germany, I\u2019m eager to get back to the New York story; when I\u2019m reading about New York I want to find out what\u2019s happening with Gesine\u2019s family in Germany, on and on and on. Every few hundred pages, the Holocaust survivor and her daughter show up in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

All this, while dense and rich, is easy to read but not easy to translate. My joke to friends during the years I was working on Anniversaries<\/em> was that on the one hand it\u2019s almost two thousand pages long, but on the other hand, it\u2019s the slowest and hardest book I\u2019ve ever translated. The challenges are to keep it moving\u2014keep it light, so that it doesn\u2019t bog down\u2014while honoring and reproducing Johnson\u2019s nearly maniacal commitment to seeing everything, understanding everything (from his character Gesine\u2019s perspective), getting everything right.<\/p>\n

Early in the novel, Gesine and Marie go to a Czech restaurant on the East Side:<\/p>\n

The restaurant is tucked away in the East Seventies, in the middle of a Hungarian and German neighborhood. The way there runs from the Lexington Avenue subway, across Third and Second Avenues, past dilapidated buildings, over badly cracked sidewalks, by shop owners standing guard over their wares, under the watchful eyes of neighbors chatting on the stoops, between garbage and scar-encrusted cats, next to dismantled cars and the abandoned wastelands of schoolyards, to a little apartment building whose ground floor shows no sign of a restaurant. The blue door with its thinly outlined white and red rectangles denotes the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the customers inside, at tables far apart from one another, speak Czech: familiarly, unobtrusively, as though the age of the bourgeoisie in Prague\u2019s Lesser Side, the Mal\u00e1 Strana, lived on. The regulars are elderly, formally dressed, dignified, couples silenced by long marriage as well as the solitary gentleman moving his lips above his raised glass as though speaking with the dead, the only ones who still recognize his doughy, old man\u2019s face. Younger and more casually dressed are the \u010cSSR\u2019s representatives to the UN, the administrators as well as the new power\u2019s spies, who here, unashamed by the presence of newly disempowered compatriots or refugees, eat away at the same homesickness for Bohemian, Czech, European cooking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a whole short story in a set-up paragraph, complete with a quiet little piece of virtuosity in the camera-eye second sentence that contains nine consecutive prepositional phrases, all using different prepositions (have to keep that, even though the nine different prepositions in German don\u2019t map directly onto nine different prepositions in English). It\u2019s not quick reading, but it\u2019s not hard, it\u2019s immersive and it has to keep moving. Not for nothing is swimming one of the main motifs of the novel.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a library\u2019s worth of historical references in the book\u2014luckily for this translator, German scholars have tracked down most of them\u2014but the real hurdle is this detailed texture. An elevator operator turns around, away from Gesine, to face the \u2026 not the metal outer doors but the wooden gate that accordions into rhombuses, which you shut from inside the elevator. What is that called? (Since you don\u2019t know what it\u2019s called, how do you look it up? Google image search \u201cparts of elevators\u201d? And when that doesn\u2019t work?) The translation could just say he turned to face the front, or the door, but that would lose a little piece of intensity.<\/p>\n

Or when Marie says, on their weekly Staten Island Ferry outing, \u201c\u2009\u2018I bet it\u2019s going to slam. Wanna bet?\u2019 Because some captains steer into the [Becken<\/em>] too late, so that the heavy ship bangs into the [h\u00f6lzerne Pfahlwand der Einfahrt<\/em>], hard the first time, then with a more muffled sound.\u201d The second term is the \u201cwall of wooden pilings as the ship pulls in,\u201d which is wordy but not too overpowering. But what is the perfect, simple little word for where the boat is going? It\u2019s not a pier, or dock, or inlet, or mooring, or berth. After an hour or so, I gave up on the Internet and saved the question for a trip of my own on the Staten Island Ferry, but it\u2019s hard for people who aren\u2019t writers or translators to answer questions about words as words. I asked various staff what it was called, and was told it was the terminal. It\u2019s where you pull in. \u201cThanks,\u201d I might persist, \u201cbut, what do you call the actual place, the area of water there?\u201d \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s called where you pull in!\u201d<\/p>\n

I eventually found out it\u2019s called a ferry slip<\/em>\u2014monosyllabic, easy to understand, doesn\u2019t slow the sentence or the reader down, nice New York texture too (Coenties Slip). Since then, I\u2019ve run across the word twice, in novels by Saul Bellow. Maybe this is the writer in English who has a prose energy comparable to Johnson\u2019s, all cylinders always firing on every level. One word down, 599,999 to go.<\/p>\n

The insurmountable challenge was capturing Johnson\u2019s games with English. Those New York Times <\/em>excerpts are given in Johnson\u2019s sometimes playfully translated, sometimes ironic German\u2014filtered, in other words, through the sharp and ironic reading of his character, Gesine, who is narrating the news to us. For those passages I had to start from the original, decide where I thought the German was intentionally deforming it as opposed to just translating it, and deform the English likewise. Then, too, I had to decide, often under cross fire from the copy editors, what to update from the fifty-year-old originals. Newspapers use numerals, book editors want them spelled out. The Times <\/em>spelled Vietnamese place names differently (Can Tho vs. Cantho, etc.); referred to \u201cNegroes,\u201d of course, but also to \u201cracial disorders,\u201d which sounds like a disease instead of unrest; hyphenated new words like teen-ager<\/em>; put clauses in now-clunky places. To what extent does fifty-year-old English need \u201ctranslation\u201d?<\/p>\n

And sometimes, Gesine or Johnson is joking with the language itself. There are the \u201cmobile kiosks\u201d in Central Park selling heisse Hunde<\/em>, which in German doesn\u2019t mean the iconic thin sausages, it means actual dogs that are literally hot. That\u2019s a gag that can work in every language except English (at least where readers can be presumed to know what a hot dog is). All a translator into English can do is try to get the same kind of humor another way, for instance by naming the hot-dog stands with Euro lingo no native would ever use here.<\/p>\n

PS. It\u2019s a \u201cscissor gate,\u201d because the wooden slats open and close like scissors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first installment of this series can be read here<\/a>. The third will be published on Wednesday, October 17.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Damion Searls is a translator and the author of a book of short stories,\u00a0<\/em>What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going,\u00a0as well as of\u00a0<\/em>The Inkblots,\u00a0a history of the Rorschach test and the first biography of its artist\/psychiatrist creator, chosen as a Best Book of the Year by both <\/em>NPR and\u00a0the<\/em> New York Post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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