{"id":130121,"date":"2018-10-17T09:02:04","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T13:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130121"},"modified":"2018-10-17T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T17:58:26","slug":"uwe-johnson-not-this-but-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/17\/uwe-johnson-not-this-but-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Uwe Johnson: Not This But That"},"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 third of three essays<\/a> by the translator, Damion Searls, a <\/em>Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the <\/a><\/em>Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

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

In the previous installment, I discussed some tricky words to translate, but the process and art of translation isn\u2019t primarily about words. It\u2019s about doing in your language, as a whole, what the original writer is doing in his or her language as a whole\u2014and sometimes about reconsidering, or reimagining, what that language is.<\/p>\n

For example, in German it\u2019s much more common and normal to say \u201cnot this but that\u201d than it is in English. In English, you\u2019d say \u201cI want a whiskey, not a beer\u201d; in German you\u2019d say the equivalent of \u201cI want not beer but a whiskey.\u201d You\u2019d say, \u201cThe train leaves at not six but five thirty.\u201d<\/p>\n

This feels like a maddening little detour in English, but in German it feels like an earnest commitment to accuracy\u2014you 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: \u201cThe train\u2019s leaving at five thirty! Not six, like you thought, so now we\u2019re running late.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

No one ever taught me this difference, and in my years as a translator from German I\u2019d never noticed the issue as such. In short sentences I would just flip it around, as one often does; in longer sentences with more clauses, the occasional use of \u201cnot this but rather that\u201d in English didn\u2019t stand out. Then came Anniversaries <\/em>by Uwe Johnson, where the construction kept coming up. In my draft translations:<\/p>\n

Lisbeth was almost surprised that the New Star and Garter Hotel existed not only in the Griebens travel guide but also on Richmond Hill itself.<\/p>\n

Francine came in with a gray bitter brew of tea that she\u2019d bought not at the pharmacy but from an old man way up in North Harlem, a wizard with herbs.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the park is not only a stable for police horses but also a police shooting range.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

None of these sentences is an especially hard translation problem in its own right. You can flip the sentence around, or expand the syntax out slightly, or downplay the contrast if there isn\u2019t really a contrast. Respectively:<\/p>\n

The New Star and Garter Hotel really existed on Richmond Hill, not only in the Grieben\u2019s guidebook.<\/p>\n

Francine came in with a gray bitter brew of tea, and not from the pharmacy\u2014she\u2019d bought it from an old man way up in North Harlem.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the park there is a stable for police horses, a shooting range for policemen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But seeing so many of these examples pile up in my early drafts finally made me pay closer attention.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I started realizing that this is part of the general mindset of the German language. In German you say \u201cbut rather\u201d in one elegant little word instead of two, sondern<\/em>, which suggests that this kind of contrast is, so to speak, more elemental in German than it is in English. There are other German words like doch <\/em>(roughly, \u201cyes, really!\u201d over opposition, as well as a particle of insistence) that reinforce this suggestion. Sondern <\/em>is related to a German verb meaning \u201cto separate,\u201d while \u201crather,\u201d from the Old English word hrathe, <\/em>with no other surviving cognates, meant \u201cfaster, more promptly\u201d\u2014the way English tends to want to cut to the chase. The German language embodies a whole different set of assumptions about conflict and agreement, statement and admission, precision and efficiency, dialogue and communication, than English does.<\/p>\n

But Johnson wasn\u2019t just using a German tic, he was doing what any great writer does: push the resources of his or her language to express a personal vision. There is no writer I know of with a more earnest commitment to slowly homing in on the truth than Uwe Johnson\u2014that\u2019s why he so often uses this kind of phrase. He is scanning and piercing, digging and digging, looking and looking, with a kind of insistent, staggeringly articulate, sympathetic but corrosive attention. Saying \u201cnot six but five thirty\u201d is truer to the way his mind works than \u201cfive thirty, not six.\u201d<\/p>\n

So now it\u2019s a problem simply to turn it into ordinary English. The \u201cnot this but that\u201d construction here is not just the German language\u2014it\u2019s part of what the author is trying to convey. The translator has to tease out an author\u2019s particular voice from his language, and then recapture what the author is doing.<\/p>\n

Writing like a translator isn\u2019t that different from writing like anyone else\u2014all writers operate under the influence of others, within certain generic conventions, and with words and a language that were invented before they came along. But reading like a translator is different: it means reading with attention to the medium. How does this specific text take up, and push against, the assumptions inherent in the original language? You don\u2019t have to be translating to read like a translator\u2014a monolingual close reader can also do this\u2014but unless you have another language to compare and contrast against, a language\u2019s built-in assumptions are likely to remain invisible to you.<\/p>\n

As a further twist, Johnson\u2019s biggest influence was William Faulkner, and Faulkner\u2019s later novels, with their long, clawing, grasping, searching sentences, prominently use this same \u201cnot this but that\u201d move of correction and negation. Here are a very few examples from the early pages of The Wild Palms<\/em> (1939):<\/p>\n

He was not eavesdropping, not spying.<\/p>\n

It was a beach cottage, even though of two stories, and lighted by oil lamps, or an oil lamp.<\/p>\n

[She] sat all day long in a new cheap beach chair facing the water \u2026 not reading, not doing anything, just sitting there in that complete immobility which the doctor (or the doctor in the Doctor) did not need corroboration \u2026 to recognize at once\u2014that complete immobile abstraction from which even pain and terror are absent. [A bit farther down he walks past her in the beach chair] with no sign from her, no movement of the head or perhaps even of the eyes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So is Johnson\u2019s usage deliberately drawing on Faulkner? And does that mean the translator should try to make Johnson\u2019s sentences in English sound like Faulkner (not to mention Bellow)? How would a line written in the seventies, in German and consciously after Faulkner, be best expressed in today\u2019s English?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Faulkner found his own searching, circling prose strategies by reading Joseph Conrad. English was Conrad\u2019s third language, so maybe Conrad\u2019s English bears traces of Polish conventions? And so on. No language is truly monolingual. Johnson\u2019s German has some Faulkner in it, English is half-Germanic to begin with, and of course much of what Anniversaries <\/em>describes in German, even the dialogue, supposedly happened in English.<\/p>\n

The most interesting aspect of translating Anniversaries<\/em> for me was just this: how it scrambles the categories of \u201clocal\u201d and \u201cforeign.\u201d I\u2019m a New Yorker; I grew up three blocks away from Gesine and Marie\u2019s apartment, and not too much later than 1967\u201368. That playground they go to was mine, and Johnson gets it right, but also makes it different. I didn\u2019t bring\u00a0Anniversaries <\/em>from German into English, it was here all along, and so was I, but now there\u2019s a new version of New York that English-speaking New Yorkers have access to.<\/p>\n

In fact, that\u2019s the New York experience, and the immigrant\u2019s experience, and the reading experience itself. People tend to think of a translator as a special kind of lonely traveler, a messenger able to move between two isolated villages or islands of different languages that would otherwise have no contact between them. But that\u2019s a misleading image. Sitting in my apartment or on a bench in Riverside Park reading a German novel isn\u2019t a split or dual experience, nor is it a means of bringing something \u201cforeign\u201d into a \u201clocal\u201d environment\u2014it\u2019s just normal life. I\u2019m encountering a shared and shareable New York with my own sets of linguistic tools and mental frameworks. So was Uwe Johnson. So is anyone in any place in any language. So are you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first installment of this series can be read\u00a0here<\/a>. The second is here<\/a>.\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\u00a0<\/em>NPR\u00a0and\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New York Post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The art of translation isn\u2019t primarily about words. It\u2019s about doing in your language, as a whole, what the original writer is doing in his or her language as a whole\u2014and sometimes about reconsidering, or reimagining, what that language is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38753],"tags":[3392,1273,530,38758],"class_list":["post-130121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-uwe-johnson","tag-faulkner","tag-german","tag-translation","tag-uwe-johnson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUwe Johnson: Not This But That by Damion Searls<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The art of translation isn\u2019t primarily about words. 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