# A note on the translation

*Gabriele Tergit, on Chapter 25 of* Effingers, *"Frühling" / "Spring"*

What I had to render here was not, strictly, a chapter, but one hour-by-hour
spring Saturday of the founding years of the Reich — Eugenie and her dressmaker
at ten, Sofie's love-letter at eleven, Waldemar and the old historian's dated
prophecy at one, the workers' Feierabend and ruined Mayer at five, the swarming
Chausseestraße at six, Theodor's first sight of Wanda at eight, the empty street
at three in the morning. The cycle is held by a refrain that tolls the hour —
*Was für ein Frühlingstag … was für eine Süße* — and broken at two precisely
chosen places where the sweetness goes out of the day.

The governing principle is the principle of the whole book: **it is not written
from the end.** Nobody in March 1887 knows what 1887 leads to, and the
translator must not know either. The sweetness is rendered *straight* — the
blossom, the courtships, the workers in their shirtsleeves — and the dread is
left wholly to the reader, who knows what these people cannot. To let one
elegiac adjective leak backward from the catastrophe into the spring would
betray the chapter. The old historian's prophecy on the sixteenth of March is
the only thunder, and even that is spoken by a living man, not by me looking
back.

The English I was after is the English of her German: Neue Sachlichkeit, terse,
dialogue carrying the meaning, documentary objects and prices kept exact, the
narrator's verdict withheld so that the people damn or save themselves with the
one sentence they speak. **Speed mattered most.** She runs; the English must
run. I kept the refrain as a fixed lyric phrase, varying only the hour, and
preserved its two breaks — at six o'clock "swarming" displaces "sweetness," at
eight the second clause drops away altogether and the music goes out as the day
tips toward night.

Register I carried by **diction, not by mapped dialect.** To turn Berlinisch
into Cockney or the carter's abuse into stage-Yorkshire would be the
translator's vanity and would falsify the world. So Eugenie is the grande dame;
Käte the Berlin dressmaker (she "goggles"; a man "twists his hat into a
sausage"); the Chausseestraße quarrel is in plain low idiom; Mayer the ruined
banker-aesthete in long fastidious sentences; Wanda short and hard.

**Leitwords** I pinned down so they will hold across the whole book: *überspannt*
as "overwrought"; *Er hatte nicht den Mut zu seiner Liebe* as "He had not the
courage for his love"; Mayer's *Anständigkeit* as honour; Waldemar's *Prämie auf
Charakterlosigkeit* as "A premium on want of character"; the whole
loving-vs.-being-loved thesis rendered intact. The pun on *der Rechte / das Recht*
(right man / the law) I let soften — I kept "law" throughout for the jurist's
spine, because conceptual integrity matters more here than wordplay. German
honorifics — Herr, Fräulein, *gnädige Frau* — I kept with the names; they are
part of the air. Street-names left German, so the reader stands in Berlin.
Cultural quotations (Schumann/Chamisso, Heine's lotus flower, Wagner's "Magic
Fire Music," the fifers and drummers) kept recognizable, not footnoted: the
reader who knows hears it, the reader who doesn't loses nothing of the scene.

**What I remain unsure about.** Four things.
"**Swarming**" for *Gewimmel* at six o'clock — I kept it for the *motion* in
the German verb, but the verbal noun is grammatically marked; "throng" was the
safer choice and I declined it, and on a given day I am still not certain.
"**Casino gown**" for *Kasinotoilette* — the Riviera context two sentences
earlier could make an English reader misread it as a gown for the Monte-Carlo
casino. I kept the period specificity at the cost of that ambiguity; reasonable
judges might call it the other way. The **Annettchen echo** — I rendered both
occurrences as "dear little Annette" so the pet name repeats as it does in
German, but the warmth of the diminutive is real and English has no clean
equivalent. The **Berlin street-quarrel** — idioms like *Hammelbeine langziehen*
I rendered close to the literal ("give your mutton-legs a good haul") because
the animal-violence is the point, but English ears may catch stage-cockney
where I meant living low-Berlin, and that risk I cannot fully measure from
inside the language I lived in.

There is one truth I am not allowed to forget. **The book is partly mine** —
the watchmaker is my grandfather, the cable-maker is my father and his kind,
Lotte is something of me. To translate it now is to translate from myself, the
woman who lived this and is here, having lost the readership it was written
for. I have tried to put that fact *under* the work, not on top of it: the
translation does not mourn; it lets the spring be spring. The mourning is yours
to do.