# Translator's statement on Chapter 25 of Tergit's *Effingers*

The first thing I noticed when I read the chapter was that it didn't only belong to itself. The refrain that opens it — *What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!* — recurs eight times within the chapter and then twice more across the novel: once in Chapter 68, twenty-six years later, on the same date in March 1913, and again in the Epilog, in May 1948, when an old servant is planting maize in the cellar window-boxes of the gutted Tiergartenstraße. Whatever I chose for those two sentences had to read three times across the book. The refrain is the spine; everything else hung from it.

I knew the chapter I was translating would never be read alongside the other two, but the wording had to be portable. So I made the refrain slightly incantatory — the bare noun-exclamation *What sweetness*, which is as unusual in German as it is in English — and accepted a touch of foreign-feeling diction at this hinge of the prose. *How sweet it was* would have smoothed the strangeness out. The strangeness is the point.

My second principle was register. Chapter 25 cuts across seven worlds in a single day — Eugenie's bedroom on the Tiergartenstraße, Sofie's flushed teenage writing-desk, the University window where an old historian prophesies that the Empire will turn libraries into barracks, Hiller's restaurant, the Chausseestraße at knocking-off time, the Wollmarkt with a cabman shouting at a woman, the back room of a brothel near the Opera at one in the morning. Each scene speaks its own register. I tried to find an English voice for each — Eugenie warm and confiding, Käte working-class confessional, the historian academically precise, the cabman vulgar, Wanda flat and dismissive — without resorting to phonetic eye-dialect. That route would have located the working-class voices in Cockney or Brooklyn, which would have been wrong. The point of *Sie doofe Ziege* or *Nee, nich umbringen, da kriegen Sie dann vielleicht lebenslänglich* is class, not geography.

I kept German titles (*Fräulein, Frau, Herr, Privatdozent*) and place names. They are recognizable to English readers and serve as period markers; anglicizing them would have flattened the Berlin out of the prose. I let the diction lift slightly into 19th-century registers — *shan't, gentleman friend, dressing-gown, perambulator* — where it felt earned. I tried not to use them as decoration.

The choices I worked hardest on were the ones where Tergit makes a meaningful distinction that English doesn't carry naturally. Eugenie's whole speech to Käte hinges on the contrast between *selber lieben* (to love oneself, to do the loving) and *geliebt werden* (to be loved). My first draft collapsed it to *love* and *be loved*; pass 2 restored the contrast as *do the loving* / *be loved*. Susanna's quiet correction of Waldemar — he says *Mätresse* (the transactional kept woman), she replies *Geliebte* (a beloved, a lover) — was lost in passes 1 through 3 and recovered in pass 4 as *mistress* / *lover*. Karl's overheard endearment *Annettchen* had to be a diminutive in both Käte's quoting and Eugenie's recognition so that the click of recognition could land; I settled on *Annette dear*. The Schumann fragment Sofie misquotes in her letter, I deliberately left unmetered — Sofie is half-paraphrasing from memory in a flushed teenage state, and polished verse would have suggested more composure than she has. The reflexive paradox *Schäm dich, daß du dich schämst* I rendered *Be ashamed of being ashamed*, which keeps the loop intact.

What I remain unsure about. *Privatdozent* is a German university rank with no English equivalent — I kept it German because *junior lecturer* loses the meaning that Waldemar's professorship is being conditioned on his baptism. But it is one foreign word per page that some readers will stumble on. *Casino gown* for *Kasinotoilette* (the gown for an officers'-mess ball) might be parsed first as the gambling kind, though the surrounding context — Eugenie packing for the Riviera, the gown being fitted — should rescue it. The historian's long sentence at the University window I kept inverted, with the subject delayed to the end of the period; this is striking in German and may read heavy in English. The cabman's *give you what-for* for *Hammelbeine langziehen* is the right idiom for the threat-of-thrashing it carries, but a British reader will hear it differently than an American one.

I made one full draft and four revising passes — thirty-one changes in all from the first draft. Most of those changes were not stylistic but specifically about meaning: places where I had drifted from the German into a polished English that smoothed away a Tergit distinction. The work of revision was largely the work of un-smoothing — putting back the contrast between doing and being loved, putting back the difference between mistress and lover, restoring an interpretive *great* that I had quietly added, restoring an *elegant* I had varied into *dainty*. Tergit's German is more pointed than my first instincts in English wanted to admit.