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.