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.