Chapter 25 of Effingers — translator’s statement

The chapter is a single Berlin Saturday — 16 March 1887 — traced hour by hour from ten in the morning to three the next morning, threaded through with a lyric refrain (“Was für ein Frühlingstag, dieser Sonnabend im März des Jahres 1887! Was für eine Süße, [hour]!”) that opens each new vignette. Reading the rest of the novel before I began, I found that this refrain is not a decoration: the same sentence returns in later chapters and, in altered form, closes the entire book over the ruins of Berlin in May 1948. Whatever I did at the level of single phrases, the refrain had to become a fixed English formula — recitable, repeatable, built to bear verbatim recurrence later over rubble. That single decision shaped almost everything else: the English needed enough lyric grandeur to read as a small anthem, and enough plainness to keep its dignity when the ironies caught up with it. I also preserved Tergit’s deliberate small variants (the 6 p.m. “Welch ein Gewimmel auf der Chausseestraße!”, the 8 p.m. clause-drop, the missing comma at 3 a.m.) rather than smoothing them; they are the form clearing its throat.

Inside that frame, the chapter holds an unusually wide range of voices in one day — Eugenie’s warm cultivation; Käte the seamstress’s soft colloquial; Sofie’s adolescent quoting of Schumann; the federalist historian’s high intellectual diction with Latin tags and a precise reference to § 1378 of the BGB draft; Waldemar’s anti-clerical contempt and erotic frankness; Mayer the ruined banker’s elegiac broken-gentility; his daughter Amalie’s bitter, factual plainness; the Berlinerisch of the working-class couple on the Chausseestraße and the carter at the wool market; the streetwise deadpan of the child-prostitute Wanda. I tried to keep these eight or nine registers genuinely distinct in the English without letting any of them tip into caricature. The hardest call was the dialect. Tergit’s Berlinerisch is phonetically marked (“muß denn det sin?”, “ick”, “lassense”), and the temptation was to mirror that with English eye-dialect — “goin’,” “lemme go.” I deliberately didn’t. Heavy eye-dialect in English imports a specific locale, almost always Cockney, and reads to me as either condescension or cartoon. Instead I marked class through syntax (double negatives, “seeing as,” “let go of me”) and lexis (“bed-lodger,” “leave off,” “daft goat”) and let the contrast with the bourgeois lines do the work. I’m conscious I gave up some of the rough music the Berlin originals have. I think it was the right loss.

Some specific choices I weighed and want to name. Annettchen I left in German italics: Käte overhears Karl call his beautiful new wife by this pet name, and the diminutive is the dramatic-irony clue identifying him; “Annette dear” would have made Eugenie’s quiet echo (“He said Annettchen? Well, well”) clumsy. Feuerzauber I first calqued as “the Fire Magic,” then corrected on a later pass to “the Magic Fire Music” — the established English name for that Wagner excerpt and the proper term-for-term equivalent. The historian’s in verba magistri, Waldemar’s Privatdozent, the Monumenta, and § 1378 I left in their cultural languages, because the diction itself is part of who those characters are. The carter’s “Hammelbeine langziehen” I kept as “stretch your mutton-legs for you” rather than a neutral threat, because the mutton image chimes with the Fresh Mutton pub a few lines earlier and the wool-and-mutton market a few lines later, and the chime is part of the comedy. “Schäm dich, daß du dich schämst!” I kept crisp: “Be ashamed that you are ashamed!” The last thing I changed was a quiet error I had carried for three passes: die ganze Natur lacht uns entgegen I had rendered “all of nature is laughing back at us,” which reads in English as if nature were laughing at the lovers; entgegenlachen is the welcoming laugh that goes toward someone. “All of nature laughs to greet us” was the late fix.

A few things I remain unsure about. “Overstrung” for Paul’s dismissive überspannt is the closest cognate and keeps the über- prefix, but English readers may hear pianos before they hear temperament; another translator could reasonably pick “highly strung” or “fanciful.” The 1 p.m. refrain (“at one o’clock at midday”) trades a slight “at … at” doubling for the lyric zenith I felt the chapter wants from its noon hour; “in the afternoon” would be smoother, and on a fourth reading I still think the trade is right, but only just. I anchored “Unter den Linden” once and then kept Tergit’s shorthand “the Linden” — gambling that the boulevard registers and that the lime-trees haunt the word as well. And I rendered Waldemar’s vergessen of Napoleon’s Second of December as “forgive” rather than “forget,” because the German construction “jdm. etw. nie vergessen” is the idiom for “never forgive”; a literalist would dispute it.

Throughout, I tried to keep two things in balance: the radiant, almost too-bright surface of a particular spring afternoon, and the irony — already visible to the reader who has finished the book — that this is the height from which the family will fall. The English should sound beautiful and very slightly unstable. Whether I got there is for someone else to say.