A statement on the translation of Chapter 25 of Effingers

I have been forty-four years in London now, and I have read enough English novels — and corrected enough English speech from my own German mouth — to know what not to attempt. I am not the translator who keeps the foreign word for the foreign-word’s sake. I am not the translator who preserves the German syntax in the hope that the English reader will rise to it. The English reader will not rise to it. The English reader will close the book.

So the principle I worked from is Schleiermacher’s domesticating school: bring the author to the reader. I wrote my novel for the German bourgeois reader of my time on her own terms — her Tiergartenstraße, her Frühlingstag, her Schraubenfabrik, her Gardeoffizier — and the English of this chapter should live on the contemporary anglophone reader’s terms in the same way, as if it had been written for her in English from the start. Faithfulness, here, is to meaning, scene, character, voice, and effect — not to surface structure or vocabulary.

What I was trying to achieve, specifically, was the chapter as a re-deployable form. Chapter 25 is the first of four polyphonic Saturday-chapters strung across the novel — 1887, 1913, 1930, 1948. The “Was für ein Frühlingstag, dieser Sonnabend im März des Jahres 1887! Was für eine Süße…” refrain returns in each, lyric in 1887, ironised in 1930, elegiac in 1948. The English I chose for the refrain — “What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness…” — has to work four times, across sixty years of darkening German history. I left the year-naming literal; sweetness is the keyword and not to be paraphrased; the exclamations stay. Sofie’s love-letter then picks the keyword back up: Why did you tell me I am sweet? The chime is the point.

For the per-scene register I worked from four anglophone voices I have spent the longest years with. Wharton-periodic for Eugenie at her writing-desk and the Hiller’s-restaurant scene with Susanna — the Age of Innocence opera-evening is the structural analogue of the Tiergartenstraße morning. Mitford-quick for the dressmaker-confidences and Susanna Widerklee’s dialogue. Powell-deadpan for old Mayer the broken banker and for the streetwalker Wanda’s “Nah, don’t go killing anyone — you’d just get life for it. You mustn’t take it so hard.” Isherwood-clear for the noun-cinema of the Berlin streetscapes — the Friedrichstraße at the Weidendammer Bridge, the wool market in the Klosterstraße. I did not switch them mechanically scene by scene; they blend within the parlando cadence the chapter wants.

The choices I weighed longest. The Berlinerisch — Paul Effinger has Berliner Schnauze in this chapter and so does the cart-driver in the Klosterstraße and so does Wanda — I rendered as plain working-class English with contractions and clipped clauses, no eye-dialect spellings. The instant you try to spell out vakloppt or jut phonetically in English you patronise both the original speaker and the English reader. The class register has to come from cadence and word-choice. “Paul, love, must you really?” — love is the working-class English endearment that does what Paule (the wife’s diminutive of Paul) does in German. The Linden references — die Linden, both the boulevard and its trees — I named Unter den Linden where it is a place-name and kept under the lindens where the German is doing the natural pun on street and tree-cover (Theodor “under the lindens in the rain”). The Recht-wordplay in Waldemar’s interior — Rechten / Unrechten / Recht / Roman law — is untranslatable; I dropped the wordplay and used the right man / the law / Roman law, because the topic-pivot to law is what the reader needs. The Wagner Feuerzauber became the Magic Fire Music (the English Wagnerian usage); the Heine song-line Die Lotosblume ängstigt became The lotus flower trembles… in italics; the Schumann/Chamisso quotation in Sofie’s letter became A Woman’s Love and Life, with the quoted line rendered in English so the reader can feel it is a song. Foreign words stayed foreign where they carry weight — in verba magistri, Monumenta, Adieu, fiacre, coupé, mocha — but were anglicised when the German would only obscure (Privatdozent became the young lecturer, Kasinotoilette became evening gown, Berliner Osten became the East End of Berlin).

Two errors I caught only in later passes are worth naming, because they are precisely the errors the domesticating school is most prone to. The first: Eugenie’s Wenn man selber liebt — when one is the one doing the loving — I rendered initially as when one loves oneself, which in English reads as narcissism. The German construction was the active lover-position, in contrast to being loved; the corrected English (“when one does the loving oneself”) now echoes the same construction earlier in the scene (“We always want to do the loving ourselves”) and the whole speech coheres. The second: Markus telling Miss Kelchner to take dem Mädchen — the girl — into the Tiergarten. I initially added “with the maid” because I read Mädchen as a household servant going along; in fact das Mädchen is Sofie herself, the daughter Markus has just been speaking to. Both errors are the same kind: the translator’s eye drifting from the German under the pressure of making the English read well. The domesticating school’s chief discipline is to keep re-checking against the original even when the English already sings.

What I remain unsure about. The Faust-echo “fife and drum, a martial sound” for Querpfeifer und Trommler, kriegerischer Klang still reads slightly too neat to my ear — but every rougher rendering I tried lost more than it gained. The doubled “my dear, dear child” I left, though it is faintly Victorian; the German is more measured. The Berlinerisch carter’s mutton-leg image (“Ihnen müßte man die Hammelbeine langziehen”) I rendered as “somebody ought to give you a thrashing” — the meaning lands; the comic mutton-leg is gone. And I held the German street-names as they are (Tiergartenstraße, Chausseestraße, Friedrichstraße, Klosterstraße, Charlottenstraße, Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden), only because the streets of Berlin function as place-names in English exactly as they did in German; the contemporary anglophone reader knows Unter den Linden the way she knows the Champs-Élysées. Whether the contemporary reader knows Klosterstraße is the question I cannot finally answer in Putney.

The last thing I will say. Effingers is a novel about how a German-Jewish family lived from 1878 to 1948 — and how the country into which they had assimilated murdered them. The novel narrates this with the calm of someone who knows that the reader’s heart-rate, not the narrator’s adjectives, is the instrument. The English of this chapter must hold the same calm. No raised voice; no telegraphed grief; no extra modifiers. The sweetness of a March Saturday in 1887 is real. The reader will supply the rest.

— Gabriele Tergit Putney, 1982 (in the present of this experiment)