A note on the translation

I translated chapter 25 of my own novel Effingers into English over a Saturday afternoon and evening, in five passes. This is the chapter that establishes the polyphonic Saturday form to which the novel returns three more times across seventy years — chapter 68 (1913), chapter 131 (1930), the Epilog (1948). The refrain Was für ein Frühlingstag, dieser Sonnabend im März des Jahres 1887! Was für eine Süße… opens and closes the chapter, returns between each of its five vignettes, and stands as the formal signature of the whole book. My English had to bear being deployed four times, so it could not be too rhetorical, nor too plain. What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness… — what I gave it. Re-deployable in 1913, 1930, 1948 without strain.

The principles I held. Lightness is the law: the novel narrates antisemitism, grief, and ruin in the same calm voice it uses for a dinner-table; the English must not raise its voice either. No extra modifiers, no telegraphed feeling, no italicised emphasis. The reader’s heart-rate is the novel’s instrument, not the narrator’s adjectives. The keyword is Süße — sweetness, throughout, no paraphrase to tenderness or softness or loveliness. Three registers — salon-Hochdeutsch into Wharton’s late periodic English, Berlinerisch into plain working-class English with no eye-dialect, the slightly-formal gnädige Frau into ma’am and Madam — distinguished by cadence and diction, never by spelling tricks. German where it carries weight (the street-names; Privatdozent, Stadtrat, Kaiserreich, Junker, Fräulein; the song-cycle title Frauenliebe und -leben; the Latin in verba magistri; the affectionate diminutives Paule and Annettchen), English where it can land cleanly. And the free indirect — the narrator gliding in and out of characters’ interior without typographic marker — I matched in English, removing the italics I had used for interior thought in my first pass.

Choices I weighed. Sofie’s love-letter quotes Chamisso’s Seit ich Dich gesehen, sung in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. I rendered the line into English so the reader would receive its emotional charge — Since first I saw Thee, I think I have gone blind, always as in dream I see Thee alone — but kept the song-cycle title in German italics. Capitalised Thee (song-poetry register) set against capitalised You (love-letter prose). For the Chausseestraße working-class scene — the chapter’s hardest — I refused eye-dialect. Paule, muß denn det sin? became Paule, must you? — keeping the diminutive Paule for the wife’s affection, letting the elliptical English carry the register. The carter shouts You stupid cow, somebody ought to give you a hiding, so you’d see there’s a horse standing here — plain, sharp, no apostrophes. Eugenie’s lesson to Käte Winkel turns on the contrast between wer selber liebt and wer geliebt wird — between the one who loves and the one who is loved; I had it as loves oneself in my first pass (narcissism, not what the German says) and corrected it in the second to the one who loves. The Wache-changing under the Kaiser’s window, with its two-verb paratactic German stand … sah … sah …, I restored with an em-dash and a single explicit he, to preserve the cumulative rush my first version had softened to a participle. The closing refrain Was für eine Süße morgens um drei Uhr! — the only instance in which the German drops the comma between Süße and the time-marker — I preserved as What sweetness at three in the morning!, slightly more breathless than its predecessors, as the long day at last closes into the small hours of Sunday.

What I remain unsure of. The Kasinotoilette I rendered as ball-gown — slightly off in category (Eugenie’s dress is for the casino, not the ball-room), but the alternatives risked obscurity for a contemporary English reader; I chose clarity over period-precision and am not entirely satisfied. The bare free-indirect Idiot! she thought of Wanda’s closing line — unmarked by italics or quotation marks — may feel under-flagged to an English reader untrained in the continental convention; I trusted the reader. And Eugenie’s long Russian-flashback monologue holds together in German as one breath, one paragraph; an English editor might well want it broken up; I kept it whole, betting on the reader’s capacity for the long-breathed period sentence.

The English I have written is my English — the English of a Berlin court-reporter who has lived in London since 1938 and who hears Wharton, Isherwood, Mitford, and Powell at the back of her head when she writes. It is not quite the English I would speak; it is the English the chapter asked for.

— Gabriele Tergit
Putney, 1982