Literature

In terms of its literature, Germany is a country of immigration: around three quarters of all books on the country’s bestseller lists are the work of non-German authors. Many readers do not realize that they owe much of their reading pleasure to translators – the often happy, sometimes highly committed and almost always badly paid cultural bridge builders.

Anyone who translates and communicates necessarily crosses cultural and indeed political boundaries. It was only logical, therefore, that the translator Karl Dedecius won the German National Prize in June 2010, the year of the 20th anniversary of German reunification. One of the previous winners of this prize was the Czech president Václav Havel.

Dedecius, who is 89, was honoured as a “German-Polish bridge builder”. And it is quite true that German readers would not be nearly so au fait with Polish culture if it had not been for the founder of the German-Polish Institute, his 50-volume Polish Library and his translations of Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz.

“Advise, convert and inform”

When Martin Pollack sketched out the ideal image of his profession at the awarding of the Robert Bosch Foundation’s Karl Dedecius Prize in 2007, he no doubt had the achievements of the prize’s famous eponym in mind. Translators, Pollack demanded, should do more in German publishing houses to advertise unknown authors who write in languages other than German: they should “advise, convert and inform” and help “build a sturdy bridge between the cultures”. For Pollack, part and parcel of this also involves declining certain jobs – as was the case with a revealing biography of the writer Ryszard Kapuściński in 2010.

As a translator of Polish into German, Pollack is only too aware how much idealism he is demanding from his colleagues with his appeal. After all, particularly literature from the so-called minor (or more minor) languages has virtually no lobby at all in the major German publishing houses, most of which are interested only in quick bestseller successes. Admittedly, according to the UNESCO’s Index Translationum, Germany is one of the world’s leading nations in terms of translations, yet last year nearly 87 percent of the 4,200 or so works of fiction in question were translated from English, followed by French, Italian and Spanish. Lithuanian, Slovakian and Ukrainian, and indeed Polish, trailed far behind.

Infinite jest?

Translators of “world languages” also suffer from the economic pressure to succeed, however, which requires them, among other things, to complete their translations more or less at the same time as the original appears. To take full advantage of the global hype surrounding the American author Jonathan Franzen, the Rowohlt publishing house even went as far as engaging an entire team of translators for his 2010 novel Freedom. Reading the outcome, which she complained was inconsistent, put the literary critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in a “bad mood”.

The fact that publishing houses pay little despite the high quality they expect is something that irks literary translators. As freelancers, they often earn no more than 1,000 euros per month, according to their own calculations which have been disclosed during the course of the “new translator dispute” (2007) with publishers. Accordingly, Ulrich Blumenbach earned some three euros gross per hour for his highly praised translation of the American cult novel Infinite Jest (2010) by David Foster Wallace, on which he worked for six years. To survive, he translated a bank’s stock exchange news into German.

“Anyone who takes up translating on a professional basis”, sums up Jürgen Jacob Becker, programme director of the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB), which is famous for its translation workshops, must “accept a life in the lower echelons of the literary world”.

Poor but happy

To address this deplorable state of affairs, the Association of German Literature Translators (VdÜ) proposed, among other things, the introduction of a “translator euro” for every book sold by a non-German author – so far in vain. Leading representatives of their profession are thus currently helped through lean periods by literary prizes and, above all, by grants such as those provided by the German Translators’ Fund.

Nonetheless, most translators of literature in Germany can be viewed as happy people who are passionate about and satisfied by their work. In the award-winning film The Woman with the 5 Elephants (2010), which is devoted to Swetlana Geier as the translator of Dostoyevsky’s great novels, she describes her work as “a form of breathing”. And Christian Hansen, whose translation of 2666 (2009) contributed significantly to the sensational success of Roberto Bolaño’s novel in the German-speaking world, does not like to spend a single day without his beloved work: “For me, it is simply an inner need”.

“An increasingly important role”

In Germany, public appreciation of translation is growing, slowly but surely. “Since 1986, when my first translation appeared, quite a bit has changed”, remembers Hungarian-born Zsuzsanna Gahse, who received the 2010 Johann Heinrich Voss Prize for Translation, awarded by the German Academy for Language and Literature and worth 15,000 euros. “In the past, the translator’s name only appeared in small print in the credits. Nowadays translation plays an increasingly important role”.

These days, the translator’s biography is frequently published in the blurb to help sell the book. Another feature designed to catch the eye of the reader is the naming of numerous, in some cases recent, accolades: for instance the International Literary Prize of the House of World Cultures, awarded for the second time in 2010, the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair or the Translation Prize of the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia, endowed with 25,000 euros, which went to Sabine Baumann in 2010 – among other things for her new translation of Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin.

Teutsch becomes Deutsch

In the feature sections of German-language newspapers in recent years, new translations in particular – such as translations of Dostoyevsky (Swetlana Geier), Melville (Friedhelm Rathjen) and One Thousand and One Nights (Claudia Ott) – have met in some cases with a highly enthusiastic response, as has Reinhard Kaiser’s 2009 translation into modern German of the baroque novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (i.e. Simplicius Simplicissimus). The findings of a symposium for critics, translators and editors which was held in mid 2010 in Munich’s Literaturhaus and complained that there was a complete lack of tribute paid to translations in book discussions, are therefore only partly valid.

The fact that a non-translation prize such as the German National Prize went to Karl Dedecius in 2010 is a further symptom of this growing acknowledgement of translation in society. “Literature is a window through which a people can look another people in the eyes”, Dedecius once stated. For this reason too, German translators will also become increasingly important in the future.