Focus on Literature in Germany

Curt Meyer-Clason – one of the most important translators of Latin American and Portuguese literature – passed away on 13 January, 2012. An appreciation.

Curt Meyer-Clason’s goal as a translator has always been to be “the author’s twin brother”. He has sought to act in the name and in the spirit of the author, “to translate the text into a new landscape, as we cross a river”. But actually there have been several rivers that Meyer-Clason and his renderings into German have crossed: the Rio de la Plata as well as the Amazon and the Tejo in Lisbon. Altogether, he has so far translated over 150 books.

With his unique rhythmical, finely tinted, expressive and colloquial language and stylishly composed sentences, the flow of Meyer-Clason’s translations has opened up whole continents for German readers. Such continents as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Miguel Torga, Octavio Paz and Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, Rubén Dario, Miguel Delibes, Pablo Neruda, Juan Carlos Onetti and João Ubaldo Ribeiro.

Reborn in prison

Curt Meyer-Clason was born on September 19, 1910 in Ludwigsburg. In his autobiographical novel Äquator (i.e., Equator, 1986), he describes his parents’ home in retrospect as the conservative, nationalistic household of a German officer. Leaving grammar school early and after commercial training, he went into the cotton import business, working for an American company as a “cotton controller” in Sao Paulo, and “from there travelled around Brazil’s harbours”. Argentina is another destination.

In 1942 Meyer-Clason was arrested in Porto Alegre and sentenced by a military court to twenty years imprisonment as a Nazi spy – whether or not the allegation was true is still unresolved. For five years he was imprisoned on the tropical island of Ilha Grande near Rio de Janeiro, “where time stood still while in the outside world millions of my contemporaries were murdering one another”. Then the sentence was suspended. In retrospect, this time in prison seemed to Meyer-Clason to be a second birth, which brought the thirty-two year-old womaniser to literature. He “learns to read”: not only Latin American literature but also Proust and Rilke, Montaigne and Dostoevsky.

“Open door to Europe”

In 1954 Meyer-Clason returned to Germany, as he later wrote, a new born man – and becomes a constant visitor at the Brazilian consulate in Munich so as to be near the land of his longing at least through reading. In Munich he begins his work as a translator. In 1969 he is given the opportunity of heading the Goethe-Institut in Lisbon. As he records in his Portugiesische Tagebücher (i.e., Portuguese Diaries), published in 1979, the critical thinker not only struggled against the limitations of a sceptical German bureaucracy, but also culturally accompanied until 1976 the changes in the country, from the passing of Salazar’s dictatorship to the coming of democracy.

During the “Carnation Revolution”, Meyer-Clason furnished a forum for dissidents. And he brought to Lisbon authors such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Weiss, Günter Grass and Franz Xaver Kroetz. He sought “border crossing, exchange and dialogue beyond the bounds of political and diplomatic barriers”, and in this he succeeded in the opinion of contemporary witnesses such as António Lobo Antunes. Meyer-Clason made the Goethe-Institut into the “effective and living cultural centre of the city”, into a highly acclaimed “shelter and open door to Europe”.

In his Portugiesische Tagebücher, he tells of the efforts required to achieve this. Some passages could be read “as a picaresque novel”, wrote Walter Jens in his foreword, “in which the hero, witty, cunning, eloquent, ironic and self-confident, and with the appropriate sense of office and command of protocol, lays fine little traps for the big shots with chests of medals”.

Understanding oneself in translation

Back in Munich, Meyer-Clason dedicated himself with equal indefatigability and passion to his work as a freelance translator. Still recognised as outstanding are his translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Brief Life, Borges’s poems and Pablo Neruda’s autobiography I Confess I Have Lived. But perhaps his greatest merit has been to open up for German readers the more unknown regions of Latin American and Portuguese literature.

That Meyer-Clason does not always proceeded as an identical “twin brother of the author”, but has translated quite freely and sometimes probably more floridly than the original, has often been rebuked by critics. This has done nothing to change the great and sometimes euphoric admiration for his work on the part of the translated authors.

For example, the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa is supposed to have assured Meyer-Clason that many passages in his polyphonic novel Grande Sertão: Veredas became clear to him only through the German translation. At any rate, in a poem dedicated to Meyer-Clason on his 90th birthday, As árvores de Heine, the poet Age de Carvalho writes: “Thus he finally understood what he had himself written”.