© Tony Crawford
Tony Crawford
Tony Crawford was born in Milwaukee. He studied Comparative Literature with French in Los Angeles. His translation work has been recognised by New Books in German’s Emerging Translators' Programme, No Man’s Land magazine, Berlin, and the DAAD/IMLR Encounters competition. Tony Crawford lives in Berlin.
Three questions to Tony Crawford
Why did you choose to become a translator?
As a young man I had a certain talent for language, which I eventually discovered is a talent for multiple languages. Now my work involves reading books, connecting ideas and playing with words, so I do for a living what I have always enjoyed most.
Which German book do you like the best and why?
I like autobiographical narrative – the teller’s interest in the tale is existential. And that gives the narrative, regardless of style, a sense of immediacy, makes it human, compassionate, direct. Also, life is perhaps the best inventor of plot. For exampla I like Christa Wolf’s reflective season on the Pacific coast in Los Angeles and Oskar Maria Graf’s profligate dilettantism in the Bavarian entre-guerre.
Is there a particular book you would like to translate?
I am sure there is. Its diction and its style are poetic; it is European in scope; it is personal, urgent and political; it may be contemporary or historic, but in either case it looks towards the past and the future, inward and outward, with a unifying spirit. Until I find it, I am pecking away at a translation of Franz Jung’s memoir, Der Weg nach unten. Jung was a duellist, a deserter, a pianist, a pirate, a Dadaist, a journalist, a revolutionary, a management consultant, a theatre producer, a secret agent, a swindler, a desperate man, batted back and forth between revolutionary hope and an innate self-fulfilling pessimism