Coaxing German Literature into English with Susan Bernofsky

A few months ago, New Directions published a new translation of the early 20th-century German writer Robert Walser’s The Tanners by Susan Bernofsky; a mutual friend, knowing of my interest in showcasing literature in translation, suggested we should be in touch. I’m looking forward to reading The Tanners, and then late next spring New Directions will also be publishing Bernofsky’s translation of the story collection Microscripts; New York Review of Books Classics has also commissioned her to translate a separate batch of Walser stories. And Walser isn’t the only German-language author Bernofsky has translated into English. In this essay, she describes how “something that happened on the side” while she was working on her own writing has come to take a central role in her professional career.

Becoming a translator is the sort of thing that can happen to a writer who falls desperately in love with a foreign language and all the new possibilities it offers for saying things in different ways. There are so many gaps between languages, so many things that can be so deftly expressed in one language while they are almost impossible to explain in another, and the more conscious you become of these discrepancies, the more temping it becomes to start triangulating back into English, looking for ways to coax your own language into saying all these new things.

My first experiments with translation began when I was just starting out as a writer. I tried my hand at translating not because I had a grand plan for revolutionizing the English language, but because I was fascinated by what the foreign writers I was reading in German were doing in their texts as they played with the possibilities their language gave them. It’s possible to construct sentences in German that keep the reader waiting for the verb until the very end. What about in English? It’s possible in German to insert entire squadrons of complex adjectival phrases between the article “the” and the noun it belongs to. What can we do to make up for English’s inability to do so? I found that I enjoyed gnawing on problems like this the way some people enjoy crossword puzzles.

I never set out to become a professional translator. Translating was just something that happened on the side while I was preparing myself to be a writer, scholar and teacher, for the simple reason that I never stopped working at it. It was fun. People said they liked the stories I translated for them, so I felt encouraged to do more. It was a good way to act on the impulse I often had to show other people things I liked. For example, I became Yoko Tawada‘s translator just because I happened to stumble on a tiny one-page story by her in the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte that I liked so much I wanted people I knew to see it. After translating the story, I wrote to Tawada care of the magazine asking for permission to publish it, and by return mail she sent me another little story with a note asking me to please translate that one too.

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3 December 2009 | in translation |

Read This: Secrets of the Lost Symbol

I read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol the week it came out (was that really only three months ago?) and shortly after I was done, I began outlining an unconventional theory about the novel’s magical properties over at GalleyCat. Those posts came to the attention of Dan Burstein, who began publishing unauthorized guides to Brown’s work around the time of The Da Vinci Code—years before this latest was even announced, he’d shepherded a book called Secrets of The Widow’s Son into print that accurately pinged several elements of the final storyline—and he invited me to expand my thoughts in an essay for Secrets of the Lost Symbol. Officially, the hardcover edition of that book is still two weeks away, but electronic editions are now available, in the Adobe Digital Editions format or a Kindle edition. I’m only a few chapters into it—after skipping to the back, where my piece on “Dan Brown’s ‘Great Work'” is the penultimate contribution—but I’m really interested to see what other people discovered in this novel.

One major motivation for my curiosity is that I’ve agreed to participate in a panel at the 92Y Tribeca next month, “Secrets of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol,” in which—as the official description puts it—”Time magazine’s Lev Grossman leads a discussion with four writers who’ve subjected Dan Brown’s prose to intense scrutiny and are ready to share their insights and speculations on the author and his works.” Lev wrote one of the first and smartest reviews of The Lost Symbol, so he’s a great choice to steer the discussion; Dan Burstein and I will also be joined by Mitch Horowitz, the editor in chief at Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America—so he can speak to the mystical and neo-scientific elements of Brown’s story—and bestselling YA author Maureen Johnson, who wrote a hilarious online readers’ guide that nails everything that’s awful about Brown’s prose.

That brings up an important point: I think The Lost Symbol is better written than any of Dan Brown’s other books—for one thing, I could actually bring myself to keep reading it all the way to the end—but I still think it’s packed with bad writing. And yet… I am willing to concede that I may be in the position of John Bunyan’s contemporaries who thought the language of The Pilgrim’s Progress was banal and wretched, as it’s entirely possible that The Lost Symbol is the greatest American spiritual allegory since Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome.

[One other note: The anthology I’m in should not be confused with John Michael Greer’s Secrets of the Lost Symbol, which I haven’t seen but appears to be an A-to-Z guide to various people, places, institutions, and concepts that turn up in the novel, much like Simon Cox’s Decoding the Lost Symbol, which I did receive a few weeks ago and which looks fairly informative based on my casual flip-through.]

2 December 2009 | read this |