This wouldn’t be a problem, I guess, if I were Philip Roth. As far as I can tell, he’s a word recycler: he must sit with a dictionary or a thesaurus at his elbow and simply thumb through its pages looking for words that haven’t been used for a long time, or that have fallen out of fashion. Then he constructs a story around them. It’s not quite the same thing, obviously, as word recycling has something to do with showing off your vocabulary – a competition of the “Mine’s bigger than yours” type – as well as there being few writers who can do it without the reader getting annoyed by their showiness. But Roth can certainly get away with it, partly because you forgive him as you watch him effortlessly leap into so many different characters’ minds, and because it’s not all pseudo-Latin but vernacular, low-brow, or whatever it takes to make his characters plausible. Even a character that makes words up because he or she has spent too long living abroad, or has brain decay, or is suffering from a pesky form of verbal disintegration, he would do well. (And I do know that the last sentence is German in its syntax before you write in.)

If it’s true that translating is one of the most intellectually stimulating things you can do, a great form of “brain-jogging”, then these signs of calcification in my lobes and synapses shouldn’t bother me. I should be as fit as a gym shoe, to literally translate one of my favourite German metaphors. And in the end, somehow, I can still pass it off as an intentional joke in most situations. But part of me thinks it’s time to go and expose my addled grey matter to a native speaker environment for an extended period of time (offers of long-term home exchanges are welcome) to avoid inevitable unemployment. Only if it means, as one English aunt smilingly commented to me, I’m told on the other side of the Channel that I “sound like a German.”

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-42) was a writer and journalist who inhabited the “fascinating alternative world” around Klaus and Erika Mann in the early 1930s. In Lyric Novella (1933), her ambiguous, androgynous protagonist becomes the embodiment of a whole generation. For this reason it is unfortunate that most of those who praised the book – both at the time of its publication and through its scholarly rediscovery – have limited their readings to the context of Schwarzenbach’s (lesbian) sexuality.

The protagonist is a twenty-year-old (…) whose  life takes place in the half-dark, around the pooling light of the bar and among the smiling hopelessness of pre-Nazi Berlin. The translator, Lucy Renner Jones, succeeds admirably in reconciling the register in which the protagonist recounts these incidents with those in which he discusses his generation or describes the countryside around the small town to which he has run away. All of these come together in the believable, and believably youthful, voice on which the novella depends.
He speaks to almost no one but Sibylle’s other lovers, with whom he shares the limited camaraderie of a self-help group. The protagonist knows that Sibylle “wasn’t even interested, not even if I’d had money, not even if I were ten years older and my own master. . . . I was told a great many things about Sibylle – that she’d lived with a driver, for instance, and later with an art dealer: the driver was in prison and the art dealer had shot himself”. (…) Schwarzenbach wrote subsequently that the flaw of her novella was that she had failed to make clear that the protagonist was in fact a woman. But it hardly matters, because he, or she, bears instead the features of the time, and also the responsibility for the failure to be interested humanly in Sibylle and not just in what it means to desire her.

I feel sorry for the dog. While the owners must love it very much to spend 500 euros on finding it again in this recession-torn city, perhaps cancelling their subscriptions to their favourite magazines, gym memberships and downsizing their Christmas tree to afford such a luxury, I wonder if this pooch knows it has a gang of seven-year-olds eager to bag it for its bounty. There is absolutely no thought spared for the dog, out there on wintry nights, battling on its own in the city.  But, since my daughter drew my attention to this local poster, I have been thinking that it is a remarkably easy way of earning money – hanging around in street corners, large net in hand, waiting for unsuspecting dogs that have run away to turn up, returning them to their rightful owners and cashing the reward cheque. It certainly beats staying up on a Sunday night trying to finish translating a text on Transylvanian representative portraiture, my current endeavour. I have tried to work out how many hours I would have to spend hanging around on street corners with a dog net before I reached the dizzy heights of Ulrich Blumenbach’s fee for translating “Infinite Jest” by D.F. Wallace for six years. Ulrich obviously doesn’t have a poodle to maintain, otherwise he wouldn’t have agreed to the lousy rate of 10 cent an hour to do it. And I would get a great deal more fresh air that way, my back wouldn’t seize up from sitting at the computer all day and I wouldn’t have to tape my index and middle finger together to avoid repetitive strain injury from typing badly for extended periods of time.

The slightly worrying thing is the other poster that turned up next to the missing poodle: Underneath a picture of a neat-looking man with a freshly-ironed balaclava and a crowbar, it says: “Beware! There have been several attempted break-ins early in the morning with crowbars in this area. Probably junkies.”

It took me a while to realise that this photograph was downloaded from Internet stock photography (which website offers such things?) and wasn’t an obliging burglar posing for the camera. (“Just one for the poster, love, that’s right. Fanks a lot.”) Then it struck me that the line “Probably junkies” was blatantly wrong: Junkies don’t get up early in the morning, or own crowbars. They also don’t iron their balaclavas (oops, sorry, forgot – stock photography.) So there can only be one explanation. Those lost pooch rewards are too high and people are just cutting out waiting for the dogs to run away. They are breaking in to take them first so they can bag the reward. Then I realised that the man in the balaclava bore an uncanny resemblance to Ulrich Blumenbach.

Cars and Calcutta are inseparable. As soon as you step out of the airport or your hotel onto the street, you are on the street – there is rarely room among the street kitchen stands and people sleeping to walk on the pavement – and once you’re on the street, you’re among the traffic: rickshaws, tuk-tuks, cabs, flashy SUVs, beaten up bangers and people carrying huge baskets on their heads.

Naveen Kishore sends over a driver to the Fairlawn Hotel where we are staying, a throwback to colonial times. It sounds impossibly glamorous – I’ll send you over a driver – and then he turns up in person too. He is suffused in the Indian light, looks somehow different and more at ease, and gives a warm, expansive smile. We get into his air-conditioned car and the driver chauffeurs us over to Seagull’s offices. Whilst in the car, Naveen is chatty as though the constant motion outside, the teeming streets, the honking, the people criss-crossing in heart-stopping choreography, has animated him. He talks about his business, says he’s tired of explaining why he publishes English books in Calcutta to Western publishers. No, he has had to say umpteen times, we’re not a Chicago University Press operation: they distribute our books. Yes, we publish and print here in Calcutta. Most want to know: why Calcutta? Naveen sighs. Why not? He explains how he works with a circle of friends: without friends who admire his vision, there would be no leeway, and especially no credit, and without credit, no room for the vision he has which is to publish books recommended by translators, ‘good-looking’ books with Sunandini Banerjee’s digital collages on the covers. He is quite clearly driven by this vision: a fusion of translators and Indian artists. His books won’t attract huge audiences. But he can ship them worldwide. So how can he make money? This has been the question on most publishers’ lips, as they don’t see how money can be secondary. In fact, it downright rattles them. And of course, it should, because if money is no obstacle then what is? If he’s not bound by the drudgery of capitalism, it must seem to many people in the book business as though he lives in paradise. What an enviable position!

And then, there’s his “secret weapon”: the Seagull catalogue. Last year, it was leather-bound; this year, it is covered with 10 different sorts of patterned silk, gilt-edged pages, and includes all kinds of fiction, illustrations, e-mails contributed by translators and publishers. When the questioning gets too much, says Naveen, he plonks it down on the table with the words, “Have you seen our catalogue?”

Seagull’s offices look as if Shakespeare & Company in Paris has dug a tunnel leading to Calcutta. Works of art hang everywhere (two of everything, I notice and wonder if that means anything), postcards from flea markets pinned next to Sunandini Banerjee’s desk, Seagull’s chief editor and graphic designer of the distinctive covers. We eat a homemade lunch, lots of little delicious dishes prepared by the office staff and brought from home. I try to tear my roti nonchalantly with my right hand, as everyone else is doing deftly, and think I catch a smirk as I’m offered a fork.

Despite the tight deadlines prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the fact that the catalogue is still being printed as Sunandini finishes it page by page, the team find time to take us out to dine at a club, described by Naveen as somewhere we can talk and eat in peace, a precious commodity in Calcutta. As we walk there, he steps nimbly over puddles, and weaves through the traffic, thoroughly at home, talking animatedly once again. I find myself feeling as though I have slipped into a parallel world far from the squalor and poverty and traffic of Calcutta as we go inside: we sip perfectly mixed Margheritas in an air-conditioned room and before we have even formed a wish, a waiter is there to fulfil it for us. Bishan, Sohini and Sunandini, the young Seagull team, relax, joke, and talk to us, among other things, about the “gender-bender” appearance of Indian gods. They are really good company, witty, and warm. Only one thing nags me. Since we have sat down, Naveen is quiet, sunk in thought. Perhaps he needs the traffic, the motion, to expand again.

Or the heat.

Or the noise.

Or the light.

I have to start with the smell-heat-noise-light. These normally distinct things merge into one huge super element that forces its way into my super-organ, my eyes-ears-nose-mouth: I can’t tell which sensation is the most intense. My nose has become part ear, twitching at the hooting of a thousand car horns and Eastern music as I sway, slightly dazed, in front of the airport; meanwhile, my skin registers the humidity in the air, and my eyes, too wide open for so many impressions, narrow. I move slowly, an unconscious tactic to try and get everything to slow down, move my head slowly from side to side, watch the mouths of a thousand taxi drivers opening and closing but the soundtrack is missing: I am already deaf by choice and partially blind and I’ve only been here for 5 minutes. This is the land of superlatives, nothing under a thousand will do: people, rupees, deaths, touts, languages – refugees, dishes containing potato, ways to wrap a sari. Things in scarcity: calm, stillness, a clear space or a green, fresh air, something like brown bread, fresh water. I am in India. More than that, I’m in Calcutta.

Why? These days, there is a new pilgrimage route, little known to the world outside literary translators: the destination is the office of Seagull Books, Naveen Kishore and his team, Circus Avenue, Calcutta. The route on the map is a series of dots from Berlin via Odessa, north over the Caspian Sea, over Kabul – Afghanistan! – Decca, Calcutta. To save their knees, translators on this pilgrimage simply embark on a Lufthansa flight. Which is why I find myself sitting for 8 hours on a plane, wrestling with my neighbour’s need to stretch his elbows. I am thrilled to see the steppe of Afghanistan through the bull’s eye of the plane, in the setting sun, somewhere linked to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom I have been translating for Seagull Books.

So. Calcutta airport. My definition of culture shock is the realisation that the film reel has started with me in it. My mind grapples with this. The 5mm of celluloid separating me from an exotic place in a documentary film is missing. The image of India I had until now is splicing itself onto my real-time real-place location. For a moment, as I sway there with my super organ taking it all in, everything is slow, all Alice in Wonderland-like and then, my senses catch up, the film track starts with a jolt, and my mind hammers the words like a mantra: I am in India, I am in India, I am in India.

So, Wedding, contrary to the stereotypes, is not murky appendix of Mitte where no one white and respectable wants to put their kids in school. It’s aspiring to be up there with the capitals of the world! Berliners sit up and take note: get integrated, Wedding-style.

I don't know this man but he looks very friendly (© Serge Glanze)

I found myself thinking back to Pauline Réage’s Story of O, which does what Roche professes to do – i.e. explore the aspects of female sexuality that deal with fantasies of submission and dominance ­– but in my humble opinion, does it much better. Roche has effectively chained herself to the bright lights of the kitchen sink and parochial chores. And God, it’s tedious. I don’t need to read it, I live it every day. O is the other: escapism.

Cronenberg and Roche have a lot in common – thin on plot, big on effect,  going for the shock jugular and missing, spectacularly. Three metres of Thalia bookshelves were filled with Schoßgebete last weekend in Hamburg. Three metres of books can’t be wrong, can they? People in the publishing world have been lamenting that they could never dream of getting their much more talented writers so much space.

Film set of Crash

Kolja Mensing has written a book that touches the subject of home: the title, “Die Legenden der Väter” is about his real grandfather’s identity, a Polish soldier in the army of the Allied forces. Mensing’s father took a long time to admit that he was the illegitimate child of this soldier, and the man whom Mensing had called grandfather was in fact his step-grandfather. Mensing gave a preview of this work at a preview event in  Aufbau Verlag for the autumn catalogue on Tuesday and was impressive (although it has to be said that Kathrin Gerloff’s ‘performance’ of “Lokale Erschütterungen” stole the show). The ideas that stuck with me were: we all build stories, like homes, that we can live in. Even when these stories have little to do with reality – as in his father’s case – you can’t evict people. That’s their home. Mensing’s book is now his own story, not an adjustment of his father’s lies. And Kolja’s own small son hears his father’s version of events, his stories. Their home is built of them. He said it is very hard top resist the temptation to write your story on an impressionable child. They can’t defend themselves.

I’ve been back from holiday for three weeks now and I found myself very much in tune with the mood in Berlin: everyone has made summer resolutions to change their flats, partnerships, work-life balance, everyone is finding it hard to get back into the rhythm of work, everyone would prefer to be away on holiday. I feel the ambivalence of coming home in everyone.

Jens Bisky: “It represents a world in motion where the actors are close but can never touch because when one gondola on the big wheel moves, the others move with it and remain the same distance away. No one ever gets closer.”

Or

Hubert Winkels: “It’s a hermetic, autistic world full of self-massage, masturbation, and action without interaction.”

Seven-year-olds are not interested in the theory behind a story; they get hooked on the story itself. And at the evening in the LCB on Wednesday, I imagined how different it would have been had Clemens J. Setz had three seven-year-olds sitting up with him on the stage. He would have been made to feel a little more the centre of attention, for sure, with three little faces looking at him and asking whether he could show them a few magic tricks. Instead, it lasted a full quarter of an hour before Hubert Winkels actually addressed the author. Before that, the other two moderators, Jutta Person and Jens Bisky, were encouraged to do an exposé on their theories on Setz’s work: Freud was mentioned, as were Austria’s love of prodigies and the concept of genius. This, of course all has its place in the criticism of literature. But where were their manners? Isn’t it a little rude to debate someone’s genius when he happens to be sitting 50 centimetres away from you? Nevertheless, Jutta Person summed up Setz’s work in the nice sentence “It’s a crass anti-programme to the usual ‘compassion prose’ on offer nowadays.”

When Mr Setz was given a turn to speak, I thought a saw the indulgent look of fairground owners towards their favourite beast. Setz himself seemed to have picked up on the atmosphere on the stage and mentioned that he felt he was often expected to perform a trick on occasions like these (he describes himself as an occasional magician). But he didn’t leave it there. Much to the amazement of the audience and against the backdrop of slightly terrified smiles on stage, Setz did a confident rendition of “overtone singing”, which sounds like someone has stuck a comb and tracing paper in your throat as your lips, lungs and vocal chords vibrate. Astonished clapping followed from the audience, the smiles relaxed gratefully. He is not going to show us up, the expressions seemed to say. He really is a genius!

This led to some gesturing that overtone singing might be the singing of the spheres? And weren’t there lots of angels in his stories? Clemens Setz charmingly laughed off this idea, and did what he is good at, namely taking a running jump at a dead-end set up by his questioners, and elegantly pulling off a salto into a completely different direction: he was of no importance to any angels, he claimed. And if you realise that you are a speck in the universe, there is something pleasant, something restful in that idea. (You’re barking up the wrong tree guys, would have been an alternative answer).

Well, if religion if not the mainstay underpinning his work, are his characters then amoral, someone wanted to know. Jutta Person, in one of her many attempts during the evening to weigh in against heavyweight Bisky and his intellect, fancied that she saw some kind of a scheme behind it, a kind of laboratory in which the characters were experimented on. Clemens Setz replied by trying various suits on (entropy, monotony à la Gertrude Stein and repetition in the diaries of Thomas Mann whereby one realises at some point that the poodle he walks with on the promenade every day is the most important figure in the diaries). He seemed to be enjoying himself. He then started describing how, in the past, when hearing about men who left their wives by saying, “I’m just going out for a packet of cigarettes”, he had thought that maybe there was something about cigarette machines – maybe a wrong combination – that lands the cigarette machine user in an underground tunnel, (a kind of perjury, asked Hubert Winkels hopefully) forever stuck. The seven-year-olds in my head pricked up their ears again. Of course, that’s possible! That’s what the stories begin to sound like in Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes on reading them one after the other: highly visual allegories of people who are not anchored in any way to convention, or social or moral expectations. Aesop for amoralists, maybe- except that Jens Bisky pointed out that the boundaries between good and evil are never blurred. One always knows whom one is supposed to feel sympathy for. And it’s not for those abusing their power.

Sympathy was mentioned a lot. Sympathy or empathy, whatever one prefers as a translation for ‘Mitleid’. Apart from being a force in us that Clemens Setz said he doesn’t really understand as it no longer has an evolutionary function – maybe it’s an outdated impulse from long ago – he takes it to another extreme and imagines the horror scenario of being couple to another person’s brain, feeling what they feel. None of his characters would survive, he said, they would be pulverized if he started hugging them. He prefers to follow them from a distance, looking after them, but not smothering them. Imagine a bunch of rats, who, after having escaped from the laboratory, hide and peek out at their testers, looking at them with compassion, the poor things…sympathy can take a 180 degree turn and come from unexpected corners.

It was an exhausting and exhilarating evening. At the end, I somehow felt like my brain had been joined up to someone else’s who was being prodded by critics and theorized to death; only Clemens J. Setz doesn’t let himself be theorized to death, he shrugs off Big Theories, even mid-sentence if he catches himself going down that path. (“Having me talk about religion is like listening to the babbling of a baby. I’ve no idea what I’m talking about”). And something makes you utterly believe that his modesty is not just a trick.

And there are public footpaths: the epitome of Englishness. Taking a walk, I go up the lane before following one of the public footpath signs into the fields. They are more like little badges with arrows on, easily mounted to point in the direction that you’re supposed to walk.

The mounter of the sign has stood there for a while and thought really hard about which direction to point the arrow in: To make sure I have understood his intentions, I stand in front of the arrow and squint at it for a while. (Not doing so will send me on some wild goose chase halfway across the county, as I know from experience). It’s definitely pointing at a jaunty angle to the right. There is a perfectly good bridleway in front of me but I decide to go across the field on the path. For here, in the heart of England, the paths are unpredictable- they stick closely to the original plans from the 16^th century, regardless of how urban planning or housing developments change the landscape. And woe betide you if, rather than straight through it you walk along the side of a field. Who’s going to argue with a 500-year-old path? So, off I go through the neat swathe cut right through the middle of the still green corn, right across the field. The path swerves to the left, then to the right. I find myself looking around to see if there is a farmer having a good laugh at my expense. I carry on, veering left and right. Then: the path simply stops – a dead end. I look back. I look forward. It’s a long way back. Damn, I think. I got the jaunty angle of the arrow wrong. Then I decide to risk life and limb and hop into the nearest swathe through the corn parallel to my swathe, and I hop in this way all the way back to the edge of the field. You can be seen for miles up here and I’m fully expecting to be charged at by some maniac wearing a green jacket and brandishing a gun. It is not unheard of in these parts.

In a sweat, I arrive back at the cul-de-sac of modern houses where my father, known as an ‘Incomer’ as opposed to a ‘Local’ has lived for 20 years. The phone rings. A man with an Indian accent tries to sell me a mobile phone on a crackly line. I wonder where his call centre is, where he got this number from and how on earth we two human beings have ended up talking to each other. What are the odds? I imagine him coming to work through the rickshaws and crazy traffic with cows milling about and I see myself hopping along 16^th century footpaths in the heart of England.