“A poet looking for inspiration” Milorad Krstic

Click here for the MadHat issue 14, cut.ting edge! Last night, if you had the stamina to make it to the finish past midnight, you would have had the chance to listen to a real cross-section of translated German language fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. No, we did not manage to do the Pecha Kucha style evening – the 20 slide, 15-minute Power Point karaoke when the readers are rudely cut off by the host if they run overtime – but we did have a text about it, and Helmut Kuhn, the author, sitting in the audience, visibly enjoying listening to Ruth Martin’s translation.

There were many highlights: such as Sissi Tax and Joel Scott, the Australian-Austrian axis, reading Issi’s poems in tandem. Sissi now has new fans in Berlin among the English language translation crowd. Henry Holland, reading Donal McLaughlin’s Glaswegian speech translations of Pedro Lenz’ poems:

Jist wance
in o’er nineteen year
did Toledo miss his wurk.

It wis thi day
the gaffer wis buried
in Volketswil.

He wantit tae be sure
thi cunt’s really deid, Toledo.

Henry did point out that it was only me who made the connection between him and Donal, but I was very glad I did. I also immensely enjoyed  his “song of unification for instant singing” by Peter Rühmkorf. There was a Kafkaesque rendition of “Rosa Beetle”, and a virtuoso rendition of Anna Katharina Hahn’s “Kürzere Tage”, translated by Helen Rutley and Jenny Piening respectively. Finally, we were nearly lulled to sleep by Medhi Nebbou reading “The Patient Prince” by Karen Duve from her volume Grrrim…

But why don’t you just click over to the live issue and read these and many more wonderful texts in translation. A big thank you for all of you who gave your time, work and inspiration to produce this issue. We had a ball!

Once you arrive in Pankstr U-Bahn (U8), walk down Badstr., until you come to Uferstr. on your left hand side. It’s a street that can only be entered by pedestrians. Turn into Uferstr. and walk until you see the Uferhallen flag on your right (opposite the Uferstudios). From there, follow the yellow dots on this map! Voilá!

The Publisher (E.J. Van Lanen)

You come from a background of traditional publishing. What inspired you to start up Frisch & co.? And why Berlin?

I’ve always been interested in translated literature, for reasons that remain obscure to me, so when I managed to sneak into publishing, I thought, naïvely, Hey, I’ll become an editor, and then I can publish literature in translation. Easy right? And because of some very kind and indulgent people at HarperCollins and Ecco, I managed to publish a translation of Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain, translated by Michael Henry Heim. Not a bad start, I thought! But with time, I learned that it was extremely difficult to publish the kinds of books I was interested in at a big publisher, at least on a regular basis, so I began to look for other opportunities, and long story short, I helped co-found Open Letter Books, which is dedicated only to literature in translation. But, and perhaps this is my naïvety again, the problems we faced at Open Letter were in many ways similar to the ones I faced at HarperCollins. Just being in the book business–printing books, shipping them around, storing them, sending out mass mailing to reviewers, and so on–is expensive, and translation adds another layer of complexity, and costs, to the whole process. Actually making money with translated fiction, with exceptions, is a difficult proposition, which is why so many translation publishers are at universities and/or rely on grants from both private and public arts institutions.

One of the big problems is that physical books limit distribution. It’s just too expensive to ship books overseas, let alone to market them outside your home territory. It is occasionally the case that translations published in the US make their way to the UK and vice versa (And I’ve seen some Dalkey Archive books at an English bookshop here in Berlin), but it’s certainly not the norm, nor is the international market something these publishers are set up to reach. Basically, publishers pay to get books translated into English, but they can only ever reach a portion of the available English-reading audience.

So Frisch & Co. was set up to address all of these concerns: They’re ebooks (only), so the cost structure is completely different (much cheaper), and the audience can be global at, more or less, no cost.

But, why Berlin? Well, it occurred to me that I could run an ebook publisher from pretty much anywhere, and I thought it might be good to be closer to my publishing partners, many of which are in Europe. Also, it’s a lovely place!

What are the concrete benefits in your view to epublishing?

Well, as I mentioned before, the biggest benefits to me, as a publisher, are the reduced costs and the increased reach. But as a reader of translations, I think it’s a very exciting time. When I was pitching the idea of Frisch & Co. to publishers last fall, I was met with a lot of quizzical looks, but last week I met with a lot of the same people and it seems they’ve begun to see the potential opportunities that ebooks and the English language market can provide. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a large number of books begin to reach English in ‘non-traditional’ ways–whether that’s through publishers like Frisch & Co., through marketing and distribution deals like the one Open Road just signed with some bigger European groups, or by publishers simply translating and publishing their books themselves. With luck, we may be on the verge of having a much wider selection of translated books available.

The Distributor (Sharmaine Lovegrove)

What readership do you think “Anatomy of a Night” is aimed at and what ways do you have of reaching them?

I believe there is a really hunger for great literary fiction and as there has been so much in the media about the lack of translated work into English on offer the potential readership for this book is really quite broad. My role with epubli is to work with our independent authors and publishers to devise marketing strategies and thinking of the best ways to reach as many people as possible. It’s a pleasure to work on a book like this as it embraces multi-culturalism in it’s journey so many readers will love Anatomy of a Night as much as I do.

I believe being as public facing as possible through readings and interviews is the most important way to get good coverage for the book. We have already hosted a launch party for the book in London during London Book Fair at The Society Club that was a lovely event. And on Tuesday 14 May, I will be talking to EJ and Anna at Soho House Berlin to a large audience of readers in association with Dialogue Books. Following that we’ll be reaching readers with press and interviews as well highlighting the book on Apple iBookstore and it’s already available through Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, Amazon and other good retailers.

What are the concrete benefits in your view to epublishing?

One aspect that is a real benefit to epublishing is the fact that books can get from publishers and independent authors and into the e-bookstores really quickly. With epubli, we offer broad distribution channels and this allows for readers favouring all platforms and devices to purchase titles that are published through us with 24 hours of a book being uploaded, which is astounding.  The low-cost element to publishing electronically is another benefit to the medium. It allows for publishers like EJ to take risks and be experimental which is turn gives the readers an even bigger range of books to choose from. With so many areas in our modern lives is digitally focused and it seems fitting that publishing should embrace a new format that in time will showcase books that otherwise would not be able to be published and the more stories there are out there the more readers they will attract.

The Writer (Anna Kim)

You have 3 book titles in print. What were the significant differences for you in the process of being printed digitally?

With e-books, it’s easier and faster to correct mistakes, typos and even re-edit whole sentences. This takes away the huge pressure of having to detect every single mistake before printing. Often, the first thing you see when you open the brand new book is a typo. Here, when this happens, you can quickly correct it – and hope no one saw it…

The biggest difference for me was that I had to use a tablet to proofread my book. Usually, I would proofread on paper, scribbling on it, this time I proofread on a tablet, highlighting the mistakes I found. It took me a while to get used to it, but in the end it was ok ­– and it was a good training for my brain, because I had to remember why I had highlighted these words.

What are the concrete benefits in your view to epublishing?

I am a big believer in and supporter of independent publishing. It is always the small, independent presses that are willing to take risks, and in literature like in the fine arts or in film, it’s never the mainstream institutions that encourage risky projects. On the contrary, they often cause them to die. Unfortunately, running a press is expensive and without financial support impossible, unless you focus on genre books – and even that is difficult enough. Epublishing could be a solution to this dilemma, as it seems to be possible to cut some of the costs and even reach the reader directly, via the press’s website, for instance. I hope that because there is a reduction in risk, other forms of literature that are increasingly being rejected by publishers like poetry or short prose will see a revival. And I also hope that this will revive the culture of publishing: a bigger variety of publishing houses with a bigger variety of taste. Hopefully, this will lead to a more liberal atmosphere and to one that is more appropriate to the diverse society we live in.

The Translator (Bradley Schmidt)

This is your first book-length translation. Do you miss holding a book in your hands at the end or does the kobo give you the same feeling of accomplishment?

Because at this point in time I mostly read longer texts (novels, stories, long-form non-fiction) in printed form I do slightly miss feeling the heft of the finished product in my hands. On the other side I am accustomed to having my translations of short stories and poems appear online and not in print. My main goal as a translator is helping make literature originally only available in one language (German) available in another (English). I find it useful think about the debates surrounding epublishing in the context of writing process. Apparently there once was a time when authors decried the switch to writing literature on computers. I predict that there will soon come a time when an insistence on reading literature printed on paper and bound between two covers will seem as antiquated as a misguided insistence that authors write literature in longhand with pen and paper. My sense of accomplishment does not derive from a physical object but rather from a recognition that I’ve helped a beautiful, haunting book find new readers.

What are the concrete benefits in your view to epublishing?

Although I don’t know too much about the publishing side of the operation, I know that those people reading primarily on some sort of electronic device generally have a different profile and characteristics than those who predominantly read hard-cover or paper-backs. This means there are readers accessible and potentially reading this book who might not have given it a chance if it had just appeared in the conventional format.

At the London Book Fair a couple of weeks’ back, a spokeswoman for Amazon Crossing said: “Words are what matter, whether they are digital or analogue.” Uncontroversial enough, except coming from Amazon, I thought: surely profits are what matter to a multi-billion company? Amazon Crossing is a publisher of translations and according to one report, the second largest buyer of rights to German titles after the Dalkey Archive Press. What’s not mentioned in the report is the types of titles published by Amazon Crossing as opposed to the Dalkey Archive – unsurprisingly, they are mostly thrillers, crime fiction, and light beach reading. The Dalkey Archive, however, is a joint project by the Dalkey Archive Press, English PEN, the Free Word Centre and the Arts Council England that runs a Global Translation Initiative: their website says that “it was born out of a conference (…) where it was found that the crisis facing literary and cultural translation into the English language is in fact a shared problem of all the English-speaking countries.” The GTI aims to redress the lack of translated literary fiction in English – 3-4% of the total US book market, for example.

Due to the lack of published figures, it’s hard to say how much Amazon Crossing pays translators. Word has it that we are supposed to outbid each other for the translation fee – in a “myhammer.com” style, I imagine, although I have not checked this. Press reports such as in Die Zeit have not been able to penetrate the wall of silence either. However, one translator who has worked with Amazon Crossing say during the Q & A session: “I have been paid well and that this has ensured I was able to take on projects that would not have been able to do otherwise.” “I’m trying hard not to have an opinion about it,” says another translator after the session, as if he too realises that this Faustian pact might be something he too might have to take on to survive. Small publishers, for the record, generally pay translators fair fees. They are hugely dependent on subsidies from public funding bodies in Switzerland, Austria and Germany; the difficulty is finding a publisher willing to take on the risk of a translated title. Seagull Books is a shining example of one such publisher, but of course, they can’t be left to shoulder the entire task.

So, Amazon, the champion of translated literature? Aren’t they the only company you can’t meet? I try to imagine what it might be like to send in a manuscript of a translation to an anonymous email address. What would the editing process be like? How would you know who had read it – if at all? As Katy Derbyshire pointed out, the atmosphere during this session at the LBF was a little uncomfortable as Amazon sponsors the very seats we were sitting on in the Literary Translation Centre. It’s hard to have a frank discussion is such a loaded setting.

Also during the Book Fair, Anna Kim’s book Anatomy of a Night was launched at The Society Club in Soho – a beautiful, old-fashioned type of bookshop with leaden glass window frames and informally set out tables. I met her at the event for the first time and she told me about her book’s setting – Greenland – and the story, which is based on a real-life wave of inexplicable suicides that happened there (including a boy of 8) and her research: two trips to Greenland of about 2 months where she tried to get to the bottom of the causes of the suicides.

In itself, this was a normal Book Fair event. Except that Anna was holding a Kobo e-reader: Anatomy is a first release (and Anna’s third book) by Frisch & Co., the Berlin-based literary translation publisher, E.J. Van Lanen, who publishes ebooks only. A friend and fellow translator, Bradley Schmidt has translated Kim’s book – it’s his first book length translation – and to top it all, epubli’s Sharmaine Lovegrove hosted the event. At the club, I realised, I was able to sit and chat to the writer, the editor and publisher and the distributor over a glass of wine at one table … and they all had time, they were keen to talk about their work, open to questions and yes, it was quite an exceptional atmosphere.

Sharmaine in particular is known for her opinion that Amazon signals the death of the independent bookshop: Dialogue Books, her store in Berlin, was closed last night with the words: “We cannot carry on buying from Amazon simply because books there are cheaper.” One of the key points about Frisch & Co is that E.J. is putting his neck out for a project that, essentially, is a risk, but a risk kept minimal by the reduced costs of publishing in ebook form. No principles have had to be traded, simply the format. The project is not motored by profit, as in the case in Amazon Crossing, but by a group of people who care passionately about literature. In other words, it’s not just the words that matter, it’s the people who put them into book form.

I could go on. This is a huge subject and I am wary of judging any translator who needs to pay the rent by working for Amazon Crossing. But before anyone is tempted to do so, I just wanted to put forward the alternatives. Frisch & Co. is one, and there are other small indie publishers who are waving the flag for translation: The Serpent’s Tail, & Other Stories, Pereine Press, Comma Press in the UK, to name just a few, who are all dedicated to publishing quality translations. And on a final note: I was intrigued to know how each link in the chain of Anatomy of a Night experienced the publishing process. So to end my speculation, I simply asked them. They have been kind enough to provide me with long thoughtful answers, which I would like to share here. Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging their answers to my questions. (And I have downloaded Anatomy of a Night, which I can’t wait to read.)

Too many good things happened at this year’s London Book Fair to include them all in one blog post. So I’ll start with the first. It’s a project initiated by Jim Hinks from Comma Press in Manchester, in cooperation with Alexandra Blücher from Literature Across Frontiers and Toru Interactive supplying the technical knowledge, and it’s called the Gimbal App. Whether you live in Zagreb, Gdansk, Barcelona or indeed any city and commute, or if you are visiting and want to dip into the city’s geography in a literary way, you can using Gimbal. The name comes from a mariner’s instrument which was a metal sphere used to maintain a fixed point by keeping the compass in place, explains Jim at the app’s launch on Tuesday at Earl’s Court. Writers take on the role of “gimbals”, the fixed point in a city foreign to the reader. You open up the navigation on your smartphone, iPad or iPod and choose by location, genre, journey length or mode of transport where you’d like to go: here you find stories written by  contemporary short story writers including Roman Simic, Michelle Green or Alison McLeod in both audio and text versions. So, selecting the “by bicycle” option in combination with “34 minutes” and “Europe”, you will find a drop-down menu of the stories featuring this combination. As the story starts, you can see the journey it recounts mapped out in typical Google map style and you, the reader, can add Instagram photos or comments of the places visited.

It’s a beautifully intuitive app and one that appeal to literature lovers, especially those used to multi-tasking in busy cities and having to do their reading as they commute, for instance. Jim points out that short stories – Comma Press’ staple – are very compatible with mobility and mirror the chance interactions and accidental encounters possible in cities. Writer Alison MacLeod is quick to point out that it is not due to shorter attention spans that the short story is experiencing a revival in the UK because, she claims, it is a denser, more intense form that requires if anything greater focus from the reader. Michelle Green qualifies this by saying that there is certainly less pressure to have certain resolutions in the short fiction genre. For her, in any case, the landmarks of her short story set in Zagreb provided the story’s drive. Stories on the app were mostly commissioned for the initial phase from the writers as part of an LAF exchange programme – Simic travelled around Manchester on a tram while Green went to Zagreb but the “book” can feasibly grow, concertina-style, as additional stories are suggested by readers, translators and publishers, with relevant travel and city themes.

This is good news for translators especially as all stories can be listened to or read in both the original or English.

Simic, the Artistic Director for the Festival of the European Short Story in Zagreb, says he’s sure the gimbal will soon enter the English language as a verb: let’s do some gimballing!

© Lucy Renner Jones

Some time ago in Berlin, there was anger. There was fury, gall, and rancour, spleens vented, sabres rattled, stages stamped on in Brecht’s footprints and staccato slogans shouted in time with your feet. There was water cannon and rioting, fake police hats, real megaphones and solidarity. In the old days, everyone got angry together. It didn’t matter where your anger came from, you could always find someone to share it with. You could drink beer in angry bars, watch angry theatre, or discuss angry films.

Then anger was replaced by all-year round beer gardens, cheap flights to Vilnius, Rome or Stockholm based on whim not political conviction, and sabres were traded in for Nordic walking sticks because walking is good for you and sabre-rattling raises your blood pressure. Things gentrified and ossified.

Schlingensief was an angry figure on the German art scene, and his death has left a hole that no one artist can truly fill. This becomes clear early on in “Ich weiß, ich war’s”, (I Know It Was Me) a four-hour audio book whose very breathlessness makes it alive. Schlingensief’s associative monologues blast the listener with emotional energy – passion and outrage in full tilt towards fury. It’s a virtuoso performance, Sprechtheater in a box.

Wer macht’s?

Young Schlingensief was a film aficionado, making his first super-8 films with local Oberhausen neighbours, including Helge Schneider. But we don’t hear about this until CD 4. The audio book is not chronologically arranged, it is a fragmented series of controlled explosions spliced together. Sometimes you wince as a listener. Sometimes you crease up with laughter. Some stories have you stopping and replaying to make sure you’ve understood properly. Nearly all of it is riveting. By the end, I felt as if I had learnt Schlingensief’s verbal tics, and probably deliberate obfuscations (did he say “wer macht’s” or “Wehrmacht”?) and realised what a talented actor, brilliant raconteur, and uncompromising, furious person he was.

The crucial part of Schlingensief’s biography, we learn, began when he moved in with the experimental German film-maker Werner Nekes, and did a three-year apprenticeship that saved him from the mainstream – “where films have endings, and so on”. Nekes told him he should start films at the end if he wanted to. Fittingly, the audio book starts at the end of Schlingensief’s life too. The actor Martin Wuttke begins by reading Schlingensief’s online response to an article in Der Freitag on 3.09.2009, “Wer hat geil Krebs?” In it, journalist Michael Angele complains about a wave of confessional literature – including Schlingensief’s Ich weiß, ich war’s – in which writers subject us to their stories of cancer. Accusing them of exhibitionism, Angele asks sanctimoniously if it wouldn’t show true greatness to simply keep quiet. Schlingensief’s vitriolic response (“…so ein Dreck schreibt also der Freitag…”) can be savoured in full here.

Giving the faceless a name

But making socially marginalised groups visible was not some hare-brained scheme that occurred to Schlingensief when he was dying, it was one of his lifelong obsessions. His aim was to bring art out of theatres and cinemas, destroy the illusion of narratives and ready answers, and confront people with harsh realities. My first live encounter with him was a performance of 7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland in 1997 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, in which the audience was not allowed to sit back in comfy chairs but was marched by Schlingensief (with a megaphone in fake police gear) to Hamburg town hall, where he stood under the mayor’s window and demanded answers to Hamburg’s homeless policy, before marching back to the Bahnhofsmission where he and his actors had set up camp with prostitutes, junkies, and the homeless. Quite a few people left early.

Over his lifetime, he challenged political decisions made in Germany and Austria (Scheitern als Chance, Passion Impossible), lent a voice in Germany to the unemployed (Chance 2000), the disabled and the persecuted (Ausländer raus!), and finally turned his attention to Africa (Operndorf Afrika). One campaign that took place during Chance 2000 resulted from a simple question Schlingensief posed: where were the 6 million unemployed cited every day in the newspapers? How could they be made more visible? Schlingensief conjured up a metaphor to raise this profile of this dispossessed group – a collective jump into Lake Wolfgang next Helmut Kohl’s holiday villa to produce a wave that would wash the Chancellor away. Despite his deliberate over-extension of the metaphor, the German secret service took Schlingensief seriously and chased him back to shore in motorboats. Similarly, Schlingensief dumped a few kilos of rotten fish in Jürgen Möllemann’s front garden, performed voodoo with a hen and tinkered on a piano full of washing powder in protest against anti-Semitic statements made by the FDP.

Germany dismembered

In nearly all his tirades, Schlingensief verbally dismembers what he sees as hypocritical and smug elements of German society, whether it’s over-indulgent Prenzlauer Berg parents or institutions like the Bayreuth Festspiele, which he condemns as a fascist undertaking. It’s not so much Germany on the couch; it’s Germany on the dissecting table. He uses his voice as a scalpel. But in the audio book, you’re able to catch the humour in his voice, without which he could be accused of downright self-righteousness. He was often suspected of exploitation, especially in the case of his troupe of disabled actors. But when he recounts how Werner Brecht, an amateur actor with sleeping sickness, would be left to snooze for an hour on stage during live performances while images of tornados and other natural disasters were projected to keep the audience entertained, it’s hard to see where exploitation comes into it. Werner, Achim, Axel – these were people with names. And no, they didn’t represent The Disabled – they were individuals. And some of them needed to sleep on stage. This consideration was later mirrored in Schlingensief’s decision to leave gaps where Alfred Edel, one of his lead actors who died during the Chance 2000 campaign, was supposed to come onto the stage. The gaps marked the pain. He wanted to highlight frailty and loss, not mask it. “Those who are totally in control,” says Schlingensief with great conviction, “are the next ones who will become ill.” Schlingensief talks about what it means to be dying in an aggressively healthy society. What about the sick? Where should they go? The Opera Village in Burkina Faso was not conceived as a Third World version of Bayreuth. Its central purpose for Schlingensief was to restore music to its original purpose: catharsis. The main feature of the Opera Village should be the infirmary, not the snail-formed amphitheatre. Music, or equally the sound of football being played, was to have the function of soothing patients, not entertaining the elite.

Lebenskunstwerk

What slim chance is there that the audio book will be reproduced in English? Though he said of himself that he was “very German in many ways”, Schlingensief’s notion of integrating art into life may have been better appreciated abroad. As Marion Löhndorf pointed out in her excellent article:

“There is a constant factor throughout Schlingensief’s productions, which makes talk of a “Lebenskunstwerk’ (‘work of life art’), in the sense of art intervening in life, not that outlandish at all.” (read more)

His status remains, or has even grown since his death, as an artist who made a breakthrough. Not a flash in the pan but a lasting movement. Though not all press coverage of him abroad was good, he always made headlines. People were interested in what he had to say, and rightly so. As Roland Koberg put it:

“In Berlin, you might find yourself at a party in the middle of a dying conversation, and the mention of Schlingensief will jolt everyone back to life.” (read more)

And that is precisely what happens with this audio book: He jolts you out of apathy, back to life. So my tip for publishers would be: record it as an audio book. Ask Tilda Swinton to narrate it. Let’s bring back anger! Let’s start rattling sabres!

So, there’s reason for literary translators to take heart. It’s not just about having a wide vocabulary and a good grasp of syntax. A translator of books has to reinvent the original text in his or her own words, and transpose it onto an entirely new cultural setting and context. Works like Kelman’s, whose Glaswegian dialect prose is a ‘political commitment’ according to O’ Hagan, in that Kelman intended to give a voice to an invisible social group in Scotland, may not be easy to render in German. But nothing is impossible and you only have to know the work of Donal McLaughlin, and his transposition of Swiss dialect poetry into Glaswegian dialect, to know that this is true.(Samples will be published online in the May 2013 translation edition of the Mad Hat Review.)

The workshop we did with Andrew O’Hagan on the last day of the seminar was about voice, and as he’s quick to point out, this doesn’t mean accent. It’s about getting marks on a page, much like a musical score, to jump and sing of their own accord. And how can the translator do that unless she creates a voice? It reminds me of Sybille Lewitscharoff’s comment in Wolfenbüttel 2010, referring to how she can tell whether a translation works or not: “It’s all about the rhythm of the text.” Musical metaphors abound in literary translation and writing.

The theme “Writing in Public” comes up in various forms during the weekend seminar. During a lively panel discussion between the participants – Alan Hollinghurst, John Lanchester, Esther Freud, Sarah Hall and Joe Dunthorne, chaired by Andrew O’Hagan – these authors discussed whether the age of the writer as a public intellectual figure is over. Perhaps there is a ‘horror of responsibility,’ suggests John Lanchester? Joe Dunthorne points out that whatever you write on the internet is there ‘forever’, making it seem like a huge  task to ‘put it out there’. And the reprisals of the public can be vitriolic. Philip Hensher, the seminar’s organiser who was unable to attend at the last minute, recently discussed this issue in an article in The Independent article entitled “Disagree with me, sure. But don’t wish me dead.” Nevertheless, there are writers who are prepared to stick their necks out. O’Hagan’s assessment of the Jimmy Savile scandal in the LRB was hailed by Peter Bradshaw on Twitter as being the best article he’d read on the debate. Do we need moral touchstones? Don’t we want writers to help us decipher what’s going on in moral terms? What is that impulse to tear down intellectuals in Britain specifically? Haven’t they, after all, spent long hard hours learning to hone precisely those skills?

Esther Freud comments that although she is asked to comment on topics publicly, she invariably says no, not wanting to have the reader know what she personally thinks about certain topics and for this to forefront her fiction.

Still, novelists by definition put themselves into the public domain. The role of the novelist as social commentator is not new, as Andrew O’Hagan points out: he quotes a debate between Henry James and H G Wells on whether writers have a ‘social purpose’ (probably to be found in Henry James & H. G. Wells. A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction and Their Quarrel) Both, he says, is convincing in his brilliant way.

Whether writing is overtly political, as in Sarah Hall’s dystopian vision of the future in the novel The Carhullan Army or whether it is a way of empathising with and raising awareness for a community that gets bad press (as in Joe Dunthorne’s examination of the travelling community in Britain in Wild Abandon), we are told something about the writer’s relationship to these subjects. A portrayal of our crisis-ridden times as in John Lanchester’s Capital might be slapstick at times, but the message can be serious: the joke’s actually over. Alan Hollinghurst may not have deliberately set out to change public perception of homosexual relationships, but this has been one result of his novels.

The British Council seminar did not set out to define “Writing in Public”, but in the best sense, it provided a great deal of thinking matter for the participants to mull over when they returned to their desks. When struggling with my next book translation, I will certainly remember Andrew O’Hagan’s parting anecdote:

“You know once, a friend of mine phoned me and said ‘Have you read the German translation of your book?’ ‘Well, I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a copy on my shelf.’ ‘No, but have you read it?’ ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Because it’s BRILLIANT,’ my friend said, – ‘much better than yours.’”

© Thienemann Verlag

In the Thursday issue of Die Zeit, an article was published by Ulrich Greiner in the Dossier section, which discussed whether the word “Neger” should be removed from German children’s classics such as Die Kleine Hexe by Otfried Preußler, written in 1957, or Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer by Michael Ende, written in 1960. The article was prominently billed on the front page of Die Zeit with the caption “Unsere liebste Kinderbücher werden politisch korrekt umgeschreiben – ist das Fortschritt?” (Our favourite children’s books are being rewritten in a political correct way – is this progress?) I suppose the caption warned me that the answer was going to be “No.” But what I wasn’t prepared for was the arsenal of weapons that Ulrich Greiner lined up in his five-column defence of the word “Neger”. Firstly, he cites paragraph 5 of the German Constitution “Eine Zensur findet nicht statt”. (Censorship may not take place). The fact is, some German children’s book publishers, among them Klaus Willberg from Thienemann Verlag, have announced that they will reissue Michael Ende and Otfried Preußler’s stories after having changed “outmoded and politically incorrect terms”. This falls into Greiner’s idea of censorship.

Perhaps it’s because I am a translator and have come up close to the idea that there is no such thing as an untouchable text, in fact every text can be revised and reworked ­– you only need to take a polished manuscript to a seminar for literary translation to see this in practice ­– that I found this a rather odd idea. Surely, by removing racist vocabulary, you don’t necessarily change the author’s intentions? Unless the author’s intention is to offend, alienate and abuse. Therefore, why would changing a racist label be censorship? Ideologies change, times move on, language is in flow and naturally, it embodies concepts that have since been deemed dangerous or belittling, murderous or serving to preserve social hierarchies.

But moving on, Greiner thinks he can then prove how laughable to would be to replace the word “Neger” with “a person with black skin colour”. (His choice of words, note.) To comic effect, he shows how that lack of the word “Neger” would ruin the psychology of the characters, assassinate the plot, and other evils. No mention is made that these are figures in a book, not people. My job is to spend hours musing over better ways to translate difficult concepts that exist, neatly packaged into one word in German, and have to be skilfully loosened in English. Give a panel of German wordsmiths some time, I think, and they’d come up with much better alternatives than your intentionally ridiculous ones, Mr Greiner.

He next cites Pippi Langstrumpf, wondering whether Pippi is racist to say “All people in Congo are stupid.” He goes to great lengths to say this is not the case, it’s just that Pippi is an anarchist and says what she wants. He fails to say that this could be done to the same effect using other words. He throws in a few names, such as Bertrand Russell, and claims that “This is not a problem for children, it’s a problem for adults. And adults never really liked Pippi Langstrumpf.” I am not sure what “it” refers to, to be honest. Astrid Lindgren’s estate did “finally” agree to changing the word “Negerprinzessin”, says Greiner almost wistfully, to save themselves trouble. (No source, we must presume Greiner knows Lindgren’s estate managers personally.)

Greiner’s arguments, at this point, start to become really convoluted in their logic: “It is as clear as daylight, “ claims Greiner, “that Pippi’s ‘Neger’ are nothing other than a baseless, innocent play on the phantasm of a naïve, primitive people, such as fascinated Gauguin.” Paragraph 5, Bertrand Russell, Gauguin. Greiner’s arsenal is growing: he’s now got the law, philosophy and art on his side. Then next bit is quite hard to get a handle on but it seems to go something like this: admittedly, Greiner says, the word “Neger” has changed in usage and is now a derogatory term but it would be “Geschichtsklitterung” (historical misrepresentation) to change it in the above mentioned children’s stories. Language is after all “contaminated” with the past. Greiner is adding historical truthfulness to his arsenal, and any moment now, I’m expecting him to point out that “Neger” comes from Latin, that most untouchable of untouchable languages, and simply means “black” (although I’ve never heard even the most unenlightened of men say that the Latin origin of the word ‘cunt’ is ‘wedge’ and therefore what’s the big deal?)

Why, Mr Greiner, would you want to defend a word in a children’s book that you wouldn’t say to a person’s face because you knew it was derogatory? When you sit down with your colleagues in Die Zeit canteen, you wouldn’t use the word “Neger”, would you? Or are there simply no black employees at Die Zeit? So, in summary, contamination in language/literature is inherent, and we’re fools – nay, historical deniers – to suggest otherwise. At this point, my eyes wander to the right hand column, where a (white male) psychologist has claimed that “otherness” and exoticness is an important concept for the fostering of creativity and imagination in children. Reading the word “Neger” will not make any child racist either. That settles it, then. (Where, I wonder, is the study of the effect on black children who repeatedly come up against negative stereotyping in books?) We have now been kitted out with psychological theories that prove the point Greiner is making.

I find it hard to continue reading the article but now I am fascinated how he will pull off the end. And I’m not disappointed. Because Greiner saves his trump card to the last: the emotional angle. Mekonnen Mesghena, a Eritrean refugee who grew up in Germany, and who now works at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in the department of “Migration and Diversity” was the one who complained to Thienemann Verlag about the racist wording in Die Kleine Hexe  (quote: “The children dressed up as “Neger”, Chinese girls and Turks”). Mesghena was reading the story to his daughter and was so appalled at the racist terminology that he stuttered. His daughter noticed and there followed a conversation – “Neger” wasn’t a new word for her, she understood it to be racist. Greiner, after recounting this says:

“Now, you could reply to Mesghena (…) that the books he is criticising played an important role in the reading biographies of German children, who are adults today, and that you shouldn’t be allowed to steal their memories.”

This is not only breathtakingly insensitive; it is dangerous. It was this sentence that compelled my to write this blog entry; out of the sheer fury that a man like Greiner is allowed so much column space to expound his repulsive views. Balanced journalism looks different. We are not squabbling here about what the rolls in the bakery in Prenzlauer Berg should be called, we are talking about the claim in a major German newspaper that the word “Neger” has to continue to be printed for reasons of art, history, the psychological well-being of the nation’s children and the protection of German adults’ memories. That he overshot his mark in his ridiculous defence did not go unnoticed and it was with relief that I read Georg Diez’s brilliant response to Greiner in Der Spiegel. But it does leave me with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, not least of all a strong aversion to imagining Greiner’s bedtime reading sessions as a child, and wondering what makes him so desperate to perpetuate racial terminology. I am also seriously considering cancelling my subscription to Die Zeit.

Issue 26 of Five Dials, launched last night by Jan Brandt and the organisers by holding a Mac in the air and pressing ‘send’ after a countdown, presents texts translated into English by mostly German, and some Swiss and Austrian writers, as well as texts by English-speaking authors.

Once I’d found the entrance, the air in The Wye, I could have sworn, smelled of fish and chips. I was not alone in thinking this. It was not a trick of the mind, induced by hearing London accents. I reckon someone from Hamish Hamilton had a little fish ‘n’ chip spray in their pocket and wafted it around for authenticity.

The shock about finding out there were no chairs to slump in, and prepare for the usual 20-30 minute Berlin readings, wore off when it was announced that each person was going to read for 5 minutes. Revolutionary! And very welcome. No matter how good a reading is, most people nod off or start thinking about bed after a while. 5 minutes is the perfect reading time.

Jan Brandt kicked off in a very droll accent, reading Katy Derbyshire’s translation of his piece ‘All Chic and Elegance are Over’ in an almost perfect imitation of the lead singer of Kraftwerk. There was much laughter. I glanced over at Sophie and James and realised they didn’t get the jokes. Brandt has written an anti-Berlin hymn, full of references to Rosa Luxembourg and attitudes held by locals that few people from Hockey are familiar with. A smile ran over Sophie’s face when Brandt cited Christian Kracht’s views in his Berlin-bashing essay:

‘Do you find people in Germany unfriendly?’

‘Mainly, well, in Berlin especially. Berlin is really, really awful.’

‘Would you say Berlin is terrible as a whole?’

‘Yes. Berlin is the most awful city in the world.’

‘Appalling?’

‘Appalling.’

‘Repulsive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Disgusting?’

‘Yes.’

There’s only so much you can read into a smile, but I think Sophie was thinking – oh, they do have a sense of humour, these Germans. This Kracht guy certainly seems to have hit the nail on the head.

After that delight came Clare Wigfall, (“She’s about 17, isn’t she?” whispered someone next to me) who doesn’t seem to be published in the new issue – feel free to correct me – but who delivered a chilling rendition of her story about two homeless young people freezing underneath a bridge in perhaps Moscow (her own words)*. The same person next to me then wondered aloud if a fashion had started where people wore clothes that were far too big for them. It was then that I realised the fundamental difference between this and other Berlin literary events I normally go to: everyone was done up to the nines and very young. And most translators in Berlin aren’t fashionable and don’t care…

Next to take the limelight was Judith Schalansky, whose voice had a soporific effect on most people, even though her novel when I read it, “Der Hals der Giraffe”, was one of my favourites last year, and I’m sure Shaun Whiteside’s translation will be superb – just looking at the genealogical table that goes with ‘Ecosystems’ reminds me why I like that book. But last night, lacking a chair, we all wanted to curl up and snooze off. However, that wasn’t on the agenda, oh no: DJ Annika put a stop to any of that with some ear-splitting music. The highlight for me was the next reader, a writer called Joe Dunthorne, whose weird premise for a poem – a father concerned that his daughter has fallen for an owl – proved spiky enough to get everyone’s ears pricked*. Rounding off the readings was Katy Derbyshire, flushing brightly as she read her translation of Tilman Rammstedt’s ‘Invitation’.

It was definitely a different type of Berlin literary event. I could see some people were not buying all the Ab-Fab-ness of it all, with some toes definitely curling at the pronouncement that Five Dials is “too cool” to pin itself down to a definite schedule of release dates.  And others simply lapping up the fact that they could finally wear some high heels on Berlin’s cobblestones.

The proof is, however, in the final product though, which is a joy to behold: quirky pictures and illustrations, a fantastic range of texts and writers, and of course, superior quality translations by some of the best.

*I have contacted Clare Wigfall and Joe Dunthorne for the titles of their texts and will let you know what they are here as soon as I can.

(Clare has already answered: Her story was from “Three Roses for Zoya” from her forthcoming collection).

(Joe has now answered too: the three poems he read out were called “Owl-in-Law”, “Entertaining with Hypnotism” and “Windfall”).