S is for (Andreas) Steinhöfel...

... a multi-award winning German author and translator. His books Dirk und Ich (My Brother and I) and The Centre of My World have also been translated into English, but the most widely available is The Pasta Detectives, published in 2010 by The Chicken House and translated from the German by Chantal Wright, one of my MA colleagues. It also features new illustrations by Steve Wells. The US edition (2011) is published under the title The Spaghetti Detectives and seems not to be illustrated.

It's the story of Rico, aged 11 and a "child proddity"

-  "That's a bit like being a child prodigy, but also like the opposite. I think an awful lot, but I need a lot of time to figure things out." - 

who lives in Berlin with his mum. He has trouble telling the difference between left and right, and gets all kinds of things mixed up, yet he also notices a lot that other people don't see. He becomes friends with Oscar, who is a child prodigy but also prone to anxiety. Together they manage to solve the mystery of what exactly is going on in Rico's building, the "Aldi Kidnapper" or "Mr 2000", and the significance of the "deeper shadows".

This is another book with lots of wordplay as Rico often misunderstands what he hears. He also has difficulty with spelling, so when his teacher encourages him to write a diary the results are interesting, to say the least. As well as managing these challenges adroitly, the translation really catches Rico's voice and his view of the world - his head swirls with ideas like the balls bouncing around in a lottery machine. Some of Rico's ideas are very funny, while others are genuinely thought-provoking. You can see why it was shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation. The book also won the 2011 NASEN Inclusive Children's Book Award and, with a first person narrator who seems to be somewhere on the austistic spectrum, it has invited comparisons with Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

There are two more books featuring Rico and Oscar, so let's hope that they will soon also be available in translation so that English-speaking readers can find out what happens next.

E is for 'Emil and the Detectives'

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner was first published in Germany in 1929 and had its first UK edition not long afterwards, in 1931. Gillian Lathey has argued that Emil was the Harry Potter of his day in terms of the appeal to children, the buzz around the book and the freshness of the writing in comparison to what had gone before. For more details see this article from New Books in German. It was the first book to feature a child as a detective and, in a radical departure for children's books of that time, used the street slang of Berlin in the dialogue.

Original German cover

Emil is sent by his mother to Berlin by train with a substantial sum of money for his grandmother. On the way, his money is stolen and the adventure consists of him tracking down the thief, with the help of a group of other boys, and retrieving the money. We read this book in primary school but most of what I remember about it from that time was my Dad's anguish at my excruciating pronunciation of the unfamiliar German names... (My accent has improved at least slightly since then.) I had certainly forgotten that there is a goodly chunk of book on either side of the actual detecting - I was quite surprised how soon the villain was caught as it seemed to take weeks in my memory. Due to the pace of reading in class, no doubt. Anyway, it then transpires that the thief was a wanted bank robber, Emil gets a huge reward and his mother comes to Berlin for a party. The moral of the story may, or may not, be: never trust strangers, "children shouldn't be allowed to travel alone", or that "money should always be sent through the post!"

This is the cover I remember from school...

There is an array of English translations out there: the first UK one was done by Margaret Goldsmith in 1931 and another in 1959 by Eileen Hall, which is the one still in print as a Red Fox Classic. I haven't read the Goldsmith version, but I understand that, like Hall, she rather unfortunately makes the Berlin street slang sound more like something out of the mouths of Enid Blighton's nice middle class children. See also here for more discussion of this issue...

Red Fox Classics edition, tr. Eileen Hall

As a child, I had no idea of how the original text was written and, being more than a little addicted to the Famous Five, I was unperturbed by dialogue like:

 "Cheerio Emil. Gosh, I'm looking forward to this. It's going to be smashing!" (p. 92) 

 On my recent re-reading, though, I was aware that I'd have a completely different idea of the backgrounds of the various children without prior knowledge of the source text.

More disconcerting is the fact that Emil's 120 marks, his mother's monthly salary, has become "seven pounds". With the effects of inflation, this gives modern children no idea at all of just how much money is at stake. Besides which, given that Hall has scrupulously maintained the German names of both people and streets, it is most incongruous for the boys to be talking about shillings, "one and eightpence", "ten bob" etc.

US edition, tr. May Massee

In the US, meanwhile it was translated in 1930 by May Massee who, according to Lathey, kept a much more plausible tone to the dialogue:

 "the American translation [...] is far closer to the original German in its rendering of street slang than the conservative British version with its entirely inappropriate middle class register." Source: http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2003/v48/n1-2/006970ar.html?vue=resume

As far as I'm aware, she also maintained the German marks.

A new American version by W. Martin has also recently been published, which curiously changes Emil's surname from Tischbein (table leg) to "Tabletoe", and has had mixed reactions to its attempts to update the slang.

Finally, there is a Penguin Readers edition, retold (and apparently considerably abridged) by Rod Smith. This changes Emil's surname to Fisher, his friend Gustav's name to Paul and moves the action to England, Emil now coming from Newtown rather than Neustadt.

So there we are. Plenty to chose from.

But after all that, if there are any publishers reading this, and you'd like to take up the challenge of producing a version for the 21st century, I'd be very willing to help you out...

Should a Translation Improve on the Original?

I very much enjoy Peter Rozovsky's blog Detectives Beyond Borders and his take on crime fiction from around the world. However, I was taken aback by a recent post on Amateurish prose in a translation from Japanese, specifically this bit:

"But I'm reminded again that a translator is not just a translator but also a writer, with all the demands that entails. If the original lags, the translator should have made it better."

I have don't have much difficulty with the first sentence. It's nice to get some acknowledgement that translators do more than just churn out words in a new language. Yes, we're writers too but is it really our duty to improve on the source text?

Discussing the reluctance to match dialect for dialect in Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Particular Books, London, 2011, pp. 200-201), David Bellos argues that:

"Grammatical mistakes, malapropisms and other kinds of 'substandard' language must not be seen to be the translator's fault."

and that:

"Translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts - simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue."

 This relates to perfectly well written prose or dialogue that happens to be in non-standard language such as dialect or slang. What if the text is just not very good though? Who decides? Surely it's the height of arrogance to feel that we can do a better job than the original author? Isn't our role to capture her style, to reflect his voice? But then, on the other hand, isn't our job also to write as well as possible in our target language - doing justice to the reader? And what does improving a text actually mean? My idea of an improvement might be your idea of a travesty!

A rather fundamentalist evangelical of my acquaintance once suggested, at least half-seriously, "improving" a text on the Galapagos by replacing references to Darwin with references to an "intelligent designer"... Rest assured that even had I wanted to do something so unethical, there are all sorts of contracts and checks in place to prevent it! Obviously this is an extreme example, but it shows how subjective the whole idea is.

For some of my recent translations, I have been lucky enough to have a good working relationship with the author, meaning that where I had a problem with the text, I could ask her advice, check that I'd understood correctly or query continuity errors for example. This has not been my usual experience, however. Normally, as a translator I've been on my own with just the text to go on. Of course there are many resources for translators online too. I can also discuss such issues with other translators on internet forums, blogs or Twitter, for example. Ultimately though, it seems to me, all I can do is my best; I will write as well as I can, seek advice where I can get it and trust in my own instincts. Let the reader understand.

For more debate on the subject see also:

Publishing Perspectives: When is a Translation Superior to the Original?
About Translation: Can translators ignore theory?

Das Kindermädchen (The Nanny) by Elisabeth Herrmann

Here's another old review from my archives, this time of a thought-provoking crime novel, Das Kindermädchen by Elisabeth Herrmann, published by Rotbuch Verlag in 2005. 

It sets out to raise awareness of a little-known aspect of the Second World War – the abduction of girls from Eastern Europe for use as forced labourers in private households, as nannies, housemaids and so on. Herrmann succeeds admirably in combining this serious political subject with a well-constructed plot to produce a gripping and witty thriller, without becoming preachy.  It is based on her research as a journalist and her interviews with survivors of this period in Ukraine.

The lawyer Joachim Vernau seems to have made it in life: he is about to marry the Berlin Senator Sigrun Zernikow, be made a partner in her father’s old-established law firm, and set up his office in an up-market area.  Only his friend Marie-Luise, also a lawyer but on the left-wing and working in less well off districts, reminds him of his radical student days.  However an old Ukrainian woman turns up at the offices one day demanding that Sigrun’s father Utz von Zernikow sign a piece of paper.  As nobody can read the Cyrillic script, they send her away again.  But when her body is found in a canal, Joachim’s life turns upside down at a stroke.  He and Marie-Luise start investigating and discover that Natalia Cherednichenkova was Utz’s nanny during the Second World War, and now her daughter Milla is demanding compensation for forced labour for her mother, who can no longer travel.  As Natalia has no proof, she needs confirmation from the Zernikows that she worked for them, but they are reluctant to admit it. When Vernau finds himself threatened, assaulted and shot at, he knows that there’s more to this than a skeleton in the Zernikow family cupboard.  Perhaps the young Natalia saw more than she should have done during the air raids and, sixty years on, somebody is still prepared to kill to protect their secrets.  Joachim soon finds that he must chose between loyalty to his future in-laws and finding out the truth.

The characters are well developed and, although there are recognisable types, they never descend into caricature. There is Sigrun, the rather cold, ambitious and career-dominated politician; Utz, her father who is confused and guilty about his role in past events but too conservative to admit to them; Joachim trying to do the right thing but with conflicting loyalties and surrounded by dominant women; Marie-Luise, the radical left-wing lawyer, fighting for minorities and seeing oppression everywhere; Milla who is furious about what was done to her mother and will stop at nothing to get justice.  The author recognises human weakness and the desire to hide past mistakes, whether in Joachim’s relationship with his mother, or the Zernikow family’s Nazi past.  Herrmann has a light tone and precise and humorous style, and strikes a fine balance between informing and entertaining the reader.  The pace starts relatively slowly as we are introduced to the characters and their lives and then builds rapidly in the second half of the novel as events intensify towards the dramatic conclusion.

This book is thoroughly enjoyable and well worth reading, both for the crime story and the political and historical insights it provides.

Nea Fox, Private Detective

If you'll forgive a little self-publicity, I'd like to share the project I've spent the last year on: Nea Fox by Amelia Ellis.

Nea is a gutsy and conscientious detective, based in London. It has been a lot of fun to work on these books and to follow Nea's adventures and romantic entanglements, and I've been enormously lucky to have a brilliant working relationship with Amelia. She has always been ready to answer my questions, and has done a lot to help make the translations as polished as possible. At the moment, the books are only available on Kindle, but it is hoped that they'll be released in other ebook formats and paperback soon.

Thanks for reading, and here endeth the plug.