Uwe Tellkamp, Rosa Luxemburg and Peter Rühmkorf: would you go to that party?

I finally got round to collating the translations I've been doing over the last three years, the work already published and what is forthcoming. Looking back on them, the writers I've translated appear to me like guests invited to a rather odd party, where people often don't know what to say to each other, but where the guests are still determined to linger. Long after courtesy has called to say that it is time that they were fetching their coats.

Here's the list:
* A sample translation, commissioned by Suhrkamp, from Uwe Tellkamp's award winning novel The Tower. My translation can be read at the Suhrkamp website, here. This is the scene where the young doctors from different wards of an early 1980s East German hospital are fiercely competing for the Socialist Challenge Cup: Who's got the best Christmas tree? Dressed in Father Christmas outfits, they break into The Party's private plantation, at dead of night, where each tree is hung with the name of a leading city functionary, and nick one of the finest evergreens.

 Interestingly, it is only since Suhrkamp published this sample translation at the start of 2012 that they've gone on to sell English world rights digital for this book to Frisch & Co., and to sell English world rights print to Penguin Press, both sales happening a full five years after the novel was published, and after the rights had already been sold for all other major world languages.

* A translation of Michael Buselmeier, German novelist and poet. My translation of an excerpt of his novel The Fall of Heidelberg was published in the magazine No Man's Land, edited by Isabel Fargo Cole, Katy Derbyshire and Cathrine Hales, in 2013. Full text plus me reading an audio version of the translation are available in the online edition of the magazine, here.

If you want to get read, get censored ...

... that's the suprising by-product coming out of Christian Füller's officially ''censored'' -- i.e. by the newspaper in which it should appear -- but now everywhere available article on paedophilia, as an integral part of the German Green's ideological roots . The article was scheduled to appear in last Saturday's left-wing liberal daily TAZ newspaper, but was pulled at the last minute by the TAZ's chief-editor, stating that it was ''full of false factual claims". All the other main papers got hold of this story and rightly shouted 'censorship!' Guaranteeing that Füller's article will now be looked at by far more people than the TAZ's usual 60 000 paying readers.

A Bearer of Suffering, a victim, or somebody else?

      ''An old wine salesman, who lived beneath us, made the most of the fact that I had no dad. He made sure I had pocket money for the cinema, gave me sweets and footballs, and protected me from the fists of the sons of the workers. I went down to see him almost every evening, and we played chess. Come up on my lap, said Uncle Hofmann, taking off his sweaty shirt with its starched collar. Then he grabbed my willy fast through my trousers, kissed me with his stubble, smelling of hair cream, whispering filthy stuff in my ear, which I didn't understand at first, bullied me into fishing his floppy, old-man-member out of his flies, to work at it tediously, up and down, up and down, til it swelled up to an impressive size, and finally forced this badly perfumed cock between my teeth. I can still hear him groaning in the corner by the stove, while his frothy sperm flew into a hankie. Until his wife suddenly threw open the door and gave him an angry look, to which he replied in a jittery voice, and made the next chess-move.

      Fear and a guilty feeling. Disgust, right up to the point of throwing up, but also an experience of sexual desire. After a time I started to enjoy it. A friendship between men. A father at last. For a long time my mother didn't notice anything. And even after the man had to move out, we went on meeting secretly. I sat behind him on the motor-bike, my arms round him, on our way to motor-way lay-byes and clearings in the woods. We did it on the grass beside country roads, on waxed leather sofas, and in an Opel Olympia. I began to masturbate.''

(This is my own English translation of a passage from Michael Buselmeier's novel Der Untergang von Heidelberg – The Fall of Heidelberg, pub. 1981, by Suhrkamp. This excerpt from p.147-148. I refer to the German law of Zitatrecht for my right to quote in translation from this work, and acknowledge Suhrkamp's complete rights to the work.)

Luscious faith, left-wing activism and one poet: Michael Buselmeier.

Dante’s German: The Catharsis (2)

by Michael Buselmeier.  
 

Pained-lust, chained burden, you say, you are the field

of God’s graveyard world; you are of life

in chewy circles of death. I’m the bread, the breath

the wine in chalice bright, the word of stone, 

tanned hide, the flag red and white,

the limes’ blossom in the park, the birches’ call,

the incense-smell, the talk of birds, the bells

so near in the wind, as I, half-blind with sleep,

threw open the shutters, and there the children knew

kneeling on the petals, O and A, A and O.    

Will we be the last, to feel God lead us

under the canopy of cloth, winding through the lanes?

to swing ourselves heavenwards, wreathed in jasmine,

singing songs that strawberry ice-cream’s spilt on? 

And at the rear the shimmering monstrance.

(In publishing this workshop-translation, I'm making use of the German "right of citation" or "Zitatrecht". All rights for the original German text, "Dante deutsch: Die Läutering (2)", remain, of course,  with Mr Buselmeier's publisher, Das Wunderhorn Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. I, Henry Holland, reserve rights for that part of any future published translation of Mr Buselmeier's poem, which uses my text above.)

  

       Blogs aren't meant to be finished things. Why should they match the academic & aesthetic standards that you'd expect from a printed book on the same subject? As most bloggers aren't being paid, it would be foolhardy of them to invest too much time in their online writing. 

      That said, here's a snapshot of a poetry & a poet who needs to be talked about now, before there's time to finish & perfect, time to smooth him for a chapter in a book. The poet's Michael Buselmeier, the poetry book could be called Dante's German in a not-yet written English edition; the German title is Dante deutsch, and came out last year. The section of that poetry quoted & translated by me above is a depiction of the processions for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a religious event still celebrated with vigour in small towns & villages in Catholic southern Germany & in Austria. Carpets made from petals, painstakingly laid out to picture, for example, a smiling Mary embracing an angel, adorn the ground in front of houses & the sides of streets. The consecrated bread, the circular host, is carried in the "monstrance", something like a mini sedan-chair – covered in gold & jewels with sides open so the public can see in – & paraded through the towns.

     For those of you filled with ambivalence or even antipathy for all things Catholic, the fact that Buselmeier originally made a name for himself in the early 80s with a novel in which a left-wing protagonist passionately protects his threatened urban habitat, may add a twist of lemon to the story -- (The Fall of Heidelberg / Der Untergang von Heidelberg, 1981).** On first sight German Catholicism and the grassroots-left are two worlds which could not be further apart. But look again, and you will find attitudes & behaviours shared by the two groups. A commitment to the cause that goes miles beyond the bounds of reason. A belief that the end (the triumph of Catholic values or the triumph of left-wing goals) can justify the means. And a need to do the same thing again and again, the need for ritual. Parading the streets following a piece of chewy dry bread, transformed into the body of Christ. To be seen again this year on the 30th of May. Or the left marching on the 1st of May, same old slogans, same old beer & sausages; the more energetic among them staying up to nightfall of that day, when the ritual throwing of bottles at the riot police, the ritual retaliatory riot police charge, the ritual sofa burning on the streets of Hamburg & other larger German cities commences.

** I made extensive use of Michael Braun's article about Michael Buslelmeier, p. 18, issue 3, 2012, of the print edition of Volltext to write this blog post.