Rosa Luxemburg in English.

If you thought crowd-funding to finance translation & literature was something newish, like I did for at least a couple of days, well, then we were both wrong together. Going under the old term of collecting subscriptions, crowd-funding to publish print literature by major authors went on for centuries & at least into the 1930s. An American committee established in 1937 to finance W.B.Yeat’s writing raised the equivalent of $96 000 USD in today’s money (or €74 000), which helped Yeats go on producing world class literature in the last 18 months of his life. What is new about the Toledo Translation Fund, established this year to support the translation into English of major works in the humanities and social sciences, from a wide range of world languages and cultures, are the dynamics of donating.

(I was given the above photo by a friend, of this moving painting of Luxemburg painted in 1928)

And the guys running the TTF -- under the leadership of Prof. Peter Hudis --  have chosen a more than dynamic author to translate, for the first major work in the series. Rosa Luxemburg (1871 - 1919) -- whose Complete Works are due to be published, thanks to the TTF, for the first time in English by Verso, in 14 volumes from February 2013 on. Those of you who've stuffed Rosa Luxemburg into the drawer marked “difficult, political, avoid”, may want to take a peek at Jacqueline Rose's fiery review in the LRB of the companion volume, titled The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, review available here.

Jacqueline Rose would like us to pull Luxemburg back out of the drawer & stick on new labels: “must-read, audacious, lyrical”. To get a comprehensive introduction to Rosa Luxemburg as an historical figure, listen to this radio programme on the American college station Against The Grain. Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works should also break down other categories inside our minds: does our fascination with / professional work in translated fiction mean we're somehow disinterested in translated literary non-fiction? Which of us manage to be simultanously really into Ingo Schulze's novels but able to blank out all his critiques of capitalism, shouting out from any German newspaper you care to open?

Your own answers to these questions can tell us why the TTF model could also work for translating fiction in the future. Enough people enthusiastic about a book or group of books, & willing to put their credit cards where their mouths are: and then new ideas can move into new worlds. As you may have guessed by now, I'm going to be one of the translators in the translation-team for the Luxemburg edition, so my interest in the Toledo Fund raising the $ 11 000 / c. € 8500 it still needs -- (up to know they've already raised $ 19 000 / c.€14500) -- is not solely altruistic. And I'm going to be enjoying the fundraising work, by sending the appeal letter (no email for such serious matters) to famous well-off Germans who have at any time shown an interest in that side of philosophical & political life that Luxemburg embodies. You know the type: champagne socialists, others we may love to hate, others still who we would love even more if we knew more of them -- Günter Grass, Stefan Raab, Fritz Raddaz, Charlotte Roche, Gregor Gysi, Ingo Herzke -- and a hundred other individuals of that ilk who might wish to back the intellectual inheritance of one of the most intriguing women in German history. Writing to celebs & the nearly-famous in the off chance they'll back your project isn't just childish, it has pedigree: a good Hamburg friend got £1000 for acting school through an unsolicited letter to Anthony Hopkins. And a very polite refusal letter from Richard Briers as part of the same fundraising offensive.

So, if you're now itching to lunge for the credit card & donate online to making quality translation happen, then ... Don't let me stop you:

toledotranslationfund.org

 With many thanks,Willie MacFarlane

Play review. Reasons to be Pretty.

            There may be several reasons for you not to go and see Reasons to be Pretty running this autumn at The English Theatre, Hamburg, but the acting should not be one of them. Jed Shardlow, Madeleine Hutchins, Chris Casey and Gabrielle Douglas all act with intensity in a play and serving a script that is undeserving of their abilities.

            Steph (played by Madeleine Hutchins) reacts furiously when she hears from her friend Carly that Steph’s partner, Greg, had described her face as, ‘regular.’ Carly had overheard this statement, part of a conversation between Carly’s husband, Kent, and Greg. This single, ‘regular’ provides the main textual motivation behind the one-hundred minutes of theatre that follow. It spurs Steph onto ending her relationship with Greg, and to finding a new marriage partner who will say exclusively those things about her appearance that her fetishism of her own body demands.

            That this plot contrivance is in itself unconvincing is beside the point. It’s rather how this device is blindly used to attempt to force a message that the play as a whole is refusing to carry.

      The action closes with Greg telling us in a soliloquy how he’s done penance for his ‘regular’ faux-pas, how he now’s learnt something essential about human interaction: “what does it take to be nice? Hardly anything at all.” Yet all significant deeds in the play we’ve just seen have had nothing to do with the virtue of niceness. Justifying breaking up a long-term, fairly successful relationship on the pretext of a single, tactless comment made by your partner. Starting an affair when your wife – who you’re strongly sexually attracted to – is eight months pregnant. Finding the will-power to end a best-friendship after years of knowing your best-friend’s a bullying yob. All zero-niceness actions. The zero location being pretty much where Greg’s personable, closing plea floats off to, unable to connect itself with anything we’ve just seen, or imagined seeing.

Who cannot tell a thistle from a rose

      Orthodoxy will tell you that bloggists should stick to their declared subject, that someone who purports to blogging about translation should not diverge onto republican polemics, or onto the architechture of their home city. For – so runs the argument – so to do could mean losing any readers one might have for not obeying the commandment of Relevance & Utility. If the implicit reason for your blog existing is to get you lit. translation contracts, then Thou shallt not talk about Edinburgh fashions, nor shallt thou report on why Scottish museums are far superior to German ones. As the orthodox are holier than thou, thou shallt definitely keep your dirty hands off the Order of the Thistle.

      The counter-orthodoxy will tell you another story. Translators are actually a sub-species of the genus author, & which author have you enjoyed reading who hasn't a touch of something universal to them? Even if blogs are partly written for the publishers you don't yet know and probably never will, which publisher – however beguiled they are by contemporary German literature – is only beguiled by that? (If there are such, would we want to have anything to do with them?) And who's blogging about the psychological discomfort of their job as a literary translator – why won't your prize-winning colleague post online about her latest commission, her first translation where she truly ''loathes'' the book?

       Which brings us back, degree by slow degree, to the Order of the Thistle. The most honourable, ancient, prickly, shagacious and thistle-ly Order of the Thistle induces knights into its blooming lower drawers in a ceremony at St. Giles Kirk, Edinburgh, every July, a ceremony we happened to chance upon during our annual state holiday to Auld Reekie last week. After strolling up from our summer residence in Ramsay Garden's charming vernacular, we sight-see-ed in thick har around the castle esplanade, observing rituals of pomp & wooly-tassles that sent our four-year old boy into shrills of excitement. (''Bravo!'' he cries as the soldiers, poker-faced defying the ridiculous, change the guard & shout something ''un – in -TELLLLigbLe!!! '') Then a tour bus drew-up & out tottered a crew in green uniform with three arrows & bow hanging down each of their backs, the Queen's Very Own Home Fire Guard we find out later. They're faces show all the tell-tale signs of lives of aesthetic comfort in the Home Counties: minor aristos, they look distinguished in the way you & I would also do, if we could only lay our hands on those quantities of regular money & property over five centuries. Aware that merely to fart at the plebs in 2012 will no longer do, one of the bufties engages me in banter, at which all my most firey leftist-republican principles seep like pee through my shoe soles, and I supply deferential questions regarding the queen and which thistle-cock she'll be laying regally on whose shoulder-blades today. The average age of these chaps is over seventy. When Scotland & England become republics, I do hope this lot will continue to make themselves available for hire. Which kill-joy republican wouldn't pay to see them in close medieval combat with the remanants of Al-Quaida, they're bow strings trembling against a sky raining down with stones, fired from giant catapults?

      After obtaining details of Our Majesty's movements from this gentleman, our family scurried down, caps in hands, to the Deacon Brodie corner of George IV bridge–Mound crossroads, where amid a crescendo of groans, grunts & murmers from gathering crowds, we wait for H.R.H to come at last. As we wait tourists identify natives & demand to know of them: ''but what is zis auda of ze zistle? What is happ-e-ning ?'' Natives explain that William is to be knighted by The Queen today into the O.O.T.T., declaring with heart-felt bunk that this is ''a real honour!'' (Gasp, gosh, gosh!) For whom – for us? For William? We shiver, kids are lifted up, kids stumble onto the still busy road & are scooped up again, the Queen's Very Own Fire Guard march past, behind them the Royal House Band playing something jolly & triumphant though not obviously Scottish. And queenie finally comes, who we don't at first recognise, she's one of 13 entering the kirk in deep green robes; we see Kate's back in mauve–camel from 200 M distance & immediately my wife declares: ''she looks beautiful!'' My son has mostly seen the top of other people's legs in the crowd but is dead-set afterwards that he, too, has seen the queen.

      And who'll guess the punch-line, what do these Thistle-Members have to do with literary translation? Economically they're all somewhere else than 95% of paid translators: they feel under no pressure to sell their labour as a commodity. She'll come back to her compact & pleasing Hamburg flat after six hours a day doing her head in translating a Lithuanian novel set among Russian speaking immigrants in Denmark, a book she defends as ''worthwhile'', a book she dislikes. We haste to pack ourselves in like sardines to the overbooked Birkbeck lit. translation summer school, to get that quality tuition as one of just 84 students in the German group, to put hours into translating a tale of an emotionally needy dog. We may not value this text, but our heart's set on the good paid work & we won't let a bit of thorny tedium prevent us gaining entry to this particular Rightful Order of Honourable Underpaid Freelancers. While through all these times, their minds unbothered by earning incomes, the O.O.T.T. may devote themselves to the thrilling art of inserting Caledonia's bonniest floo'ers into each others most ancient, and honourable, orifices. The kicks only really start however, when, leather gloved, you slowly start to pull the plants back out again.