Comics Translation and Zombies: Uncomfortable Issues

I’ve known people who read and love comics, but I have never been into any comics myself. It was simply a lack of exposure, I think, because I’ve come to respect and appreciate the art form ever since I’ve been exposed to it in Case Studies this semester. Yes, like painting, sculpture, graphic design and all the rest, comics are a form, a way of presenting art. But it is also a form of writing, of literary and narrative effort. Since reading McCloud’s (2006) book Making Comics and making myself break the threshold of comics with an issue of Fables, I appreciate comics and see their entertainment value, but more importantly their readability—their multiple layers of characters, narratives and themes. I did not particularly like Fables itself, but I could see how complex comics could be. I learned how enjoyable they can be to read, though I admit I read quickly through the text and overlooked much of the art. I think comics, like drama, straddle different art forms, and like zombies which are both living and dead, indefinable forms are often difficult to accept. (Appropriately enough: The Walking Dead) It is difficult to read them, at least I found it so, because a person reads differently than he or she looks at art. Art you look at as a whole then read in parts; literature you read then look at as a whole (see Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective, (1978)).

I think people who don’t like comics have not found the right comic yet. I say the same thing of poetry. I haven’t found the right comic for me yet. I admit I haven’t started reading comics, but I do search for them. I think I have a difficult time, because my narrative style and artistic style are at odds. My literary tastes are in realism, or at furthest magical realism; my art tastes lean toward the abstract. A gap has not been bridged thus far, but I will find a comic some day. Recommendations welcomed. But it does take both to appeal to someone, both an appealing narrative or literary side and inviting artwork. That is the risk of such an art form. With the freedom to display your ideas pictorially comes the responsibility of displaying your ideas pictorially in addition to text. But the rewards, as I have heard from friends, are highly worth it.

In my experience attempting to translate for comics, I found brevity the most difficult issue. I constantly overwrote in German, and I doubt my translation would have been accepted anywhere for publication due to its length. It would not have fit in the speech bubbles. Translating for comics takes a similar, though certainly more extreme, amount of brevity as subtitling. Both are limited in space, but if the subtitle is a tweet of 140 characters, the speech bubble is half a haiku. Space is at a premium.

Cole Konopka is a translator of German to English, a writer, painter. He can be contacted at colekonopka@gmail.com.

 

The New Sorrows of a Young Translator

After two pages I chucked the thing across the room. I’m telling you, guys, you just could not read that shit. Even with the best will in the world. Then five minutes later I’d got hold of it again. Either I wanted to read till the early hours or not at all. That’s just what I was like. Three hours later I’d finished it.

Guys – I was majorly pissed off. The bloke in the book, this Werther, his name was – he commits suicide at the end. Just gives up the ghost. Puts a bullet through his fricking head because he can’t get the woman he wants, and feels mega sorry for himself the whole entire time.

 

This biting critique of one of the all-time classics of German literature – Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novelDie Leiden des jungen Werther (‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’) – is spoken by the protagonist of another popular German work called Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (‘The New Sorrows of Young W.’), written by Ulrich Plenzdorf and published in 1973. Plenzdorf’s hero, Edgar Wibeau, is seventeen years old and a self-styled ‘unrecognised genius’. He likes painting abstract pictures, listening to jazz and inventing things, none of which are very compatible with being a factory apprentice in small-town East Germany. Edgar therefore abandons his apprenticeship and runs away to Berlin to become an artist. He holes up in a friend’s empty summer house, where he stumbles upon Goethe’s classic novel. It consists of a series of letters written by an emotional young man called Werther, whose verbose, effusive style Edgar initially finds somewhat ridiculous. Eventually, though, Edgar comes to see Werther as a kindred spirit. Both young men are frustrated by the conformist, restrictive worlds in which they live – in Werther’s case the rigidly class-conscious society of eighteenth-century Germany, in Edgar’s the authoritarian regime of the Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1970s. Both protagonists feel unable to express their creativity, fulfil their ambitions, and live authentic lives within the confines of their respective societies, but Edgar expresses his frustrations in an ironic, slangy, modern idiom which is in stark contrast to Werther’s elevated language and tendency to wax lyrical.

 

I had to take all this into account when, as part of my final dissertation for the MA in Literary Translation, I translated the first 10,000 words of Plenzdorf’s The New Sorrows of Young W. The two biggest problems I faced were what to do with Werther – a figure well-known to most German-speaking readers but potentially unfamiliar to English-speaking ones – and how to translate Edgar’s GDR youth slang: should I use 1970s or twenty-first-century slang, where in the world should it come from, and could I make it sound convincing? Both problems turned out to be hugely enjoyable to (try to) solve, and both involved some fascinating research.

 

Plenzdorf’s book is closely tied up with Goethe’s in terms of themes, plot, and characters. Werther, for instance, falls in love with Charlotte, and Edgar with Charlie. Both women are already engaged when Werther and Edgar meet them, and both end up marrying sensible older men. I felt that in order to fully understand and appreciate Plenzdorf’s text, it would be helpful for readers of my translation to know a bit about The Sorrows of Young Werther. I therefore decided to write a Translator’s Preface providing information about the novel for readers who might not have come across it before.

I also had to deal with some direct quotes from Goethe’s text. While living in Berlin, Edgar records several messages to his best friend Willi onto cassette tapes. The messages are all quotations from Werther’s letters, which Edgar uses to express his own feelings and views on the world – in a language, however, that is so alien to poor Willi that he thinks it is some kind of code, and cannot understand a word. Edgar’s mother and father are similarly baffled. I knew that these ‘Wertherisms’ would need to sound as flowery and archaic in English as they do in German to justify the characters’ mystified reactions to them, and to capture the comedy generated in the German text  by the contrast between Edgar’s modern(ish) slang and Werther’s eighteenth-century rhetoric. I decided to lift the Werther quotes from an existing translation of Goethe rather than translating them myself, so that English-speaking readers of my translation might have a chance of recognising them (given that they would be recognisable to many German-speaking readers of the original text). The question was, which of the existing English translations of The Sorrows of Young Werther could supply the antiquated-sounding language I was after? I was thrilled to discover the following passage in a translation by R.D. Boylan from 1854:

Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.

 

Compare this with a 2012 translation of the same passage by David Constantine:

 

Friends, on both banks are the dwelling places of placid gentlemen whose summer-houses, tulip beds, and vegetable plots would be destroyed and who therefore in good time ward off the future danger by damming and diverting.

 

And, forsooth, I compared several different translations but it was Boylan’s – deliciously old-fashioned throughout – that won hands down.

 

When it came to translating Edgar’s language, however, I went in completely the opposite direction and used contemporary slang and colloquialisms, gleaned from slang dictionaries in print and online as well as from personal experience. As Michael Adams observes, ‘[s]lang is fresh and improvised, for the most part young language’ (2009:88). Slang that was in vogue in the 1970s, I felt, would not sound very fresh or improvised today. Slang also ‘indicates that the speaker is fun-loving, youthful and in touch with the latest trends’ (Coleman 2012:71), and I knew that if Edgar was to strike modern-day readers (particularly younger ones) as being ‘youthful and in touch with the latest trends’, he would need to use youthful, trendy slang.

 

I had decided when to locate my slang, then – knowing where it should come from was slightly more difficult. I didn’t want Edgar’s voice to sound too localised, as I felt it might be jarring for the reader to hear a German character speaking like a born-and-bred New Yorker or Yorkshireman, for example. I eventually opted for the strategy suggested by Susanne Ghassempur of using ‘a supraregional colloquial language that is universally understood by readers in the target language’ (2011:54). I tried to use slang and colloquialisms that were not strongly identifiable with any particular place (so Cockney rhyming slang was out, unfortunately!)

 

The work I have done for my dissertation, translating part of Plenzdorf’s text and writing a commentary explaining my translation strategies, has been a lesson in the potential neverendingness of translation. Firstly in the sense that I could work on this project for years – reading and comparing the many English versions of The Sorrows of Young Werther, consulting secondary literature on Plenzdorf and Goethe, researching the historical context of the GDR, poring over slang dictionaries, referring to books and articles on translation theory – without knowing everything there is to know. And secondly in the sense that, as I have realised over the past few months, different people could translate this book (or any book) over and over again forever, and each version of it would always be new, and would never be definitive. Language is always evolving (and slang evolves particularly rapidly). A text can be renewed in translation with each new generation of language users – with each new translator, in fact, since every translator will produce a different interpretation of a given text. The New Sorrows – and Joys! – of every translation can shed fresh light on an original text, and on whole multitudes of new linguistic possibilities.

 

References

Adams, M. (2009) Slang: The People’s Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Boylan, R. D. (tr.) (2009 [1854]) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther [Online]. Available at:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2527/2527-h/2527-h.htm [Accessed 6 August 2013]

Coleman, J. (2012) The Life of Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Constantine, D. (tr.) (2012) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ghassempur, S. (2011) in F. M. Federici (ed)Translating Dialects and Languages of Minorities,Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 49-64

Plenzdorf, U. (1973) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp (the extract quoted here is from page 36 of the original text and is my own translation).

‘Foreign lands’ in translations for children

 

Up into the cherry tree

Who should climb but little me?

I held the trunk with both my hands

And looked abroad on foreign lands.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Before studying it on the MA in Literary Translation, I hadn’t really given much thought to the issue of translating for children. Which is strange, perhaps, given that one of the stories I loved most as a child was a translated one: Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (also a favourite of the writer Michael Rosen, who is due to give a talk on the book at the Brighton Festival in May.)

The fact that Emil and the Detectives had been translated from German really didn’t matter to me when I read it as a child. What I was interested in were the characters, and the twists and turns of the plot. I certainly don’t remember being put off by what was ‘foreign’ in the story. The question of foreignness in a translated text and how it impacts upon young readers is one I find fascinating, having now explored some of the issues surrounding children’s literature and translating for young readers in more depth.

Do children dislike foreignness in texts, tolerate it, or positively relish it? And is that even a valid question to ask, since it lumps all children together under one umbrella? Children’s reading tastes vary enormously, just as adults’ do; some young readers are more willing to tolerate uncertainty than others, some love strange names or made-up words, some like fantasy and some like football stories. Factors such as age, gender and reading confidence may well come into play here, and a translator needs to bear these in mind when thinking about the target audience for any given translation. But even an individual child’s reading tastes can vary from week to week or from book to book. We should not assume we can always predict what children will enjoy or want to persevere with. Author Gillian Avery celebrates ‘the encouraging thought that you never know what [a child] is going to make of the material with which you confront him’ (1976:33).

Translators for children need to be careful, then, not to jump to conclusions about which elements of a source text their target audience will be interested in or able to cope with. This includes elements specific to the source language or culture – such as names of people or places or historical or literary allusions – that could potentially be unfamiliar to young readers in the target culture (what Ritva Leppihalme refers to as ‘culture bumps’, 1997). When I translated part of a German children’s book called Jette (aimed at readers of twelve and over) I came across several culture-bound elements which I felt might pose a problem for English-speaking readers of my translation.

Names of people and places didn’t actually fall into this category – I retained most of the characters’ original German names unaltered in my translation, knowing that children ‘can and do take delight in the sound and shape of unfamiliar names’ (Lathey, 2006:7). I did adapt the spelling of a couple of names – for instance, I changed the protagonist’s name, Jette (pronounced ‘yetter’), to Etta – but I only adopted this strategy when I felt that the spelling of the German name would cause major pronunciation difficulties in English.

However, when it came to some of the other culture-specific aspects of the text, I felt that a little more intervention was needed. The historical references found at several points in the book were a case in point. The extract I translated contained references to Hitler, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ‘Ossis and Wessis’ (nicknames referring to the citizens of East and West Germany in the era of the Iron Curtain). I was determined not to delete the references altogether, even though I knew they would quite possibly prove challenging for English-speaking child readers. My feeling was that part of the value of translating this particular book was surely to give English-speaking children an insight into Germany past and present. Göte Klingberg maintains that ‘one of the aims of translating children’s books must be to further the international outlook and the international understanding of young readers’ (1978:86). While I don’t think that this necessarily holds true for every translation, I felt that in this instance the historical references were so central to the text and to an understanding of Germany that it wouldn’t be appropriate to remove them.

Equally, though, if I’d retained them in translation exactly as they were I would have been failing to acknowledge an important fact: that the historical events in question are unlikely to be as familiar to UK children as to German children. I therefore decided to make some additions which would to help explain the references, and make them more accessible to my young target audience. At the same time, I didn’t want to turn an exciting story into a history lesson. I needed to work the explanations into the narrative unobtrusively. It is perfectly possible to do this in translation: Gillian Lathey notes that ‘[a] neatly disguised insertion conveys the necessary culture-specific information without jarring the narrative or alienating the young reader’ (2010:179). I inserted extra information ‘disguised’ as dialogue and free indirect discourse, in the hope that this would prevent the translation sounding too didactic while still helping readers to understand the cultural allusions.

Van Coillie and Verschueren point out that today ‘more and more translators, out of respect for the original text and because they want to bring children into contact with other cultures, choose to retain a degree of ‘foreignness’ in their translations’ (2006: viii). To me this shows an encouraging faith in children’s ability to tackle what is new and unfamiliar. Yes, ‘foreignness’ in a text may present a challenge – but it may also appeal to children’s curiosity, fire their imaginations, enable them (to borrow Robert Louis Stevenson’s words) to ‘look abroad on foreign lands’. And that is an opportunity I don’t think we should deny them.

 

Romy Fursland translates from German and French into English. She is studying for the MA in Literary Translation at UEA and is currently translating a selection of contemporary German poetry for the Translating ‘Live’ Poetry project organised by UCL and Poet In The City (www.ucl.ac.uk/spanishlatinamerican/news_events/repository/translating-live-poetry).

 

References

Avery, G.  in Fox et al (eds) Writers, Critics and Children, 1976

Leppihalme, R. Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, 1997

Lathey, G.  The Translation of Children’s Literature: a Reader, 2006

---- The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers, 2010

Klingberg, G. in Klingberg et al (eds) Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, 1978

Van Coillie, J. and Verschueren, W. Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, 2006