{"id":282096,"date":"2011-02-07T15:36:50","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T15:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/02\/07\/visitation-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T15:26:29","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T15:26:29","slug":"visitation-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/02\/07\/visitation-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/","title":{"rendered":"Visitation [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Similar to years past, we\u2019re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA<\/span> Fiction Longlist<\/a> over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we\u2019re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as \u201cwhy this book should win.\u201d Some of these entries will be absurd, some more serious, some very funny, a lot written by people who normally don\u2019t contribute to Three Percent. Overall, the point is to have some fun and give you a bunch of reasons as to why you should read at least a few of the BTBA<\/span> titles.<\/em><\/p>\n

All posts in this series can be found here.<\/a> Today\u2019s entry is from Katy Derbyshire, translator from German and curator of Love German Books.<\/a> And the book she loves is<\/em> Visitation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Visitation<\/em><\/b> by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky<\/p>\n

Language:<\/b> German
\nCountry:<\/b> Germany
\nPublisher:<\/b> New Directions
\nPages:<\/b> 150<\/p>\n

Why It Should Win:<\/b> Susan Bernofsky; in a sense, the main character is a house; Susan Bernofsky; the translation of the title (Heimsuchung<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Visitation<\/em>,<\/a> quite plainly, should win the BTBA<\/span> because it\u2019s a babe of a book, written by a thinking reader\u2019s babe of an author and put into English by thinking reader\u2019s babe of a translator. I\u2019m allowed to say that; I\u2019m a woman.<\/p>\n

That may not be enough for you\u2014although lord knows it should be, because it\u2019s not just that men get much more review coverage, it also just happens to be more often men who win these literary and translation prizes, so my facetious argument is actually striking a blow for feminism. But in the interest of fairness, I shall provide a few more details.<\/p>\n

Jenny Erpenbeck is an opera director who writes stunning novels. You might want to read that sentence twice because it\u2019s so awesome. She once pretended to be 17 and went back to high school to research a book. Her mother was a highly respected translator from Arabic. And I\u2019ve met her and she\u2019s gorgeous.<\/p>\n

Susan Bernofsky is a translator, scholar, writer and blogger.<\/a> She teaches translation and creative writing and has written a biography of Robert Walser, who she also happens to translate. She\u2019s co-curating the Festival Neues Literatur in NYC<\/span> as we speak. And I\u2019ve met her and she\u2019s gorgeous. I was totally intimidated at first but then realized she\u2019s not only one of the most impressive translator babes ever (and believe me, there\u2019s a lot of tough competition on that front), she\u2019s also actually really nice.<\/p>\n

Just a quick recap here: we have two women both utterly devoted to and excellent at what they do. If that\u2019s not worth a prize I don\u2019t know what is. But you may be one of those people who thinks it\u2019s books and not people that deserve prizes. In that case, you\u2019ll want to know something about the book these two \u00fcber-babes have been generous enough to give us, I suppose.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a structure you may be familiar with: the house as the element uniting a series of narratives, as in Alaa-al-Aswany\u2019s Yacoubian Building<\/em>, Elif Shafak\u2019s Flea Palace<\/em>, and Nicole Krauss\u2019s latest. Only Erpenbeck takes a very thorough chronological approach, going right back to the formation of the land itself, the previous owners of the plot, the house\u2019s architect, and so on to its demolition some time after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because the house is not far outside of Berlin, and so a witness to all that twentieth-century German history.<\/p>\n

What I particularly adore about the novel is that it doesn\u2019t focus solely on the Nazi era. But that\u2019s a personal thing; I can only assume everyone else in the English-speaking world is utterly fascinated by Nazis, judging by the number of books dealing with them, either written in English or translated. So don\u2019t worry, there are some Nazis and some murdered Jews and some collaborators in amongst all the other beautifully sketched characters. And to get to Susan Bernofsky\u2019s excellent work, each section is written in a different style, gorgeously rendered in English as in German.<\/p>\n

In other words, this is a novel with brains, brawn and beauty\u2014it\u2019s basically a babe of a book. If the BTBA<\/span> were Miss World, Visitation<\/em> would win the swimsuit competition and then turn down the main prize because she had to work on actually forging world peace once she\u2019d completed her Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Similar to years past, we\u2019re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we\u2019re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as \u201cwhy this book should win.\u201d Some of these entries will be absurd, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[37856,5706,9506,24856,56,1646,23836,35136,37876],"class_list":["post-282096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2011","tag-german-literature","tag-jenny-erpenbeck","tag-katy-derbyshire","tag-new-directions","tag-review","tag-susan-bernofsky","tag-visitation","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282096"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397552,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282096\/revisions\/397552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}