{"id":292306,"date":"2012-12-06T19:03:26","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T19:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/12\/06\/canvas\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:17","slug":"canvas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/12\/06\/canvas\/","title":{"rendered":"Canvas."},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Full Stop,<\/a> Scott Cheshire has a lot of love for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas<\/em>, including this review:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Canvas<\/em> is loosely based on the account of Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments<\/em> (1995), a tremendously popular Holocaust memoir; like Minksy\u2019s story it was proven to be a fabrication. But when I say loosely based, I mean loosely: Wilkomirski and Minsky are more like ghosts at the center of this book. There is plenty of plot, to be sure \u2014 murder, intrigue, interrogation rooms, the inevitable double-cross, and exotic locales \u2014 and the pages turn like in a supermarket thriller (or at least one daring enough to substantively tackle the inexhaustible questions of God, death, and memory). The book is ambitious in scope: it is about religious orthodoxy and the transgressive power of literature; it\u2019s also about collective guilt and national identity. Yet The Canvas<\/em> is so particular in its details that it comes with a glossary appropriately placed in the middle of the novel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Most disturbing of all, in a novel ultimately about the mutability of memory, are lines like this one from Wechsler: \u201cSomeone who stole other people\u2019s identities wouldn\u2019t stop short of murder.\u201d Is this true? And if so, what does it say about Minsky or Wilkomirski? Are they killers at heart? And what of Zichroni, who steals the memory of his patients by touch alone? And what of Wechsler, the man who steals Minsky\u2019s \u201cmemories?\u201d Or Wechsler, who confesses: \u201cI am what I remember. I don\u2019t have anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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A fabrication of character and memory, The Canvas<\/em> is both a great novel and a genuine Holocaust testimony, in that it bares witness to the lasting power of trauma and how it shapes the strange and subjective mystery of human experience. It is an upsetting book, unabashedly philosophical, refusing closure, and challenging the very notion of truth by reminding us how much depends on perspective. It also happens to be playful, suspenseful, and one hell of a page-turner. I could not put it down. Both times.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Additionally, Scott had the chance to interview translator Brian Zumhagen<\/a> and talk about some of the translation issues in doing this book:<\/p>\n

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In the case of an idiom like that, I\u2019m sure you\u2019re worried about losing meaning with an English version.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Any translator, or anyone who reads translation knows there will always be a loss. And there are certain things you can\u2019t do it at all. You can use a new idiom and hope it\u2019s not too bound up with your own particular moment in time. There are those cases when you know the translator was trying to be a little too hip. That\u2019s really painful. There\u2019s one expression where Wechsler is talking about going to Spain and he takes a bunch of unsolicited manuscripts with him in a suitcase, and he throws it out. And the expression is der Koffer mu\u00dfte dran glauben, or \u201cthe suitcase had to believe in it.\u201d What the hell does that mean? It actually means the suitcase had to go, that it had to die. It\u2019s a euphemism that sounds like the suitcase is getting its last rights. I wound up choosing the suitcase had to \u201cbite the dust\u201d because it has a similar meaning and has a similar gangsterish feel. I guess that\u2019s the one point where twenty years from now it may seem a little cheesy, I hope not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But in the book it also has the feel of an antiquated expression still in use.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Yes, and it\u2019s that way in German as well. That kind of thing was fun. I don\u2019t think anything in the book required too great a sacrifice. Which is why Benjamin\u2019s so happy with it. And most of the things that were really challenging linguistically were interesting to do. And most of them came up in chapter two. The biggest problem: Whechsler quotes a German translation of a Polish poem, and in that translation is a play on words that only exists only in the German, and it becomes central to his own explanation of life in East Germany. \u201cThey live in the basements of huge tenement houses, and only the shop-sign WRINGER<\/span> HERE<\/span> betrays their presence\u201d \u2014 In the German, mangel means \u201cshortage,\u201d as in the food shortage sense, but it also means \u201cwringer,\u201d as in pressing rollers used for pressing water our of clothes. I could have used the British term, \u201cmangle,\u201d which means the same thing, but then I\u2019d be going with UK usage when the rest of the book is American usage. And then I found that \u201cWringer\u201d is in the English translation by Czeslaw Milosz. And you don\u2019t argue with Milosz. The problem then is than that I had to invent a new sentence, reveal the proscenium arch a little bit, and explain to the reader that in German the word for \u201cwringer\u201d is the same for \u201cshortage.\u201d This is the last thing you want to do. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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How did Stein respond to it? I\u2019m guessing he appreciated how faithful you were.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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He was fine with it because it retained the meaning. I had to make a radical move but it worked out well. In that same chapter there was a more fun radical move, in which I had to quote Tina Turner. And in a way that does not appear in the original.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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This one I remember!<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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There\u2019s a section when Wechsler\u2019s wife is cataloging all of her book purchases, and Wechsler comments on the stories the inscriptions in her books tell. In one used book that she found at a flea market, there\u2019s a loving dedication between two women, and he wonders what may have happened? Did somebody die? Did the relationship end? Wechsler\u2019s wife, in the original, says, \u201cSomeone has sold their heart out for cheap.\u201d This is the expression. And immediately I thought of Tina Turner\u2019s \u201cwhat\u2019s love but a secondhand emotion,\u201d because the German here, vertr\u00f6deln, contains the word for junk like you\u2019d find at a flea market. So what Wechsler\u2019s wife is literally saying is, someone has second-handed her heart. The closest thing in English would be \u201csomeone has trifled her heart away,\u201d but nobody talks like that, and it doesn\u2019t sound antiquated in the German. It\u2019s too lofty. Nobody in the novel is saying anything like \u201cforsooth methinks someone hath trifled away her heart.\u201d I really hated the way it sounded. So finally I asked to Benjamin if he thought Wechsler\u2019s wife would quote Tina Turner. I\u2019m not sure he completely grasped what I was asking at that moment. So I went with: \u201cI guess sometimes love really is a second-hand emotion.\u201d Not a literal translation but it got to the heart of what she was saying. And he thought it was perfect.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Definitely worth checking out, as is Full Stop in general. It’s an excellent, excellent site. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Full Stop, Scott Cheshire has a lot of love for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, including this review: The Canvas is loosely based on the account of Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments (1995), a tremendously popular Holocaust memoir; like Minksy\u2019s story it was proven to be a fabrication. But when I say loosely based, […]<\/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":[67486],"tags":[33756,46996,5706,1646,49166,33766],"class_list":["post-292306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-benjamin-stein","tag-brian-zumhagen","tag-german-literature","tag-review","tag-scott-cheshire","tag-the-canvas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292306","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=292306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318756,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292306\/revisions\/318756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}