{"id":419282,"date":"2019-04-24T15:00:07","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T19:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=419282"},"modified":"2019-04-23T16:34:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T20:34:29","slug":"interview-with-damion-searls-about-anniversaries-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/04\/24\/interview-with-damion-searls-about-anniversaries-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Damion Searls about Anniversaries [Part II]"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m on a self-imposed hiatus from writing posts for this site until I finish two other articles for other publications (almost done!), but I am lifting this restriction for one post to share the next set of answers from Damion Searls in my (probably never-ending) interview with him about Uwe Johnson’s\u00a0Anniversaries<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

To set this up, you might want to read Part I<\/a> and\/or this write-up<\/a> about the first of the four parts of the massive novel.<\/p>\n

If you don’t feel like reading either of those, here’s what you need to know about\u00a0Anniversaries\u00a0<\/em>before reading Damion’s responses:\u00a0Anniversaries <\/em>centers on Gesine Cresspahl, a young mother living in New York in 1967 with her daughter, Marie. Using a diary format, she recounts their life in NYC while also explaining the history of her family back in Eastern Germany in the build-up to World War II. The diary entries range from recaps of what was in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>that day to long stories to Marie about Germany to short anecdotes about their trips to Staten Island and the like.<\/p>\n

I think that’s all you need to know. Probably. These questions are kind of in the weeds, but I think you’ll find them interesting\u2014even if you haven’t read the book.<\/p>\n

Chad W. Post: One thing that struck me in reading the first volume of the book was Marie\u2019s age. She\u2019s supposed to be 10, but does a lot of things\u2014exploring the new subway lines on her own, doing a lot of shopping alone, very politically aware (which doesn\u2019t seem too out of keeping with her age)\u2014that don\u2019t really seem age appropriate. (I barely trust my eleven-year-old to change his underwear on a daily basis.) Times were different, I suppose? Or, what occurred to me as I started reading this second part, was that Gesine is the one describing Marie\u2019s action. And in both a conversation with Marie about Robert Papenbrock and one of the internal ones with Jacob, Gesine acknowledges either leaving out particular information or refashioning it for the story. So maybe this is Marie as being told to us by Gesine? And not Marie a very-realistic-depiction-of-a-10-year-old-in-1967? I don\u2019t necessarily have a question about this, except that I wonder if the \u201cbelievability\u201d of Marie\u2019s age struck you at all as you read\/translated?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Damion Searls: Marie as a precocious child is one of the things that strike most readers of the novel. As a very eminent realist novelist commented to me over email (in private, so I won\u2019t say who it is), precocious kid characters are really hard to pull off, in novels or movies, but when it works they\u2019re amazing, and Johnson really nails it, in this writer\u2019s opinion and in mine.<\/p>\n

What Marie does is certainly different from children today, for instance in the great chapter where she explores the new NYC subway lines on her own, but I have to say that I was a child in New York not too long after her, in the 70s, and I took the subway by myself at age six or seven, for example, so I don\u2019t think it\u2019s that unrealistic.<\/p>\n

Probably more interesting is what these aspects of Marie\u2019s personality say about her character. I mean think about it: she has no father, minimal to no extended family, she moved to a new country speaking a foreign language at age 3\u2014she has had NO ONE in the world except Gesine, and has obviously adapted accordingly. Naturally she\u2019s going to be independent, with interesting things to say about intellectual topics, someone who pleases adults, and so on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s smart of you to think about the fact that Gesine is shaping the presentation (the way she also, of course, shapes the child by being her mother!). There\u2019s an incredible chapter you\u2019ll get to soon where Gesine suddenly asks Marie: So, what do you <\/em>think of my family? and Marie gives her take, and we suddenly realize that the whole third-person novel we\u2019ve been getting about Germany is a first-person story after all, shaped by Gesine. As the book goes on, especially near the beginning of Part 3, there\u2019s an increasingly clear story arc of Marie\u2019s growing confidence and self-awareness: she is more and more able to challenge Gesine and is slowly getting closer to adolescent rebellions.<\/p>\n

CWP: Another thing I\u2019m obsessed with right now (and\/or have been for ages) are various patterns in narrative structure. Anniversaries basically declares its cyclical structure in both title and diary structure. There\u2019s also the parallel between the advent of World War II and the ongoing Vietnam War in a \u201chistory repeats itself\u201d style. But what particular draws me to this book, so far, is how time is represented in the two-plus narrative styles. There\u2019s: 1) the faster moving Germany sections in which years pass, and time elapses between visits to that storyline; 2) the daily occurrences reported in the New York Times and relayed in a factual, of-the-moment fashion; and 3) Gesine\u2019s accounts of their days, which are in between the two in terms of narrative compression. What I\u2019m more curious about\u2014and in part because of your comment that this was initially intended to be a trilogy, which you can see in the three water scenes\u2014is is there is another level of organization that a first-time reader might not pick up on. Like the three water scenes that open books I, II, and III, but not IV, or more subtle things about how frequently certain settings\/situations\/characters recur. A more simply way to ask all this: Are there other markers I should be noting as I read through this the first time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

DS: The swimming scenes are the most apparent markers\u2014there are a few others I know about (e.g., one all-New York Times <\/em>chapter per part), but I don\u2019t think they\u2019re very important to readers, or to me as a translator. I think that\u2019s one of the strengths of the book, actually. Compared to, say, Dante, where every little piece fits together into this giant system, or Proust, which gets so much of the big picture into every little detail\u2014practically any pair of adjectives describing any noun in the book is the whole polarity and structure of the Proustian universe in microcosm\u2014Anniversaries <\/em>is much looser. There is an openness to different kinds of material, new ways of telling the story, the book is actually very playful and moves more unpredictably.<\/p>\n

And in any case, the structure changes and kind of falls apart in part 3, which turned into parts 3-4\u2014the balance between the storylines shifts, which is why those months got so much longer.<\/p>\n

CWP: Silly technical translation question: Did you refer to any of the actual NY Times articles when translating those bits?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"DS: Absolutely, of course. Sometimes Johnson\/Gesine is directly quoting Times <\/em>articles (translating them into German), so I wasn\u2019t going to try to reverse-engineer the English; more often, Gesine is filtering the Times<\/em>, emphasizing or being sarcastic about various bits, and so I would refer to the English, decide where I thought Gesine was changing the article instead of just translating it, and then morph the English to match. Plus the language was just different then than it is now: the still-new term \u201cteen-ager\u201d was hyphenated; they referred to \u201cNegro\u201d issues, of course, including \u201cracial disorders\u201d instead of unrest or violence; Vietnamese place names were spelled differently; the whole tone was slightly different. Things brings in good sixties texture. I was sometimes sad to lose some of the nuance or humor in Johnson\u2019s translations\u2014for example, the informer explaining drug slang to the Times <\/em>saying \u201cGeschwindigkeit ist t\u00f6dlich,<\/em>\u201d i.e., \u201cRapidity is deadly,\u201d as Johnson\u2019s very German translation for \u201cSpeed kills\u201d: I think that\u2019s funny and I tried to think of a way to keep it in without it being too obtrusive, but eventually I let it go.<\/p>\n

CWP: There is so much violence permeating this book\u2014the Times reports, the mafia section in book I (which was the weirdest bit to me), the wars\u2014and yet there\u2019s such a sense of calmness to this book. Part of that, I think, is due to the tight focus on the characters as characters, but there are other craft things that keep the violence as a sort of lurking backdrop rather than the sole focus. Not sure if you\u2019d agree with me, or if I could properly articulate all those techniques (the pastoral depictions of Jerichow that accompany the changing social situation, Marie\u2019s seeming invulnerability giving the reader a sense of security, the switch to more domestic interests like marriage after chapters of more upheaval), but I wondered if this informed your writing of the text. If there were particular words or phrasings that you avoided or tones you leaned into in order to maintain this tension.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

DS: That\u2019s a perceptive and sensitive way to put it\u2014I hadn\u2019t thought of it quite that way. I agree that Johnson\u2019s lyricism and sensitivity to nature (sunsets, rivers, light and water) are crucial and beautiful counterpoints to the brutal history. Marie is certainly confident, but it\u2019s hard for us as adults to have faith in her own sense of invulnerability, so that doesn\u2019t feel safe and secure to me. I tend to think more about Gesine\u2019s pretty strong defense mechanisms, her ways of trying to keep experience and history at least partly under control, so I don\u2019t think of it as calm, exactly. The more outwardly cool she is, the more turmoil and horror she\u2019s trying to keep at bay.<\/p>\n

Johnson, a bit like Gesine, almost-suppresses a lot: he writes in a very slanting and sometimes cryptic German, where it\u2019s not always obvious what\u2019s going on and a tiny little nuance is all he gives the reader to figure it out with. This is like life, of course, where we have to interpret people from occasional encounters and glancing gestures.<\/p>\n

In terms of the tone, that\u2019s what I was thinking about most: compression, rapidity, little sharp details that open up into much wider meanings but don\u2019t spell everything out. Which is hard as a translator, because I have to figure it out and then compress it down again\u2014unpack everything and then \u201crepack\u201d it, you might say. My best example of this comes in Part 4\u2014ask me about it then if you\u2019re still interested!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m on a self-imposed hiatus from writing posts for this site until I finish two other articles for other publications (almost done!), but I am lifting this restriction for one post to share the next set of answers from Damion Searls in my (probably never-ending) interview with him about Uwe Johnson’s\u00a0Anniversaries.\u00a0 To set this up, […]<\/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":[68202,68442,1356,68432],"class_list":["post-419282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-2019-translations","tag-anniversaries","tag-damion-searls","tag-uwe-johnson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419282","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=419282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419332,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419282\/revisions\/419332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}