That’s one of the questions Ulrich Blumenbach asked himself while translating David Foster Wallace’s monster-sized novel, Infinite Jest, into German. The process of making this translation, which was published late last year in Germany, is detailed today at Publishing Perspectives.

Interestingly, through a website dedicated to the translation Blumenbach found that there are some challenges when readers respond to Wallace’s notoriously tricky and often purposely “incorrect” English:

In one of many such examples, a November 18th comment on Blumenbach’s November 15th entry from a user called Ronald Bergner says, “I noticed a mistake: P 1,032 ‘Dieses Vorgehen bergte Risiken [...]’ Do you mean the past form of ‘bergen’ or something else?” Blumenbach responds the very next day: “Concerning the apparent mistake on P. 1,032: Wallace allows the narrator to assume the respective speech of the character (here of the Wheelchair Assassins), and ergo on P. 1032 the “French-ified” German that we otherwise associate with Marathe emerges. Wallace marks the French Canadians not by their incorrect pronunciation, as the French are recognized in jokes or comedies…but through very precisely mistaken verb forms, terms, and idioms…” and he proceeds to give several examples.

Interestingly, the blog where Blumenbach received the above feedback become something of a hub for him to interact with his readers, an experience that is described as “a positive one for him.” Maybe more translators should think about creating websites for their books?

The article also notes that Blumenbach will be translating Wallace’s incomplete posthumous “novel,” tentatively titled “The Pale King.”

Not to be lost amid Muriel Barbery and JMG Le Clezio at Lit&Lunch next week is Christian Bobin, who is huge in France but not so much over here. A good way to get an idea of this is to compare his Wikipedia pages in English and in French. To say the least, the French one is a bit more substantial. (Also check out how the French-language blogs hum with Bobin’s name.)

But reading Alison Anderson’s description of discovering and translating Bobin, he does sound like the kind of author with real potential to take off in the U.S., sort of like a Gallic Cesar Aira:

On every subsequent trip to France I bought up each new book; Bobin’s works are short, rarely more than a hundred pages, and he sometimes publishes several a year. I decided I would try to translate some of his short pieces. I sent them out; they came back; people didn’t get it. He’s not edgy, or trendy, or experimental; he’s deeply reflective, almost religious. Maybe people aren’t used to thinking about life in a philosophical way, at least not through literature. But while I may not have been doing a good job marketing or pitching Bobin to potential publishers and journals (something which Bobin would abhor, anyway, the whole commercial side of literature), I must have been doing something right in my translation, because in 2004 I was awarded an NEA translation grant for three short volumes, two of which, A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope You Would Come, have finally found a home at Autumn Hill Press and will be published at the end of this year.

Bobin is one of the authors you’ll be able to hear Anderson reading from and discussing at our Lit&Lunch on March 9. As always, RSVP at our Facebook page, and those who can’t attend can hear the audio that we’ll be making available online afterward.

And be sure to check publisher Autumn Hill’s website for more about Anderson’s two new Bobin books, A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope for You.

And for a little more Bobin, in our anthology Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed you can read Anderson’s translation from the yet unpublished La Dame blanche (”The Lady in White”), about that famous literary woman in white, Emily Dickinson.

With The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Tokyo Fiancee, and a Frenchman named JMG Le Clezio, translator Alison Anderson has had her share of success, something she’ll be sharing with the Center at Lit&Lunch on March 9.

Now she’s just published a translation of Consolation by Anna Gavalda in the UK, and it looks like more success is on the way:

Consolation follows the classic narrative arc of a principal character being jolted from the callow irresponsibility of youth through a wiser period of guilt to eventual redemption. Despite an awkward start, it makes an uncomplicated, easily digestible, cheering read; so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it became the best-selling French novel of 2008, moving over half a million copies and being translated into 32 languages. This achievement puts Anna Gavalda alongside well-established writers like Fred Vargas, whose compounding sequence of taut procedurals and thrillers has earned her a loyal reputation.

Gavalda’s success has enjoyed a similar steady growth. After widespread rejection, her debut collection of stories about love, penned while she was still a French schoolteacher, was published in 1999 by a small house. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, selling almost a million copies.

Don’t forget to join us for Alison Anderson in March. RSVP now to ensure your spot!

We’ve made available audio from our Lit&Lunch event last week with Susan Bernofsky. The full audio is right here.

In addition to talking a lot about The Tanners, the latest Walser book out from New Directions, Bernofsky read one of the microscripts from her forthcoming collection, called The Microscripts. These were full stories, in same cases in the tens of pages, that Walser wrote on single pieces of paper.

The forthcoming collection only represents a small fraction, as Bernofsky detailed during the event:

It represents approximately 1/20th of all that’s out there . . . they’re fascinating, fascinating stories. There’s so much untranslated Walser out there, even of his earlier works, [which will be translated] if people continue to be interested in reading them.

And later she speculated as when exactly Walser invented the method he used to write the microscripts, a matter of some debate:

Conventional wisdom is that he started them in the ’20s, or maybe in the very late ’10s. I believe he started experimenting with them much, much earlier, because in The Tanners he describes an incident writing where Simon sits down and writes something: “Winter arrived. Simon, left up to his own devices, sat dressed in a coat writing at the table in his small room. . . . He now saw and wrote as if offhandedly, without forethought on small strips of paper he’d cut to size with scissors . . .” And this cutting the paper into small strips with scissors before starting to write is something that was part of the micrography, the microscript writing. Simon sits down and writes something that’s eight book-pages long. . . . I take that to mean that Walser was already experimenting with small writing early.

That and more is all right here at our audio page.

Translation pops up in an interesting way in this article on Chinese author Louis Cha, who has perhaps sold a billion copies of his novels (if pirated editions are accounted for). Though Cha is a powerhouse in China, not much of his work is available in English, and here’s where translation pops up:

Many who want to read Louis Cha in English have found backdoor access to his books through the Internet. Nearly all of Cha’s novels are available in English as online bootlegs. The bootlegs are of varying quality, often communal efforts by wuxia enthusiasts, and sometimes the long serials are incomplete. According to Statbrain.com, just one of these sites averages over five hundred hits per day, which isn’t impressive by Internet standards, but when compared to how many hits per day many well-known small presses receive, it’s a respectable statistic. Furthermore, nearly every one of those five hundred hits is a downloaded book in translation. The fact is, there are more readers for Louis Cha in English than there are for many other novels.

The author of the article goes on to advocate reading Cha (though not bootlegs) and leaves it up to intrepid readers to take that as they will.

We’ve picked the winners of the drawing for our Natasha Wimmer-signed copy of 2666 and our Breon Mitchell-signed edition of The Tin Drum. First off, thanks to everyone who participated in this drawing by donating to the Center over the holidays. Every donation counts, and your support of the Center will enable us to keep promoting translation and translators this year.

Now on to the winners. First prize, receiving translator-signed copies of 2666 and The Tin Drum, plus a copy of the newest Two Lines anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, is Karen Miller. The winners of the two runner-up prizes, a translator-signed copy of The Tin Drum and a copy of Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, are the pairs Michael Metzger and Chikako Nakandakari, and Chiara Andres and Davi Robinowitz.

In this review of the new translation of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, Hans Kundnani gets in-depth with some of the issues of translation Breon Mitchell encountered:

Equally significantly, Mitchell aims to convey the way the language of the original text mimics Oskar’s drum. In one case, Manheim simply left out an apparently incoherent series of words at the beginning of a chapter in which Oskar describes his ability to “zurücktrommeln”, or “drum up the past”. Mitchell restores these words, translated as “Built up, chopped down, wiped out, hauled back, dismembered, remembered”, which suggest the manipulation of memory and convey the percussive effect of the original text.

At our Breon Mitchell Lit&Lunch event, the translator himself discussed just this issue. You can hear the percussive effect itself in action by checking out our audio from the event, where Mitchell reads from the book.

Don’t miss your chance to hear even more translation goodies when Susan Bernofsky comes to town next week. RSVP now on our Facebook page.

We’re just 8 days from our Lit&Lunch event with Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser, so I thought I’d present a roundup on some writing by and on Walser freely available online. The variety of venues you can find Walser in these days–as well as the quality of writing you’ll see–is a real testament to how far he’s come as a popular author in the U.S. So here are the resources:

Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker on Robert Walser:

As adolescents, he and Karl had apparently perfected the art of perching in a high window and throwing their hats onto the heads of passersby, and their mischief persisted in adulthood. One evening at a party, they challenged the famous playwright Frank Wedekind to a bout of Hosenlupf (literally, “trouser-hoist”), a Swiss wrestling variant that makes inventive use of an opponent’s waistband. When Wedekind, discomfited, fled to a café, his tormentors pursued him, hailing him with friendly, if cryptic, cries of “Muttonhead!” and causing him to get caught up in a revolving door. On another occasion, in a literary salon, Walser interrupted the high-flown talk by seizing a young Englishwoman’s leg and praising her small feet.

Three Stories by Walser, translated by Damion Searls, in Vice magazine (Note that for Walser “story” is a bit looser than for more authors. His short fictions really defy most ideas of what a story is, and they should be experienced.)

THE ITALIAN NOVELLA

I have strong cause to doubt if readers will like a story like this about two people, two little people, namely a charming nice young woman and an honest good and in his own way at least just as nice young man who enjoyed the most lovely and heartfelt relations of friendship with each other. The tender and passionate love they felt, each for the other, was like the summer sun in terms of heat and like December snow in terms of purity and chastity. Their kind mutual intimacy seemed unshakeable, and their fiery, innocent inclination toward each other grew from day to day like a wonderful plant rich in color and as rich in perfume. Nothing seemed able to disturb this very sweetest of conditions and very most beautiful trust, and everything would have been nice and perfect if only the honest good dear and young man were not deeply familiar with the Italian novella. . . .

Waggish on Walser’s novel The Assistant:

But what’s most striking is how the tone and scenario anticipate that of early Kafka, particularly that of “The Stoker” and the novel it became part of, The Man Who Disappeared (aka Amerika). Walser is often compared spuriously to Kafka, but in The Assistant, and not in any of his other work that I’ve read, I think there’s some merit to the comparison. . . .

JM Coetzee on Walser in The New York Review of Books:

In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox. Here is Jakob in reflective mood:

We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.

What is the mystery of Jakob? Walter Benjamin wrote a piece on Walser that is all the more striking for being based on a very incomplete acquaintance with his writings. Walser’s people, suggested Benjamin, are like fairy-tale characters once the tale has come to an end, characters who now have to live in the real world. There is something “laceratingly, inhumanly, and unfailingly superficial” about them, as if, having been rescued from madness (or from a spell), they must tread carefully for fear of falling back into it.

A Robert Walser Scrapbook at A Journey Round My Skull–a great list, with images, of Walser resources, many of which are hard to find

An excerpt from Susan Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners, which she’ll be reading from at Lit&Lunch

We’ve been talking a lot about Swiss novelist Robert Walser this month as we count down toward Walser-translator Susan Bernofsky’s appearance at Lit&Lunch on Feb. 9. (RSVP now to save a spot!) You might have noticed in my interview with Bernofsky last week that she mentioned one Carl Seelig, a “guardian” of Walser when he was in the mental asylum:

SE: Since you’re working on a biography of Walser, I’d like to ask what you think of his decision to quit writing, which he made in 1933 when he had a full 23 years yet to live. Do you have any theories as to why he chose this, or if he would have been able to produce anything worth reading during that period of his life?

SB: It’s far from certain that Walser ever stopped writing. His guardian Carl Seelig says that when he asked Walser about returning to the literary life, Walser brushed off the idea . . .

Seeling, in fact, regularly conversed with Walser for over 20 years, and you can read a number of these conversations right now. He collected the them into a book called Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (”Wandering with Robert Walser”), published in German, French, and Spanish editions. Though there is currently no published English translation, Walser-fanatic Sam Jones, and some collaborators, have been translating a publishing a free version online.

For instance, here’s a bit from the meeting that occurred on April 15, 1943, which happened to be Walser’s 65th birthday:

I bring Robert some birthday presents, which he coldly puts aside. We have hardly left the sanitarium grounds when he asks me what I was doing so long with Dr. Pfister. I tell him that we were talking about common friends among the Zurich doctors. This explanation appears to calm him, but even so the morning walk to Degersheim and Mogelsberg, in the low Toggenburg, is rather monosyllabic. He doesn’t answer my cautious question about the operation, so I immediately change the subject so as not to irritate him any further. After lunch we go up in elevation in the Herisau suburbs and sit in the sun with three bottles of beer on a terrace, where he is more comfortable and chat with the almost mechanically clattering innkeeper. To finish up we go to a tea house, where he devours eight little tortes with gusto. When we part, he says, most likely in reference to his sickness:

“There have to be unpleasant things in life, so that the beautiful things stand out better. Worries are the best teachers.”

These conversations between Seeling and the notably romantic, unpredictable Walser make interesting reads for anyone, and they’re absolute necessities for the Walser fans out there.

Congrats to translator Edith Grossman, who will be honored on Feb 2 with the $10,000 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her work on Antonio Munoz Molina’s novel A Manuscript of Ashes. Those in New York can attend a conversation between Munoz Molina and Grossman at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute.

An excerpt from Manuscript appeared in the Center’s 2008 anthology Strange Harbors, which is available for purchase here. Grossman was also a guest of the Center at Lit&Lunch, where she read from her translation of Manuscript and discussed Munoz Molina and issues of translation. Audio from that event can be heard at this link.