Interview with Anthea Bell, the translator of

Austerlitz

Anthea Bell: Oh, always. All the time, except in the most uninspiring texts, which most definitely do not include Max Sebald’s. A translator can go on changing things for ever, having second thoughts, third, fourth and fifth thoughts, sometimes going back to first thoughts in the end. One is never satisfied. And of course no two translators will produce exactly the same version of any given passage – that is for machine translation, and a hilarious muddle machine translation makes of it. The human translator is not going to be superseded in the foreseeable future. What one always hopes to do is reflect the author’s original voice while making the translation genuinely accessible in English. With Max Sebald in particular, his scrupulous use of language calls for the most careful attention. I was lucky to have the benefit of his opinions throughout the translation of Austerlitz, but more of that below.

Penguin: People do not normally associate comedy with Sebald’s writing, but there are several strains of quiet humour in the novel, finding the ridiculous amid the pompous or the tragic.  Does translating humour pose particular challenges?

Anthea Bell: You are quite right about the humour in the novel. I particularly enjoyed Max’s account early in the book of the grandiose construction and, as he puts it, ‘paranoid elaboration’ of ever larger and increasingly useless military defences and fortresses. He also has a description of the equally paranoid grandeur of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, which in fact I quoted in a paper given at a seminar on translating humour. The seminar was called Traduire le Rire, and was the brainchild of the late Edith McMorran. It had been fixed for the weekend after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and Edith decided to go ahead, although some of her speakers were marooned in the United States and unable to fly to the UK. All of us who did get to Oxford to deliver our papers thought Edith was right not to cancel the whole thing. Humour, after all, is a weapon to be turned against totalitarian and terrorist structures.

And yes, translating humour in general does pose challenges – not so much the gentle irony to be found in Austerlitz, but there are instances from my own experience where puns and wordplay are involved and must be reinvented in translation. The Astérix le Gaulois saga is an extreme example: especially challenging, but also especially enjoyable.

At the moment I am conducting a small personal crusade to explode the widespread myth that the Germans have no sense of humour. If Max Sebald, in an extremely serious book, can write passages quotable in the context of a paper on translating humour, that in itself says something. And I noticed, in the readings preceding the award ceremony of the various translation prizes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last autumn, that the only two to get a laugh were from the German: David Constantine reading a couple of poems from his brilliant translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air, which won the poetry translation prize, and a passage that I read from Karen Duve’s black comedy Rain, the German prize-winner. The other readings, from French, Dutch, Swedish and Spanish, were all magnificent translations, but there wasn’t a humorous moment among them.

Penguin: Are there any great works you would like to retranslate?

Anthea Bell: Well, translations do inevitably date, a fact frequently pointed out, most recently by Umberto Eco in his Mouse or Rat? I have recently had the interesting experience of being one of the translators in the New Penguin Freud series, although that series was not intended to replace the standard versions but was designed for the general reader, hence the use of so-called literary translators rather than psychoanalysts. I found working on my own title, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, at first a rather alarming and then a fascinating and absorbing task. A few years ago I translated E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr for Penguin Classics, and I would very much like to translate some more Hoffmann some day. Some of his stories have been much translated (both Penguin and OUP have excellent selections), but there are others that are still under-represented in translation. You often have to explain to people that there is no such single book as ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’ – that’s just the title of Offenbach’s opera. The tales themselves are scattered throughout his considerable body of work. For a man who died at forty-six his output was amazing, particularly when you remember that he also held down a day job in the legal profession and had been a career musician and composer.

Penguin: How do you feel about the profile of translated literature in the UK?  Are we made lazy by the volume of English language writing?

Anthea Bell: In my view the profile of translated literature in English is improving. The balance between works translated into and out of English is notoriously disproportionate, but I do think that foreign books are getting a larger share of the market now, and English-language publishers are more willing to consider them. Such initiatives as the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize have certainly been influential.

Penguin: You had a very close working relationship with Sebald before his death.  How different have you found working on his writing in the years since?

Anthea Bell: I did indeed, as you say, have a close working relationship with Max Sebald – it was a great experience. Some phrases we tossed back and forth between us in up to half a dozen letters before we were both satisfied. Max was not a man for computers at all, let alone e-mail, so we conducted a traditional snail-mail correspondence. Because his own English was so good, I was delighted when I could introduce Max to a term he didn’t already know. Over the top of ‘traveller’s joy’ in the draft of Austerlitz, as one of the vernacular names for wild clematis, he wrote in : ‘What a lovely name.’

Max was very knowledgeable about plants as well as lepidoptera, by the way. Moths make their way through his work. I had to confess that all my life I have suffered from quite a bad moth phobia, which I think amused him. (It’s not an uncommon one, if less usual than classic arachnophobia.) I could translate the passage where young Austerlitz and his friend Gerald go moth-watching with Gerald’s genial Uncle Alphonso and enjoy it, but in real life I would have fled the scene screaming in panic. In fact my phobia came in quite useful: not all the vernacular names cited are exactly the same moths as in the German. Max wanted the general effect rather than exact equivalents of the German names. I had once tried to cure my phobia by the cognitive method – accustoming myself slowly to the object of my terror; the total immersion method is too horrifying for cowards to contemplate. But I found that instead of looking at the pictures of moths in a butterfly-and-moth book, I was listing their beautiful vernacular English names as a kind of displacement activity. So I offered Max my list of names, and he chose the ones he liked – some, but not quite all, actual translations of the German moth names.

When he tragically died, we had worked our way together through the translation of the main part of the essays now published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction. This change of title from the German Luftkrieg und Literatur [Air War and Literature], by the way, is amply justified by a long essay in the forthcoming Campo Santo on some of the same themes as those treated in the book; that essay already bears our new book title. The English edition of the book includes that main part, a critique of post-war German literature originally delivered as lectures in Switzerland, and then essays on three German writers: Alfred Andersch, Peter Weiss and Jean Améry. Max’s notes on my translation of the Andersch essay were found on his desk after his death, and I spent a very strange day going through them and incorporating them in my draft. Helpful as ever, he had noted my comments on the difficulty of conveying in English translation some of the stylistic infelicities he deplored in Andersch – especially as one of the main passages quoted was from a novel published in English in a translation by the late Ralph Manheim, who would have found it hard to be infelicitous – and he had cut some of his quotations and added a little explanatory passage especially for the English edition. After that I was on my own. In the Weiss and Améry essays, as in Campo Santo, I just tried to keep second-guessing, asking myself what Max might have thought of this phrase or that.

Campo Santo, by the way, is a collection of prose texts on Corsica and essays of literary criticism, all previously published in various journals except for the longest of the Corsican pieces, but never before in book form. Both the Corsican passages and the essays touch on many of Max’s favourite subjects and authors (Nabokov and Kafka), and one of the essays, which takes as its point of departure a book by the German film actor Hanns Zischler, quite recently published in English by Chicago University Press in a translation by Susan Gillespie, as Kafka Goes to the Movies, casts considerable light on Max’s own ideas about photographic images. He famously used photographs not exactly as illustrations to his books but as tangential comments. I have often been asked about the point of those photographs, and once Campo Santo is published I shall be able to refer people to the essay on Zischler’s book.

Penguin: How hard is it to find a balance between literal and literary translation?

Anthea Bell: Balance is indeed the word. Of its very nature translation is an illusion, because readers are not looking at the author’s actual words, but the translator hopes to persuade them that they are! I regard it as a constant balancing act. Fall off the high wire, and reviewers will instantly, and rightly, accuse you of translationese. You have a double duty: to the author and to the reader. There is at present a debate in the new academic discipline of Translation Studies about the merits of so-called visible and invisible translation. Visibility is the fashion – allowing the foreignness of the original text to show through, maybe even with explanatory footnotes. If asked, I define myself as an old-fashioned, unreconstructed invisible translator who hopes to seduce the reader into feeling that a book might have been written in English in the first place. But in practice, frankly, I think the debate is indeed academic and just that, for I see little real difference between self-proclaimed visible and invisible translators. A proper respect for both author and reader will, one hopes, result in a readable text that is as faithful as possible to the letter of the original, but in the case of any conflict is certainly faithful to its spirit.

Penguin:Could you recommend two paperbacks to our readers’ groups?