MTV, Benjamin Lebert, and Me

Benjamin Lebert burst onto the international literary scene a few years ago as a teenager with his novel, Crazy. A German newspaper wittily dubbed it “Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Lebert” [The Confusions of Young Lebert], drawing a comparison to Robert Musil’s first novel. Radio Berlin’s Deutschlandfunk called it “Die Leiden des Jungen B” [The Sorrows of Young B]. When I read Crazy, I was fascinated by its language and style, with its innovation and staccato sentences: From a translator’s standpoint, one felt that a compelling new voice had emerged.

When Benjamin Lebert’s second novel Der Vogel ist ein Rabe appeared, I was pleased at the unexpected opportunity to translate such an exciting young author. But when I put pen to paper, I was hit by culture-shock, or perhaps it would be fairer to say ‘generation shock,’ or even ‘era shock.’ The shock of the middleaged translator of Thomas Mann and Chekhov who is plunged into the work of the youngest new novelist on the European scene. In fact, I had just completed translations of Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and Voltaire’s Candide, and was well into The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, all for Modern Library. It was at this point that I decided to rejuvenate myself by taking a break and spending some time with Benjamin Lebert’s young, elegant style. Changing gears, however, was harder than I had anticipated. I suddenly became very self-conscious.

The first thing I realized was that I was a 40-something translating the speech and living narration of a 20-something. With what words does a youngster nowadays enter a room or, in Lebert’s case, a train compartment? How does a teen say, “Shall we go for some tea and light refreshments?” How does a teen confide a sexual secret?

My second realization was that I was not as American as I thought. I am American, but of a British origin that cannot always be eradicated. The issue of style—in particular British versus American—is particularly critical when translating a young author whose dialogue depends on nuance and undertones, and whose characters are believably real. When an American publisher brings out a book where language and tone play such a key role, the dialogue must sound right in American English—so one cannot opt for a British register or even a mid-Atlantic one. Any errors in the natural flow can prove fatal to the book. The characters become unbelievable.

I have mainly translated literature from the 19^th century and earlier, from various languages. So it was particularly important to take stern measures to avoid the Renaissance elegance of a Machiavelli, or the wit and nimbleness of an early Chekhov. I have translated modern literature, but always gravitated toward works that would naturally fall into the registers I had most experience with. One example is the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s recent novel Elegy for Kosovo, which I translated. Though it is a modern novel, it is set in fourteenth century Kosovo, with uneasy interaction among Ottoman, Serb, and Albanian characters. Two of the central characters are a Serb and an Albanian bard, and the tone of the novel has an anachronistic epic register—Kadare has in fact always been interested in Albanian epic literature and its Homeric roots.

Another example is my translation of the novels Con Brio and Death of a Primadonna by the Slovenian writer Brina Svit. Though written in Slovene, these novels mainly take place in contemporary Paris, and the narration and dialogue of both are very original: the central characters are mainly ex-pat Eastern Europeans, who speak a cool and slightly distant, flawless French (though in the novels their speech is reported in Slovene). In other words, though they are sophisticated members of the Parisian scene, they do not speak like all-out French (or Slovene) 20-somethings.

One thing I would like to stress, however, is that the language of The Bird is a Raven is not ‘crazy’ and wild—it is elegant (sometimes I felt a little too much so)—but it always sounds authentic, and my aim in my translation was to sound as authentic in English. The German protagonist does not enter spouting German hip-hop slang. You never hear him saying things like: “Echt voll hammermässig! Mann bin ich freaky drauf heute!”

All the dialogue, all the reported speech, all the narration of the novel come from the twenty-something narrator and the nineteen-year-old he meets on the train. The narrator describes his new acquaintance at the beginning of the novel:

Er ist klein und zierlich, hat kurzes braunes Haar und einen schwarzen Rucksack, den er gleich neben meiner Tasche abstellt. Bei seinen Bewegungen, wie er das Gewicht von einem Bein auf das andere verlagert und seinen Kopf schnell vor-und zurückstösst, denke ich sofort: ein Vogel.

He’s small and delicate-looking, has short brown hair, and a black backpack, which he immediately puts down next to my bag. From his movements, the way he keeps shifting his weight from one foot to the other and darting his head back and forth, I think right away: a bird.

Even in these few lines, the control and timing of the clauses, as they are pressed uneasily into exciting sentences, are very apparent. This is young speech, the voice of a youth on his way to Berlin to find himself, but the author‘s constructions, as the careful reader quickly realizes, are quite masterful. Lebert is above all a stylist.

Another personal stumbling block was that my family on my mother’s side had left the German-speaking world for a Greek-speaking world in the 1950s. Though we spoke German at home, it was a German suspended in time. I admit I was puzzled by newer words not in my Oxford-Duden, words like Nasszelle [‘wet cell’?] and Spaghetti-Träger [‘spaghetti porters’?]. But I have family that remained in our remote Austrian village. So I made regular phone calls to my cousin Henriette there, phone calls that would go something like this:

„Heast Henri, I ken mi to net aus. Do steht vos von Spaghetti-Träger!”

(“I say, Henriette. I am somewhat puzzled: there’s something here about spaghetti porters.”)

Which she would then explain:

Jo, heast, des is wos de Menscha heitzutog trong—waast, ee: de Träger, hoit, dos nix obirutscht.

(Which in a nutshell means: “Ah, yes, that is what young girls wear nowadays. You know, spaghetti-like straps so that nothing ends up slipping down.”)

However, it was when Lebert’s two characters exchanged their first greeting in the train compartment that I realized that the most vital help I needed would be all-American help from New York. The two young men, Paul and Henry, exchange terse and with-it greetings. Quite simple, quite straight forward greetings: but how would their English-speaking counterparts have exchanged these same ‘hellos’ in English?

„Hey!” sagt er.

„Hallo,” sage ich. Wir lachen uns an.

„Gehen wir noch in den Speisewagen?“

„Okay, gehen wir in den Speisewagen.”

A straightforward translation would have been:

“Hi!” he says.

“Hello,” I say. We smile at each other.

“Shall we go to the dining car now?”

“OK, let’s go to the dining car.”

I could probably have gotten away with translating it this way, but I was certain that real American youths—or British ones, for that matter—would not sound like that.

When in doubt, the translator looks back to his or her own linguistic resources. But at 17 or 18, I was a British teen, from Hounslow, and it was the London seventies, with platform shoes and bell bottoms. My characters would have sounded more like:

“Whatcha!” he says.

“Ai there,” I say. We smile at each other.

“Let‘s scarpa fru to tha dinin‘ car”

“Yeah, let‘s scarpa through to tha dinin‘ car, I reckon.”

I knew this wouldn’t work.

The first thing I had to do was total language immersion—which I realized I could do from the comfort of my living-room couch, watching MTV—with its plethora of young, bright-eyed shows: from Pimp My Ride, which I quickly realized was too jivey for my purposes, to Taquita and Kaui, which was linguistically just as young and nimble, but sported the language of wild teen girls. MTV, however, is a treasure-trove of young language, and is worth watching for those who want to acquire the newest registers in English. Shows like: Band in a Bubble, Parental Control, Real World, My Super Sweet 16. I recommend them. Particularly Punk’d—Ashton Kutcher’s candid-camera-like show. “I was punk’d,” by the way, means “I’ve just had an unfortunate prank played on me.” “She punk’d him again,” means “she played one of those impossible practical jokes on him.”

After watching a few months of MTV, one has a wealth of young language at one’s fingertips. But it turns out that fluent though one might feel, one cannot be certain one is always saying everything right. As we find out in all our acquisition of new language, the sociolinguistics of any given statement or interchange is a vital last step to fluency. The two young men in Lebert’s book are what one might call middle-class youths from an urban background; the narrator in fact had gone to Berlin to study Ethnology, as he tells us in the opening sentence of the book. Everything they say in German fits who they are. A translator like myself, who is not a modern 20-year old undergrad, runs the risk of misusing the newly learned language. Everything that is said has to conform to the social context as well as to the linguistic register of the age group one is portraying. Undergraduates might say, “How’s it hanging?” or “Sup?” but the question is when, where, and with whom they will use what.

The only solution to this problem was to turn to real, all-American teens and twenty-somethings: individuals, in other words, of the same age and background as the German characters in The Bird is a Raven. There was no other way but to rope in some high-schoolers and an undergraduate or two and put them to work. It wasn’t only the dialogue that needed to be checked, but in fact every word in the book. (The narrator is after all a twenty-something). My method was simple: various young readers would read aloud from the manuscript of my translation, and there would be shouts of ‘stop’ whenever something was said that would not be said that way. The changes were often subtle, but important.

The first dialogue with its perhaps imperceptible pitfalls became younger and more youthful. What I might have translated as:

“Hi!” he says.

“Hello,” I say. We smile at each other.

“Shall we go to the dining car now?”

“OK, let’s go to the dining car.”

changed into:

“What’s up?” he says..

“Hi there,” I say. We smile at each other..

“Want to hit the dining car?”

“Yeah, let’s go for it.”

Or when one of the characters says:

“I don’t know anything about Berlin. [Kannst du nicht ein bisschen erzählen?] Can you tell me a little about it?”

The preferred version of my young informants was:

“I don’t know anything about Berlin. Can you fill me in?”

Or:

Wie lange dauert es, bis man von Berlin voll gesabbert wird?

How long does it take to get slobbered over by Berlin?

Sociolinguistics is in fact central to every translation project. As I mentioned, the book that I was working on before The Bird is a Raven, and to some extent during it, was the Essential Writings of Machiavelli. There the constant struggle was to recreate the elegant and multilayered Italian Renaissance style of which Machiavelli was an accomplished master.

There is beautiful music, even if what Machiavelli is saying might be frightening. In chapter three of The Prince, he writes:

Men must either be flattered or eliminated, because a man will readily avenge a slight grievance, but not one that is truly severe. Hence, the offense done a man must be of the kind that cannot incur vengeance. [l’offesa che si fa all’uomo debbe essere in modo che la non tema la vendetta]

This is, however, an unfair quotation, as it underlines a ruthless cynicism that we associate with Machiavelli. But there is much more to him. My mission in editing and translating this panorama of his work was to reintroduce him as a literary writer of incredible range. We think of him as the author of The Prince, but he also wrote the great three-volume Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, which today we usually refer to simply as The Discourses. He wrote the novella Belfagor, the fictional biography The Life of Castruccio Castracani. He wrote The Persecution of Africa, a first-person narrative in the voice of a Christian cleric who is besieged by Vandals in northern Africa, and the wild and witty play The Mandrake. He wrote the great historical chronicle, Florentine Histories.

In an early essay, “How Cesare Borgia killed the generals who conspired against him,” Machiavelli writes of the brutal and cunning means by which Borgia eliminated rivals who crossed him. The controlled prose that describes the mounting menace of Borgia’s murderous tactics is given a touch of lyricism, as Machiavelli retards the brutal action by describing a landscape:

Whoever approaches Senigallia has on his right the mountains, with foothills that come so close to the sea that there is often only a narrow strip of land between them and the waves. Even in those places where the foothills are further inland, the strip is never more than two miles wide. Senigallia lies a bow’s-shot from these foothills, and less than a mile away from the shore. There is a little river by the city that washes the walls facing toward Fano.

In translating Machiavelli, colloquial language is also an important issue. In his time, high literature was generally written in Latin. In fact the contract for his last great work, Florentine Histories, specified that he could choose to write either in “Latin or Tuscan.” Machiavelli did indeed choose, as he almost always did, a new vibrant Italian based on the Tuscan speech of Florence.

He was particularly interested in capturing real live language. In his play The Mandrake there is much colorful Tuscan speech. In fact there is hard-bitten slang that would even get bleeped out in MTV’s Pimp My Ride. What was particularly fascinating for the translator was Machiavelli’s rendering of natural everyday speech with all its shades and nuances. In this scene, an excited woman turns to a friar about fantasies she still has involving her dead husband:

WOMAN

Here’s a florin for you to say a requiem for my dead husband’s soul every Monday for the next two months. He was a rough brute of a man, but my flesh is weak and I can’t help feeling all a-flutter whenever I think of him. Do you believe he’s in Purgatory?

FRIAR

He definitely is.

WOMAN

I am not so sure myself. You remember what he used to do to me from time to time. Oh, how often I came running to you about that! I used to try and get away from him, but he always managed to corner me! Ah, God in Heaven!

The project I embarked upon after completing Machiavelli and The Bird is a Raven was Sophocles’ three Theban plays.

One of the joys of reading Sophocles in Greek is the stark clarity of his language. In his monologues, dialogues, and choral odes, the lines are crafted to shed everything extraneous, creating his powerful dramatic voice. As an anonymous biographer wrote a little over a century after Sophocles’ death: “With a mere half-line or single word he creates an entire character.”

In the language of his tragedies, Sophocles combined a compelling mix of registers and dialects. There were elements of a more ancient and stark Doric Greek (particularly in the choral odes), and also moments of melodious epic Ionian. One of Sophocles’s innovations is his strategic use of colloquial (not formal) Athenian Attic. In his plays we see colloquial elements such as we find in the wild comedies of Aristophanes, but which we would never encounter in the more staid tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles’s predecessor, who uses colloquialisms more sparingly. Sophocles’s mixture of registers would have been clear to his Athenian audience, as perhaps Shakespeare’s similar linguistic feats would have been to his audiences almost two thousand years later. Macbeth, his hands bloodied by murder, says: “No, this my hand will rather / the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / making the green one red.” Shakespeare juxtaposes exotic Latinate terms with the simplest Anglo-Saxon words.

Another Sophoclean strategy was to bring to the stage figures from ordinary life, who speak to the grand protagonists in a language colored with colloquial expression, which poses another problem for the translator. They are real people emerging from a stylized setting, bringing a new degree of realism to the stage, which is difficult to convey in English. The messenger and, more markedly, the shepherd in Oedipus Tyrannos are examples of this, as is the guard in Antigone. The traditional function of the unannounced messengers in Greek tragedy is to be the bringers of news or information that will change the course of the plot, but in the case of the guard in Antigone, Sophocles has created one of the liveliest and most fleshed-out characters in Greek tragedy. The translator must capture this, with all its color. The guard’s lively speech and musings, his witty and garrulous digressions, his fearful hesitations at how Creon might react to the news he is about to reveal, all dangerously test Creon’s patience. The guard has over a hundred lines of ponderous speech and fast dialogue to impart his information, challenging Creon (in what might be the first ever example of a passive-aggressive exchange), and annoying him with his prattling truisms. Creon is so infuriated by the guard that he abandons his formal literary language, slipping into colloquialisms himself: “Oh what a babbler you are!” he splutters.

During this exchange between Creon and the guard, Sophocles employs yet another dramatic strategy: the chorus interrupts the guard’s string of speeches and dialogue, reciting Sophocles’s most elegant and famous ode:

There are many wonders, but none more wondrous than man. He crosses the gray seas in wintry southern winds, cutting through engulfing waves. He tames Earth, the most exalted of the gods, the imperishable, the inexhaustible, following his plow year after year, as his tribe of horses furrows the soil

[...]

Sophocles’s most surprising use of Athenian colloquialisms, however, is when his royal protagonists, in moments of anger or high drama, abandon formal language. The translator must be on the alert for this, otherwise Sophocles’s wonderful dramatic device gets lost in translation. In Antigone, for instance, Antigone asks her sister Ismene to help her bury their fallen brother. When Ismene refuses, but promises to keep the secret, Antigone, exasperated, slips into colloquial Athenian:

ANTIGONE

Oh go ahead and proclaim it! You’ll be more hateful

if you keep silent and do not announce it to all.

At another dramatic high point in Antigone, during Creon’s catastrophic exchange with his son Haemon, which will lead directly to the disastrous climax, Creon in his anger again falls from elevated dramatic Greek into colloquial speech:

CREON

Slave to a woman! Don’t provoke me with your prattle!

HAEMON

Do you wish to speak, and, having spoken, hear no answer?

CREON

Ha! Is that what I wish? Well, by Olympus,

know that you’ll pay for this string of insults!

Today it is impossible for us to gauge the full range of Sophocles’s stylistic prowess. Of over 120 plays he created only seven survive. (Most of Sophocles’s plays were lost in the Middle Ages when the Crusaders burnt the libraries of Byzantium.) But even in the plays we have today we can see his mastery. In the golden age of Athens, Sophocles was praised as the Attic Bee—not for the sting of his language, but for its honey. This is why he is a particular challenge to translate, but also a joy.