It is one thing to be lost in an original, something else to be lost in a translation. A translation is unwilling, perhaps, to allow or stand up to the amount of interrogation from the reader that an original must expect: it has everything to fear, it is, after all, an imitation, a performance, a substitution. Every word of it is wrong – perhaps especially if it is called Plaza de Alejandro. It seems to be a difficult thing, in some ways even a dereliction of duty, for a translation to be baffling, or to transmit in a passive way bafflement. There is a component in what I’ve done that is to clarify or interpret or guide. I’ve tried to stay light on my feet. ‘What he means is this,’ I’ve known to intimate, or couldn’t help myself intimating, ‘this section is from the coffee leaflet’, ‘here he is washing the glasses’, ‘they are on the tram’, rather than some riddle or opacity. The opaque is my enemy. This is what I mean by ‘signalling’. The occasional explanatory note seemed worthwhile – Jolas has none. Leaving the odd thing in the original as well. Perhaps the time of ‘total translation’, of which he was an example, is over.
I’ve had some guides. As I say, the quicker rhythm of English. More economy, less creativity in the idiom, because, honestly, it isn’t there in English, which is, certainly by now, a more normed, predictable, usage-driven language than federated and regional German, and certainly less flamboyant, less idiosyncratic than Berlinerisch. (As David Bellos has argued, translation will most likely tend to plane away the highs and lows of diction anyway.) So: underplay, gesture at something, rather than go any whole hog. Der richtige Berliner was a big help – it allowed me to think that some of what I was grappling with was itself researched and got up, not the work of a GP in a poor area with an infallible ear over decades. (Translation fears the deeply real.) A couple of slang dictionaries came in, one English, one American: how I wish there was a thesaurus of slang, or an English-Slanglish dictionary, for me to have looked up ‘prison’ or ‘woman’ or ‘half-pint’! I was happy to try and go for what my colleague Anthea Bell cleverly dubbed the regional unspecific: contractions, dropped endings, a bit of colloquial, a bit of vulgar, the odd odd word: there is nothing else I am fitted to do in any case. My speakers say what they mean in a swift and low half-sentence, rather than speak two whole ones in what would probably be felt to be a pompous and attitudinizing and implausible way. (Some of what I call the book having ‘good bones’ is found in that.) I don’t like dropping letters and misspelling words in speech the way Dickens does, until I found that the effect is entirely different if you just do it, without the rather self-congratulatory apostrophe, which is the perfect mark of bad faith. (I had forgotten, but there are recent Scots prose writers who proceed exactly in this way.) Also, when I found that Döblin often has it in him to speak like his characters, that seemed to improve things; there isn’t the distribution of tones and levels, and the use of dialect isn’t something done with excessive subtlety or purpose, at some moments, or for some characters. It seems to be a function of intensity, but generally within reach of all – and I was happy with that.
•
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a montage of passages, many of them remarkable, and some of them remarkably beautiful. It is the combination of so much, so many, and so varied that makes the book: the Job playlet; the refrains from Ecclesiastes and Matthias Claudius; the retelling of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; a lot of the transitional and walking-around scenes; some of the quick stories (and the stories within stories); the anatomization of the tenement building; the undoing of Reinhold. Everyone will have their favourites; mine is probably the song to the outgrowths of Berlin: ‘Suffer them to approach. Suffer them to approach. The great, flat plains, the lonely brick houses giving out a reddish light. The towns all in a line, Frankfurt an der Oder, Guben, Sommerfeld, Liegnitz, Breslau, the towns appear with their stations, the towns with their great and small streets. Suffer them to approach, the cabs, the sliding, shooting cars.’
Michael Hofmann
Hamburg, July 2017
* Wilfried F. Schoeller, Döblin: eine Biografie (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2011)
† Klaus Schröter, Alfred Döblin in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978)
‡ Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas (London: Secker, 1931; Penguin Modern Classics, 1978)
§ Anke Detken, Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz’übersetzt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997)
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
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