When Oskar Pastior died so suddenly in 2006, I had four notebooks of handwritten notes, in addition to drafts of several chapters. After his death I felt paralyzed. His close presence in the notes made the loss even greater.
A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone. But without Oskar Pastior’s details about everyday life in the camp I could not have done it.
Herta Müller
March 2009
Translator’s Note
Amid all the upheavals and mass movements of the 1940s, Leo Auberg is doubly displaced—as an ethnic German deported from his home in Romania and as a man with poetic and erotic sensibilities at constant odds with his surroundings. As he says: “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.”
In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism. When the words cannot be found, she invents them. And when words do not suffice, she alloys the text with silence, creating striking prose of great tensile strength.
Translating this prose requires unpacking it in one language and repacking it in another. New coinages such as Nichtrührer or Atemschaukel defy literal rendering: “non-stirrer” and “breath-swing” fail to convey the layers of meaning lurking in these compound words that echo the wordplay in Oskar Pastior’s poetry. Even uninvented words strain against a single definition: Geschirr may be a bowl or a dish or a tin plate or a mess kit or simply a vessel waiting to be filled with something that will determine its meaning, like words themselves, especially in Leo Auberg’s world, where innocent expressions are frequently filled with lethal content. Words, too, can be displaced. My task was to preserve this fundamental displacement without adding undue dislocation.
In matters of style and punctuation I have kept close to the original, where the abandonment of question marks and semicolons reflects the unpunctuated thoughts of the narrator, the simultaneity of insight and experience, the blurring of past and present. Similarly, I have followed the author’s use of small capitals to mark certain words of iconic significance to the narrator.
All of these matters require careful consideration. Fortunately I have not been working alone, and I’m thankful to my family and friends for their kind assistance. Thanks to Herta Müller for indulging my many queries and to the staff at Metropolitan Books for their ongoing support. I am indebted to Ed Cohen for his usual creative scrutiny of the text and to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her invaluable ear in various languages. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Sara Bershtel for her consistently remarkable insights and generous engagement.
—Philip Boehm
ALSO BY HERTA MÜLLER
The Passport
Traveling on One Leg
Nadirs
The Land of Green Plums
The Appointment
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Romania in 1953, HERTA MÜLLER immigrated to Berlin in 1987 after suffering repeated threats for refusing to cooperate with Ceauşescu’s secret police. The author of The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, among other novels, she has received numerous honors, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Hunger Angel has been translated into forty-seven languages.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PHILIP BOEHM has won numerous awards for his translations from German and Polish, including works by Franz Kafka, Christoph Hein, Gregor von Rezzori, and Stefan Chwin. He also works as a theater director and playwright: produced plays include Mixtitlan, The Death of Atahualpa, and Return of the Bedbug. He lives in St. Louis, where he is the artistic director of Upstream Theater.
Metropolitan Books
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Metropolitan Books® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright © 2009 by Carl Hanser Verlag
Translation copyright © 2012 by Philip Boehm
All rights reserved.
Originally published in Germany in 2009 under the title Atemschaukel by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Müller, Herta.
[Atemschaukel. English]
The hunger angel : a novel / Herta Müller ; translated by Philip Boehm.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
“Metropolitan Books.”
“Originally published in Germany in 2009 under the title Atemschaukel by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich.”
ISBN 978-0-8050-9301-8
I. Boehm, Philip. II. Title.
PT2673.U29234A9213 2012
833'914—dc23 2011050952
First U.S. Edition 2012
eISBN 978-0-8050-9546-3
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel: A Novel
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