My book reviews achieve “international stature”
Recently I was amazed and delighted to receive an email with the subject line: “Translation of your Moretti-review to the German.” Finally, like Kathy Griffin, I am approaching the level of the D-list “global empire”! The message was from Kevin Vennemann, a novelist and translator upon whose credentials I am unable to comment in any detail since his web page is in German (a language which I am very embarrassed not to know, even though The Confessions of Felix Krull is one of my all-time favorite books). But, see for yourself, he is a good-looking guy.
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| Kevin Vennemann ©Juliane Henrich |
Ein Schritt weiter: Die n+1-Anthologie |
“As you might know (I hope so),” Vennemann’s message began, “I am currently working on a translation of several n+1-essays for a n+1-best of-collection to be published with Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt next year.” In fact, this was the first I had heard about a German n+1 anthology. Eager to learn more…
…I copy-and-pasted the Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt blurb to Babelfish. “The first expenditure of the magazine n+1,” I learned, “was a sensation on the American magazine market”:
The New York Times called the essays “pointed, precisely and brilliantly originally”, the Frankfurt General Newspaper determined, the New Yorker intellectual ones stuck at the booklet such as flies. In short reflections and essays over Fitnessstudios, the misery of the permanent accessibility, over George W. Bush and the crisis of philosophy combine the publishers around the best-selling author Benjamin Kunkel (Undetermined) philosophical discourses from old Europe irreverently and intelligently with the Anglo-Saxon telling tradition.
These guys have their finger on the pulse of just what n+1 is really about! I was deeply honored to learn that my Moretti-review (of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees; n+1 Issue 3) was considered illuminating to the international study of the misery of the permanent accessibility, and assured Vennemann of my readiness to answer such questions as he claimed to have encountered during the production of what he described (without a doubt, inaccurately) as his “unworthy translation.”
These turned out to be great questions. E.g. at some point in the review I call Franco Moretti “a latter-day Formalist” and the question was whether I wanted to change it to “a contemporary/ modern Formalist” or was I OK with literally calling him a Mormon (Formalist der Letzten Tage). (I said: “sure, call him a Mormon.”)
Another query came up with regard to my description of Moretti’s seminar on “Lost Victorian Bestsellers”:
Coelebs in Search of a Wife, The Mysteries of London, The Woman Who Did: these proved to be the kind of mirthless and dismal productions that made you want to take your copy of the Princesse de Clèves and go hide in the Rhine.
The Rhine allusion is to an earlier passage in my review:
In [his] manifesto, “Conjectures on World Literature” … Moretti denounces the discipline of comparative literature for failing to be the study of Weltliteratur as defined by the likes of Goethe or Marx and Engels (”from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises”). He reproaches comparative literature for having become a shabby and parochial affair, “mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature).
Apparently, the phrase “to take your copy of the Princesse de Clèves and go hide in the Rhine” conjures, to the German reader, not the intended image of safety and retreat (cf. taking your copy of Felix Krull and hiding in bed), but something altogether more Wertherian:
Does “go hide” mean “to drown oneself”? Or is the book being thrown into the water?
Rheinfront bei Hochwasser, St. Goarshausen
Image from the St. Goarshausen website.
Tags: comparative literature, d-list, Germany, n+1, poetry, publications, reviews, w00t!
January 4th, 2008 at 11:11 am
As a student of German literature who first encountered your work by means of that very review, I must say this is stupendous news. Congratulations.
Assuming you are still in contact with Herr Vennemann, and unless you genuinely do want a Mormon Moretti on your hands, might I suggest “nachgeboren” as a translation for “latter-day”? Granted, that has its own set of connotations, but I think it might be closer than either the Mormon angle or the allegation of contemporaneousness (contemporaneity?).
I’m enjoying your blog, by the way. Good luck with it!
January 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Dear Kári,
Thank you for the kind words and for the interesting lexicographical suggestion, which I will certainly transmit to the German translators.
I’m not joking when I say I don’t know any German though, so I have no idea what it means. Maybe, something like “born again”? The online dictionary says “posthumous” (further qualified as: “child, born after the death of the father”), which is interesting, although I’m fairly confident that Franco Moretti is alive and well, because when I wrote to him about the German translation a few days ago, he sent an elegant one-word reply: “Wunderbar.”
But, these online German dictionaries are incorrigibly witty. This is what I recently learned in an email from Mark Greif, who had just looked up Schritt weiter and established that one of the meanings of schritt is “crotch”: “As an English speaker,” Greif wrote, “I would add that it rhymes with ‘Shit.’ Will you help me think of better titles? How about: Many More Crotches! An n+1 Anthology. Then I would like us to be edited by Robert Musil. Aarrrggh.”
Good luck to you with your studies!
Elif
January 18th, 2008 at 11:26 am
In fact it means “One step further”!