re: #411 Decatur Deb

Is that the train-in tunnel translation? Do you get to negotiate subtleties with the author(ess)?

Actually, yes.

A rare occurrence, but I know her personally. The reason I didn’t finish until early this morning was because it took me until then to get everything cleared up with her (damn those time zones!)

She was able to work through everything I didn’t get and listen to me read the whole thing to her on the phone. Then gave me a seal of approval and a promise of the best dinner Berlin has to offer next time I’m there.

Her work is extremely clear, on the one hand, and extremely, densely poetic prose on the other. For instance: recurring words used in a different sense each time they occur. Puns. Neologisms. Proustian sentences. Displacements. Grammar that would give someone who hadn’t lived for a decade in Germany and worked as an illegal immigrant (I did) conniptions.

So I think, as far as the last-minute request from the director of the Goethe Institut goes, I’m going to pretend I never saw it. My honorarium, such as it is, is far outweighed by the author’s praise.

Here’s another sample of the text:

And I read, because I can’t fall asleep, the stories of the region, and listen to the voice of a colleague who once upon a time warned me against this hermitting business. At a party in the bishop’s hall in the castle. We had been drinking, grew bright red in the face, when he suddenly dropped his voice and started talking about the sacristan who one night comes by my church and pauses, because he hears noises from inside, as if someone was playing at ninepins. The sacristan goes to report to the priest, who laughs at him. The following night, the same game, the sacristan on the way home, inside the church the ninepins, he goes back to the priest, who starts to think it’s alarming. In the third night the priest goes himself, bends over, looks through the keyhole and sees twelve men dressed in black in the chancel. At the stroke of one the ninepin brothers disappear.

In the fourth night, back to the keyhole: Inside, the twelve men with a coffin, inside the coffin pins and balls, the balls skulls, the pins bones. Comes the fifth night, when sacristan and priest take their posts in the chancel of the church inside a circle of sanctified chalk, flanked by the local saints, three freshly-hallowed candles in their hands. At the stroke of twelve the ninepin brothers appear. What business do you have in my church? cries the priest. We are the twelve unjust judges, the bowlers cry back in unison. We played a false game, burned innocents as witches and buried them in unhallowed ground. For that, we must bowl heads at bones until the Last Day, unless it be that one would save us. If that’s all it is, that I can do, as God is my witness! cries the priest. Dig up the innocents from the false earth and lay them to rest in the sanctified graveyard. Since then it is as quiet as death in the church.