It is rare for a major US newspaper to review books translated from German - or from any other language, for that matter. It is rarer still for the New York TImes Book Review section to feature TWO recent translations of THomas Bernhard as it cover piece. Book critic Dale Peck in "The Alienator" reviews My Prizes (translated by Caral Brown Janeway) and Prose (Translated by Martin Chalmers. Or, rather, Peck doesn't review these books: he dismisses Prose out of hand as "amateurish" and discusses only 15 pages of My Prizes. Rather, Pexk's peice is a reckoning of Bernhard's reputation 21 years after his death:
"Bernhard’s international reputation has never solidified in the manner of a W. G. Sebald, Christa Wolf or Peter Handke, let alone the three most recent German-language writers to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller — all of whom, one wants to say with a dash of Bernhardian bile, are vastly inferior talents when compared with the master."
Peck describes himself as a "sympathetic Anglophone", and it is doubtful he read Bernhard in the original German. Bernhard himself charateristically was dismissive of any attempts to translate his work - or anyone's else's. He said in an interview shortly before his death:
What happens to your books in other countries.
Bernhard: Doesn't interest me at all, because a translation is a different book. It has nothing to do with the original at all. It's a book by the person who translated it. I write in the German language. You get sent a copy of these books and either you like them or you don't. If they have awful covers then they're just annoying. And you flip through and that's it. It has nothing in common with your own work, apart from the weirdly different title. Right? Because translation is impossible. A piece of music is played the same the world over, using the written notes, but a book would always have to be played in German, in my case. With my orchestra!
Nearly 20 years ago a local banker in Passau pressed five slander volumes into my hands and said: "Read these. They will change your life." The books were the five volumes that make up Thomas Bernhard's autobiography: Ein Kind, Die Ursache, Der Keller, Der Atem, and Die Kälte. I don't know if the books changed my life, but they certainly changed the way I looked at Austria, and,in particular, the city of Salzburg. No longer was it beautiful, idyllic town of Mozart and The Sound of Music:
"Die Stadt ist für den, der sie und ihre Bewohner kennt, ein auf der Oberfläche schöner, aber unter der Oberfläche tatsächlich fürchterlicher Friedhof der Phantasien und Wünsche." (Thomas Bernhard, Die Ursache)
("On the surface, the city (Salzburg), for those that know it and its residents, is beautiful, but beneath the surface in reality a horrible graveyeard of fantasies and desires")
Only after Salzburg is leveled by American bombs and the citizens are struggling to survived does Bernhard - for a brief instance - love his home town. The terror is described in startling detail in Die Ursache. But the veneer of normalcy is quickly restored after the end of the war: the swastikas are replaced with crucifixes. Nothing has changed - or will ever change. And it is this that enrages the young Thomas Bernhard and starts him on a different course - out of the Gymnasium and into the cellar - Der Keller. The rage would fuel his immense talent for the next 35 years and change the course of postwar literature.
Austria is as he says, and I don't need to read his work to know that!
Of course his take on translation is ridiculous on the face of it. Still, I think I'll wait until I can get his novels in German to read them.
Posted by: Hattie | January 04, 2011 at 12:35 AM
I appreciate his comments on translation, and have quoted them to others. That being said, I read the English translation The Woodcutters, and it was fantastic. That translator was wildly talented, by Bernard’s logic.
Posted by: The Holiest Of Holies | January 10, 2022 at 10:57 AM