Posts filed under 'GDR'

Great Material for a Novel: Lucy Jones on Translating Brigitte Reimann

The translation is always another chance to improve a piece of writing stylistically, ‎to make it really sing.

In our March Book Club selection, the sharp and passionate voice of German writer Brigitte Reimann paints a tender portrait of post-war Berlin, when the Wall has yet to go up, but lines have already been drawn, and devotions already divided. In an unflinching autofiction that finally sees an English debut after being long-adored in its original language, Reimann uses the materials from her own life to elucidate the deep ruptures carved into family by politics, the bright, early idealism of socialism in East Germany, and the hope that people hold to amidst the most tumultuous times. In this interview with the translator of Siblings, Lucy Jones, we discuss the storied history of Siblings, the political context necessary to this text, and the meeting-place between art and idealism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Samantha Siefert (SS): Lucy, Thank you so much for being here to talk with us about Siblings. Can you tell us a little bit more about the road that led you to translation?

Lucy Jones (LJ): It’s probably not a very conventional one. I graduated in German and in German language and literature, and then I actually didn’t do anything with it for a while; I became a photographer. I did photography for about twelve years, and then I came back to translation just after my daughter was born. This is when I went back to the roots of what I started out doing at university.

I started by pairing up with a good friend who translates in the other direction; together, we’re Transfiction. She translates from English to German, and I translate from German to English, and we’ve been going since about 2008.

SS: You’re known for being a huge advocate for Brigitte Reimann’s work. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with her work in particular, how you came to advocate for her, and eventually translate her?

LJ: Translators often do work as literary scouts or something in-between, and I came across Reimann because I was in a seminar for translators in Berlin. There is quite a good infrastructure here, and in that seminar we were visiting different publishing houses. During one visit, I was given a pile of her work, and it was really warmly recommended to me. When I started reading, I realized—especially when I came across her fiction—that it could have been written now as an historical novel. You didn’t have that kind of patina from, you know, a novel from the past. It was more modern, as though it just happened to be set in the past. I found that really striking. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Siblings by Brigitte Reimann

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream.

In a time of deepening divisions, when the bipartisan nature of contemporary politics feels increasingly intimate and personal, Brigitte Reimann’s lauded autobiographical novel, Siblings, hits close to home. In a vivid and passionate depiction of a family torn apart in the division of 1960s Germany, Reimann writes with profound emotion about the brutal lines drawn by ideology, the inner turmoil of living under orthodoxy, and still—the bright ideals of socialism’s promises. As our Book Club selection for March, Siblings is a bold assertion of unities and divisions from one of East Germany’s best writers—a boundless voice speaking to the limits of individual perspective. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones, Transit Books, 2023

Much of translated literature focuses on fresh, contemporary voices, but projects that arrive after a long simmer hold the special promise of an enduring story, one that has earned its place in the cultural conversation; the work of Brigitte Reimann triumphantly takes this route towards English-language readers. Prolific and storied in the German sphere—where her work has never gone out of print, Reimann is a cornerstone writer of social realism and the German Democratic Republic. Born in 1933, she wrote prolifically from a young age, racking up literary awards from her school days until her untimely death from cancer in 1973, with her 1976 posthumous novel going on to become a bestseller and new, uncensored versions of her work continuing to attract new readerships. Siblings, winner of the 1965 Heinrich Mann Prize, is her first novel to be translated into English, following the 2019 publication of her diaries under the title I Have No Regrets—both translated by her persistent advocate, Lucy Jones.

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream. Formulated as an impassioned political debate, the novel follows young artist Elisabeth Arendt’s pro-socialist bent in a familial battle of virtues—East versus West—with her titular siblings. Her older brother, Konrad, has already defected. A former member of the Hitler Youth and an “elbow-man” who is used to getting his way, Konrad’s fate is of little consequence to Elisabeth: “I had nothing else to do than come to terms with the idea that I’d lost my brother (and lost meant permanently, for ever); a brother who was alive and well, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth a few streets from where I was, who would fly back to Hamburg the following morning, build tankers, save up for a Mercedes, sleep with his beautiful wife, go to the cinema, and carry on with his life.” Instead, her passion is directed towards her other brother, Uli, closer to her in both age and ideology, who has announced that he too will defect the following day: “I can’t stay here, I can’t breathe . . . I feel like a prisoner trapped behind bars, just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere.” Set in 1960 before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, defecting was not the daring escape it later became: at the time, when a person could simply walk from one side of the city to the other, weight of this journey fell firmly on moralistic grounds.

Elisabeth spares no conviction in arguing for the socialist dream. She is young and idealistic and works as a painter, charged with documenting the spirit of the factory worker through art. She herself lives and works at the factory, as was customary through a program known as the “Bitterfelder Weg,” designed to foster relationships between artists and workers and foment equality. The program’s ambition offers some of the most compelling writing in the novel, as Elisabeth shares her own revelation that the “production plant like any other, barren, flat land, milling with a few thousand workers building chimneys, halls and roofs, functional buildings made of glass or cold, dead concrete” may indeed be worth loving and fighting for.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2017

Looking for reading recommendations? Here are three releases—a book-length essay about translation, a German novel, and an experimental anthology.

Summer is drawing to a close and our bookshelves are groaning with the weight of new releases. Asymptote team members review three very different books—a genre-bending meditation on the practice of translation, a German bestseller about African refugees in Berlin, and an anthology of monologues that were once performed on the streets of Quebec City. There is much to delve into. 

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This Little Art by Kate Briggs, Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Reviewed by Theophilus Kwek, Editor-at-Large, Singapore.

It is in 1977, as he begins lecturing as Professor of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, that Roland Barthes realizes he is no longer young: an “old and untimely body,” on a “new public stage.” But to speak to the students gathered—with their “new concerns, new urgencies, new desires”—he will have to “fling [himself] into the illusion that [he is] contemporary with the young bodies present before [him]”; he must, in Kate Briggs’s memorable words, forget the distances of age and time, and be “carried forward by the force of forgetting, which is the forward-tilting force of all living life.”

Briggs’s new book-length essay on translation, published this month by Fitzcarraldo (who surely must produce some of the most elegant books around) joins the ranks of treatises that ponder how we, as practitioners, should “properly register what’s going on with this—with [our]—work.” It’s an important question, she argues, not only because translation is a little understood (and hence undervalued) enterprise, but also because the process of translation itself sheds light on what it takes to make meaning, and art. Her answer, pursued over seven interlocking chapters, runs parallel to Barthes’s realization. Just as the old professor must “be born again,” translation is the work of making new: of bridging time and language to “make [literature] contemporary with [our] own present moment.” READ MORE…

In Review: “The Tower” by Uwe Tellkamp

An impressive and occasionally surreal collage of scenes and character studies from a country that is not mourned but most certainly vanished.

The Tower, by Uwe Tellkamp, may appear to be a monolithic, singularly heroic literary act by a surgeon and survivor of the indignities of the German Democratic Republic. This man, who lived to tell the tale, so to speak, penned an epic about a bourgeois family which has retreated into a kind of inner emigration in the crumbling but stately villas of the posh Weißer Hirsch neighborhood in Dresden. But The Tower is much more complex than that, and intellectually rich. The story, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, focuses on three men of various ages and various levels of complicity with the putrefying system of 1980s GDR, and it is now (finally!) available in print in English translation.

Who are these three men? Christian is a pimply and ambitious young student who dreams of following his father, Richard, into the field of medicine; he ultimately signs up for three years of military service in the hopes of securing a spot as a medical student. His efforts to mimic Party loyalty are largely successful until his collapse as a soldier. His father Richard’s 50th birthday party opens the novel and initially Richard appears equally eloquent and morally blameless. However, numerous affairs and a secret second family make him a pawn in the hands of the Stasi. Finally, Meno, Christian’s maternal uncle—something of a mentor to the teenage boy, and a former botanist—works as an editor at one of the GDR’s few high-quality imprints that frequently ran short on paper, rounding out the trio of protagonists.

READ MORE…