Language: Swiss-German

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

Multilingualism in Adagio: On Switzerland and Its Languages

They are—there is no other way to put it—blank spots on the literary map of Switzerland.

Switzerland’s multilingualism has long been an inextricable part of its national identity, but how is this amalgam really implemented in everyday lifeand how is it reflected in the country’s literature? Ahead of the Swiss Special Feature in our Summer 2022 issue (by the way, translators of this country’s literature are invited to submit work—and stand to receive an honorarium of USD80 if their work is accepted—by June 1), Swiss translator Zorka Ciklaminy sheds a light on the reality of living within this complex intersection of speaking, living, reading, and writing. The Berlin-based writer and translator Katy Derbyshire translated the following piece from the original German. 

The Swiss Language Landscape

Switzerland is a country coloured by multilingualism; German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh all have equal standing as official national languages. Yet, this presumed quadrilingualism does not unilaterally apply to all those living in Switzerland, since it is not the case that the entire population speaks all four languages; the country instead consists largely of monolingual regions, with little dialogue between them. Along the language boundaries, and in the multilingual cantons (Bern, Fribourg, Graubünden and Wallis), however, many people are bi- or multilingual, and in areas such as German-speaking Switzerland, we see a varying bilingual phenomenon: High German may be the official language, but in everyday life people speak Swiss German—a collective term for various Alemannic dialects.

How is this multilingualism lived on an individual and societal level, and used in everyday communication? As one might suspect, the answer is not entirely clear or logical at first glance. Though the country’s everyday multilingualism does not differ essentially from that of its neighbouring countries. It must be emphasized that dialogue between the linguistic communities is actively promoted by the Swiss government, with a language law stipulating, among other things, that Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh—underrepresented languages compared to German and French—are to be maintained and promoted as national languages. However, it is obvious that when we speak of a multilingual Switzerland in this age of globalization, and of English as a rising lingua franca, our focus cannot possibly remain solely on the official national languages—which would not reflect Switzerland’s linguistic diversity, excluding a large part of the country’s residents. Instead, one should be attentive to what are still frequently referred to in Switzerland using the rather infelicitous term “fifth national languages”.

In a country of immigrants, like Switzerland, migration-led linguistic diversity plays an emphatic role in formation of new language communities. After the end of the Second World War, the 1950s and 1960s saw the arrival of political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Tibet, along with a larger group of labour migrants—known as Saisoniers—from Italy. During the 1980s and 1990s, migrants came mainly from southern and south-eastern Europe (Spain, Portugal, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey) and Sri Lanka. Following the 1999 Treaty on the Free Movement of Persons between Switzerland and the EU, further immigration occurred from central and eastern European states. This development prompted numerous languages to spread in Switzerland over the decades, forming a linguistic potpourri. In more specific terms, this migratory multilingualism means that these migration languages combined are spoken by more people in Switzerland than Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh together. For many years, the fact that this has led to new literatures in Switzerland was neglected or even ignored. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Our First Interactions with New Languages

Discover funny stories about linguistic misunderstandings in our latest podcast episode!

Before we translate with a language, we have to pick it up. In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, learn about people’s first interactions with new languages. Discover the funny stories about linguistic misunderstandings unearthed by Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle as he stands on a bridge between two countries. Plus, hear what’s in store for the podcast this fall.

Podcast Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle

Music by Podington Bear, used under a Creative Commons License from the Free Music Archive.

Asymptote Podcast: The World of Mundartliteratur, Part 2

Language with fewer boundaries.

In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast we return to the world of Mundartliteratur in Switzerland in an exclusive interview with Pedro Lenz, one of the best known Swiss authors who writes in dialect. His engaging and immediate works of prose and poetry present life in modern Switzerland as it really is: a far cry from the idealized herders of Heidi. His 2010 novel Der Goalie bin ig has been translated out of the Bernese Swiss-German into 8 languages, including Glaswegian English, and adapted as a film.
Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle talks with Lenz about the relationship between language, sound, and story. Lenz believes that the highly deliberate but ultimately artificial way he constructs his texts paradoxically allows a work to connect to its audience with fewer boundaries. We also speak about how his work was given a new life and context when translated into Glaswegian.

All sound recorded and produced by Dominick Boyle, or available in public domain.

Asymptote Podcast: The World of Mundartliteratur

Writing in their own language.

The Swiss are known for their rules and order. Language is not exempt from this trend, except when it comes to Swiss-German in which case there are no rules and there is no order, because there is no Swiss-German. Instead, the German-speaking part of Switzerland is home to many different dialects, often referred to as distinct languages: Baseldytsch, Bärndütsch, Züritüütsch. Despite the lack of a standardized writing system, authors in Switzerland are writing the stories of modern Switzerland the way they hear them and in the language in which they live. This literature, referred to as Mundartliteratur, is a unique form of translation from the spoken to the written, as each author must create their own method for transcribing the unique sound of their “Swiss-German”. In the first of two episodes exploring MundartliteraturAsymptote Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle speaks with Professor of literature at the University of Fribourg, Ralph Müller, to provide some valuable historical context, and Swiss writer and poet Beat Sterchi who explains just why it is so important for the Swiss to write in their own language. Sterchi, a member of the collective Bern ist überall, also shares a reading, giving us a true sense of his work and the sound of his Bernese Swiss-German.

Podcast Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle

All sound recorded and produced by Dominick Boyle.