The Tin Drum (88 page)

Throughout
The Tin Drum,
Grass renders Oskar's story with the loving detail of a historical painting tinged with surreal fantasy. As with Joyce in
Ulysses,
or Alfred Döblin in
Berlin Alexanderplatz,
every detail counts: street names, geography, dates, the time of day, but also whether it is the right or left hand that is raised, the cloth from which a suit is made, the particular odor of a damp cellar. These details are never merely photographic (although photography is also central to the novel) but are the touches that turn life into art, and bring that art to life.

If every button counts in Grass, one aspect of the translator's task is surely to be certain that none are missing. Yet in the history of translation this has been anything but a foregone conclusion. In an attempt to make the text more readable, to smooth the way, to iron out difficult passages, translators have long omitted or blurred such details in the name of a style domesticated for the home audience.

Of course no translator, even one emboldened to render every facet of the text fully, insists on a slavish word-for-word correspondence. But acting on the assumption that Grass's stylistic innovations, his attention to detail, and even his deliberate provocations are crucial to the work as a whole, I have chosen to err on the side of inclusion. As a result, in hundreds of instances, a word, a phrase, or a sentence has been restored.

Among many other items I have returned to the English text of
The Tin Drum
a pair of polished boots, a missing mustache, a lifted little finger, a disquisition on the ABCs, a head of tousled hair, some day-old
pastries, a Norwegian barrel, the battered rim of a cook pot, the conservators of a bell tower, a Number Five streetcar, four seats at a Christmas play, an early Mass, the Mirror of Confession, Judas, several boxes of Persil, a daddy longlegs, a Prince Heinrich Memorial Cap, a guitar and apron, the churches of Rechtstadt, Altstadt, Pfefferstadt, and several streets along which Oskar walked or onto which the windows of various buildings and apartments opened.

Even small omissions may be telling. Throughout the first third of the novel, Oskar calls his mother "mama." Following her funeral, however, he invariably refers to her as his "poor" mama—a note of lament I have restored in the English version wherever it was missing. Here a consistent rendering restores one small indication of the depth of Oskar's emotional attachment to his mother.

The inclusion of such small details often serves a wider purpose. Like Grass himself, Oskar is left-handed, and the overtones, both artistic and at times literally sinister, of this left-handedness (or, on occasion, left-footedness) reverberate throughout the novel. In more than two dozen places I have restored Grass's specific references to left (as opposed to right) where it was missing. Thus Greff the greengrocer now pulls "a boy of perhaps thirteen with overly large eyes" toward him with his left hand; now it is Jan's gray-stockinged left foot that he allows to wander between Agnes's thighs beneath the table as Oskar watches; now, as Oskar looks on in supposed innocence, Maria steps from her rolled-up shorts and kicks them off into a corner with her left foot; now it is Maria's left leg that Oskar sees "hooked over the backrest, as if it weren't involved" on the couch with Matzerath; now it is Maria's left hand into which Oskar pours fizz powder before she kicks him, and her left hand she washes clean; now the fatal Nazi pin remains open in Oskar's left hand. In these and other similar instances, overtones of sexual transgression, crime, and art are reinforced almost subliminally by that little word "left."

But the missing buttons to be restored in the new version go beyond single words. On several occasions entire sentences have been reinserted into the text. Such gaps can occur, as every translator knows, for reasons that are innocent enough: simple oversight, an editorial decision to smooth out the text, moments when the translator is fatigued, rushed, and simply at a loss as to meaning. At times, however, editorial
squeamishness may have been involved. Although it would be unfair to refer to the text as bowdlerized—for much of what remained in
The Tin Drum
was certainly shocking enough fifty years ago—there were instances where the publishers may have wished to spare the reader. Today, when condoms are ubiquitous in public life, we would scarcely think of omitting the italicized phrase from this sentence in Grass's novel:

Now and then I visited the office building, talked to journalists, let myself be photographed, lost my way at times in that box that looked, smelled and felt the same everywhere,
like some highly indecent object with an infinitely expandable condom stretched over it, sealing it off.

And in the passage where Matzerath and Maria are found coupling on a couch, the omission can hardly have been accidental:

Then they would fall apart
and let the snot splat down somewhere, onto a towel they'd brought, or if they couldn't reach that, onto the sofa or even on the carpet.
But I couldn't bear to see that.

Apart from one other brief phrase, however, that seems to have been the extent of omissions intended to spare the reader.

It was in part the complexity of Grass's style in
The Tin Drum
that led to other gaps. For example, the opening words of the chapter entitled "The Hedgehog"—aufgebaut, abgeholzt, ausgemerzt, einbezogen, fortgeblasen, nachempfunden—must have seemed quite unintelligible and therefore were simply omitted in the first version. Ironically, when the translators met with Grass in Gdańsk, he referred to this opening paragraph as a key passage in the work. Those opening words, he told us, refer to memories themselves and how we deal with them, tapped out to the beat of a drum. In the new version, I've taken the sort of liberty Grass encouraged in order to convey this effect:

Built up, chopped down, wiped out, hauled back, dismembered, remembered: Oskar first learned the art of drumming up the past as a lodger.

The English words have a different rhythm, and the German prepositional pairs—auf/ab, aus/ein, fort/nach—are only approximately
matched in English by up/down, out/back, and dis/re, but drum and memory are now linked as Grass intended.

From the day of his birth beneath two sixty-watt light bulbs, the rhythm of Oskar's life is rapped out on his drum. The novel itself is generated to that sound, which resonates from one passage to the next, at times soft and gentle, at times strident and insistent. As Oskar wears out drum after drum, the chapters rise in turn. And by the closing page those drumbeats have been transformed to poetry.

In German the effect is often like jazz, with riffs on words instead of notes. In such freewheeling passages Grass urged us to find equivalents in our own language, but to sense and maintain a rhythmic flow. Encouraged by Grass, I have sometimes placed the sound and rhythm of a sentence above normal syntax and grammar.

The precision with which Grass weaves the verbal web of
The Tin Drum
is remarkable, and one of the major challenges of a new translation is to follow each thread in detail. Again and again Grass echoes earlier passages, building a cumulative effect by the end of the novel that is particularly powerful.

Tracing these motifs in translation is sometimes difficult, but it is far easier today than it was fifty years ago, because we now have a technology that makes it easier for us to identify repetitions. As a collateral benefit, it has been possible to correct several dates, facts, and figures in
The Tin Drum,
including one or two instances of authorial inconsistency. (Thus the number of stairs Oskar threw himself down when he took his plunge into the cellar has now been firmly established as sixteen.)

Even chapter titles in
The Tin Drum
are often precisely echoed in the text. In the new translation the episode formerly entitled "No Wonder" is now called "No Miracle," since in the chapter itself the phrase refers straightforwardly to the failure of the boy Jesus to perform a miracle for Oskar. The chapter title "He Lies in Saspe" remains unchanged, but when the phrase occurs in the text, it now, as in the German, repeats the title.

These small points are multiplied many times over throughout the novel, and although the reader may not note and react to every one of
them, they are central to aesthetics of Grass's text, as they are to music and art itself. In the new version, something of the beauty and complexity of Günter Grass's novel should be felt on every level, both in the macrostructure of the work and in its smallest details.

The challenge of
The Tin Drum
has been remarkable. But nothing can match the challenge it must have posed almost fifty years ago. I am only too aware of the shortcomings of my own translation, of the debt I owe to Ralph Manheim, and of the good fortune I have had to share some part of this long journey with him.

BREON MITCHELL

January 2009

Atlantic Wall (Atlantikwall):
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Baron Münchhausen (1720-1797):
a German baron famous for his outrageous tall tales about his adventures. The tales were later collected and published by others.

Belisarius (ca. 500-565):
one of the greatest generals of the Byzantine Empire.

Biedermeier:
a term used to refer to Central European culture from ca. 1815 to 1848, marked by the rise of an urbanized middle class that was focused on domestic affairs, with a sentimental taste in art and literature.

Bollermann and Wullsutzki:
popular characters in Danzig jokes and stories, symbolizing German and Polish elements.

Bonbon:
used colloquially to refer to the Nazi Party pin, which was round in shape.

Burckhardt, Carl Jacob (1891-1974):
a Swiss diplomat and historian who served as League of Nations High Commissioner of Danzig, 1937-1939.

Cold Storage Medal:
the colloquial name given to the medal for service in the German Army on the Arctic Front.

Crossing the T:
in naval battles, an attack against the flank of another ship.

Currency reform:
the West German monetary policy established in 1948. The introduction of the German mark (Deutsche mark) to replace the inflated Reichsmark had a highly beneficial psychological effect on German businessmen and was considered the turning point in the postwar reconstruction and economic development of West Germany.

Der Cherubinische Wandersmann (The Cherubic Pilgrim) (1674):
a collection of mystical poetry assembled by Angelus Silesius.

De Gaulle's cross; the cross of Lorraine:
the Cross of Lorraine was adopted by Charles de Gaulle as the official symbol of the Free French Forces during World War II.

Draußen vor der Tür (Outside the Door; The Man Outside) (1947):
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Edelweiß Pirates of Cologne:
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Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) (1809):
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Flex, Walter (1887-1917):
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Forster, Albert (1902-1952):
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Frings, Josef Cardinal (1887-1978):
an outspoken critic of Nazism who served as Archbishop of Cologne from 1942 to 1969 and was elevated to Cardinal in 1946 by Pope Pius XII.

Greiser, Arthur (1897-1946):
the president of the Danzig Senate from 1934 who signed a treaty with the Nazis regulating Danzig's relations with Poland. After World War II he was condemned to death in Poland as a war criminal.

Gulden:
the currency of Danzig from 1923 through 1939, when it was replaced by the German Reichsmark. It was divided into 100 pfennigs (pennies). Until 1923, Danzig issued paper money denominated in marks.

Hartmannsweilerkopf:
a pyramidal rocky spur in the Vosges Mountains fiercely contested by the French and the Germans in World War I.

Heil dir im Siegerkranz (Hail to Thee in Victor's Crown):
the unofficial national anthem of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918.

Hitler Youth Quex and SA Man Brand:
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Home to the Reich (Heim ins Reich):
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Jan Wellem:
the popular name for the elector palatine Johann Wilhelm (16791716), whose monument still stands today in Düsseldorf.

July 20th conspiracy:
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Kashubes:
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Käthe Kruse dolls:
individually designed, handmade cloth dolls from the workshop of the onetime actress Käthe Kruse.