The Tin Drum (87 page)

Grass first raised the idea of his now famous "Übersetzertreffen" (translators' meetings) in a letter to Helen Wolff in 1976:

Not long ago I was in Bergneustadt (near Bonn) at a gathering of translators.... During the symposium an idea came to me: to
arrange such a meeting of my translators three or four months after the appearance of a new text, one which I would attend as author for three or four days, making myself available, discussing the major problems, and helping to get this important process under way. Luchterhand and the foreign publishers could bear the cost.... What do you think of the idea?

With his publishers' blessing, such gatherings, which soon achieved a certain fame of their own, were to become a regular feature of Grass's literary life, and have recurred with each new novel.

Few authors have the power to generate financial support of this magnitude from their publishers, but, more significantly, few seem to care deeply enough about translation even to ask for it. Grass's desire to meet and discuss a new work with his translators sprang directly from a belief that rendering the style, substance, and linguistic complexity of his writing required a closer bond. And on that summer day in Gdańsk, translators both old and new had gathered once again with a special goal in mind—new translations to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of
Die Blechtrommel.

The most common question I faced while working on the new
Tin Drum
was, "What was wrong with the old one?" This question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of literary translation. It is precisely the mark of a great work of art that it demands to be retranslated. What impels us toward new versions is not the weakness of existing translations, but the strength and richness of certain works of literature. The works that are never retranslated are those we only care to read once.

We translate great works because they deserve it—because the power and depth of the text can never be fully revealed by a single translation, however inspired. A translation is a reading, and every reading is necessarily personal, perhaps even idiosyncratic. Each new version offers, not a better reading, but a different one, one that foregrounds new aspects of the text, that sees it through new eyes, that makes it new.

We also retranslate for new generations of readers. Language con
stantly changes, and although most original texts, by some mystery yet to be explained, maintain their freshness, translations, for better or worse, do not. After a few decades they become dated. If we are to perpetuate the life of a masterpiece in another language, we need new versions as the years pass.

We retranslate from a new vantage point, with a wealth of detailed scholarship behind us, with a wide range of newly available reference works, including specialized dictionaries, illustrated guidebooks, and wordlists of dialects. And we can now turn—as we do so often—to the Internet for rapid answers to even the most arcane of questions. All these aids are crucial to producing a new and more accurate version of
The Tin Drum,
since its pages teem with the detailed vocabulary of brick making, stonecutting, petrography, mining, sculpture, musicology, and warfare, with the rules of skat, with ecclesiastical paraphernalia, and with the perverse coinages of the Nazi era.

And if we're lucky, we may retranslate with the help of the author.

In Gdańsk, each morning at nine, we took our places around a long table and set to work. We were free to ask any question we wished, and Grass always answered directly and clearly, with unfailing good humor. In more than twenty-five hundred instances, carefully noted page by page in a protocol each translator later received, he clarified the meaning of a word or phrase, noting a particular linguistic effect, urging us to capture a special nuance.

He called our attention to his own idiosyncratic style—his penchant, for example, for writing numbers and dates out in full, rather than using Arabic numerals. He requested that we indulge him in this, pointing out that this practice struck German publishers as strange too. He asked us to follow Oskar's odd predilection for the use of the superlative, a verbal tic seldom noted in previous versions. He asked that we differentiate the characters more carefully in spoken dialogue, particularly with regard to variations in dialect, grammatical usage, and vocabulary.

He was anything but dictatorial, however. In passages involving complicated wordplay, or strongly marked by rhythm, he told us just to do our best, trusting us to come up with similar effects in our own languages, and encouraging us to coin new words where he had invented new ones in German (thus
zersingen
becomes "singshatter" in the new
version,
Betthüter
becomes "bedkeeper"). And on almost every page, he read one or more passages aloud, stressing the musicality of the language. Over the course of those days in Gdańsk, nothing made a more lasting impression on us than the sound of his voice, the melody of the text, the rhythm of Oskar's drum.

But it is not information alone that comes to our aid in retranslating a text, even when that information comes directly from the author. Our notion of the nature of translation itself changes over time. Should a translation transport the text into our own life and culture, or should a translation convey the reader into the world and culture of the original? Should the translation of a difficult and innovative work be rendered into a more readable and simplified form for readers, or should they be treated to an equally difficult and innovative text in their own language? Do we owe our allegiance to the author or to the reader? Can we be true to both?

Two brief examples may serve to sharpen the sense of these contrasting translation styles. During the trial of the gang called the Dusters in Book Two of
The Tin Drum,
Oskar looks down from the metaphorical heights of a diving tower and sees the world spread out below him. He watches as the threads of current events are woven into history. As Ralph Manheim's version continues:

I also saw that activities such as thumb-twiddling, frowning, looking up and down, hand-shaking, making babies, counterfeiting, turning out the light, brushing teeth, shooting people, and changing diapers were being practiced all over the world, though not always with the same skill.

This is a smooth and readable sentence that conveys the sense of Grass's original text quite clearly. But what makes this sentence special is something Grass does with language:

Auch fiel mir auf, das Tätigkeiten wie: Daumendrehen, Strirnrunzeln, Köpfchensenken, Händeschütteln, Kindermachen, Falschgeldprägen, Lichtausknipsen, Zähneputzen, Totschießen und Trockenlegen überall, wenn auch nicht gleichmäßig geschickt, geübt wurden.

Here a translator can achieve a similar rhythmic and semantic effect by stretching the language a little:

And I saw too that activities like thumb-twiddling, brow-wrinkling, head-nodding, hand-shaking, baby-making, coin-faking, light-dousing, tooth-brushing, man-killing, and diaper-changing were being engaged in all over the world, if not always with equal skill.

The sense of the sentence is still clear. One version draws nearer to the reader; the other clings closer to the author.

This may be seen at a syntactic level as well. To take only one example:

Auch war er der Chef der Formellabrüder und freute sich, wie wir uns freuten, uns kennengelernt, ihn kennengelernt zu haben.

He was also the Formella brothers' boss and was glad to make our acquaintance, just as we were glad to make his.

Here Manheim renders the German in a smoothly flowing sentence unlikely to attract special notice. Grass, however, catches his German reader's attention by allowing the introductions to cross each other, as they often do in real life, rearranging and interlocking the parts of the sentence. Retaining that effect in English is not difficult; it is simply a matter of taking the same linguistic liberty:

He was also the Formella brothers' boss, and was pleased, as we were pleased, to meet us, to meet him.

The difference between these two versions—one smooth and readable, the other deliberately playful and inventive—hints at a difference in philosophical approaches. A small matter in a single sentence, but over the whole of a novel the cumulative effect is considerable. Ralph Manheim could have translated
The Tin Drum
in either mode. A gifted writer of extraordinary linguistic skills, Manheim produced, often against the grain of standard literature, a timely and literate translation that played a major role in the international success of Günter Grass's novel and helped propel its author to a Nobel Prize. The new version I offer is meant for our present age, one that is increasingly open to the foreignness of the text, to the provocative innovation of linguistic play, to a syntactic complexity that stretches language.

A few general comments on this new translation may help the reader sense the broader implications of this approach.

One of the most memorable figures in
Die Blechtrommel
is the Black Cook, whose frightening presence pervades the novel. Grass recalled her to life from an old German folksong, first recorded at the end of the nineteenth century:

Ist die schwarze Köchin da? Nein, nein, nein!
Dreimal muß ich rum marschiren,
Das vierte Mal den Hut verlieren. Eins für mich!

Ist die schwarze Köchin da? Ja, ja, ja!
Da steht sie ja, da steht sie ja,
da steht die schwarze Köchin da! Zisch, zisch, zisch!

This song was sung by little girls standing in a circle. The game consisted of reducing the circle one by one until only the "schwarze Köchin" remained, who then hid her face in shame as the other girls whirled around her, singing the final verse.

The Black Cook not only haunts Oskar's nights and days but adds an important thematic motif to
The Tin Drum,
from the disgusting brew forced on Oskar by the children of the courtyard, to the dish of eels that sickens his mother Agnes, to the sausage sandwich devoured by Luzie as she urges the boys to jump to their death. It is no wonder that Luzie and the Black Cook coalesce in the course of the novel, or that the taste of that courtyard soup stays with Oskar forever. When the novel was first translated, however, there was no way to know the important role that cooks would continue to play in Grass's later works. So the Black Cook was reduced to a generic "witch, black as pitch" in
The Tin Drum,
and one important motif vanished. There were no doubt reasons for this choice, which was obviously a conscious one, and it is interesting to speculate on what they might have been. Whatever they were, the Black Cook is called back in the new version, and woven once more into the fabric of the novel.

One of the most pervasive stylistic changes in the new version of
The Tin Drum
is made in direct response to a plea Grass voiced long ago. In a letter to Helen Wolff of 6 February 1978, Grass lamented "the tendency
[of English translations] to break up the structure of my (necessarily) long periods into easily consumed, practical, sensible sentences, and thus to flatten the dramatic and temporal buildup of tension, and so destroy the effect; particularly since such longer periods are often followed by a series of short, staccato sentences which depend on the gradient of what has gone before.... Please don't tell me this doesn't work in English, that it runs counter to the rules—my prose doesn't follow German rules either, and is an offense to [standard grammars like]
Duden."

This same issue was raised by Grass during our meeting in Gdańsk, and I have responded. Each sentence in the new
Tin Drum
now faithfully replicates the length of the sentence in Grass's original text, and no sentences are broken up or deliberately shortened. As a result, long sentences reign in this version, as they do in the German. Grass does not write long sentences just to be difficult. Time and again, the length and cadence of a sentence underlines a mood, reinforces the impact of the moment, or reflects a central theme.

In a passage in Book Two, Maria slips into bed for the first time with Oskar, the apparent three-year-old who is nearly her own age. The paragraph consists of two sentences, one short and one long. The second sentence, after an initial caesura marked by a colon, glides along smoothly, in a mixture of humor and sexual tension, toward Maria's final words:

As soon as Maria put down the comb, the whistling stopped. She turned, shook her hair out, and arranged things on her chest of drawers with a few deft movements, which put her in high spirits: she threw a kiss to her mustached father, photographed and retouched in a black ebony frame, then leapt into bed with exaggerated energy, bounced up and down a few times, grabbed the eiderdown on her last bounce, and disappeared up to her chin under the mound, didn't touch me at all as I lay under my own quilt, reached out from under the eiderdown with a round arm from which the sleeve of her gown slid back, felt over her head for the cord to click off the light, found it, clicked it, and only when it was dark, said to me much too loudly, "Good night!"

The old version broke this passage into six short sentences, and while the humor was by no means lost, the steadily increasing syntactic tension Grass sought was missing.

Another example of a single sentence broken into five shorter ones in the earlier English version occurs near the close of Book One. In a mood of uncertainty and fear, Oskar meditates on the menacing present-day figures who may be hiding behind the beard of Santa Claus, those false messiahs of Hope, Faith, and Love who are ready to turn on the gas again, ready to butcher both people and language. For almost an entire page, the lament pours forth like a true purgation, of which any fragment has power: "...and we'll never know who had to fall silent, to say not a word, so guts could be filled and books could be heard, stuffed tight, jam-packed, thickly written..." All this erupts from Oskar's inner core in one long spasm of nausea—and in one long sentence.