Read Selam Berlin auf Englisch in Canon Translation Review

January 28th was a momentous day in my life: it was the first time something I translated was published! Lucky for you, ever-so-wide blog-audience, the publication is online and waiting for your excited eyes to peruse it.

Parked in Kreuzberg, Berlin, August 2009; featured on Canon's homepage with my translation.
 
It's the first issue of a new translation review, Canon, which is put out by the Undergraduate Comparative Literature Association at the University of Michigan. My final academic year, 2009-2010, was designated the "Year of Translation" by the comparative literature department. (Hilariously, this year is the "Year of Comparison." Shouldn't that be every year? I mean, that goes for both, but what's comp lit without the comp-ing? I always make jokes about comp-ing, and I always laugh inside.) Anyway, to go along with the Year of  Translation and to take a step closer to having an actual translation curriculum, the comp lit department started a translation workshop course for undergraduate students to be offered each semester. And I took it. And I translated part of a novel. And then I was one of the undergraduates invited to apply (thanks, Editor-in-Chief Megan!) to U of M's 4th Biannual Graduate Student Translation Conference, and so my translation benefited from further workshopping. (And because I'm someone who answers her emails, and likes to be righteous about standardized American spelling practices and comma placement, sometime during the summer I became an editor of Canon Translation Review.)

It's full of great things. You can read a little about them all here, in the letter from the editors, but then you need to read the translations. There's modern and there's old. French, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Czech. But now, conveniently just for you, all in English!

There's German, of course. Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin, translated by moi. You should read it. I don't know if this is more convincing but I'll try:

Selam Berlin is a novel about being Turkish and German. It's a novel about the Wende—the turning point—when the Berlin Wall fell, two halves of a city and a country came back together, and one half of a family learns another half exists. It's about a nineteen-year-old who feels himself very much a Turkish-German and not a Turk living in Germany. It's about becoming an adult as the Wall is reduced to a remembered shadow, as secrets and realizations come to light in the aftermath of the Peaceful Revolution. This bildungsroman by the Turkish-German author Yadé Kara was published in 2003 and won the German Book Prize for best debut in 2004. No complete English translation has been published, although the first chapter was published in English in the November 2009 issue of Words Without Borders in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9th of the same year. Although Selam Berlin takes place after the Wall has been opened, the novel shows how dramatically the division of the city affected its residents’ lives—in particular, the lives of Hasan and his family. There are not many long passages that represent the book by themselves. The first chapter is one, but it had already been translated, and the last chapter is powerful, but not standing alone, so I tried to include a series of scenes that wouldn’t be too confusing out of context. They survey Hasan’s reactions to life in post-Wall Berlin and carry the reader through the city streets.

So there you go. You want to read it. Do it.

I made this to go along with the translation—I didn't want footnotes to interrupt the enjoyment of the story, but I wanted to provide some supplemental information. So, here you go.

Mit wärmeren Worten = With Warmer Words

Translated by yours truly for a translation class. It's "spring" break!

Zweiohrküken = Two-Eared Chick(en)

Today, Emma was looking up Inglourious Basterds and things and ended up reminding me of the films Keinohrhasen (commonly translated as "Rabbit Without Ears", but I think "No-Ear Rabbit" sounds better 'cause it's more like a name) and Zweiohrküken, which are German romantic comedies starring, co-written and produced by Til Schweiger. (On a side note, I still need to see Inglourious Basterds.) I saw the first one, Keinohrhasen, in which Til Schweiger's character finds himself working at a kindergarten to fulfill his sentence for crashing some party/event/whatever because of his job at a tabloid. He can't sew and ends up making an adorable rabbit without ears. And, you know, love story. It's funny, and cute, and I really like Nora Tschirner's glasses on her (it's apparently impossible to find any other photo than this one, but pay attention in the video), but the best part is the teaser video for its sequel, Zweiohrküken.

You don't need to know German. It's adorable no matter what. Just watch it.


The movie has since come out, and there's a trailer that actually gives a plot outline, but this video is just so good. The golden light. The music. The comforting setting and sewing-machine. The narration. The darling, darling Emma Tiger Schweiger, Til Schweiger's daughter, who plays the cute little girl asking about Til Schweiger's newest creation, is unbelievably cute.

Okay, you want to know what's going on? I'm going to skip some parts, because some things are repetitive or hard to understand for English-speaking me. And I bet it's more enjoyable just to watch their smiles than to read.

Adorable child/Cheyenne-Blue: What's that supposed to be?
Nora Tschirner/Anna: It looks like a jaundiced, floppy-eared pot-bellied pig.
Til Schweiger/Ludo: This is No-ear Rabbit's new friend[...] Two-eared Chicken[...]
Cheyenne-Blue: But chickens don't have ears.
Ludo: They do as of now.
[...]
Cheyenne-Blue: But why does the chicken have ears?
Anna: Because Ludo can't sew.
Ludo: She has ears because she wished them there.
Cheyenne-Blue: But why did she wish them there?
Ludo: Because she wanted to fly so badly.
Cheyenne-Blue: She can fly with her ears?
Ludo: Mmhm. But only at wind speeds of four to five, and when the wind's coming from the northwest. She stands here like this and waits for the wind, it comes from behind and goes under her ears, and she can take off like an airplane and fly around the whole world. From up there, she can see everything perfectly. She's been to Turkey, to Antarctica, the Lüneburger Heide—once, she was even behind the moon.
Cheyenne-Blue: And the ears grew just because she wished them there?
Ludo: When you really wish something, when you firmly believe that it will come true, then it happens.

Thanks to Nico for help with some particularly difficult lines. Maybe being obsessed with linguistics helps you hear better.

Knulp = der Landstreicher = Me?

Maybe you've been following my blog these past few weeks, or even months. Maybe you randomly clicked the link on Facebook while you were stalking me. Either way, odds are you don't know what der Landstreicher means. According to my Langenscheidts Wörterbuch (wordsbook—>dictionary), ein Landstreicher is a tramp or a hobo. According to LEO, it can also mean vagabond, vagrant, yegg, landloper, or rolling stone. (And rolling stone comes with a female equivalent, die Landstreicherin...maybe I should go for that.)

First, I would like to point out that landloper is very old, and very Dutch. It doesn't even come up on Merriam-Webster.com unless you have a paid account. But I guess that's okay. It means literally land walker, or a wanderer, vagrant, or adventurer. More questionable is yegg. Like seriously, what? A yegg is a safe cracker or a robber. Have you ever heard or seen that word before?

I am certainly not a yegg. (Hahaha.) Or a vagabond, vagrant, or hobo. Nor a tramp, in any sense of the word. I do, however, walk on land—who would have thought—and hope to consider myself an adventurer soon. There are so many places I want to visit, and also many I'd like to try living in, so it seems like a fitting title. I originally learned it with only the definitions tramp and hobo. I was trying to read Knulp, by Hermann Hesse, and after getting sick of constantly stopping to look up words, I tried a few pages without a dictionary. Then I got frustrated with not understanding all the words and I gave up. But the word Landstreicher really bothered me, because I thought I should have known it, but I didn't.

The word I had been thinking of was Anstreicher, which means house painter. Or in the context of what we read for class, the person painting the world with propaganda, aka Hitler. But when I looked up Landstreicher and read tramp, hobo I laughed to myself, because hobo makes me think of bum (even though they're not the same thing) and I call myself a lazy bum all the time. Later, when I was trying to come up with a German title for this blog, I remembered Landstreicher and decided it was good, at least for the time being.

Later on, I looked into Knulp and the word more, and decided that if I was going to use it as my title, I needed to know what I was alluding to. Plus Knulp takes place in the Black Forest, which is where I was headed, so with four days left in Ann Arbor, I checked it out of the library and read it—in English, because the German version would have required making a request and four times as much time. Knulp a novella made up of three stories about Knulp, der Landstreicher, from different phases of his life. The translation I read used tramp every time. I know this is long, but this the word's first occurence in the book, in a passage explaining Knulp's carefree, restless existence.

"Keeping his roadbook in order was indeed one of Knulp’s hobbies. In its dazzling perfection, his roadbook was a delightful fiction, a poem. Each of the officially accredited entries bore witness to a glorious station in an honest, laborious life. The only seemingly discordant feature was his restlessness, attested by frequent changes of residence. The life certified by this official passport was a product of Knulp’s invention, and with infinite art he spun out the fragile thread of this pseudo-career. In reality, though he did little that was expressly prohibited, he carried on the illegal and disdainful existence of a tramp. Of course, he would hardly have been so unmolested in his lovely fiction if the police had not been well disposed toward him. They respected the cheerful, entertaining young fellow for his superior intelligence and occasional earnestness, and as far as possible left him alone. He had seldom been arrested and never convicted of theft or mendicancy, and he had highly respected friends everywhere. Consequently, he was indulged by the authorities very much as a nice-looking cat is indulged in a household, and left free to carry on an untroubled, elegant, splendidly aristocratic and idle existence." (p. 9)

I recommend it. And I also would like to enjoy the untroubled, idle existence of a nice-looking cat.