An Interview with Susan Bernofsky
Joyelle McSweeney: Susan, I greedily devour your translations of German-language prose stylists—from Robert Walser and Franz Kafka to contemporary masters like Yoko Tawada and Jenny Erpenbeck. Then I re-read them to admire the keenness and mobility of your translation; each sentence becomes a fascinating maneuver to watch you execute—and you always stick the landing. Can you tell me what it’s like to spend time translating a prose work, learning the physics of a particular author’s sentences?
Susan Bernofsky: First of all, thank you so much for your kind words about my translations. It means a lot to me to know that an amazing writer like you is reading my work. I love all the incredibly inventive things you do with language. And it’s so important for translators to immerse themselves in the work of writers who push the limits of English, given that we’re always trying to stay lyrical where appropriate while also finding ways to say things that might not fit so organically into the language. Reading “my” authors as a translator, I’m always doing a sort of “reading between,” interlingually triangulating with the help of all the writers who teach me what English can do.
JM: As an Anglophone reader, I’ve been so grateful for the weird exactitude of Jenny Erpenbeck and the buoyant darkness of Yoko Tawada. Why have you focused on bringing these particular authors into English? What did you hope Anglophone readers would take from these works, and what kind of picture of contemporary German-language literature do you hope to paint?
SB: I have no ambition to give a full or in any way complete picture of contemporary German-language writing in English. The authors I’m drawn to all do writing that’s weird in some way or other, and reading them makes me joyful. With Jenny it’s the way she glides through multiple layers of history, stitching everything together until we feel the way the separate strands of supposedly individual human lives fit together. She does this with a fluid style that creates a sense of flowingness even as she’s actually cramming tons of information into each sentence in a way that might easily produce stagnation in a less skillful writer. And with Yoko we get the rug pulled out from under us in every paragraph. She has a genius for destabilizing assumptions and is always writing in such a way as to draw attention to the actual meanings of words, which don’t always align with our beliefs about them. She makes us think about the ruts of thought and speech we tend to fall into—reading her is always a wake-up call.
JM: The latest works by Erpenbeck and Tawada feel like departures. Erpenbeck’s new novel, Go, Went, Gone(opens in a new tab), focuses on the interaction of a retired Berlin classics professor with African refugees and is for the most part more realist, with fewer surreal touches and telescopic sleights of hand than, say, The End of Days(opens in a new tab). Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear(opens in a new tab) strikes a less stark balance between the dark and the fanciful than the other works I’ve read by her, though it also conveys somewhat heartbreakingly the loneliness of the female (polar bear) artist. But you know the oeuvres more intimately than I do; do these novels feel like departures to you? How would you describe these books?
(opens in a new tab)SB: Jenny’s Go, Went, Gone is less of a departure than it seems at first—though I too also thought it was a completely different sort of book for her when I first read it. But really what’s different is just the present-tense setting and current events tie-in, as well as the fact that she uses a male narrator. The book feels different from her earlier novels. But really she employs quite similar narrative techniques to those used in The End of Days, including the many historical excursions. And for me Yoko’s polar bear book is still plenty dark, but beneath a thin veneer of playfulness. She uses the fact that she’s writing (on the surface) about the “light” subject matter of bears to get into all sorts of gritty topics like prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. In that sense, this book seems grittier to me than much of her previous work (though there’s some of this in The Naked Eye(opens in a new tab) too). It’s not as abstract as she sometimes gets.
JM: Is translation an act of activism—and specifically feminist activism?
SB: It’s probably not a coincidence that I’ve gravitated to women writers when translating contemporary literature. There are lots of men writing wonderful work, of course, and when I’m choosing what to translate, I don’t tend to think consciously about gender, but it’s very true that when you translate a book, you wind up spending a huge amount of time in that author’s world (and worldview), and well, I guess I just like hanging out with women. Sometimes in books by men I come across assumptions that make me cringe—sometimes only a little bit, sometimes a lot—and generally it’s because of unconscious objectifying or othering of women (or others in various non-cis-male categories). But when you translate someone, you use your words to say what they say, and sometimes I just don’t want to say certain things or invest the energy to push back against them. It’s more comfortable to me to work with writers whose worldviews make me happy on a basic level and whose work challenges me in other ways.
JM: As I’ve alluded to above, your translations really get me a little high. I feel buzzed and transported by their intricacy and energy. Which translators give you this kind of charge?
SB: Margaret Jull Costa just knocks me out every time. In German, I really admire Anthea Bell. And I grew up reading Barbara Wright’s glorious translations of Raymond Queneau.
JM: What should we expect from you next?
SB: Right now I’m writing a biography of Robert Walser. I’ve been working on it for years now but somehow am supposed to get it finished this year. He’s currently twenty-five years old in my book, which means I’m about one third of the way through in terms of his chronology, though his life becomes much less eventful after he enters the asylum at age fifty, so that part of the book will no doubt be shorter. It’s been fascinating delving into his life and work—I’ve learned so much about him, and I’m really enjoying the process of learning how to tell his story. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in (fingers crossed) early 2019.
Joyelle McSweeney is co-founder of www.actionyes.org, a web-based journal featuring international writing and hybrid forms, and Action Books, a press that publishes poetry and books in translation. She has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
Susan Bernofsky, one of the preeminent translators of German-language literature, directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Progam at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Among her many published translations are Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the small masterpieces of Robert Walser.
