A job for Pinter’s ghost
Saturday, January 17th, 2009As a translator you should not sound too flippant about colleagues. We all make mistakes, and I know myself only too well the feeling of sitting in a first night and flinching at some turn of phrase because you only then realize how stilted it sounds. Paradoxically, in many cases this is because one tends to stay too close to the original. I needed a couple of translations to feel freer in that respect. Where I once turned “Don’t drift away from me” into the dreadful “Lass uns nicht auseinanderdriften”, today I would be confident enough to look for an adequate paraphrase. Despite knowing about one’s own sins in that respect, there is a certain ghoulish element of Schadenfreude when it comes to mistakes by others for which your sixth form teacher would rightly have thrown a dictionary at your head. Perhaps the all-time number one is the German rendering of Goldberg’s question “Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?” in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The translator who didn’t seem to be a cricket-fan turned that into: “Wer hat an das Stadttor von Melbourne gepinkelt?” (“Who pissed against Melbourne city gate?”) Even the notoriously humourless Pinter should have seen the joke.
My own favourite is in a similar vein. In Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda during a scene set at a dog-racing track “a fifty pee stake” became “Ich bin 50 mal dafür pissen gegangen.” (“I went pissing for it fifty times.”) During the German première at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg director Matthias Langhoff for good measure had an extra desperately running between two locked toilets during this memorable sentence. Somewhere hidden there must be a doctoral thesis on “Unfortunate bodily functions in German translations of British plays”. Brenton and Hare’s translator, the late Thomas Brasch, was not only a well-known dramatist himself but also born in England. Unfortunately he left the country aged two which probably explained mistakes like turning the “Labour HQ” into a “HQ-laboratory”.
But if the tone in German is right even such howlers can easily be corrected. With Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water on which I worked as a dramaturg the translator wanted a character to say: “Ich bin von einem Mähdrescher überfahren worden”, whilst the actual victim of the accident had been the family cat. This was rather good news for the actress not only concerning her make-up. The German version had errors on practically every page, mostly because the original was understood in an over-literary way. So “I was taken for a ride” became “wann immer ich auf einen Ausflug mitgenommen wurde”. The family father was referred to as “ein verdammter Irgendwer, das war er, die meiste Zeit” whilst in fact he had been “fucking someone else for most of the time”. However, apart from numerous mistakes like that the translation proved quite useable, because it managed to convey a nicely individualized language for the three daughters in Stephenson’s play.
Unfortunately the whole tone of a character differed from the original with Alice, the young stripper in Patrick Marber’s Closer, also receiving its German première at the Munich Kammerspiele. From her first appearance and her accent Alice seems to come straight out of the gutter, but sometimes she uses strangely obsolete terms like “codswallop”, which the translator changed into “Psychoschrott” (“Freudian rubbish”). Despite the well-known fact that nothing dates as fast as yesterday’s yoof-slang “very good” became “echt geil”. The character throughout appeared dumber than Marber wishes her to be, for instance when she explicitly refers to a statue as “a Minotaur” and in German is expected to say “‘n Stier” or when “a lonely old bastard” turns into “ein einsamer alter Witschi”, whatever that may be. An emergency meeting between translator, agent (who is the sole owner of the German rights), director and dramaturg led to absurd exchanges. When we questioned whether “Look at your little eyes” in German should really be “Sehen Sie mal Ihre Mausaugen”, the answer was: “If you don’t fancy my ‘Mausaugen’ at least you have to say ‘Äugelein’, because that sounds more poetical”, which is exactly the kind of spinsterishness Marber did not want. As it was impossible to find enough common ground, we took the risk of having a miffed translator attend the first night and complain about changes afterwards. At such instances one should be able to summon Pinter’s ghost as a combination of Goldberg and McCann at their most threatening. Surely he’d easily be able to come up with a few bodily functions appropriate to the occasion.
