The Passport

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/herta-mullers-passport/

This is a very short book, just 92 pages, and it’s made up of short sentences. Here’s a random paragraph:

'The skinner had given the stuffed animals to the town museum as a gift. He didn’t receive any money for them. Two men came. Their car stood in front of the skinner’s house for a whole day. It was white and closed like a room.'

Sentence after sentence. Page after page. It proceeds in that staccato way. It doesn’t quite say what it’s saying. People do things, and say things, and see things. There are snippets of folklore, a bawdy song, symbolic objects, similes and metaphors as odd as the white room in that quote. You have to fill in the gaps, decode the descriptions. Only a handful of characters have names, the rest being known only by their professions or relationships. It took me until page 42 to realise I was in the middle of a narrative that I hadn’t been following. I started over. I’m glad I did.

It’s a terrible tale of the German-speaking minority in a village in Ceauçescu’s Romania. Uneducated, superstitious, despised by the Romanian majority, they live lives of quiet desperation and degradation. The village miller sets out to secure from the corrupt system a passport that will enable him, his wife and daughter to leave for West Germany.

I hated a lot of this as I was reading it: I just wanted to be told the story, to have a spade called a spade, rather than a headache being called a grain of sand moving around behind the forehead (at least, I assume that was a headache). But there is something mesmeric about it. I’m amazed that now I intend to immerse myself in that world again – not immediately, but when enough time has passed that I will be revisiting it rather than extending the current visit.

I did not enjoy this book. But if you want to read a book to practice your German, this one is by a Nobel Prize winner, is short, and is in very simple German. If the German title makes sense to you, maybe the book will, too. ( )

This short novella, an early work first published in 1986, is set in a German speaking village in Romania under the Ceauşescu dictatorship.
I had read the novella in the original German. As it had made a profound impression on me I was astonished to find a review of the English translation by the writer Tibor Fischer, to be unenthusiastic, in particular about its language. He in fact suspected ‘that something significant is being shed in the rendering’ into English . This awoke my curiosity: What could it be that is lacking in the translation? and what could be the cause of it?
I found that difficulties of translation have their root in H.M.’s very precise use of language in combination with a highly distinctive and personal voice. These problems can be traced to the following features:
(i) H. M. uses words for which frequently no satisfactory English word can be found, so they have to be circumscribed by a sentence, substituted by using an inevitably weaker approximation or left out completely; (ii) she uses and stresses grammatical features for which there is no equivalent in English; as a result, the translation can become weak; (iii) H.M.’s idiosyncratic use of the German language includes coinage of new words (the latter being easily possible in German by combining two nouns but impossible to reproduce in English); (iv) finally, I think, at times a more appropriate translation can be found that preserves better what H.M. elsewhere calls ‘der fremde Blick’ (‘the estranged gaze’) of the original.
I will give examples of each. References are by page number (a/b) where a stands for the page number in the German Fischer Taschenbuch (2009) edition and b for the page number in the English Serpent’s Tail (2009) edition (transl.: Martin Chalmers).

To (i): Examples of German words that have no direct equivalent in English:
‘Die Baumkrone’ (36/31), (lit.: tree-crown ) translated here as: ‘The crown of the tree’; this is not as strong as the German but better than ‘tree top’ because it preserves the images of the crown, an intentional or unintentional reference to the king of a later chapter who is here ritually exorcised.
‘fressen’(engl.: to eat): a word that appears many times e.g. ‘Der Apfelbaum fraß Äpfel’ / 'The apple tree ate apples' (32/28), ‘Der Dunst frißt sein Gesicht’ / ‘The steam eats his face’ (49/42), ‘Das Grundwasser frißt’ / ‘water eats’ (57/48), Ziegen fraßen’ / ‘ goats had eaten’ (59/49), etc. German distinguishes between ‘essen’: humans eat and ‘fressen’: animals eat (or to picture a human eating like an animal), ‘devour’ may be nearer to ‘fressen’ as it expresses the speed and greed of the action but lacks the coarseness of ‘fressen’. There are similar problems with ‘Maul’ (engl. transl.: ‘mouth’) repeated 5 times (34-35/30); again it is only used for animals or with pejorative meaning.
‘vertrunken’ (adj.) in: ‘Die vertrunkenen Briefe’ / ‘The Letters’, i.e. the adjective has not been translated (50/42). ‘vertrunken’ means: ’spend or squandered on drink’; an association here is with ‘ertrunken’: ‘drowned’; not only are the letters ‘drowned in drink’ but disappear like persons drowned – death never being far away in this novella.

To (ii): grammatical features without English equivalent:
Nouns have no gender in English. This can weaken the image in the case of repeated use of the personal pronoun in a sequence of short sentences that refers to the same noun in a previous sentence. An example (68/56-57) referring to the owl (in German ‘die Eule’ (f): … für sie..., dann wird sie ...., wenn sie ..., etc.; by comparison, the repeated ‘it’ – ending in a plosive - sounds rigid and dead. The owl is the bringer of death but herself very much alive.
In another case (71/59), the masculine article ‘der’ introduces 5 consecutive short sentences which conjure up a foreboding and a threat that is lacking in the repeated ‘The’: ‘Windisch turns round. The …’etc.
The use of the Konjunktiv that is lacking in English: ‘Die Leute sagten, hinter der Kirche stehe ein Mann. Er sehe aus wie der Pfarrer ohne Hut.’ In English: ‘People said that a man was standing behind the church. He looked like the priest without his hat.’ (37/32) Missing in the translation is an undefined threat (taken up again by different means and images, like a set of variations on a theme, in every single sentence in this chapter).
The verb employed in its reflexive form, which is rarely used in English, see below.

The language differences become important exactly because of H.M.’s distinct and precise use of the German.

To (iii): H.M.’s idiosyncratic use of language:
‘Der Nachtwächter trägt um den Hutrand einen Fransenkranz aus Regenschnüren’ (56/47); both, ‘Fransenkranz’ and ‘Regenschnüre’ are H.M.’s creations, new words she formed by combining two nouns each; they convey a startling and very visual image (‘Kranz’ is a ‘wreath’ in English); the given translation – ‘Rain fringes the brim of the night watchman’s hat.’ – is merely descriptive, it ignores that the night watchman carries a wreath out of strings of rain that fringe the brim of his hat.

In the phrase ‘Der Totenwagen dreht sich …’ – transl. as: ‘The hearse turns …’ (56/47) H.M. makes unusual use of the reflexive verb form. As a result, the verb describes a state in German whereas in English the verb describes an action. In German the image is that of a wheel or merry-go-round turning round and round: the image of the hearse ‘breaks through time’ and, in doing so, acquires a symbolic dimension which is lost in English.
Later, H.M. coins her own expression for this ‘breaking through time’ with the phrase ‘die stehende Zeit’, which she uses repeatedly e.g. (110/91): ‘Am Hals des Nachtwächters klopft eine Ader in die stehende Zeit’ which the translation breaks up and renders as two sentences: ‘A vein beats on the night watchman’s neck. Time stands still’. As startling the phrase: ‘die stehende Zeit’, as banal is ‘Time stands still’! The English looses, first, time as a quasi living being, as a mysterious power (the English phrase, by being too familiar, has lost this power); secondly, the invocation of life, the blood beating, exposed to time and with it, death, standing, watching, waiting.

To (iv): some examples of words and phrases for which I propose a more appropriate translation:
(18/16) ‘ihr Atem schnurrte.’ (repeated once), is translated first by ‘her breath hummed’ then simply by ‘The sound of her breath …’; more precise is: ‘her breath purred’. The 2nd occurrence (18/17) could be translated as: ‘As if the purr of her breath has reached the end of all things, his own end.’

(34 §3,4/29 §7,8) ‘No one in the village slept. …… The children did not cry.’ The translation omits the repeated definite article. It should read: ‘The dogs …, The cats …, The people …, The mothers …, The children …’. The definite article underlines that the whole village stays awake. Also, in the first § the translation combines twice two sentences with the result that the English reads smoother than the original. My translation: ‘No one in the village slept. The dogs stood in the streets. They did not bark. The cats sat in the trees. They watched with glowing lantern eyes.’

(55/46) ‘The water lingers on the streets.’ / ‘Das Wasser betet auf der Straße.’ – a mistranslation; it should read: ‘ The water prays in the street.’

(56/47) ‘The hem of his black cassock trails in the mud.’: this is a straightforward description but the original sentence is anything but conventional: ‘Die schwarze Kutte geht auf dem Saum im Schlamm.’ –: ‘The black cassock walks on its hem in the mud.’ In this image the cassock becomes a living being; the translation needs to preserve this. Many, perhaps most things come alive in the story, changing into something else. In this it resembles a fairy story. The translation does not always convey this. A few more examples from this chapter:
(55/47) ‘A hydrangea leaf trembles.’ / ‘Ein Hortensienblatt zuckt.’– ‘trembling leafs’ is a conventional expression; better to translate ‘zucken’ more precisely as: ‘to twitch’.

(56/47) ‘Above the village, the roofs are leaning towards the water.’ / ‘Überm Dorf gehn die Dächer wasserwärts’–: better: ‘ … the roofs are walking towards the water.’

(57/48) ‘Windisch sees his hat in the puddle.’ / ‘Windisch sieht seinen Hut durch eine Pfütze gehn.’–: more precise: ‘Windisch sees his hat walking through a puddle.’

(85/71) The chapter heading ‘Der Saugfleck’ is translated here as ‘The love bite’. The common German word is ‘Knutschfleck’ (‘knutschen’: ‘to snog’); ‘Saugfleck’, (lit.: ‘suck-stain’) may perhaps be Austrian or Banat dialect. The image the word conveys here is of injury or worse – ‘sucking the life out of her’ - the opposite of ‘love’! A literal translation (‘suck stain’) would have preserved this association as well as a further reference: This chapter heading (‘Der Saugfleck’) alludes to a previous chapter heading ‘Der Todesfleck’ / ‘The Death mark’ (48/41); the translation looses this link.

Lastly, I would like to add some general comments:
The original title reads: ‘Man is but a pheasant in the world’. The English edition gives the book an entirely different title: ‘The passport’. This changes the reader’s expectations and misleads: although the hope for a passport so as to be able to escape the village and Romania and start a new life in West Germany, and the steps taken to get one, runs like a thread through the narration, it is not the essence of the story. The heart of the story lies in the – at first glance very strange – chapter ‘The king is sleeping’.
This chapter occupies the core of the book. It is the 26th chapter out of 50 and exactly 53 pages precede and follow it. It ends with the, by far, longest sentence in the entire text.
H.M. presents elsewhere the king who accompanies her already since her childhood, in many disguises and undergoing many changes. A powerful king, an arbitrary king, no mercy is to be expected, but one who keeps discipline who brings order into her life. She says the king is everywhere and lives in all things. She calls the king double-edged: her craving for live amidst fear of death. It is this that permeates the narrative.

This chapter reminds me of a very short parable by Kafka, two sentences only: Auf der Gallerie. In both, the audience claps and both end with a visitor helplessly crying:
Cracks and holes appear, reality, or is it appearance?, breaks up, any moment one can fall into them. Here, in this sentence, lies hidden the key to the narrative. It is essential that the word order is preserved and the sentence and the chapter ends with ‘… und weinte.’ -: ‘… sat, until the goats had eaten all the bunches of flowers, alone in the waiting room and cried.’
Herta Müller wrote an extraordinary novel. This English translation does not do it justice. (V-10) ( )

A small village in communist Romania is slowly dying. Almost everyone wants to leave for West Germany, but passports are hard to obtain. Those in power in the village, the priest and postmaster, demand bribes and sexual favours for their role in providing an escape to the west. The short novel follows one family's travails in this decaying, corrupt place, before they eventually manage to escape its clutches.

Told in a cold, almost perfectly externalised style, with poetic, rich symbolism throughout, the book is evocatively, subtly surreal, with reality bent towards primitivism, prejudice and fear. The emotions come not from the people, but are reflected instead in the objects around them. Although taking some getting used to, I soon found this approach hypnotic and fascinating, even if occasionally I was left a little bewildered as to exactly what Muller was trying to convey. The characterisations were sparse, almost charicatures, and I felt a little dissatisfied by this, even if the heavy, wonderful poetry of the book obscures this well.

To me this was an obviously early book, with moments of brilliance, and an incredibly effective atmosphere of oppression, but ultimately it was not quite as polished as her later works, even if watching her developmental steps is fascinating in itself. ( )

There is a lot here in this little book. There is the whole dark 20th-century history of the Banat Swabians* hanging in the background, in the shadows, yet overshadowing everything. And there is the story, which involves a desperate effort for emigration passports, and bribery by whoring one’s daughter who is young enough to be bribed herself with a crystal vase. And there is Müller, and her ability to capture this all without exactly saying it.

The words are simple, the sentences are straight-forward except that taken together they are somewhat disjointed, forcing the reader the put things together and to think about the meaning within, between and beyond the text - where things are both profound and complex. There is some pleasure in trying to work this out, and that’s what really drew me in. This novel isn’t simply imagery, although there is a lot of that, but something like a picture emerges, like an image where something terrible is happening, but the victims don’t fully grasp the darkest part it, and it’s their obliviousness that is maybe the real horror of the image. Although I’m quite sure that's it; Müller defies my ability to explain, but she’s thought provoking in ways that both fascinating and very dark.

*see Wikipedia for a decent summary of the Banat Swabians. In brief, they were Catholic Germans from various regions recruited to re-populate the Banat region by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the 18th-century. In that last century, first Austria-Hungary collapsed, then the Banat Germans allied themselves with Nazi Germany. During later World War II they were heavily recruited to the SS where they gained enough notoriety for crimes against Jews and Serbians during World War II that they had alienated themselves from about everyone. The immediate post-war saw revenge taken against the Banat Swabians, with their property confiscated and with thousands being sent to Russian labor camps or dying in Yugoslavian “Village Camps”. The later 20th-century saw a continual Swabian exodus to Germany, and many dark years under Ceauşescu who turned Ultra-nationalist during his roughly 25-years in power. According the Wikipedia the German population in Romania fell from about roughly 750,000 to about 75,000 today. ( )