Schirach and Lust Nominated for LA Times Book Prizes

I know nothing about the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes except that they're awarded on 11 April and come in lots of different categories. Among them are Graphic Novel/Comics and Mystery/Thriller, and two names looked oddly familiar: Ulli Lust for Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (trans. Kim Thompson) and Ferdinand von Schirach for The Collini Case (trans. Anthea Bell).

How exciting! An Austrian graphic novelist and a German crime writer, nominated for American book prizes! On the one hand I'm very pleased that the awards don't discriminate between books written in English and books written in other languages, simply singling out good stuff. But then there's the fact that the LA Times website doesn't mention the translators' names, or indeed the fact that the books are translated. And that I had to spend a while searching for Schirach's translator, because neither does the Penguin website. Pretty poor show all round.

Lucas Klein foams at the mouth – justifiably so – about how reviewers need to toughen up and name the translator at Words Without Borders. Awards – and publishers! – need to do the same. The LA Times awards come with a small prize of $500 each, but even that ought to be shared between writer and translator. I've written them a friendly email.

Readux Announces New German Fiction Competition

Amanda DeMarco has announced an exciting new opportunity for German writers aged 30 and under – a competition with publication in German literary magazine Edit as a prize, and also publication in book form in English translation by Readux. And €500. And subscriptions to Edit and Readux. And events in Berlin and Leipzig.

It really is quite extraordinary.

Leipzig Book Fair Prize Nominees

Today they announced the fifteen nominated titles for the three categories in the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, Germany's big springtime literary award.

Non-fiction ranges from pop theory to an analysis of changing fashions to a biography of Max Weber. Translations come from Norwegian, American English, Japanese, French and Romanian, and here are the fiction nominations:

Fabian Hirschmann: Am Ende schmeißen wir mit Gold

A debut novel that's being compared to Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick and Thomas Klupp's Paradiso, possibly because it's about a young man from a comfortable background going on a road trip, it would appear. I'd say it's closer to Klupp, but only because I hate the protagonist already, from the short sample I've read. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Per Leo: Flut und Boden

The embarrassing pun in the title gives it away – a grandson named Per is fascinated by the story behind his Nazi grandfather and his Goethe-obsessed great-uncle, who grew up in a villa on the River Weser. It might be interesting, or it might be another personal reckoning with Germany's dark twentieth century history. Of course, it might also be both.

Martin Mosebach: Das Blutbuchenfest

Conservative Germany's favourite old man contrasts a garden party with the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. I suspect there will be lots of deplorable wealthy people doing debauched things, while the Bosnian cleaning lady looks on in horror and enjoys the simple pleasures in life. Certainly, she gets innocently naked on page 10. But people do so love his style.

Katja Petrowskaya: Vielleicht Esther

I shall be reading this one, most definitely. Petrowskaya won the Bachmann Prize last year with an extract from the manuscript, and it was good, solid, touching writing. Rights have already sold to fourteen countries and everyone's talking about it. Her family history (Jewish, Ukraine) in short chapters or stories, with the first-person narrator reflecting on whether it's OK to write about them and whether the stories are true, as far as I recall. I think it might win.

Saša Stanišić: Vor dem Fest

Another personal must. I've heard the author read from the manuscript twice now and enjoyed it enormously. As did the Döblin Prize judges, who gave him the bi-annual award for unpublished manuscripts. Stories, myths, characters from a Brandenburg village, swooping between the centuries – with a quiet humour that Stanišić worked hard to get pitch-perfect.

The winners will be announced at the book fair in Leipzig on 13 March.

Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated

Franz Kafka is the most commonly listed writer in a study of online dating profiles, followed by Milan Kundera and Paolo Coelho. Kafka has his own adjective and, as Michelle Woods points out in her fascinating Kafka Translated, has even made it into The Wire. You can't get much bigger. And yet Kafka made it big in English via a series of translators. Woods sets out to make those translators a little more visible, and to explore other aspects of translation in and of the writer's work. Her book's tagline is How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka.

She begins with his first translator, into Czech in this case, Milena Jesenská. Many readers know of her through the collection of Kafka's Letters to Milena. I read these letters once, only once, and then tucked them away safely on the shelf because I knew I ought never to read them again. Love letters between a writer and his translator. They can't be un-read and it's an idea a translator would probably do better not to have in her head. Too late. Jesenská's side of the correspondence has been lost, and she remains so invisible to this day that she rarely warrants a surname. Woods tells us how she has been dismissed as a "bad translator" by all sorts of people who don't read Czech, and romanticized by novelists. Her story as Kafka's lover and a victim of the Nazis is inviting but is rarely told with her as an active protagonist. Being a reader of Czech, Woods goes some way to redeeming Jesenská's translations and certainly lends her a voice of her own, as a journalist and translator. She also gives us some fascinating information on the literary climate in which Kafka's Czech translations were first published - a new nation interested in writing experiments and new styles, with much scope for non-domesticating translation.

The next maligned woman in the plot is Willa Muir. Like Jesenská, Muir led a ground-breaking life of her own accord, growing up in poverty in the Shetlands, being one of the first women to attend a British university, moving to Europe and then London and attempting to make a feminist idea of marriage work. What Woods does in her book is provide convincing evidence that Kafka's first translations into English were not done by Edwin Muir and his wife, but by Willa Muir with occasional assistance from her husband. The Muir translations have been subject to a lot of criticism (there's a pattern arising here) for their smoothing-out and domesticating, along with other petty things like their use of allegedly Scottish words. Woods is not naive; she admits that much of this criticism is legitimate – although some of the blame can be placed on Max Brod for his posthumous sanitizing of Kafka through the editing process. What she does here, however, is show that Willa Muir was probably perfectly aware of what she was doing and chose to domesticate because that was what publishers at the time wanted. Sometimes, I'm afraid, they still do. Based on Muir's diaries and an unpublished, thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Woods unearths a fiercely intelligent woman who was translating to feed her family and hated some of the work – notably Feuchtwanger – but loved some of it too, even though it kept her from her own writing. Also, she was very funny indeed.

Woods moves on to living translators, starting with the Irish-born Mark Harman, who pressed Schocken to publish his re-translations of Das Schloß and Amerika because of the drawbacks to the Muir versions. In this section, she focuses partly on the way a translator's own language and reading colour their work. Harman is a Kafka scholar and a great fan of Samuel Beckett, who apparently found Kafka difficult and said that he wrote "like a steamroller". Here, Woods traces the tiny impressions left in Harman's Kafka by Beckett, and looks at the issue of "mid-Atlantic English", something I'm not sure exists. Certainly, it's not a language I can produce, but Harman seems to think he can, having lived in the States for many years. It's in this part that Woods introduces us to an indirect argument between two writer-critics, Milan Kundera and J.M. Coetzee. Both of them have grumpily critiqued Kafka translations, something many writers seem to enjoy doing, as Woods reveals by the by. Coetzee is the baddy, arguing in the case of Harman's The Castle that the translator ought to have tidied things up more towards the end, been less stylistically faithful. When it comes to Michael Hofmann, however, Coetzee finds his Joseph Roth translations not faithful enough. Kundera meanwhile argues that it's important for translators to render not into conventional good French, or English, but to show the author's transgressions against accepted style. To his credit, while this may seem utterly obvious, he did write it in 1996.

The section on Michael Hofmann was the most exciting reading, for me. I have had a problem with Michael Hofmann for a while, presumably founded on envy pure and simple. It's a little late in this review to admit it, but I've only ever read two translations of Kafka, and those were two versions of Ein Landarzt by Michael Hofmann and by Joyce Crick, both built into Will Self's magnificent digital essay "Kafka's Wound". I absolutely adore Hofmann's version. It is playful and stylish and it embellishes very slightly to make up for anything that may have been lost along the way. Whereas Crick's is the translation students ought to read, because it's more accurate and sober. I loved Hofmann's voice as Irmgard Keun in Child of All Nations, and in general I am all too willing to admit that Michael Hofmann is an outstanding translator. I suppose the non-envy part of the problem must be that I don't share his literary taste, with a few exceptions. Michelle Woods contests that his taste is what makes him stand out as a translator, and I found that very interesting. Because he has in fact translated a large swathe of mid-twentieth-century German-speaking men whose work doesn't grab me in the slightest. Which has the major advantage of leaving contemporary writers for the rest of us. I do think there is a kind of translator typecasting at play to some extent, whereby certain translators end up doing historical fiction, some will do classics, one will do racy contemporary novels by young writers, and so on. The subject was discussed by readers at Vishy's Blog last November, and it was interesting to think about how much choice translators have in the matter. Hofmann, at least, speaks of his own "imprimatur" and his wish that people will see his name on a book cover and buy a translation on the strength of that. I think in a small way that already happens.

Woods conducted an interview with Hofmann, which helps matters further by making him seem less pompous than in some of his critical writing. I was most relieved, after about a hundred pages of translation comparisons highlighting euphony and metre and the use of plosives, to find that Hofmann is often motivated by impatience and that he tackles his translations instinctively. Those daring translatorial choices of his that I so much admire are not the result of hours of weighing up and syllable-counting but spur-of-the-moment decisions. So despite being closer to Willa Muir in terms of financial constraints on my work, I now feel I can genuinely aspire to translate as playfully as Hofmann, when the occasion allows. Where he details his working philosophy in the interview, I find myself nodding:

Everything I do is on a case-by-case basis. The degree to which a book is left in German or all goes into English – I call it the schapps or wurst (or brandy or sausage) question. Whereabouts on the Anglo-American continuum it goes.

And elsewhere, he wrote something I find equally inspiring and close to my own emerging understanding of translation as a utopian project. Woods quotes him as describing translation as "a mode of reading so sympathetic and transitive that the outcome is a wholly new work, it's hunch and nerve and (my own muse) impatience. It's approaching the avowed-impossible, and shrugging your shoulders and just getting on with it." Yes.

There is much more in Kafka Translated but the second half focuses on Kafka's reception, which is of less specific interest here – although well worth reading. For me, the first half is an inspiring read for all those interested in translation. Woods is inherently sympathetic to the translator as a creative individual and has done us all a good turn by shining a light on four of the people who have indeed shaped our reading. She argues that what critics often launch upon as "mistakes" are almost always conscious decisions and should be respected as such. I devoured the book in one day and would wholly recommend it to general readers as well as translators, if only it weren't so expensive. for those interested in exploring translation decisions for themselves, Susan Bernofsky's exciting-looking new The Metamorphosis is more affordable.

German Crime Prize to Friedrich Ani

The Germans love crime fiction. Probably every culture loves crime fiction, but the Germans love home-grown crime fiction with a passion. There's something about reading a crime novel where the mutilated corpse is found in your local park and the detectives drink strong black coffee on your local station forecourt that makes you happy. There are market stalls and poky little shops that do a roaring trade in used crime paperbacks. There's the TV crime show Tatort, which has been running since 1970 with the same opening theme, which is not unlike Doctor Who in its nation-building ubiquity and which features police detectives in all sorts of German, Austrian and Swiss regions. People meet up to watch it in bars on Sunday nights, and canteens across the country resound with conversation on Monday lunchtime over whether it was a good one or not.

Of course there are several prizes for crime fiction, reflecting just how important it is to the nation's psyche. The longest-running award is the Deutscher Krimi Preis, and this year it has gone to Friedrich Ani for his novel M. Ani is a big name; I can't count the number of times he's been recommended to me. I just looked him up and found he's won an astounding twenty-one prizes for his work. He sets his crime novels in Munich; M features the popular missing-persons private detective Tabor Süden. Not unlike a certain other famous detective, Süden retired for a while but was brought back by popular demand – now in his nineteenth book. Ani also writes young adult novels, poetry and screenplays, including for the Tatort series. A few of the Tabor Süden books have been adapted for the screen too.

So the most amazing thing about this prolific and talented author is that his books have apparently been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Korean, Chinese and Polish – but not English. Publishers! What's the matter with you? M is set in a city Brits and Americans have heard of, has won a big fat prize, and features neo-Nazis. What else do you need? Good grief.

I'm hoping that someone somewhere is actually translating all these books as we speak, and will publish them all at once to surprise us. Wouldn't that be nice?

Isabel Cole on Surveillance

Regular readers will know that the writer and translator Isabel Cole is a long-standing partner in crime for me. We co-edit no man's land and co-host the no man's land literary translation lab, and we are often seen in cahoots over various other undertakings. She's been a great inspiration to me over the many years I've known her now.

So it's with a decent amount of pride and of course prejudice that I'd like to call your attention to two things Isabel has done recently. The first takes its starting point with a report in Words Without Borders on the genesis and progress of the writers' anti-surveillance appeal A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age. It's heartening to see so many writers and readers coming together behind an important issue, and I know Isabel and the other initiators have put in months and months of hard work towards it. Please read her article and sign the petition, if you haven't done so already.

The second thing ties in so well with the first that I can't let it go unmentioned. Isabel also has an ebook out with Mikrotext, Ungesichertes Gelände. It's an epistolary love novella set amongst political activists, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Informed – almost inevitably because she is his translator – by the work of East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, it is dark and wintry and heart-wrenching and quite the most intelligent and simultaneously beautiful and radical thing I've read in a long time. Isabel writes very precisely in German, not fulfilling that almost Orientalist cliché about exophonic writers adding "spice and sparkle" to their host language.

I can't write a proper review because I'm too biased, but the novella costs less than three euros so you can judge for yourself at the drop of a hat. Please do.

Lilo, Nelly und ich

Last year I translated Christa Wolf's final short story, "August". During and after the translation process, I wrote about it in English, and then I offered the piece to the German magazine Merkur and they took it. My friend Ina Pfitzner translated it into German, and now you can read it in the print edition or in fact download my essay for free. I hope it'll be somewhere in English at some point. The book comes out in February.

German Book Things That Were Amazing in 2013

2013 was a bit of a bumpy year, not without its frustrations. Lots of great English translations of German books came out, which is A Good Thing around these parts. But based on anecdotal and statistical evidence, I get the feeling publishers have started feeling the effect of the Goethe Institut translation funding cuts (from 70% down to 50% of translation costs). That means that long books are slow to sell to publishers. Nevertheless, I note that German Book Prize winner Terézia Mora's very long Das Ungeheuer has been picked up by Harper Collins/Ecco in the US, who published her Day In Day Out in Michael Henry Heim's translation. No sign of a UK publisher that I can find though.

On a personal level, I had a couple of disappointments. My two favourite German books of the year remain closed to Anglophone readers, as no publisher has got up the courage or the funds to commission translations. And a couple of planned events fell flat because, again, my enthusiasm was apparently not convincing enough for others. A group of us applied for events funding but didn't get it because Berlin is too skint. Plus I couldn't go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and had to sulk at home instead.

Despite the doom and gloom, though, there were some amazing and wonderful things this year. Here's a list, in random order:

Readux Books launched! My lovely friend Amanda DeMarco turned publisher and sacrificed all her time and energy on the altar of teeny books. She's worked so incredibly hard to put together an outstanding programme of beautiful works of literature. Amanda is totally my Publishing Person of the Year.

Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books got the Goethe Medal! We all put on our posh frocks and swanned off to Weimar for the ceremony, honouring special contributions to promoting German culture abroad.

Fiction Canteen started! The lovely ladies at Transfiction now have a warm and welcoming venue for translation-related events in Berlin, and they're not afraid to use it. We kicked off with the return of Translation Idol, which I enjoyed enormously.

The London Book Fair brought together Brits and Americans at the best ever Literary Translation Centre. The place was bursting at the seams, and not just because of the free sandwiches. You can watch videos of all the panel sessions, including one involving me on my 40th birthday.

I overcame my fear of (fellow) expats, partly by teaching a course on contemporary German literature for English-speakers, but also through the lovely people from SAND journal, who ran a translation workshop for under-30s back in April. I'm getting a vibe that English-speakers in Berlin are actually quite interested in translation and German writers, but find it difficult to gain access. I hope we can find ways to improve the situation further in 2014 – I'd love to try bringing together German and English writers on stage, but someone has to give me some money to pay them. Anyway, I've met some delightful and dedicated people and even wrote something of interest to expats with writerly intentions.

There were incredible workshops! I got to work with David "Excellent Writer" Wagner and a generous handful of other translators at a workshop led by Karen "Excellent Translator" Nölle, and I led workshops with the excellent German writers Daniela Dröscher and Tilman Rammstedt. Translation workshops are awe-inspiring things, whether you're participating or running them. May there be many more.

People were talking about translation all over the shop, partly prompted by big-name writers Adam Thirlwell and Jonathan Franzen's respective projects. It feels to me like we translators might piggy-back our way to fame and glory.

To add to the own-trumpet-blowing department, I am very pleased with my occasional extra blog, Going Dutch with German Writers. Strangely, no one had ever thought of going out drinking with German authors and then writing about it afterwards. It's been fantastic fun and has helped me to spend drunken evenings with some wonderful people.

If I had three professional wishes for 2014, I'd like to win a prize, get bilingual literary events off the ground, and translate those two books I loved so much this year. Thank you, literary translation fairy.

Thomas Meinecke: Pale Blue

Thomas Meinecke says of himself that he's a male fag-hag. A gay friend of mine is a Thomas Meinecke-hag. His gender-bending novel Tomboy was apparently a very big deal for my friend. So I decided to read the other of his novels that has been translated into English, Pale Blue. Because I didn't want the pressure of wanting to like a novel because a friend of mine adores it so strongly. I can't explain my choice any better than that.

Pale Blue I can like on my own terms. It's sort of about a German man called Tillmann, a.k.a. Venus, who is writing a theoretical something about music and politics in North Carolina and gets together with a Jewish-American woman called Vermillion, who is writing a theoretical something about ultra-orthodox Jews in New York and femininity. I think. And there's a woman in Berlin called Cordula, who is co-writing the thing with Tillmann and likes deep-sea diving, and is his ex but is now with Heinrich, who is doing something else academic. And then there's Yolanda in Chicago, who's friends with them all and is sort of involved in a three-way exchange of music and discussion with the other two places. And the music is techno but also jazz, and sometimes the musicians are Black and sometimes they're Jewish and sometimes they're "Jewish white Negroes" and sometimes they're Mariah Carey who is Black but isn't. Some of the techno music is radically political underground techno and I don't understand very well how that works other than it's not on major labels and it has messages scratched into the vinyl. One of the jazz musicians is Slim Gaillard, who wrote a dictionary of jive language. My dad met him once. And there are lots of old German submarines sunk off the coast of North Carolina, which divers like to explore. And Ford employed forced labourers in Nazi Germany and ought to pay them compensation; those that survived.

That's what happens. Tillmann and Cordula and Yolanda do their thing and exchange emails and talk about cultural phenomena and Tillmann wears an African tunic that looks like a dress and there's a big storm and they go to visit Williamsburg and look at Jewish people and Cordula comes to visit and then George W. Bush probably gets elected and that's the end. It's hard to tell their voices apart and there's no tension whatsoever and I understood very little of the techno stuff, except for the part when a major label re-records a track in identical form using different musicians and tries to sell it and everyone gets angry. But I found the book totally absorbing. I dipped in most nights and even found I could read it a little bit drunk, which doesn't usually work, because there was no need to remember the plot. I read it very slowly indeed but it still worked.

It worked because I was really interested in the three-way conversation. I was fascinated by the concept of the "Jewish white Negro" in jazz, by white people – well, not "passing" but assimilating themselves into Black culture through music, and by the idea that after WWII, it was no longer Jews but other working-class white boys like Elvis and the Beatles who emulated Black music. And I enjoyed the gentle gender fun between Tillmann and Vermillion, who does his hair and gives him a girl's name and thinks about orthodox Jewish men who can't work because they're studying the Torah so their wives earn the family's living, wearing wigs.

And it worked because we have the internet. Because I could pick up the characters' leads and follow them and look up the music and listen to it at the same time as they did, in my head. Because I could look up the political subjects and see what's happened since 1999, when the book is set. That makes it dated; the characters are sending scans of articles and CDs and letters between each other, which feels almost archaic. I'd like the book to be electronic itself, with links to further reading and with the quotes – there are many, and they're long – highlighted more clearly, and with a soundtrack and pictures of submarines and beaches and New York and the Love Parade and the Robert Taylor Homes. I'd like to imagine the translator, Daniel Bowles, as the central point of an impossible circle of material, all those artefacts splayed out around him in mid-air as he researches the novel. Like a scene out of Matrix with that frozen time effect, only the other way around so that all the months of hard work are visualized in a single moment. I think he did a great job; the English feels fluid but never dull, never stilted but still non-conformist.

And I like the title, the way it resonates with Lou Reed and Rudolf Virchow's plain-speaking scientific proof of the 1880s that there are no differences between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans in terms of skin, hair and eye colour. And at the same time with the colour of Vermillion's jacket and the colour of the sea. And I like the way it picks up or maybe negates a lot of the novel's obsessions with skin colour and identity, making "race" a movable, subtle thing, a thing without a plot of its own, like gender seems to be here too at times. I remember a boy in my class at school whose parents came from Pakistan, and he had pale blue eyes, the very palest I've seen, and very long eyelashes.

So it's not, you know, a well-constructed novel. You don't want to give it to your auntie for Christmas. But you might like to read it yourself, the way you'd spend a rainy day moving from one thing to the next on the internet, coasting. You'd like that.