Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specializing in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. A recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, Price translates from Italian and German into English. Her translation of Juli Zeh’s novel New Year, published by World Editions, was a finalist for the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize as well as the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s translation of Zeh’s novel About People (World Editions) was published last month. In the following interview, Price discusses how her background in printmaking has influenced her translation process, the challenges in translating About People, particularly in how to render a self-proclaimed Nazi main character in a multi-faceted manner, and what drew her to this particular project.
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Nancy Naomi Carlson: Last September I had the good fortune to attend your panel on “Word + Image: Where Meaning Collides,” at the Phillips Collection in DC, sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation to celebrate the Day of Translation. Please share with us how your passion for art and aesthetics interfaces with your translation work.
Alta L. Price: My background in the arts made every aspect of my translation practice possible. While working toward my BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, I studied German at Brown, and then went to Rome for the European Honors Program; Italian hadn’t been part of my plan, but then a part of me never came back. Beyond the level of spoken and written language, however, the education I received in printmaking really set the stage — we not only practiced techniques ranging from lithography to mezzotint to screen printing, we also learned about their histories —where, when, and how they were discovered, what they were used for in the past and what they could do in the hands of contemporary artists. In the European realm, printmaking was often seen as a secondary, lesser, reproductive art form that popularized higher art forms — if you couldn’t go see the Farnese Hercules in person, you might experience it through Hendrik Goltzius’s engraving of it, for example. Perhaps you can already see the parallels with translation. But, much like English is not German or Italian, an engraving is not a sculpture. Each does something different and comes with different constraints. A concept or experience or narrative can be conveyed through both, but fundamentally changes in the process. And the observer or reader rarely sees how that transformation takes place. Loving images has liberated me to play more freely with words.
NNC: How fascinating to look at translation through the lens of a parallel process involving printmaking, and your mention of the connection between images and words. I’d love to hear more about how your love for images has freed you in your writing.
ALP: The quickest way to answer this might be to return to that 2022 Day of Translation at the Phillips Collection. My first slide took the panel title and played with it as follows:
Word + Image
Word – Image
Word ≠ Image
Where Meaning Collides
Where Meaning Clashes
Where Meaning Conflicts
Meaning Where …?
That was a fragment of the sketch — a sketch surrounded by a bunch of doodles! — that I had made while on the phone with the symposium organizers, because I was trying to wrap my brain around what exactly they were thinking of, and how I could contribute to a conversation with two remarkable artists — Verónica Gerber Bicecci, visual artist who writes, and Abdulrahman Naanseh, calligrapher — moderated by a talented translator, Heather Green, translator of Dadaist Tristan Tzara and others. The collides/clashes/conflicts is clearly me playing with alliteration and synonyms. The meaning where…? introduced the idea of word order and its importance for interpretation. These elements — alliteration, synonyms, syntax — are just a few of the aspects that often differ between languages, and that every translator is constantly contending with. I chose this riff as my first slide to get the audience thinking about what words can and can’t do, what the difference between words and symbols — and, by extension, images — is, and to limber up our brains. Now, I invite each reader to pick up whatever writing implement is handiest and translate those first three lines into words, or however you might verbalize the symbols you see. Some of the possibilities I came up with:
Word + Image
word plus image
word and image
word & image?
adding image to word
Word – Image
word minus image
word dash image
word en-dash image
word to image
Word ≠ Image
word does not equal image
word is not equal to image
word isn’t the same as image
Some of those results are rather nonsensical, some are fascinating: just think of all the history behind the ampersand! Are plus and and and & and et and adding the same concept? In some ways they are, in some ways they aren’t. All such decisions help inform a translation and, by extension, a writing practice.
I suppose one of the most concrete and surprising ways images have informed my translation practice are through the mishaps that can occur in the rough draft stage. In many forms of printmaking, you need to remember the image you create on the matrix will appear flipped in the final print, so any text needs to be reversed. It’s basic, but you see flipped characters throughout the history of printing, just as spoonerisms easily happen in everyday speech. An analogue of this would be remembering that you can’t maintain the exact word order of another language when recreating a chain of events in English unless the work calls for that specific kind of weirdness — think of how Yoda speaks. Translation requires liberation.
But to more directly speak to how my love for images has freed me in my writing, I’ll take a potentially incendiary example from my translation of Juli Zeh’s About People. The title of chapter 8 is a made-up, compound word built around a root that is an ethnic slur. Reading the German, images from 19th- and 20th-century pseudoscience from both the United States and Europe immediately came to mind, but I knew the political context and setting of this contemporary novel called for something else. I needed to find the right words to capture today’s concept, especially in a time and place where it’s not supposed to be spoken, but the characters in this book absolutely speak that way. I then talked to several German friends and colleagues, from all over. I asked what their take on the root word was, and their responses differed widely — by which I mean they touched on four different continents. Add to that the fact that this term has been reappropriated by some groups, but the use in this novel wasn’t reappropriation. And those conversations led me to a less specific solution than I had originally envisioned. I played with the idea of serf ’n’ turf, which would’ve been fitting in so many ways — adequately agricultural, related to food, related to class — but was too cute and wasn’t the one-word solution this really called for. This was a case where colonial-era images from both German and North American history informed my thought process, and subsequent conversations with my contemporaries pointed me to various nuances. Images and ideas freed me up to find unexpected parallels and create an effective solution.
NNC: I remember being astonished at this neologism when I first read it: “Fugginforeignfarmhands.” What a delicate balance between avoiding offensive language when translating a term that might be construed as such in German but delivering an emotional wallop. I see now what you mean by being “liberated” by image. So now that you’ve brought up the Zeh novel, with its mine field of “difficult” topics, please talk about your process/challenges in translating the words to portray a Nazi-sympathizer main character in a way that would move the reader.
ALP: Did I avoid offensive language? If I did, part of me thinks that might constitute a betrayal. In chapter 8, Dora is horrified when she hears that neologism, and by chapter 13 it’s slipping out of her own mouth. Maybe we can try to control language, but language definitely controls us. As a translator, perhaps the crux of the matter is to ask whether the original intended to offend or not, and then to decide whether and how that intention truly matters, and what you’re going to do with it. And of course, the various identities of the writer, the characters, the readers, and you as translator all play a part. It’s easy to bring one’s own baggage to the work of translation, and I’m convinced one of my key tasks in this profession is setting all possible presumptions aside before I sit down to work every day. I’m intrigued by the idea that Dora can be seen as a Nazi sympathizer, and I wonder whether the author would describe her that way. She could also be described as PC, enlightened, privileged, over-privileged, as someone who’s trying to change, as someone who has blind spots as we all do — and maybe she’s all of the above. Right from the start, because the story is written in third-person omniscience, we understand we’re seeing things from mainly Dora’s perspective, and we see how very skewed it can be, how it might not necessarily line up with reality. And as the story goes on, her perspective is undermined more and more. It becomes very clear to the reader that Dora has all these assumptions she’s projecting onto others, especially her family of origin and the residents of the town she has recently moved to, and later on we learn many of those assumptions are hers and hers alone.
In terms of my translation process, I just had to be very attentive to what the original was saying and not saying, because it really plays with perspective, and flips you on your head. Just last week I had a publicly broadcast conversation with Mithu Sanyal, another German author I’ve worked with, and I said a terrible thing I end up saying fairly frequently, something along the lines of “I’m ‘just’ the translator, it was all there in the original,” it being the humor, the brilliance, the subversion, the friction. And I really do believe that, but as an answer I suppose it’s a cop-out, and I’m not so great at describing what it is I do. But it helps that, in the case of Dora and Goth, Zeh played with a bunch of tropes, some of which will be familiar to English-speaking readers, some less so. And I hope readers of my translation laugh out loud at Dora’s retort when her new neighbor introduces himself as “Goth,” which is as weird and ambiguous a designation in German as it is in English — though the East-West divide is clearer in the German Westgote and Ostgote than in our Visigoth and Ostrogoth. Her ad-writing brain required more creativity on my part than her potentially Nazi-sympathizing heart.
Maybe I can more successfully address specific challenges, including one that changed after I delivered my translation. First, the term Reichsbürger, or “citizen of the Reich.” On page 159 of the German edition, Steffen says, “Der Job des Reichsbürgers ist anspruchsvoll,” and on page 381 we hear Dora thinking “Immerhin ist er kein Reichsbürger, sagt sie sich…” These became “Being a citizen of the Reich is a full-time job” and “he doesn’t call himself a citizen of the Reich, like so many right-wing nutjobs do, she tells herself…” I wrestled with this, but decided “citizen of the Reich” was okay, since English speakers know the Nazis led the Third Reich, and could make the connection. I added “like so many right-wing nutjobs do” to pick up a contextualizing, dismissive insult that is a refrain of sorts peppering the entire book. But then, not too long after I had delivered my translation, news media worldwide were covering the Reichsbürgerbewegung and its attempted coup, and my first thought was, well, now I could’ve just left it, since most major media outlets weren’t translating the term. The biggest challenge, which I’m sure a lot of translators relate to regardless of language pair, is just how much context and history risks being obscured in translation, especially concise bits like Zeh’s pithy, often one-word chapter titles, which are invariably laden with significance. And, finally, the personal challenges one can never predict: in this book, we learn Dora’s mother died of a neuroendocrine tumor, and Goth dies of a glioblastoma. As I worked on this translation, my dad died of a neuroendocrine tumor and an old classmate I’d known since childhood died of a glioblastoma. So that dimension of this fictional world suddenly became very real for me, and I do think that helped plunge me deeper into that element of Dora’s character.
NNC: Actually, I was thinking of Goth, not Dora, when I said Nazi-sympathizer. I think this continued discussion of who’s the potential Nazi and who’s the Nazi-sympathizer is intriguing, and perhaps at the heart of how you were able to orient yourself to translate the book. You chose to translate this book written by someone who does not appear to be a Nazi-sympathizer, nor do you, so I’m riveted by this question.
ALP: Your questions help me do something I mentioned above but often fail to fully accomplish — setting all possible presumptions aside before I sit down to work every day! But let me say this up front: I did register a visceral shock I when I first read Über Menschen, and I can still physically tap into the incredulity I felt as I realized this author was really going to go there — to make me, as the reader, feel for a Nazi, or Nazi-sympathizer, or whatever Goth is — and it made me very uncertain. Because then I knew that I, as the translator, would have to make you, as the reader, feel that same way as you read my English version. It was scary, and challenging, and exciting, which are three elements I often appreciate in the literary and life experiences I seek out.
And it might be obvious, but the threats looming in this book are just as present here in the United States as they are in Germany right now, probably more. The healthcare and insurance aspect of the story will be less striking to readers in the United States than to Germans. Nazism and National Socialist movements didn’t disappear in 1945, and the kinds of personal and political violence they stoke happen every day here in the United States. When I look around —neighborhood, city, state, country — I see many individuals helping one another, but then others denying their fellow human beings’s right to live. This is such a violent country. I think someone in my grandparents’ or even parents’ generation could have easily dismissed this book, but one of the reasons I was glad to translate it is that I know “we” here in the United States aren’t the unequivocal “good guys,” just like Dora is no hero and Goth isn’t pure evil. But I digress.
I presumed you were talking about Dora as the Nazi-sympathizer because I do consider her the main character but, rereading your question, I also now see that you wrote “a” main character, not “the” main character. Shame on me — these are precisely the kinds of nuances we translators need to be especially attentive to! But maybe my confusion can help me refocus on those bigger questions of how I pick my projects and then how I approach them — even and especially when they portray viewpoints or beliefs that I do not hold.
Speaking solely for myself, it’s a matter of remaining open. I’ll talk to anyone, I’ll read anything, I’ll research whatever is required of me to do right by any given work. For About People, I listened to a podcast episode Zeh did that lasted over eight hours — research like that isn’t always necessary, but it did help me understand where the characters were coming from, because she was writing from a specific time and place that she knows very well: a village in rural Brandenburg during a global pandemic. In the past, I’ve declined to work on texts I didn’t feel I could properly convey, and I’ve referred clients to other colleagues, and I’ve added paratexts like a translator’s note when helpful or when an author chose to override some of my decisions — this has only happened to me with nonfiction work, never with fiction — or when there was more to say that might not have been obvious to the English-language reader. Who am I to portray an author or that author’s work in a way they don’t feel is fitting? That’s not my job.
I took on the project because I had translated Zeh before, and it was a strange and very fulfilling experience; I heard from a lot of people who read New Year, and it’s always gratifying to know a book is taking on new life through being read. As an author, Zeh is incredibly prolific, and every book takes readers to a very different place. In Germany, the 2021 novel Über Menschen was broadly seen as a companion to her 2016 novel Unterleuten, although there are only two or three tiny details that overlap. Side note: the word play of her titles presents its own challenge — one colleague asked me why I didn’t just keep the title Über Menschen in German so the Nietzschean reference wouldn’t be erased, which is a valid criticism of the rather literal choice of About People, so I was glad I managed to use the German in the cabaret scene; I’m hoping to eventually bring that earlier novel into English, and Among People might be the right title there. They’re profoundly different books that in many ways get at some of the same issues: small-town life, political and societal divisions, personal freedom, individuals’ identities being questioned or reinforced by threats like climate change, financial dynamics, sex-based expectations, and so much more. And critics who want to take her to task for portraying multiple sides of heated debates could also criticize my choice to bring her work into English. I think one of the surprises of About People was that I couldn’t help but feel for Goth on a human level. Maybe he is a Nazi, maybe he has committed violent acts, maybe he isn’t a good father or partner; maybe he is a loving human being toward some people and not others, maybe he is trying to change, maybe he is clueless, maybe he’s lost — all these possibilities are left open in the book. As for Dora, maybe she’s more conservative than she thinks, we know she’s prone to anger and occasional violence, we see her express love for some people and not others, she is changing, she is often clueless, and she’s definitely lost. But maybe she’s beginning to find herself.
Another aspect of this novel I respected was how the author successfully conveys all these ambiguities; ambiguity can be risky and hard and fun to maintain in a new language. As translator, I tried to position myself toward this work so that each of these characters would feel as real and alive and contradictory in my translation as they do in the original. And I hope their existence in English sparks ongoing conversations like this one