Trials of a Translator

IT is often said that good translations are like women: If I faithful they are not beautiful, if beautiful they are not faithful. The real test of a translator's skill, however, is not one of truth v. beauty but of workable compromise. That is a particular challenge in the case of Guenter Grass, whose writing is generally regarded as remarkably hard to translate. Fortunately Grass's publishers managed at the very beginning to find one of the world's most talented translators for the task. He is Ralph Manheim, 63, a multilingual American who lives in Paris. He won the P.E.N. Translation Prize in 1964 for Grass's The Tin Drum and has just received this year's National Book Awards prize for translating Celine's Castle to Castle.

In part, a translator's job is to act as a sensitive and knowledgeable link between alien cultures. The incredible range and idiosyncrasy of Grass's language make extraordinary demands on any translator. Heaps of new coinages are typical in Grass's books, as with "Knochenberg" (bone mountain), which Grass used to describe the enormous pile of human bones lying outside the processing plant in Dog Years. Leaps of Grass's imagination incongruously link references to obscure moments in Polish and German history, folklore, pop songs and blasphemous echoes from the Catholic Mass (relics of Grass's days as an altar boy).

Grass is much given to parody. Hitler's military jargon, for instance, is spoofed in delusive GHQ commands sent out to recapture the Fuehrer's lost German shepherd, Prinz, as the Third Reich crumbles. Sample: "On the JueterbogTorgau line, projected antitank trenches are replaced by Fuehrerdogtraptrenches." Often the bristliest bits in Grass's prose derive from what critics refer to as "thing magic" (Dingmagie), those long inventories of physical objects that Grass compiles to retrieve German from abstraction and the swarms of technical terms he uses, mostly derived from his own odd pockets of experience.

After wrestling with Oskar's stonecutting experiences in The Tin Drum, for example, Manheim finally gave up. "You've got to find a German-American stonecutter who can get the terms right in both languages," he wrote the publisher. The publisher did. Manheim made it through ex-Potash Miner Grass's scenes from Dog Years with the help of special dictionaries. But in translating Local Anaesthetic, Manheim had tremendous trouble with the highly technical language of dentistry used by Grass, who has made a study of the subject. "Many of the words," Manheim admits, "just weren't in the dictionaries." Fortunately, he got help from a dentist's assistant who had studied in the U.S. for two years--and he supplied the English terms. "Between them," Manheim adds, "Grass's novel and that dental assistant sold me on a Water Pik."

No translator, of course, especially if his author knows both languages involved (as does Grass), can win every time. In German, the last line of Local Anaesthetic is "immer neue Schmerzen," or always new pains. Manheim translated it as "There will always be pain." For his taste, Gunter Grass finds that far too full of resignation.

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