Journale Lucy Fricke’s Töchter: A Translation Road Trip

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

By Sinéad Crowe


Lucy Fricke at HAM.LIT, February 2018  ©Gordon Timpen   

 

I first encountered Betty, Martha and Kurt, the sardonic, intractable protagonists of Daughters, at HAM.LIT, Hamburg’s annual – and achingly cool – festival of contemporary German literature and music, in February 2018. A large crowd had gathered in the darkened auditorium ofthe Uebel und Gefährlich nightclub, bottles of beer in hand, to hear local girl Lucy Fricke read from her new novel for the first time. Lucy chose one of the book’s early scenes: Betty, Martha and Kurt bickering about money, feminism and the perils of dating men with tattoos as they splutter down the autobahn towards a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. It didn’t take long for the audience’s reverent hush to dissolve into gales of laughter at the gallows humour. Glancing at the people creasing up around me, I thought about how I’d love to share this uproarious side of German literature, so underrepresented in the English-speaking book market, with readers back home. I bought the book right after the festival, and reading it – or rather devouring it – only strengthened my desire to share this warm and witty tale with readers outside Germany. The question was, would I be able to find a publisher willing to take a risk on a German novel that dared to be funny?

Listen to Lucy premiering Töchter at HAM.LIT here

Over the coming months, I had to put my search for an English-language home for Töchter on the back-burner as I finished up other translation projects. In the meantime, I lost track of how many copies of the novel I bought as gifts for my German-speaking friends. And no matter where these friends originally came from – Ireland, Britain, France, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria – Töchter struck a chord, reinforcing my sense that, for all its cultural specificity, Lucy’s tale would resonate far beyond Germany. Now if only I could share the novel with friends of mine back home who can’t speak German …

Imagine my excitement when around a year later, I received an email from Katy Derbyshire, the indefatigable director of V&Q Books, telling me she had secured the translation rights for Töchter and thought I would be the right person for the job.  Not only was I thrilled about finally being able to share Lucy’s novel with the UK and Ireland, I was extremely excited to be involved with V&Q Books, a new English-language imprint of one of Germany’s best-regarded independent publishing houses, Voland & Quist. As one of Katy’s ambitions is to “bust plenty of myths about Germany, including the one about the Germans having no sense of humour,” I knew that V&Q Books would be a perfect home for Daughters. What’s more, I was delighted to learn that Katy herself – a renowned German-English literary translator and a long-time champion of both contemporary German literature and emerging translators – would be editing my work, making this project an excellent opportunity for my own professional development.

Find out more about V&Q Books, Voland & Quist’s exciting new English-language imprint, which aims to share “remarkable writing from Germany”

If you want to find out more about this theme, make your way to these pit stops: AND SHE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER AND DID LOTS AND LOTS OF TRANSLATIONS and ROADMAP TO A TRANSLATION

Drive on

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