Journale Lucy Fricke’s Töchter: A Translation Road Trip

THE MARZAHN PROBLEM

A conversation between Sinéad Crowe, Isabelle Liber and María Tellechea


SINÉAD: Dealing with cultural allusions is an age-old translation challenge. As the translator, you first need to be familiar enough with the source culture (in our case, Germany) to understand the allusion and the various associations it evokes. Then you may well need to come up with a way of enabling non-German readers to understand the allusion, or at least of evoking similar associations.

As I mention in my discussion of humour, Töchter addresses universal themes, but it is also a very “German” book filled with jokes about German society and culture. Let’s take a look at one example, where Betty and Martha visit a street party in the little Italian town of Bellegra. Looking around at the locals dressed in sequins, neons and ill-fitting jeans, Betty describes the town as “Italy’s answer to Marzahn”. The humour here is characteristic of the novel as a whole: it’s based on a moment of bathos that explodes romantic stereotypes – in this case, the cliché that Italians are sharp dressers. I have to admit, I struggled with the allusion to Marzahn. As I’d lived in Berlin for a few years, I could at least understand the allusion: Marzahn is a district of Berlin known for its 1970s’ prefab apartment blocks, high unemployment rates and social problems. It’s not exactly one of Berlin’s hipster neighbourhoods.

 

A prefab apartment block in Marzahn. © A. Savin, WikiCommons 

The problem is, of course, that few readers outside Germany will know what Marzahn is. So what do we do as translators? Do we explain the allusion? Do we just leave it as it is and hope that the reader guesses its meaning from the context? Or do we replace the allusion to Marzahn with an allusion to a similar district in our home countries? How did you deal with Marzahn, María?

MARÍA: You’re right, Marzahn is a tricky translation issue. It involves not just conveying the idea of a stigmatised neighbourhood, but also creating a moment of politically incorrect humour. I decided from the outset not to use footnotes to provide explanations. As you’ve said, Marzahn is associated here with an unfashionable, tacky, cheap aesthetic. I briefly considered referring in my translation to a roughly similar neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, but I decided against this for two reasons. First, it wouldn’t make sense for the central figure – a German in Italy – to suddenly be talking about Buenos Aires. Second, I didn’t want to denigrate one of my home city’s districts. I couldn’t help thinking of Cualca, a comedy troupe that created a parody of the Sex and the City TV series set in the neighbourhood of Munro in Buenos Aires:

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In the end, I decided to replace “Marzahn” with “barrio mersa”, which means something like “tacky neighbourhood”. But then the problem was that the phrase “el barrio mersa de Italia” (“Italy’s tacky neighbourhood”) wouldn’t work, because only cities, and not entire countries, have neighbourhoods. So I formulated the phrase as follows: “esto era la versión italiana de barrio mersa” ( “this here was the Italian version of a tacky neighbourhood”). The adjective “mersa” is colloquial, regional (it is only really used in Argentina and Uruguay) and pejorative. When you use this word, you are looking down on people who are “mersa”; you consider yourself to be different. Did you have similar issues in the French translation?

ISABELLE:  It might seem at first that Marzahn is roughly similar to what we French call the “neuf trois”, a banlieue to the north of Paris. Like Marzahn, the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, which has the administrative number 93, is a concrete jungle. But I didn’t feel it was appropriate to adapt the allusion to the target culture here. And anyway, the situation in France’s suburbs is actually very different to that in Berlin’s. The 93 tends to be associated with poverty, drugs and ghettoes. But though Marzahn also makes the headlines here in Germany, it has more positive aspects. For example, it is known throughout Berlin for its beautiful park and funicular. So I felt that when Betty refers to the neighbourhood, she is not necessarily being very pejorative or looking down on the people there. There is also a lot of fondness. I was reminded of the character “Cindy from Marzahn”, the brainchild of the comedian Ilka Bessin. Cindy is overweight, unemployed and has extremely bad taste, yet she is absolutely lovable:

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So Marzahn doesn’t have the kind of slums that come to French people’s minds when they hear the word “banlieue”. For a while, my draft contained the formulation “l’Italie version Tati” (“the Tati version of Italy”). Tati is a French clothing change known for its Marzahn-style fashion, the kind Cindy would love. One of the window displays shown at the beginning of the sketch you mentioned, María, could easily belong to a Tati store. But ultimately I felt the comparison was risky. The chain has lost the cultural significance it had when I was a teenager, so there was a danger that the translation would quickly become dated. Another danger was that some readers might think the narrator was referring not to the retailer but to the brilliant filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati, who was famous for a very different, funny, poetic world. Visualising the rails of (the other) Tati, I thought about discount clothes and end-of-season sales and eventually came upon the phrase “au rabais”: cheap, poor quality, second class.

SINÉAD: That’s interesting, I considered similar solutions. I thought about replacing “Marzahn“ with places in the English-speaking world that tend to be seen as ugly, uncool and slightly “chavvy” (please excuse my political incorrectness!). I even googled “crap towns in England“ and found quite a few entertaining articles on the topic. But then I came to the same conclusion as you, María. The reader would surely be puzzled if the narrator, who is German, suddenly mentions a random English town such as Blackburn. So I tried to think of places that evoke similar associations but aren’t so specific. Eventually I came up with “trailer park”. Admittedly, trailer parks are mainly associated with the US, but thanks to the omnipresence of American culture, all Irish and British people know what a trailer park is. I browsed Pinterest, where I found gorgeous photos of “trailer-park chic” featuring just the kind of fashion that Betty describes in Bellegra: sequins, tight jeans, neon, etc. Cindy of Marzahn would be a fan!

Below you’ll find the whole paragraph in all four languages

EN:

Kids danced, parents poured themselves wine from plastic one-gallon containers, and everywhere I looked, I saw rhinestones and spangles, jeans that managed to be simultaneously tight and saggy, faded rock stars on flimsy T-shirts, bulging bellies, neon-yellow shoes. Whoever said Italians know how to dress? The fashion sense on display here would be at home in a trailer park. It was glorious.

(Daughters, S. 81)

ES:

Los niños bailaban, los padres se servían vino de damajuanas de plástico, por todos lados veía strass y lentejuelas, jeans apretados que igual caían, desteñidas estrellas de rock estampadas en remeras finitas, panzas grandes, zapatillas amarillo fluorescente. ¿A quién se le había ocurrido afirmar que las italianas siempre se vestían bien? Esto era la versión italiana de barrio mersa. Era maravilloso.

(Hijas, S.122)

FR:

Les enfants dansaient, les parents descendaient des gobelets de vin d’un gallon, et tout autour de moi, il y avait des strass et des paillettes, des jeans moulants mais qui pochaient quand même, des rock stars délavées sur des tee-shirts presque transparents, des ventres gras, des baskets jaunes fluo. Qui avait bien pu décréter que les Italiennes étaient toujours bien habillées ? Ici, c’était une Italie au rabais. Une merveille.

(Draft translation)

 

Drive on.

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