Journale Lucy Fricke’s Töchter: A Translation Road Trip

TRANSLATING TUSSI

By Sinéad Crowe


«Ah so», sagte sie, und wir fanden es fast ein bisschen schade, dass sie nicht einmal versuchten, uns die Handtaschen zu klauen. Zum Trost bestellten wir Aperol Spritz, was wir zu Hause nie taten, weil zu Hause Kreuzberg war und wir keine Tussis. Die Tussi-Werdung hoben wir uns für das Alter auf, wenn wir sonst nichts mehr zu tun hätten. (Töchter, p. 93)

Betty and Martha have finally made it to Genoa and, after a hair-raising parking escapade in a dingy underground garage, they are gasping for a drink. They sit down outside a bar on one of the city’s seedier squares and order Aperol spritzes – something they wouldn’t be caught dead doing back home in trendy Kreuzberg, Betty assures us, because only Tussis drink Aperol, and they’re not Tussis. Not yet, at least.

Ah, Tussi. Despite the misogynist connotations (which Lucy invokes ironically, of course), it might be one of my favourite German slang words – partly because of the way it sounds (so hissy!), partly because every German I know has a slightly different understanding of what, exactly, a Tussi is. Indeed, long before I translated Töchter, my friends and I spent a tipsy hour trying but failing to provide our American pal, Jen, with a satisfactory working definition. Now the word has come back to haunt me.

My first port of call, my favourite online German-English dictionaries, aren’t much use. Pons’s suggestions – chick, girl, bird – completely fail to communicate the derogatory connotations of Tussi. At least some of the translations on dict.cc reflect the pejorative nature of Tussi, but honestly: bimbo? Broad? Does anyone under the age of eighty use these terms? And bitch is just far too nasty.

Translations of Tussi on dict.cc

The Duden German-German dictionary’s definition – “a superficial, self-obsessed woman who is overly concerned with her appearance” – is too terse to be really helpful. Wikipedia isn’t much better, though it does offer me the fascinating etymological titbit that the word refers to the Cheruscan noblewoman Thusnelda.

I give up on the dictionaries and WhatsApp my friends: how would they define Tussi? Their answers demonstrate a bewilderingly wide range of associations in relation to gender, sexuality, money, class, appearance and intellect. For Mo, a Tussi is “a woman who isn’t particularly intelligent, always wears a lot of makeup and tends to dress a bit sluttish”. Sarah, though, disagrees about a Tussi’s dress sense. She describes a Tussi as “a sort of preppy bimbo,” and I’m pretty sure I myself have heard the preppy women I’ve seen around the posh suburbs of Hamburg referred to as Tussis. Rasha sees the term as “a pejorative description of a hyperfeminine woman who wears expensive but trashy, tasteless clothes and speaks in a loud, shrill and exaggeratedly girly way.” What’s more, Rasha adds, “being a Tussi means being unemancipated, or at least pretending to be unemancipated: feigning helplessness, etc.” (Which I suppose means a Tussi is unlikely to change her own car tyres, unlike the young lady in the picture above.) Meanwhile Rasha’s mum, Anne, thinks that a Tussi is far from stupid: “Tussis are crafty but pretend to be naïve. They talk like little girls, especially to get what they want from men and to manipulate them.”

Conversations with friends: WhatsApp chats about the Tussi conundrum

Phew, how can one little word express so much? By now, I’ve accepted that I’m not going to find one single English word that conveys all the nuances of the German. Still, when I look up “Kinds of Women” in the Cambridge SMART Thesaurus – one of my favourite online thesauruses – I can’t find anything even vaguely suitable for the context.

“Kinds of women” in the Cambridge Dictionary’s “SMART Thesaurus”

I close my laptop in frustration and head out for some fresh air. And for some reason, as I’m walking down my street, the English supermodel Kate Moss pops into my head (I know, I have a very intellectual interior life). I start thinking about a notorious incident a few years ago when she was escorted off an easyJet plane for (allegedly) became disruptive after (allegedly) drinking a little too much of her own personal vodka stash. As she was passing the cockpit, Moss famously called the pilot a “basic bitch”. Eureka. Basic. Okay, so it doesn’t have exactly the same meaning as Tussi; Lexico.com, the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, defines basic as “having tastes, interests, or attitudes regarded as mainstream or conventional (typically used of a woman).” Nevertheless, it ticks many boxes. Firstly, it is an insulting slang term for women that is not painfully outmoded; according to The Guardian, the earliest definition appeared in the Urban Dictionary in 2009 (“A bum ass woman who think she the shit but really ain't,” in case you were wondering).  Secondly, it’s a word that could realistically be part of Martha and Betty’s sociolect; La Moss herself was 41 when her little outburst brought basic into the mainstream, and my English-speaking friends and I, all of whom are in our late thirties and early forties, use the word. Thirdly, there is something very basic about drinking an Aperol spritz, the ultimate Instagram cocktail, and so it fits the context perfectly. (Read more about the challenges of translating alcohol here.) Finally – and most importantly – there is something inherently funny about the “basic” insult. The cherry on top for me is that basic is easily turned into a noun – basicness – which provides me with a sweet solution to the subsequent use of the noun Tussi-Werdung (literally “becoming-a-Tussi”). As a result, Lucy’s punchline at the end of this paragraph about Tussis and Aperol spritzes loses none of its, well, punchiness. It took me a while to get there, but I am inordinately proud of my solution to the Tussi challenge:

‘Hmm,’ she said, and we were both a little disappointed that no one even tried to snatch our handbags. To console ourselves, we ordered Aperol spritzes, something we would never do back home, because home was Kreuzberg and we weren’t basic. We were saving basicness for old age, when we wouldn’t have much else to do. (Daughters, p. 81)

If you want to find out more about this theme, make your way to this pit stop: WHEN WE’RE TUSSIS

Drive on

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