Journale Lucy Fricke’s Töchter: A Translation Road Trip

TRANSLATING HUMOUR

By Sinéad Crowe


As I’ve already mentioned, one of the things that first attracted me to Töchter is that it is laugh-out-loud funny. I hoped that by translating the novel into English, I might make my own tiny contribution to dispelling the myth that German literature is heavy and humourless. But the book’s many comical moments also made me nervous. After all, humour is notoriously difficult to translate, and when you don’t get it right, it is painfully obvious. As the translation theorist Jeroen Vandaele points out, “the humour event is very visible due to physiological correlates: laughter, smiling, arousal,” and as a result, “any translation failure will therefore be very visible: it is obvious that the translator has failed when no one laughs at translated humor.”1 In my moments of self-doubt, I pictured my translation as a bad stand-up comedian delivering dud one-liners to a stony-faced audience.

Before beginning my translation, I read Töchter through for a second time, this time paying more attention to the translation challenges the novel was likely to present. My qualms only grew as I noticed how much of the humour either involved tricky puns, neologisms and wordplay, or else seemed rooted in a specifically German context. There are jokes about the Airbnb-ification of Berlin’s Kreuzberg, for example, and the fashion choices of the residents of Marzahn, a rather less gentrified suburb of Berlin. Then there are the many funny asides about banal aspects of contemporary German life such as the midrange department store Karstadt, the Eckkneipe (a smoke-filled, neon-lit, resolutely uncool kind of corner pub generally frequented by hardened drinkers) and the talk-show host Sandra Maischberger. Even those parts of the novel set in Italy and Greece derive much of their humour from mocking the postwar German romanticisation of southern Europe, as immortalised in Schlager (cheesy pop songs) such as this one and this one. I began to panic that much of the comedy would be lost on the average English-speaking reader. Should I provide glosses to help people get the punchlines? No, I decided; that wouldn’t work. Everyone knows jokes stop being funny the minute you try to explain them. But I also disliked the idea of replacing the cultural allusions in Lucy’s jokes with ones that would be familiar to readers in the English-speaking world, as I didn’t want the novel to lose its German flavour.

As Betty herself points out, sometimes when a difficult journey lies ahead, you just have to say, “Let’s go” (“Dann wollen wir mal”). So I got going, hoping that I would figure out how to overcome the challenges as I went along. And once I did start translating, I found the voices of Lucy’s characters so strong and so authentic that the cultural specificities no longer seemed so essential to the humour.

The eye of God: the Pantheon’s dome. Not pictured is the pink Victoria’s Secret balloon. ©Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji

For example, the novel opens with a vivid evocation of Betty’s jaundiced outlook on her life – her blackly comical determination to always find the fly in the ointment – as she visits the Pantheon in Rome. Rather than marvelling at this ancient architectural feat, Betty watches in disgust as her fellow tourists – “hundreds of degenerates,” as she calls them – are transfixed by the sight of a pink Victoria’s Secret balloon – “an ad for fucking underwear” – trapped inside the dome. Much of the novel’s humour derives from similar moments of bathos, which are funny in any language, I think. So by the time I got to the reference to Sandra Maischberger later in the novel, I was no longer so fazed. There was no need for me to add an explanation or “domesticate” the allusion to make it relatable to an English-speaking readership, I realised, because the joke doesn’t require familiarity with Maischberger to work. Instead, the comedy lies in the bathos. After making it all way to Lake Maggiore, one of Italy’s most scenic spots, on what is supposed to be the last day of his life, all Kurt wants to do is watch daytime television in a budget hotel room – much to the frustration of his daughter, Martha, who longs for him to end his life with some kind of profound experience.

Unimpressed by the beauty of Lake Maggiore, Kurt would prefer to spend his final days watching daytime television. ©Alessandro Vecchi

Strong characterisation also made the novel’s witty dialogue fun to translate. I particularly enjoyed translating the banter between the jaded Betty and the tightly wound Martha, whose almost pathological fear of losing control is brilliantly captured in Betty’s description of Martha as a “Linksheulerin” (a neologism I rendered as “left-eyed bawler”).  One of the reasons their dialogue was such a joy to translate was that they talk the way so many women I know talk. Their resilience and refusal to lose their sense of humour, no matter what life throws at them, reminds me of dear friends scattered all over the world. Once I had found these characters’ voices, I realised that the tone and rhythm of their language is often as integral to the humour as the semantic content; after all, any comedian will tell you it’s all in the delivery. The quick-fire repartee is funny, I think, even if you are not intimately familiar with all of the cultural allusions. Take the following exchange:

«Was soll das eigentlich werden?», fragte ich. «Thelma und Louise?»

«Die waren jung, sexy und unterdrückt», sagte Martha. «Guck uns an, wir sind nicht mal unterdrückt.»

«Tschick?», probierte ich weiter.

«Das waren Jungs. Wir sind Frauen kurz vor den Wechseljahren. Ich hoffe, das willst du nicht vergleichen.»

(Töchter, S. 88)

‘So what are we going for here?’ I asked. ‘Thelma and Louise?’

‘They were young, sexy and downtrodden,’ Martha said. ‘Look at us, we’re not even downtrodden.’

I tried again. ‘Why We Took the Car?’

‘They were teenage boys. We’re premenopausal women. I don’t quite see the comparison.’

(Daughters, 76)

Obviously, the Hollywood blockbuster Thelma and Louise will be familiar to the average English-speaking reader.

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The allusion to Tschick is a bit trickier. The late great Wolfgang Herrndorf’s multi-award-winning young adult novel was a huge bestseller in Germany when it was published ten years ago. Later turned into a film, it is now widely considered a classic of the German road trip genre. Though it was translated by Tim Mohr and published in 2014 as Why We Took the Car, the cultural impact in the English-speaking countries cannot be compared to that in Germany. As a result, the reference to the novel is unlikely to be immediately familiar to the average English-speaking reader. Again, though, I decided not to adapt the reference for the non-German audience. The humour still works, I believe, for so much of it is about the fast rhythm of Martha’s rejoinders, along with the self-deprecation, wry understatement, sense of the absurd and, again, bathos.

In fact, as I translated Betty and Martha’s bickering and the farcical situations they get themselves into, I was reminded of a long line of double-acts, from Laurel and Hardy through Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy and Edina to Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon. (Is it just me, or are there echoes of the existential troubles of Waiting for Godot protagonists in Lucy’s figures’ “Let’s go” refrain?) There is something timeless about the blackly comic way in which the novel addresses its protagonists’ struggles with ailing parents, stalled careers, ticking biological clocks, romantic disappointments and the indignities of old age. Thus while many of the cultural references may be German, there is nothing specifically German about the sense of humour itself and the way in which it is used to tackle universal themes.  

For all that I was concerned to make English-speaking readers laugh, though, I hope I have also managed to capture the sadness, longing and hope at the core of this story. I have reread the novel countless times by now, yet certain scenes still bring tears to (both) my eyes. Daughters is far more than a collection of dark jokes. At its heart, it is a moving exploration of loss, family and the consolations of getting drunk with an old friend – themes that will surely resonate with readers far beyond Germany’s borders.

If you want to find out more about this theme, make your way to this pit stop: THE MARZAHN PROBLEM

Drive on

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