\u00bbDanish is often considered an ugly language. Foreigners are probably not allowed to say so openly, but Danes may admit it. And that\u2019s exactly the reason why we translate into Danish. To prove that its back-throated sounds can compose their own peculiarly beautiful music.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Confessing such an unflattering opinion about your own native tongue doesn\u2019t come easy. Therefore Judyta Preis and J\u00f8rgen Herman Monrad challenge this unfavourable impression with a well-chosen argument \u2013 they turn for support to the eighteenth-century German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:<\/p>\n
\u00bbIn order to know your own language, you need to go abroad.\u00ab <\/p>\n
Going abroad may help you to better understand your mother tongue. However, this understanding may come at a high price.<\/p>\n
Although Judyta Preis regards Danish as her first language, she was born into Polish. She came to Denmark, when she was only two. Just after her arrival into her new homeland, she became mute for about a year. Then, equally unexpectedly, she uttered her first words of Danish.<\/p>\n
Her mother tongue receded before the second language. She would no longer speak Polish, but she would act as a translator for her mother. Amused, Preis retells her first interpreting success:<\/p>\n
\u00bbMy mum had to buy radishes for a kindergarten party. So she took me to the supermarket and said: \u2018Judyta, find rzodkiewki.\u2019 And I did find their Danish counterparts \u2013 radiser.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Only as a student of English at the University of Copenhagen did Judyta start wondering about her \u2018linguistic identity.\u2019 Aware of her latent mother tongue, she studied Polish as her minor. Contemplating her own in-betweenness, she wrote her BA thesis on Jewish immigrant writers.<\/p>\n
After her third year, Judyta worked as an intern at the Danish Cultural Institute in Warsaw. She wandered around the city, observing trams, milk bars and fishermen on the ice-locked Vistula.<\/p>\n
\u00bbIt all seemed strange and vaguely familiar.\u00ab She names these two qualities as inherent in the process of translation itself. <\/p>\n
\u00bbIt\u2019s dangerous to think of who you are in another language,\u00ab Judyta comments on her quest.
\nBack in Copenhagen, thinking of her MA (which she defended with distinction in January 2010), she focused on Sebald, a German author who voluntarily chose England as his home. Sebald\u2019s writing imaginatively recreates the condition of contemporary homelessness.<\/p>\n
J\u00f8rgen Herman Monrad, a philosophy graduate from \u00c5rhus University, read German at the University of Copenhagen. In 1999 he went to Warsaw, where in one of the bookshops he pulled off the shelf a copy of Bruno Schulz\u2019s collected stories.<\/p>\n
The Polish-Jewish author was known to J\u00f8rgen mainly from German, since Danes had only one translation of Schulz at the time. <\/p>\n
The Danish version of Sklepy cynamonowe (Kanelbutikkerne) appeared in 1964 and sat in J\u00f8rgen\u2019s parents\u2019 bookcase. Its unattractive cover embraced a world whose attraction J\u00f8rgen couldn\u2019t resist.<\/p>\n
Standing in the Warsaw bookshop, with the Polish copy of Schulz in his hands, J\u00f8rgen instinctively felt he would soon embark on yet another journey \u2013 to discover what Schulz himself was looking for: \u00bbwhere short circuits of sense occur between words\u00ab of another tongue.<\/p>\n
\u00bbIsn\u2019t Judyta a Polish name?\u00ab J\u00f8rgen asked, when they met.<\/p>\n
The year was 2001 and the two of them were standing in front of yet another bookshelf, J\u00f8rgen\u2019s bookcase. He thoughtfully picked only three authors: Joseph Roth, Herta M\u00fcller and Bruno Schulz. His choice could either communicate or miss.<\/p>\n
As it turned out, Judyta would have selected the same three authors herself. Since that momentary recognition of their own provenances \u2013 real and literary \u2013 which strangely enough they had already shared, J\u00f8rgen and Judyta have been working as a team, both privately and professionally.<\/p>\n
Their first translation (five years in the making) appeared in 2007. The small independent publisher they approached didn\u2019t agree to publish Roth, their first choice, but, surprisingly, suggested Schulz instead. <\/p>\n
J\u00f8rgen and Judyta couldn\u2019t believe their luck. That serendipity created its own challenges. Now their beloved author could rely only on their sensitivity, perseverance, hard work, patience, inventiveness.<\/p>\n
\u00bbWe had to recreate the density of the Polish original by stretching Danish. Danish sentences don\u2019t welcome Polish participle constructions. Danish is analytical, Polish \u2013 synthetic,\u00ab explains J\u00f8rgen. <\/p>\n
\u00bbAfter our re-writing, each sentence had to be perfectly logical. As simple and clear as the language of the lullaby.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Judyta prepared a rough version; J\u00f8rgen reworked it; drafts shuttled back and forth between the two translators at least five times. Co-translation created its own tensions. The team shrugs them off with a perceptive remark:
\n\u00bbWe impersonate the schizophrenic relationship between the original and the translation.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Their routine is defined by their enormous sense of responsibility: under-recognized authors who work on the fringes of their communities, cherishing their own minority languages against all odds, are rarely given a second chance to find out how they may sound abroad.<\/p>\n
\u00bbWe edit, re-edit and self-edit; we are very critical. Also, we read aloud to each other for assonance and consonance.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Both Judyta and J\u00f8rgen have musical backgrounds, so in their readings the musicality of a given passage must find its way into Danish. Likewise, every author they admire has their own specific music.<\/p>\n
\u00bbAs translators, we will need to maintain Sebald\u2019s heavy German syntax,\u00ab says J\u00f8rgen.<\/p>\n
At the moment Judyta and J\u00f8rgen are working on the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. <\/p>\n
To know Celan\u2019s language better, they have visited Czernowitz, the former capital of Bukowina, the province that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now is part of the Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u00bbWhen Celan lived there, he could hear Romanian, German, Swabian and Yiddish,\u00ab says Judyta.<\/p>\n
Apart from looking for languages no longer spoken in Czernowitz, Judyta and J\u00f8rgen wanted to see the chestnut trees that used to grow outside Celan\u2019s window. Ash trees have replaced them, but an elderly Jewish man they met confirmed: Celan could indeed see chestnut trees through his window.<\/p>\n
Translating hand-picked authors from Polish and German into Danish means conceiving elaborate itineraries. To traverse imaginary linguistic homelands. To retrace charged distances between words.<\/p>\n
To locate trees familiar to a foreign author and make them grow again in another language.<\/p>\n
Polyglot milieus attract with their linguistic, \u2018musical\u2019 and cultural capacity for growth and cultivation. J\u00f8rgen observes that the authors they\u2019ve been drawn to as translators benefited from the multiculturalism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When queried, he admits to his rather nostalgic view of this imaginative construct:<\/p>\n
\u00bbI believe we\u2019re writing from the sense of loss.\u00ab<\/p>\n
But the team is equally aware of their gains, frequently immaterial. Judyta and J\u00f8rgen have rendered their \u2018marginal\u2019 authors visible, even though their own names do not feature on the covers of their translations. (By comparison, American and British translators have already won this fight for their visibility.)<\/p>\n
Through translation Judyta and J\u00f8rgen have also rendered audible the third language Walter Benjamin wrote about in The Task of the Translator. They hope that every co-translation brings them closer to \u00bbthis mystical language between the original and the translation, present in its absence.\u00ab<\/p>\n
uni-avis@adm.ku.dk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two translators of Polish and German authors into Danish, talk about their journeys into unfamiliar languages and locations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":22918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","expression-news_article"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n