Life in Translation: Being Elfriede Jelinek

For clarification: The title is not a statement of megalomania, but the reference to the film Being John Malkovich. You will remember the plot: Craig, an unemployed puppeteer accidentally discovers a small hidden door behind a filing cabinet, that leads directly into the head of Malkovich. Through a tunnel he gets sucked into the actor’s head.Something like that happened to me when I began to translate Elfriede Jelinek, albeit not directly, but gradually. Very gradually. My small hidden door was not a filing cabinet but the announcement of her receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. It’s a long story, which I will briefly summarize as it connects to my relationship with PAJ that dates back to 1980, with the first publication in English of my translation of Thomas Bernhard’s early play The Hunting Party, and later The German Lunch Table, in the journal, followed by the PAJ Publications book The President and Eve of Retirement. Subsequently, the press also published my volume of translations of Elias Canetti’s plays Life Terms, Comedy of Vanities, and The Wedding.Looking back at our collaborations, I realized what an important part they played in the development of my self-understanding as an Austrian-American translator primarily of Austrian culture and literature. In this age of identity politics, a sentence from an essay I wrote for the journal in 1983 entitled “Acts of Translation” stands out: “I know myself better in German. I like myself better in English.” My thoughts on this are best captured in a quote by Roland Barthes, from his Empire of Signs, that I set as an epigraph to my reflections:The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner . . . in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienation of the mother tongue: the regional and social origin of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize. Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality.To which I responded “I know the feeling. It was my original seduction by the English language.” To the Austrian child of the first post-World War II and post-Holocaust generation those were the smiling sounds of Mickey Mouse, movies, and PAN AM stewardesses (as they were called and admired then). I wanted to be happy and pretty and from another country. I wanted to be a “foreigner.”Growing up, I was an ardent fan of the German edition of the Mickey Mouse magazine. So was Elfriede Jelinek. It was a significant bonding element, especially when I revealed to her after several years of collaboration that my first experience of the U.S. was as a “Junior Ambassador to Disneyland.” The adventure is worth telling because it leads to the unexpected discovery of the early influence of Mickey Mouse language, particularly in the witty, slyly ambiguous translation of Erika Fuchs on the development of a Nobel awardee, known for her serious, dense works, admired for her innovative linguistic strategies, and often reviled for her provocative critique of contemporary society.EXCURSION: “MEESKA, MOOSKA, MICKEY MOUSE”In 1956 I won a competition co-sponsored by Western European and South American Disney magazines in collaboration with TWA airlines to travel as Junior Ambassadors, one female, one male, from each of their respective countries that took us from Paris (for a brief visit with the then President Coty) to New York (where we met with mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. and stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel), to Los Angeles and a reception with Walt Disney in his recently opened theme park, followed by a photo op with Davy Crockett/Fess Parker. Then back via Denver (where we ambassadors appeared in Mickey Mouse Caps on some local Mickey Mouse Club show), Washington (to be welcomed in the White House by a deputy of President Eisenhower), and on to London (to be greeted in Buckingham Palace by a representative of the Queen). A kid’s dream of a lifetime. Scheduled for November 1956, the trip was meant to foster international relationships in the traumatized and traumatizing wake of World War II, and the intensification of the Cold War: the Soviet Union had just invaded Hungary. For the Western sponsors it was an impressively effective staging of political propaganda. For Elfriede and myself, the brutal events preceded by the brave revolution of the Hungarian people so close to the Austrian border remained a defining childhood memory.Little did I know that sixty years later I would be frantically looking for the original telling name of what I wrongly assumed to be a Disney character, renamed by the brilliant translator Erika Fuchs as Fähnlein Fieselschweif. At that time, I needed the information for my translation of Jelinek’s 2016 play, an instant response to Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, titled On the Royal Road: The Burgher King.In 2021, I was working on the final draft of my translation of her 2004 novel The Children of the Dead when I received this email from Jelinek:Did we ever find Fähnlein Fieselschweif in English? I found out today—because these crooks mutilated the (German) translation by the divine Erika Fuchs under the influence of p.c. (out of the wonderful Fridolin Freudenfett they made a Fridolin Freundlich, or something like that, those gangsters, they should all be in jail—Junior Woodchucks). Or did you find it anyway back then, when you needed it?I did.The ambiguous meaning in the cartoon’s context of Fähnlein is absolutely untranslatable. At first, I thought it was a nickname. Derived from either Fähnrich for “little cornet” or “standard bearer” or “petty officer,” or from Fahne—flag, turned into a diminutive by the second syllable “-lein,” “little flag” in English. Only when I found in an old German Micky Maus magazine Donald Duck’s boy-scout nephews Tick, Trick, and Track, did I recognize their Disney originals, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. (I resisted further experimental presidential associations with their uncle’s given name.) Fieselschweif I took to be a family name. The first syllable “fiesel” suggests a neologism derived from the German colloquial “fies,” in English as nasty, vicious. Literally translated, I would go for “nasty tail.” However, “Schweif” is also a colloquial term for penis. The “p” in penis suggests the alliterative “prick” and would have resulted in “Prickly Prick.” But translating it back to English one would also have to consider the military resonances, the allusions to boy scouts and developing male genitals. Then Fähnlein Fieselschweif freely translated back into English might turn into a naughty “puny Private Pricklyprick” for Disney’s innocent Junior Woodchucks.Another acknowledged influence of Disney comics in Jelinek’s dramaturgy is the humanization of animals. She often suggests human-sized plushies for her stage characters. Her most recent play, Geld oder Leben [Your Money or Life], about the corruption in the entire capitalist banking system, features a long cast list of animals. It has not yet been published or performed.My close collaboration with Elfriede Jelinek began when I started to translate her 666-page holocaust-horror-ghost novel The Children of the Dead in 2005, shortly after she received the Nobel Prize the year before, at the invitation of Yale University Press, specifically of Jonathan Brent, its daring editor-in-chief at that time. Earlier in his career, he founded the literary magazine Formations, which was the first English-language publisher of Jelinek. I submitted the final version in July 2022, and it was published in March 2024. In retrospect, my acceptance of this assignment seems indeed a fit of megalomania. I had translated Jelinek’s play Death/Valley/Mountain [Totenauberg] about a fictional meeting between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt long before she received the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1996 in the PAJ title DramaContemporary: Germany, edited by Carl Weber. Throughout these twenty years, I frequently had to think back to what I wrote over four decades ago in the journal about living one’s life in translation. It is therefore a fitting coincidence, both fortuitous and bittersweet that Sun, one of Elfriede Jelinek’s most recent plays, is introduced in the final issue of PAJ. The journal’s end marks the closing of an exciting era in American theatre when innovative, challenging theatre mattered.Sun, one Jelinek’s “texts for speaking” as she calls them is the first play of a trilogy about the four elements inspired by pre-Socratic philosophers. It is the first in her trilogy Sun/Air/Ashes.As I mentioned earlier, my relationship to the press began in its early years with the publication of my translation of Thomas Bernhard’s early play The Hunting Party in 1980. The play opens with the necessary clear-cutting of an entire forest due to a bark beetle infestation. Though written at a time of increasing awareness of the effects of acid rain and other environmental challenges, The Hunting Party is not a play about the aftershocks of the industrial revolution. The forest is owned by a former general in Hitler’s army, a hero of the battle of Stalingrad who was hiding there with his wife after World War II. Nearly blind from cataracts and dying from an unspecified terminal disease, his wife keeps the devastation of his forest from him, as he cannot see any of it. For Bernhard, dying nature is the symbol (cynics might call it one of them) for a dying generation of Nazis.By comparison, nearly all of Jelinek’s works are haunted by allusions to the undead victims of the Holocaust, including her paternal relatives. In this text the Sun shines a glaring light on the generations that follow the General and his wife, the consumers of products of the post-industrialist, global capitalist world.Jelinek, like Bernhard, is known for her linguistic virtuosity. Austrians, although acknowledging their linguistic innovations, recognize them primarily for the vociferous criticism of their country’s Nazi past and its continued insistence on having been the victims rather than perpetrators under Hitler’s regime. Both were among the first post-World-War II-generations of writers to do so, which earned them the epithet “Netzbeschmutzer” [those who soil their own nest]. But while Bernhard, at least after his death, has become the beloved Shakespearean fool of German-language culture, Jelinek, at age seventy-seven, continues to disturb as the Cassandra of Austrian doom still not escaping the shadow of the Holocaust. The undead on either side continuously enact their revenge in the nearly unimaginably complex catastrophes of the past, present, and future; an eerie foreboding of the now unfolding Israel-Hamas conflict. This becomes spookily evident in The Children of the Dead. Published in Germany in 1995, the first English translation (mine) came out, as I noted, almost thirty years later, in 2024. I finished the translation of Sun around the same time. The historical holocaust of the monumental novel prefigures the human-caused cosmic holocaust presented in the dense, brief monologue of the Sun.Although the term climate change is never directly mentioned, Sun is a deep reflection on how the world came to the current critical stage through human activity, tracing its roots back to the pre-Socratics’ more comprehensive, experience-based understanding of nature. And while Bernhard focused on individual guilt, Jelinek puts the whole of humanity on the spot (or at least the industrial Western part of it, which mostly contributed to the current situation). The Sun, from its distance in both space and time, delivers an indictment of human actions causing one catastrophe after another.Jelinek’s characteristic obsession with homonyms (often to her translator’s despair) enables her to jump across eons and eras of inquiries from the sublime to the trivial. Along the way she interweaves herself, either as the inquiring, commenting author or as the Sun herself. Detours of puns and word-games, driven by her free-associating thinking process rather than by logic provide the grammatic structure for her unique linguistic strategies. In the several decades of her writing career Jelinek has amassed a treasure trove, or rather, a Pandora’s box of what has become a very personal vocabulary of words the experienced reader or “most intimate reader” (Gayatri Spivak’s term for the translator) recognizes as triggers of homonym-heavy transformations of meanings.The most recent production of a new play by Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen—was danach geschah [Charges: What Happened Thereafter (2024)], which opened on June 3, 2024, at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, and was directed by its artistic director Johan Simons, presents the problems of translation in the contemporary context of migration. The play is an extension of Jelinek’s 2014 play Charges: The Supplicants (published in my translation by Seagull Books) on the tense, tragic situation for migrants in Vienna. The new version is her instant response to a secret conference in Potsdam, outside Berlin, in November 2023, where an Austrian extremist presented a plan for the deportation of asylum seekers, foreigners with a residence permit, and “non-assimilated German citizens.” It was attended by members of the right-wing populist AfD party, the mainstream center-right party CDU, and other small right- and extreme right-wing parties and came to light in early January 2024 to outraged responses. Simons, one of Jelinek’s devoted directors, staged the work outdoors on the steps of the theatre with fifteen performers from Syria, Iran, the Ukraine, three German members from the Bochum Ensemble, and a Greek member, wearing T-shirts with the imprint “We are alive” in their native languages. According to the on-line publication Nachtkritik [Night Review], the most important effect was “the multitude of languages. “Sadly, we do not speak your language, where is the interpreter, who was promised us,” writes Jelinek. “In Bochum all the languages are mixed up. Choral speeches in Arabic, Polish, Ukrainian. The German audience does not understand them. The interpreter is missing! No surtitles. Occasionally, one can hear 5 languages at the same time. What are they saying? Experiences of foreignness reflected back.” (https://www.nachtkritik.de/glossar/jelinek-elfriede)To brilliant theatre practitioners who are committed to Elfriede Jelinek’s work the challenges of her associative thinking and grammar in conjunction with her indefatigable social and political engagement are an addiction, as they are to this translator.They are also a constant confrontation with failure. The co-directors and founders of the innovative Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, arrived at the most radical solution to this predicament with their adaptation of The Children of the Dead. Using the first unfinished rough draft of my translation of the (483!) page novel as a starting point for their film script, they quickly found out during the first rehearsals the impossibility of realizing the scope of their vision with the available resources and began to rethink their project as a staging of failure. The result was a ninety-minute, nightmarishly silent zombie movie in the idyllic rural hinterland of Austria for low-budget vacationers. An ingenious translation into silence.