Last week I attended the Best Translated Book of the Year Award ceremony, for which Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Visitation was nominated in the fiction category. While it didn’t win (congratulations to Tove Jansson and Thomas Teal for The True Deceiver!) I did get to chat with Susan, and to meet the lovely Uljana Wolf, a young German poet with whom Susan has just collaborated on the chapbook False Friends, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
“Falsche Freunde,” Achilles’ heel of many a student of the German language, refers to false cognates—words that sound similar to familiar English words but in fact mean something totally different. It is in this realm of confusion, this playful space in-between languages, that Wolf has found poetry. The book is an abecedary, in which the poems follow the letters of the alphabet, with a pair (or more) of false friends forming the inspiration for each poem. How then to translate such poetry, where parts are already in English, and where the interplay between languages is itself a subject? Susan has done a beautiful and creative job at this difficult task, and the results are a joy to read. Take for example “M,” which riffs on the words “man” (an indefinite pronoun in German), “manners” (“men” in German, minus the umlaut), and “mist” (shit). “she has manners…half a manner’s quite the contrary,” the translation begins. Each translation is a delicate balance, trading understanding in one language for sound in another and vice versa. Even if the English reader isn’t quite in on the wordplay in “if the mist hits the fan,” the sense of fun and shifting boundaries is clear and the image lovely in its own right. The whole series of poems shows off Susan’s chops as a translator, and tests what it really means to translate poetry as a whole— what a poem “means” rather than what it says. The results are stunning, and an engaging puzzle for the reader, as well.
