"I've been busy," I told myself as I walked down that familiar street -- Gabelsbergerstrasse -- walked past all the engineering students, past the expensive corner pizza place and the music high school and all that old Nazi architecture. "I've been applying for jobs. I had things to do."
Really, I think it was just that I was afraid I'd walk in the door and they wouldn't care -- that any affection for me they'd professed had been thoroughly faked, that now that they had my thousands of euro and had processed my transcript, they would pretend never to have heard of me.
But there it was, the sign, the stone walls -- I walked to the door (the weather was still cold and gray) and I pressed the doorbell, and it buzzed, and I turned the knob but somehow it wouldn't open, it just spun in a circle, so I just kept turning it in a panic that this is how they would find me, back and without a job and not even able to open a door for God's sake, and then all of a sudden it was turning the other way on its own and the door was opening and there was Patrizia, office assistant, vengeful angel, former theater professor, her hair curlier than ever.
"Du hast es wieder zugesperrt!" she said. (You locked it again! Haha!). "Wie geht's??! Komm rein, komm rein!"
For whatever reason - I blame the children I've been babysitting in German for the past month -- speaking the language is no longer scary for me. I feel like my grammar hasn't gotten any better, but I'm no longer afraid of independently producing words -- I produced words for a solid half hour today, sitting with Patrizia in her office and stirring the cappuccino she'd made me. We talked about jobs, her job, my potential job, another ex-JYM student living in Munich who might be able to help me out, Brijhette (<3),>
H.P., my favorite semi-lazy German professor, had apparently invited his friend (his genius lies in the fact that he has many, many friends) to speak. Normally I would have bowed out, but I was intrigued: the man sitting in the library was a translator.
Literary translators, here in Munich, are a rare breed -- one must be well-established, a writer on one's own already; one must be experienced and know how to shop around manuscripts; one must be an experienced researcher; one must know that literary translating doesn't pay the bills.
Apparently, one must also know that literary translating can, on occasion, nearly kill you. That's what I learned today, mostly.
The man sitting in the library was a man about my height, a man with an annoyed brow and a silver beard and spectacles and two coats. Patrizia approached him. "Hallo, _____, darf ich jemand vorstellen? Das ist die Jessica, eine ehemalige JYM-Studentin; sie ist wiedergekommen, um Arbeit zu suchen..." (She's come back to look for work!)
The man took my hand, shook it somberly. Then he said, auf Deutsch, "And of course, also because of a boyfriend, yes?"
I laughed like hell. "Yes."
That was all he needed to know about me. I asked him what he was going to be talking about, and he said, "Do you know Danielewski?"
I didn't recognize the name, and was ashamed. "Noo?" I said sheepishly, a literature major.
He began to expound, talking mainly to Patrizia, glancing occasionally at me -- "The young in America enjoy his books; there have been many blogs written about them, their mirrored-ness, their inscrutability, and so of course now we must translate them into German, for the young folk here to read. But there are many problems with the text, even more than there were with the first novel -- for instance, how do you translate that title? Is it "Haus aus Blaettern" or "Haus dass Verlaesst"?---"
"WAIT," I said. "You mean, 'House of Leaves?'"
He looked at me.
I was going to say something about how much I'd hated that book, but instead I just nodded. "Yeah, I do know it!"
"House of Leaves" is this black-covered brick of a book. Later, in Hans-Peter's class, a girl was asked to summarize it, and she said, "It's about a house that is a labyrinth, and it's a book that is also a labyrinth". I'd never thought of it like that, but it's true -- the text jumps around the page, the footnotes are a story in themselves, pages will be jam-packed with print or nearly empty. I found it annoying, frankly -- it was cute at first, but I am a lazy reader, one who does not want to constantly be shifting a brick-weight book around in a circle in order to find out what happens. The main characters also seemed annoyed by the sort of visual art they were trapped in, and retaliated by being two-dimensional, which made me even more not want to finish it.
"I can see how that'd be hard to translate," I said.
"Just wait until you see the other one," he said, fuming, and he went to his bag and pulled out a well-marked copy of the author's less-successful second novel "Only Revolutions". I opened it to find pages that look like this:
"Oh god," I said. "It's like Ulysses, except..."
"Yes, quite," he said.
Apparently, it's about two young people who carry on a romance that lasts for 200 years and a road trip that travels across America. That's it. "Nothing else really happens," he says. "It's just very... Facebook. It is what the young in America want right now. It is a truly American book."
Translation of this book required the man to surf through thousands of web pages for each book-page he translated -- in the margin, aided by Wikipedia, the author had chosen to write events that happened on the day the book was taking place. Generally, with the aid of the Internet and native speakers, he could figure it out, but once he'd encountered a word that "ONLY OCCURRED IN THE TEXT. It was NOWHERE else on the Internet." Except for a discussion board posting about the novel, that is.
On the board -- which was full of people gushing about how awesome the book was -- he posted the baffling page with the baffling word, with the sentence, "If anyone can tell me what this means, I will give them ten free copies of this book."
Nobody could.
The man talked for thirty minutes. Patrizia and I stood and nodded; Patrizia, on occasion, added helpful things; I mostly made what I thought were intelligent-sounding noises and sent vague "get me a job like yours even if it's hell" rays in his direction. It was like being in a lecture, but a lecture where not only were you judging the professor, he was also judging you, sitting up there behind his podium with a furrowed brow and -- when you chose to speak -- a careful appraisal of your German abilities.
I fear I came up short -- once or twice Patrizia had to translate for me into better German -- but at least now I've met someone semi-famous, or at least someone who has in his possession, printed out, an angry email from one of his colleagues to Danielewski that says, in summary, "Take your book and shove it. I can't make any sense of this bullshit. How is this published??"
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