In a tumultuous January, Asymptote Book Club sent to subscribers a remarkable novel that is as compelling as it is disorienting: The Sweet Indifference of the World, written by esteemed Swiss author Peter Stamm and translated by Michael Hofmann, an accomplished poet with the penchant for “avoiding the obvious.” Instilled, as the best fictions are, with the tantalizingly elusive and the startlingly clear, the prose takes unorthodox turns to investigate a love lost and a life lived. Though we now have tools to navigate nearly every physical terrain, literature is still our main method for traversing the topography of psychological human experience. To grant us an insight on this unique work, Michael Hofmann talks with assistant editor Lindsay Semel about failures, freedoms, and the the survival of simplicity through translation.
The Asymptote Book Club is our gift to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Bringing the most notable titles in translated literature for as little as USD15 per book, you can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page.
Lindsay Semel (LS): So far, you are Peter Stamm’s only voice in English, and you’ve ironically referred to him as your “living author.” How does his writing converse with some of the other work you’ve translated? Do you find any interesting points of contact, clash, or cohesion?
Michael Hofmann (MH): Peter’s writing is so pure and clean. There’s nowhere to hide in it. Most of the things I’m associated with (or that I write myself) are much murkier and endlessly more elaborate. In some ways, we’re not a natural pairing at all. For someone like me who spends much of his time shuffling subordinate clauses or thinking of the ideal way to modify adverbs (with another adverb), it’s a purge and a cure. The contact, I suppose, is that to some extent he comes out of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (Hemingway, Carver, etc. etc.—though he has many more writers behind him), and I’m trying to return him to it in the most graceful and fitting way I can. In a way, it doesn’t feel like translating at all—it’s more like making a forgery. Trying to pass off something English-inspired as English!
LS: You’ve said that one of your “guiding principles” for translating “is to avoid the obvious word, even if it is the literal equivalent of the original.” Could you point out some instances in The Sweet Indifference of the World in which you chose a particularly felicitous un-obvious word? Which choices delighted you as you were making them?
MH: Translation in my experience effaces itself as you do it. There’s no such thing as translation-memory or any abiding feeling of translation-pain or -triumph. It would be lovely if I could end a day, and say to myself: “Well, there’s three baroque choices I’ve put over on my author today!” Unfortunately, it’s not like that. Now I’ll have to go looking for them in the book, and the distances, the freedoms I referred to will seem tiny, insignificant, really pitiful. Though they do exist. [Ten minutes later] Here goes:
The German says: “auf den Wiesen der sanft gewellten Landschaft.” On the meadows or grass of the gently rolling scenery. It’s a description of a cemetery. I just have “the gently contoured lawn.” It’s a little shorter, a little more practical. The German says: “auch die Kritik wurde darauf aufmerksam.” Something like: even the critics paid it attention. I put: “Even the reviewers seemed to sit up.” It puts a little tone into it, a little shop, a little self-deprecation. I think “seemed“ is useful to Peter, where there’s lots of doubt to go around. The German says: “Ich sagte ein paar Gemeinplätze über das Stück und die Aufführung. Magdalena schien ihre Rolle schon ein wenig satt zu haben, und sie hatte auch keine Lust, mit mir über die Inszenierung zu reden.” It’s very straightforward. I have: “I made a couple of remarks about the play and the production. Magdalena already seemed to be slightly fed up with her part, and she didn’t feel like hashing out the production with me either.” i.e. “remarks” instead of “commonplaces” and “hashing out” for “speak with me about.” Hash out, I think, is perfect for a slightly irksome trivial dutiful conversation with small returns.
But that’s not really what matters here. What matters is authority, a rhythm of conviction. Something close to the inner speech of musing and recollection. Peter’s not a vocabulary writer. He could have been, very easily, but he took a conscious decision not to. At most, I have to see that the English doesn’t get too simple, and the sentences too short, so that the reader doesn’t think: Hmm, there’s something wrong with this, it’s too elementary, it’s simple-minded. So there’s just enough complication or sophistication to let the simplicity survive.
LS: I’ve run into trouble trying to discuss the novel, largely because my experience of it is so much more expansive than what’s on the page. I think this is a testament to what you’ve identified as a simplicity in Stamm’s writing that creates an enormous participatory space for the reader. Since the writing style is so suggestive, and since you have proclaimed yourself the antithesis of the self-effacing translator, I’m wondering if there are themes, or strands of inquiry, that you selected to privilege or understate in different ways than the original does.
MH: I think, as a translator, your greatest gift is your author. There’s really nothing worse than a passage or a sentence or even a phrase you don’t see the point of, that’s superfluous. It’s like an instruction—your original is your instruction—that doesn’t mean anything. Then the rope or leash starts to trail on the ground. Why has your master stopped? There’s never been a moment like that with Peter. He’s always up to something, pursuing something, going somewhere; there’s no embellishment, nor even psychology. He just tells you what happens, and it’s up to the reader to work out why and what effect it has and what it felt like. The girl goes back to Argentina. Christoph thinks about going after her and doing something in Argentina, but it doesn’t happen. So that’s it, that’s the end of her in the story. They exchange letters for a while, then they stop.
I have complete trust in Peter; he doesn’t leave room, and there’s no need for it. There’s no commentary, no anguish, no vaporings. So I would never feel called upon to “privilege or understate in different ways.” For the translator, it’s the pleasure of following something that you know will carry you—that will keep the line taut. The only thing I would admit to is perhaps keeping the temperature of the whole thing a degree or two warmer than in the original. It’s a little bit more personal, a little bit more vocal. But I think that’s in the nature of English. Something too curt and impersonal and metallic wouldn’t work.
LS: You’ve often used words like “inadequacy” and “guilt” to discuss your relationship with literature. In discussing your body of work—its variety and size—you’ve commented that “One is a plant, and one has to bear. And I’ve never thought of myself as anything particularly exquisite. So: bear more!” The novel’s protagonist Christoph is, to extend your analogy, a plant that has borne only one fruit. He has not followed your injunction. Can you tell me about your relationship with him?
MH: Poor Christoph, but he’s tried, he’s tried! If you played a word-association game with me and said: writer, I’d say: failure. Not that as a writer, you have to be comfortable with failure (but that’s probably because you shouldn’t be comfortable, period), but it should be your North Star. You’re pointed in its direction. You set your course by it. He writes a book by mistake, and then by further accident, people read it! Of course, a writer is a failure. How can you see the life of Flaubert, or Chekhov, or practically any of the greats, as anything but a resounding failure? Equally, the American TV writer and workshop leader in the book—what kind of success is that?! There are lots of routes, but they all lead nowhere. Christoph just got there early. Got there early, and never got beyond it.
LS: One of the themes of The Sweet Indifference of the World is that of the living story. The notion that a great written novel has a vivacity that is difficult to define or to force is dramatized by the simultaneous retelling, reliving, and revising of Christoph and Magdalena’s love story. You are a poet and a critic as well as a translator. Do you think that the discourse that surrounds a work of literature (including criticism and translation) is necessary to keep it alive? Or that Stamm’s novel itself somehow makes that argument?
MH: I think Peter’s been haunted by the idea of story-as-agent ever since Agnes, his first book. The narrator’s girlfriend was killed, as he says, “by a story” he’s written about her. There are echoes from Agnes in The Sweet Indifference of the World. I think Peter’s come through the whole of (demystifying) existentialism and reached mystery. There’s the wonderful ghost story “Summer Folk” in the volume We’re Flying, with the literary scholar and the mysterious caretaker, set in the deserted hotel, and ever since there’s been something otherworldly in Peter’s writing. How we repeat ourselves, how certain patterns are waiting for us, how our lives are not our lives or not our only lives or not ours alone. You think of the two versions of the story of the man who walks out in To the Back of Beyond. He’s gone, he comes back, he lives, he dies. Existence is diaphanous, one of any number of layers—“Folie” would be the German word.
It’s done with a sort of vitalist understanding. Whatever there is, it’s life. It doesn’t really matter what happens. Life is everywhere. In one form or another. As a philosophy, it’s either bleak, or it’s wildly affirmative, I can’t make up my mind. I don’t have that, I’m an old-fashioned atheist individualist. I have perhaps what at this stage is an equally mystical faith in print. To me, life is in print. Or print is the possibility of life. That the poem or story once printed will live, if it’s any good, and maybe for as long as there is a person somewhere to read it. Sine die, like sunny day.
Photo credit: Thomas Andenmatten
Michael Hofmann is a poet, reviewer, and translator from the German. He teaches at the University of Florida. He has translated nine books by Peter Stamm, and some eighty in all, including work by Kafka, Koeppen, Wenders, Roth and Keun.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: