Zehn Wahrheiten: Ich musste das Falsche richtig falsch übersetzen

TL;DR

The German translator Ulrich Blumenbach's ten truths, given to Der Spiegel in September 2009 after six years turning Infinite Jest into Unendlicher Spaß — a rare piece of craft testimony from inside the prose. Blumenbach, who never met Wallace, reads the novel from the translator's chair as an engine of engineered detail: sentences a page and a half long, deliberately archaic and self-coined vocabulary, and a punctuation rhythm he came to hear as breathing. His most-quoted line names the hardest discipline of the job — that Wallace's small errors and word-swaps were intentional, so the translator had to render the wrong thing correctly wrong ("das Falsche richtig falsch übersetzen"). It closes on grief: the inner voice that had read the text aloud in his head for six years vanished the instant Wallace died.

Key claims

• Six years, and never a meeting. Blumenbach began by asking Wallace urgently for contact and got no reply, kept a lengthening list of questions, and had expected one day to hand him the finished work with a genuflection ("Mit einem Kniefall"). He states plainly, "Ich bin ihm nie begegnet" (our translation: I never met him). Wallace's suicide attempts and depression became known only after his death; Blumenbach had guessed nothing of his actual condition.
• Why six years. Because the book is thick and "manche Sätze eineinhalb Seiten lang sind" (our translation: some sentences are a page and a half long); because Wallace, raised on lexicons and encyclopedias, took pleasure in seeding words only he knew. Blumenbach's example is 'ascapartic', which Wallace derived himself from the rare 'ascapart', a legendary hero — a single word the translator spent hours on.
• Wallace's aim, as the translator names it. "Sein Ziel war ein Hyperrealismus, der aller Facetten des Lebens sprachlich habhaft werden wollte" (our translation: his goal was a hyperrealism that wanted to get all facets of life into language); it was about sensuousness and the greatest possible precision of world-description.
• Punctuation as breath (a craft claim about the prose's design). Blumenbach describes a rhythm built from punctuation and endless hypotaxis — semicolons above all — "besonders wenn Morde geschildert werden" (our translation: especially when murders are described): the punctuation marks become breath-marks, and the victim's suffocation transfers itself to the reader.
• The intentional errors (the title truth). Word-swaps, mix-ups. "Zunächst habe ich das korrigiert, bis mir auffiel, dass Wallace es natürlich so wollte" (our translation: at first I corrected them, until it struck me that Wallace of course wanted them that way) — because his losers had to talk exactly like that. So he had to translate the wrong thing correctly wrong.
• The economics. Six years for 52,000 euros; the work was planned as four years for a 2007 release; the fee was a third of what Blumenbach needed to live on, and he used up a small inheritance in the period. His publisher Helge Malchow told him the book did not stand 'im Zentrum unserer Umsatzerwartungen' (our translation: at the centre of our sales expectations), though he shares in the proceeds from the first copy.
• Grief, without drama. Asked whether the suicide left him betrayed or angry, Blumenbach declines to dramatize — many of his authors are dead — but says the voice that had read the text aloud in his head "war schlagartig weg und kam nie zurück" (our translation: was abruptly gone and never came back).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's small errors, word-swaps, and mix-ups are deliberate craft, not slips — the wrong language is engineered to voice Wallace's losers, and a faithful translation must reproduce the wrongness

• Crux: intentional-errors
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The translator's discovery, stated as method: "Zunächst habe ich das korrigiert, bis mir auffiel, dass Wallace es natürlich so wollte." [Wahrheit 8]
  • [secondary] The rationale he assigns it: "Weil seine Verlierer genau so sprechen mussten" (our translation: because his losers had to speak exactly like that), and so "Also musste ich das Falsche richtig falsch übersetzen." [Wahrheit 8]
• Notes: Craft testimony from inside the prose — a translator who first tried to fix the errors and reversed himself on recognizing their design. Independent corroboration for intentional-errors from a non-Anglophone craftsman with no stake in the Anglophone debates.

THEORY: The novel's length and sentence-architecture are engineered for tempo and breath — punctuation (especially semicolons and deep hypotaxis) is designed to make the reader physically enact the prose, up to the victim's suffocation in the murder passages

• Crux: prose-tempo-design
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "Zum Beispiel ein Rhythmus durch Satzzeichen, Zeichensetzung, unendliche viele Hypotaxen, also Semikolons, besonders wenn Morde geschildert werden; dann werden die Satzzeichen zu Atemzeichen, das Ersticken des Opfers überträgt sich auf den Leser" [Wahrheit 7]
  • [secondary] The bulk as design-driven, not accident: "Weil manche Sätze eineinhalb Seiten lang sind" is his own first answer to why the job took six years. [Wahrheit 5]
• Notes: A translator's testimony that the punctuation is a tempo/breath instrument — an experiential-design claim of the family keyed to prose-tempo-design / length-as-time. Adjacent to walled-sentence (the page-length sentence as a designed obstacle). The suffocation-transfer reading is specific and load-bearing: it treats semicolons as somatic notation.

THEORY: Infinite Jest's vocabulary is a deliberate encyclopedic project — Wallace's delight in rare, obsolete, and self-coined words is part of the book's design, not ornament

• Crux: encyclopedic-design
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "Weil David Foster Wallace mit Lexika und Enzyklopädien aufgewachsen ist und es ihm eine Freude war, Wörter einzustreuen, die nur er kannte." [Wahrheit 5]
  • [secondary] The worked example: "Finden Sie mal ein Wort wie 'ascapartic'." — which Wallace derived himself from the rare 'ascapart'. [Wahrheit 5]
• Notes: Endorses the encyclopedic-design reading from the lexical side (cf. the novel's obsolete-word habit that Blumenbach elsewhere describes replacing with archaic German via the Grimm dictionary — see Infinite Jest Around the World). Sighting, craft-grade.

Themes

Translation and reception (the first German passage of the novel; the craft of carrying Wallace's registers into another language); prose and design (sentence length, punctuation-as-breath, the intentional errors, the encyclopedic vocabulary); Wallace's hyperrealism and his subject — an America of too much ("Zu viel Vergnügen, zu viel Spaß, zu viele Möglichkeiten" — the Spiegel editors' framing sentence, not Blumenbach's); depression, suffering, and the near-messianic role his admirers assigned him; the economics of literary translation.

Cross-references

• Blumenbach reappears, in English and at more length, in Veronica Esposito's translator roundup Infinite Jest Around the World — where he gives the German sales figure (70,000 copies of Unendlicher Spaß), the OED-plus-Grimm method, and the sixty pages of online annotations; the two cross-reference each other and are the archive's paired Blumenbach sources.
• The French translation strand runs alongside: the Spirale review L'infinie comédie et la tâche ingrate du traducteur and the Slate.fr release essay «L'Infinie Comédie» debate the same prose-design questions — whether Wallace's wonky-seeming syntax is deliberate — from the French side.

Notable passages

German verbatim (Blumenbach unless marked); English in reader prose above is our translation, not a quotation.

• "Ich musste das Falsche richtig falsch übersetzen" (the interview's title truth).
• "Zunächst habe ich das korrigiert, bis mir auffiel, dass Wallace es natürlich so wollte. Weil seine Verlierer genau so sprechen mussten."
• "Zum Beispiel ein Rhythmus durch Satzzeichen, Zeichensetzung, unendliche viele Hypotaxen, also Semikolons, besonders wenn Morde geschildert werden; dann werden die Satzzeichen zu Atemzeichen, das Ersticken des Opfers überträgt sich auf den Leser; und außerdem sind da die kleinen Fehler."
• "Weil David Foster Wallace mit Lexika und Enzyklopädien aufgewachsen ist und es ihm eine Freude war, Wörter einzustreuen, die nur er kannte. Finden Sie mal ein Wort wie 'ascapartic'."
• "Sein Ziel war ein Hyperrealismus, der aller Facetten des Lebens sprachlich habhaft werden wollte" (the body sentence continues past this point).
• "diese Hirnstimme war schlagartig weg und kam nie zurück."