Wie man David Foster Wallace übersetzt: Ulrich Blumenbach im Gespräch

TL;DR

A long 2011 magazine interview with Ulrich Blumenbach, the German translator of Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spaß, 2009), given just as he had begun The Pale King. It is the fullest German-language account of what it took to carry Wallace's prose into another language: the 28 distinct technical jargons Blumenbach had to manage inside the novel, the whole afternoon he spent on a four-line pseudo-mathematical passage, the online Wallace newsgroup he leaned on as a research lifeline. Its rarest content is a translator's firsthand verdict on The Pale King as Michael Pietsch assembled it — structurally coherent, he thinks, but tonally uneven, a fragment-novel with passages Wallace would probably have massively reworked. Blumenbach, who never knew Wallace, also pushes back hard on Wallace's own retrospective dismissal of Infinite Jest: that self-criticism, he says, is overblown, and IJ is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Key claims

• The translator's paradox: „0% und 100%.“ Asked how much of himself is in Unendlicher Spaß, Blumenbach answers with a balancing act (Spagat): the book must stay entirely Wallace and become entirely Blumenbach. The German is always his, but it exists to reproduce what Wallace did in the original, so the question can't be quantified.
• Wallace's defining move is a huge expansion of language. He uses a larger vocabulary than most contemporary writers and stretches the possibilities of sentence construction, writing more complex periods than are usual — richer, more complex, more digressive than the surrounding contemporary literature.
• What German prose could learn from him is Welthaltigkeit (worldliness). Blumenbach's complaint about much German literature is that it is too self-absorbed, too given to literary-philosophical navel-gazing; Wallace by contrast lets a maximum of world stream through himself and gives it back transformed. He credits American fiction generally with refusing to look down snobbishly on popular culture and treating it as literarily usable — one of the decisive differences he sees between American and German prose.
• 28 jargons, historical dictionaries, invented words. In Unendlicher Spaß Blumenbach identified 28 distinct technical languages and jargons, from medical termini through gutter-slang to high mathematics; at the novel's end he thanks 31 people and two internet newsgroups. To match Wallace he had to mimic his techniques — using an equally recherché but also technical jargon and vocabulary that often sent him to remote historical dictionaries — and, like Wallace, to invent words himself.
• Wallace's precision (his „Hyperrealismus“) makes translation slower but more rewarding — the four-lines-in-an-afternoon anecdote. Blumenbach singles out the Infinite Jest passage in which James Incandenza tries to find the mathematical formula for a point tracing across a floor on a broken-off cabinet latch — a rolling curve (Rollkurve) — which Wallace compresses into a single sentence. Grasping the movement and rebuilding it in equally mathematical German took Blumenbach an entire afternoon and yielded four lines.
• The Wallace newsgroup was a research lifeline. Reading the discussions of fans who had reread the novel and knew it inside out taught him the novel's own cross-connections and micro-motifs and the factual knowledge Wallace embedded; in the late phase he posted questions himself. His example: after publication an ornithologically minded friend caught that a bird which falls dead into a whirlpool in one scene — a Cactus Wren — was mis-coloured; via the newsgroup he learned the bird lives only in the U.S. (he thinks only in Arizona), is actually turquoise, and is Arizona's state bird — extra knowledge that adds an additional semantic dimension to a tiny detail.
• The economics of the work, and the tax-law wall ahead. To afford the IJ translation he did stock-market and corporate copy for a Swiss bank in the evenings; for The Pale King, set largely inside a U.S. tax authority, he has so far translated only a short passage (for a grant) and has bought a monograph on American tax law — the first of several — because one country's tax law does not map onto another's.
• He never knew Wallace, and grieved him as the abstrakte Instanz — the abstract instance (gloss ours) of the author of the work. Wallace's suicide does not weigh on him more for The Pale King than for IJ — if anything less, since Wallace had already treated his depression in IJ. Not having known Wallace personally, he says, may have been his good fortune; he grieved the author of the work as any admirer grieves a revered writer.
• A translator's verdict on Pietsch's Pale King: coherent structure, uneven surface. He is not entirely satisfied with what Pietsch made of the material and thinks some passages were unnecessary, but calls the result a novel of very coherent, very plausible structure — 300 to 400 pages of characters' vivid backstories converging in the stasis of the tax office. The unevenness comes, he says, because Pietsch could only include passages as they lay, though Wallace would probably have massively reworked them.
• The Pale King as a conscious counterpart to IJ. Blumenbach agrees Wallace surely knew he was building a counterpart: from the constant search for the next kick (Infinite Jest) to boredom (The Pale King).
• On Wallace's development, and against his self-criticism. After one reading he finds The Pale King stylistically changed: the mannerisms are dialed back (only one chapter carries annotations, where nearly all his earlier texts did), the meandering sentences decrease, and two chapters run so moral as to verge on moraltriefend (morality-dripping — gloss ours). But he calls Wallace's own self-criticism overblown — nonsense to call IJ immature — and insists Wallace's books were always moral, only more cryptic and hidden than in The Pale King.
• He has no wish to write his own fiction: he has language but no Stoff (material) and no urge to tell a story; both, he thinks, must come together.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Pale King as Michael Pietsch assembled it is structurally coherent but tonally uneven — a genuine fragment-novel whose weaker passages Wallace would have reworked, not a finished book, yet the best outcome available and truer to Wallace than the bare manuscript would have been

• Crux: pale-king-incompletion
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [S — DE] Blumenbach opens by calling the question a nasty one — „Das ist eine böse Frage.“ (that is a wicked question — gloss ours) — and says he is not entirely satisfied with what Pietsch made of it, thinking some passages were not necessary. [reply on the Pietsch/Pale-King question]
  • [S — DE] Yet he judges the result a novel of „einer sehr schlüssigen, sehr plausiblen Struktur“ (a very coherent, very plausible structure — gloss ours): 300, if not 400, pages of characters' eventful backstories all ending in the stasis of the tax authority, isolated figures who become colleagues — from the dynamic of the lived seventies into the stasis of 1985 (gloss ours). [same reply]
  • [S — DE] The unevenness is a completeness effect: the book contains passages „die Wallace wahrscheinlich noch einmal massiv überarbeitet hätte“ (that Wallace would probably have massively reworked — gloss ours), which Pietsch could only take in as they lay, „darum kommt es zu Schwankungen im Roman“ (which is why fluctuations arise in the novel — gloss ours); some passages are dense and at Wallace's known level, others less so. [same reply]
  • [S — DE] He frames it as the general condition of the fragment-novel — „bei jedem Fragmentroman so, etwa auch Robert Musils „Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften““ (as with every fragment-novel, e.g. also Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities — gloss ours), assembled by Adolf Frisé — and adds that fans are grateful to have as much material as possible and would not have been satisfied with „den 200 Seiten, die Wallace vor seinem Selbstmord angeblich auf seinen Schreibtisch gelegt hat“ (the 200 pages Wallace allegedly laid on his desk before his suicide — gloss ours). [same reply]
• Notes: This is Blumenbach's own firsthand critical verdict (translator/critic voice, quotable in German), and it genuinely cuts both ways — he criticizes Pietsch's inclusions and defends the assembled structure, so the block is complicates, not a flat endorse or reject. The counterweight in the same reply (fans grateful; the bare manuscript would have satisfied no one) is recorded above per the counterevidence clause. The interviewer's question supplies the matching Wallace-side material — that Wallace worked at least 7 years on the book, kept despairing at it, believed he had gotten linguistically stuck, and reproached himself that his verbal habits had hardened from a discovery to a technique to a tic he could barely shake off — but that is a back-translation of Wallace's reported self-assessment (the journalist's German for English the archive does not hold): PARAPHRASE-ONLY, not a Wallace quote. Oeuvre-scoped (about The Pale King, not an IJ-internal crux).

CONNECTION: Blumenbach's craft testimony is firsthand evidence for the encyclopedic, hyper-precise density of Infinite Jest — 28 layered technical registers, single sentences of pseudo-mathematics, and buried factual knowledge that rewards but does not require decoding

• Crux: encyclopedic-design
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [S — DE] The interviewer states, confirming Blumenbach's own count, that he identified in the novel „ganze 28 verschiedene Fachsprachen und Jargons ausgemacht, angefangen bei medizinischen Termini über Gossenslang bis hin zur hohen Mathematik“ (fully 28 different technical languages and jargons, from medical termini through gutter-slang to high mathematics — gloss ours), and that the novel's acknowledgments thank 31 people and two internet newsgroups. [question on the 28 jargons]
  • [text] The Infinite Jest passage Blumenbach anchors: James Incandenza trying to find the mathematical formula for a point moving across a floor on a broken-off cabinet latch — a rolling curve (Rollkurve), a point on one plane moving over another — which Wallace gets into a single sentence of pseudo-mathematical description, and which cost Blumenbach a whole afternoon to render as four lines. [reply on Wallace's precision / Hyperrealismus]
  • [S — DE] The buried-knowledge example: the Cactus Wren that falls dead into a whirlpool — „Dieser Cactus Wren, sagte er, sei nicht grün, sondern blau.“ (this Cactus Wren, he said, is not green but blue — gloss ours) — which Blumenbach learned via the newsgroup is turquoise and Arizona's state bird, so that even a tiny detail „eine zusätzliche semantische Dimension erhält“ (gains an additional semantic dimension — gloss ours). [reply on the newsgroup]
• Notes: The clearest IJ-internal contact point in the interview — the novel's dense, precise, encyclopedic construction, attested from the inside by the person who had to rebuild every register. The Incandenza rolling-curve geometry adjacently echoes the roulette/annular-curve family of readings, but Blumenbach draws no such link, so the echo stays a loose candidate rather than a recorded reading. The whirlpool bird-scene is not pinned to a scene number here (unverified). The 28-jargons figure and the acknowledgments count are also held, in convergent form, in the Spiegel/Esposito Blumenbach notes.

CONNECTION: Wallace's late style dials the Infinite Jest mannerisms back — the endnote/annotation apparatus shrinks to a single chapter and the meandering sentences recede — a translator's read on the endnotes as a signature tic that The Pale King largely sheds

• Crux: endnotes-function · prose-tempo-design
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [S — DE] On Wallace's development: his mannerisms are dialed back — „Es gibt tatsächlich nur ein Kapitel mit Anmerkungen“ (there is in fact only one chapter with annotations — gloss ours), where nearly all his earlier texts carried them. [reply on Wallace's development]
  • [S — DE] The syntax likewise loosens: the sentence structures generally become more manageable, „diese Mäandersätze nehmen ab“ (these meandering sentences decrease — gloss ours). [same reply]
• Notes: A mentions-grade double sighting. Blumenbach reads the annotation apparatus and the meandering long sentence as Wallace mannerisms — signature habits — and marks their reduction in The Pale King; he does not argue what the Infinite Jest endnote apparatus is for (endnotes-function's actual crux), so a mention-level sighting, nothing stronger. The complex-period expansion he praises earlier (more complex periods than are usual — gloss ours) is the positive-pole datum for prose-tempo-design (the meandering sentence as design, not accident).

CONNECTION: Wallace's books were always moral, only more cryptic than in The Pale King — the ironist/immature label (including Wallace's own) is a misreading, since even Infinite Jest runs on an enormous empathy for its characters

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [S — DE] Blumenbach calls Wallace's own retrospective self-criticism overblown — „Ich finde natürlich, dass seine Selbstkritik überzogen ist.“ (I do of course find that his self-criticism is overblown — gloss ours) — and „Es ist Quatsch, „Infinite Jest“ als unreif zu bezeichnen, einen der größten Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts.“ (it is nonsense to call Infinite Jest immature, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century — gloss ours). [reply on Wallace's development]
  • [S — DE] The continuity claim: „Seine Bücher waren schon immer moralisch, nur vielleicht ein wenig kryptischer und verborgener“ (his books were always moral, only perhaps a bit more cryptic and hidden — gloss ours), and The Pale King has two chapters so moral as to verge on „moraltriefend“ (morality-dripping — gloss ours); even in IJ Wallace shows an enormous empathy for his characters. [same reply]
• Notes: Oeuvre-scoped support for the earnest/moralist reading of Wallace against the ironist/immature framing — consonant with the archive's large sincerity-definition lane. The self-dismissal Blumenbach rebuts — that Wallace retrospectively found IJ immature and bloodless and aspired to morally passionate, passionately moral fiction — is stated in the interviewer's question as a back-translation of Wallace's reported/written words: PARAPHRASE-ONLY here. The aspiration's English original is HELD — the Joseph Frank Dostoevsky essay's closing line at ctl-frank-dostoevsky — so quote authority for that phrase resolves there, not to this German rendering. Blumenbach's own rebuttal (his word „unreif“, his „moraltriefend“) is firsthand and quotable.

Themes

Translation as craft and its economics (the „0% und 100%“ balancing act; historical dictionaries; inventing words; night bank-copy to fund the work; tax-law monographs for The Pale King); the expansion of language (larger vocabulary, more complex periods, the meandering sentence); Welthaltigkeit / worldliness and the American-vs-German-prose contrast (pop culture as literarily usable; the charge of German navel-gazing); Wallace's precision and hyperrealism (the four-lines-in-an-afternoon rolling-curve passage); the encyclopedic embedded knowledge (the Cactus Wren's additional-semantic-dimension payoff); the fan newsgroup as reading community and research resource; The Pale King's completeness and Pietsch's assembly (the fragment-novel problem; the Musil/Frisé analogy; the 200-page desk rumor); TPK as the boredom-counterpart to IJ's distraction (Blumenbach's own earlier Postman summation — Wir amüsieren uns zu Tode, the German title of Amusing Ourselves to Death — reported back to him in the question); Wallace's stylistic development and dialed-back mannerisms; morality and earnestness across the oeuvre (the ironist/immature label as misreading; the enormous-empathy line); the author as abstrakte Instanz and the translator who never met him.

Cross-references

• blumenbach-spiegel-2009 — the archive's other primary Blumenbach interview (Der Spiegel "Zehn Wahrheiten", 2009). The two are the paired German Blumenbach sources and agree on the load-bearing facts: he never met Wallace, worked from remote/historical dictionaries (Grimm), and had to invent words to match Wallace's coinages (the Spiegel 'ascapartic' example is a case of the word-invention this interview describes). The night bank-translation to fund the work appears in both.
• esposito-ij-around-the-world — the English companion, where Blumenbach reappears at more length (the Unendlicher Spaß sales figure, the Grimm-dictionary method); convergent with this interview's account of the translation's demands.
• The three-plane precision passage (James Incandenza's rolling-curve formula) is the concrete Infinite Jest text Blumenbach uses to make the hyperrealism point — the novel's mathematics-as-prose density seen from the translator's desk.

Notable passages

Blumenbach's words unless marked; German is the verbatim anchor, the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). Curly German typography reproduced as printed.

• „0% und 100%.“ (zero percent and one hundred percent — gloss ours) — his answer to how much of himself is in Unendlicher Spaß.
• „Es soll alles Wallace bleiben und es muss alles Blumenbach werden.“ (it should all stay Wallace and it must all become Blumenbach — gloss ours).
• „Wallace weitet die Sprache einfach ganz ungeheuer aus.“ (Wallace simply expands language quite enormously — gloss ours).
• „Vor allem seine Welthaltigkeit.“ (above all his worldliness — gloss ours) — what German literature can learn from Wallace; against prose that „zu sehr literarisch-philosophische Nabelschau betreibt“ (engages in too much literary-philosophical navel-gazing — gloss ours).
• „Und genau wie Wallace muss ich teilweise Wörter erfinden.“ (and just like Wallace I have partly to invent words — gloss ours).
• „Das hat einen ganzen Nachmittag gedauert – und wurden am Ende vier Zeilen.“ (that took a whole afternoon – and became four lines in the end — gloss ours) — on the Incandenza rolling-curve passage. „Diese Präzision ist lustvoll, wenn sie gelingt, aber schwer zu erreichen.“ (this precision is pleasurable when it works, but hard to achieve — gloss ours).
• „Dieser Cactus Wren, sagte er, sei nicht grün, sondern blau.“ (this Cactus Wren, he said, is not green but blue — gloss ours) — the newsgroup ornithology anecdote; the buried detail „eine zusätzliche semantische Dimension erhält“ (gains an additional semantic dimension — gloss ours).
• On the fan community: „die Freaks sitzen, die das Buch in- und auswendig kennen“ (the freaks sit there who know the book inside and out — gloss ours).
• „Das ist eine böse Frage.“ (that is a wicked question — gloss ours) — opening his verdict on Pietsch's Pale King, which he still credits with „einer sehr schlüssigen, sehr plausiblen Struktur“ (a very coherent, very plausible structure — gloss ours) despite passages „die Wallace wahrscheinlich noch einmal massiv überarbeitet hätte“ (that Wallace would probably have massively reworked — gloss ours).
• „Ich finde natürlich, dass seine Selbstkritik überzogen ist.“ (I do of course find that his self-criticism is overblown — gloss ours). „Es ist Quatsch, „Infinite Jest“ als unreif zu bezeichnen, einen der größten Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts.“ (it is nonsense to call Infinite Jest immature, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century — gloss ours).
• „Seine Bücher waren schon immer moralisch, nur vielleicht ein wenig kryptischer und verborgener“ (his books were always moral, only perhaps a bit more cryptic and hidden — gloss ours).
• On writing his own fiction: „Ich habe nur Sprache zur Verfügung, aber überhaupt keinen Stoff.“ (I have only language available, but no material at all — gloss ours).

Accuracy notes

• The tax office's location. Blumenbach places The Pale King's converging characters in a tax authority „in Georgia“ (in Georgia — gloss ours). The novel's Regional Examination Center is in Peoria, Illinois, not Georgia — a slip of memory, reproduced here as spoken (cite-as-written). His „1985“ for the novel's Stasis is broadly right (much of The Pale King is set in 1985).
• A grammatical slip, preserved. In the four-lines anecdote Blumenbach says „und wurden am Ende vier Zeilen“ (as printed), where standard German would read und es wurden am Ende vier Zeilen; reproduced as spoken, not silently corrected.
• Date of the interview vs. its first printing. The intro dates the conversation to May 2011 („Bei unserem Gespräch im Mai 2011“); the raw's footer says the interview „erschien erstmals in ]trash[pool Nr. 2 im Dezember 2011.“ The blog republication is dated 13 December 2014. (Frontmatter date: uses the conversation month, 2011-05; the December 2011 print appearance and the 2014 republication are both recorded.)