IJ study archive

Ulrich Blumenbach zu verschiedenen Übersetzungen einer Passage aus Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

A two-part German piece — a short essay plus an 18-part interview — in which Ulrich Blumenbach, the German translator of Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spaß, 2009), does something the other Blumenbach primaries only describe: he shows his work. He takes one of the novel's hardest passages — the Irish AA speaker's phonetically mangled monologue about the miraculous first solid stool of his sobriety — and lays out three successive German renderings: first an unmarked standard-German crib made only to figure out what the English even says (including the puzzle of what “Har Par” means — it is Higher Power), then a North-German dialect version he rejects because a North-German-speaking Irishman in Boston breaks the reader's willing suspension of disbelief and is anyway far too easy to read, and finally the version that stands in the published book, in which he has changed the speaker's nationality from Irish to Swiss and rendered him in Basel German worked out with a Basel historian friend. The interview then ranges across his method: language as world-disclosure and Wallace's Genauigkeitsfetischismus (precision-fetishism) as a door to new worlds; the art of translating error correctly wrong (Marathe's near-miss idioms, Randy Lenz's malapropisms); the ascapartic word-hunt that ran through a 1906 dictionary to a Shakespeare quarto; the Cactus Wren whirlpool-bird puzzle and how research feeds interpretation more than translation; his taste for Explosionen (Joelle van Dyne and films where a whole lot of shit blows up); Infinite Jest as a thousand-page interior view of depression whose message is that you are not alone; and what German prose could learn from Wallace — Welthaltigkeit, worldliness, the building-in of real things.

Key claims

The passage-comparison (the heart of the piece)

  • The hard passage, and why it is hard. Blumenbach picks the AA testimony of an Irish immigrant “der einen so breiten Dialekt spricht, dass man zunächst fast gar nichts versteht” (who speaks so broad a dialect that at first one understands almost nothing — gloss ours). The English is deliberately barely legible; a faithful German must be barely legible too.
  • Step 1 — a standard-German crib, just to understand it. He first rendered the passage “in ein unmarkiertes Standarddeutsch” (into an unmarked standard German — gloss ours), which itself took a while, partly because he could not at first work out what the “»Har Par«” of the closing lines meant. In the specific spirituality of the Anonymous Alcoholics it could only be Higher Power — “»Höheres Wesen«” (Higher Being — gloss ours).
  • Step 2 — a North-German dialect version, rejected. German translators have for decades rarely swapped Anglophone dialects for German ones, but for so short a passage he tried it, in a loosely Hamburg / Lower-Saxon North German. He rejects it on two grounds: an Irish immigrant in Boston speaking North German “schubst das den Leser aus der Fiktion” (shoves the reader out of the fiction — gloss ours); and it is anyway “noch viel zu verständlich” (still far too comprehensible — gloss ours). To achieve the Wirkungsäquivalenz (effect-equivalence) that literary translation needs, the German has to be made more unintelligible, because the original is unintelligible to non-Irish English speakers too.
  • Step 3 — change the nationality, go to Basel. The decisive move: he asked why the speaker must be Irish at all — “Kann der nicht auch aus der Schweiz, genauer gesagt aus Basel kommen?” (couldn't he also come from Switzerland, from Basel to be precise? — gloss ours). He changed the speaker's nationality, sat down with a friend, the historian Lucas Burkart of the University of Basel, and produced the Basel-German (Baseldytsch) version “wie sie jetzt im Buche steht” (as it now stands in the book — gloss ours), printed with the page cite “(US 507f.)” — Unendlicher Spaß pp. 507f.
  • Defending the intervention. The one objection he recalls was whether one may change a literary figure's nationality at all — “ein massiver Eingriff in das Werk” (a massive intervention into the work — gloss ours). He held and holds the move legitimate: the passage sticks out so sharply that, as the Joyce scholar Fritz Senn says at the Zurich translators' meeting, a translation must do something so readers feel the text's dynamic. “Das muss kesseln!” (it has got to sizzle / kick up a racket — gloss ours).

The interview (method and stance)

  • Language discloses world; Wallace's precision-fetishism opens new worlds. Citing Wittgenstein's Tractatus — “»Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.«” — Blumenbach frames translation as widening one's world by learning to name it better; Wallace was “eine Offenbarung” (a revelation — gloss ours) precisely because his “sprachlicher Genauigkeitsfetischismus neue Welten erschließt” (linguistic precision-fetishism opens up new worlds — gloss ours).
  • Translating error correctly wrong is an art of its own. Hal Incandenza — the boy with the photographic memory “der das Oxford English Dictionary auswendig lernt” (who learns the Oxford English Dictionary by heart — gloss ours) — forced him to consult encyclopedic dictionaries of every field. The franco-Canadian terrorist Rémy Marathe (imperfect English) and the cokehead dealer Randy Lenz (malapropisms) are his favourites to render: “Falsches richtig falsch zu übersetzen, ist eine Kunst für sich.” (translating the wrong thing correctly wrong is an art unto itself — gloss ours). He compensates: for Lenz's bonafide → bonerfied (with a boner hidden in it) he has Lenz elsewhere speak of Geishas rather than Geysire on Iceland, and turn regeneriert into regenerigiert.
  • The ascapartic word-hunt. Wallace describes a man as ascapartic; the word stood for years on Blumenbach's list of unsolved terms, unknown to the OED, the 1962 Muret-Sanders, and Webster's Unabridged. He found it by chance in a 1906 Muret-Sanders: Ascapart, a giant of old romance whom Bevis of Hampton defeated — a trail that led on to a 1594 Shakespeare quarto of Henry VI, Part 2. (This is the same ascapartic anecdote the Spiegel interview turns on.)
  • The Cactus Wren puzzle — research feeds interpretation, not translation. In the Orin whirlpool scene a bird drops dead into the pool; the German calls it “Ein Zaunkönig vielleicht.” (a wren, perhaps — gloss ours). An ornithologist friend caught that a (European) wren never crosses open water; Blumenbach put the doubt to a Wallace-readers' forum. One reply — “»My vote is for the cactus wren«” — led him to Wikipedia and the discovery that the Cactus Wren is Arizona's state bird: a buried allusion (a Phoenix Cardinals footballer thinking of his state's emblem) in the Joyce/Pound/Eliot manner. A monograph author instead proposed a playful homophony — wren sounds almost like Orin. Either way the knowledge is untranslatable: in German it can only ever be “»Zaunkönig«”. His thoroughness, he concludes, “dient weniger der Übersetzung als der Interpretation” (serves interpretation more than translation — gloss ours).
  • Explosionen. He claims no single favourite, since Wallace fills even negative figures (Poor Tony Krause, an artificial-heart-stealing junkie) with empathy; but he likes Hal Incandenza and Joelle van Dyne, “das Schönste Mädchen Aller Zeiten (SCHMAZ)” (the Prettiest Girl Of All Time — the German rendering of P.G.O.A.T. — gloss ours), partly because, like her, he likes films “»wo jede Menge Scheiß in die Luft fliegt«” (where a whole lot of shit blows up — gloss ours; Unendlicher Spaß 428).
  • Depression and the message that you are not alone. Infinite Jest condenses “das Bewusstsein eines ganzen Kontinents und das Nervensystem einer ganzen Epoche” (the consciousness of a whole continent and the nervous system of a whole epoch — gloss ours); it is a thousand-page interior view of depression whose message to depressed people is “»Du bist nicht allein.«” (you are not alone — gloss ours). He adds, in parenthesis, the impression that Wallace had escaped his own demons — “auch wenn er ihnen zwölf Jahre später doch erlag” (even if he succumbed to them twelve years later — gloss ours).
  • Welthaltigkeit — what German prose could learn. He recants an old prejudice that German contemporary literature suffered a “zerquälten Anämie” (tormented anaemia — gloss ours) of solipsistic navel-gazing, naming writers who refute it; what one can learn from Wallace and American fiction is “Erdung. Welthaltigkeit. Das Einbauen von Realia.” (grounding; worldliness; the building-in of real things — gloss ours).

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: Blumenbach's craft testimony is firsthand evidence for the encyclopedic, hyper-precise density of Infinite Jest — a novel whose buried single-word knowledge (ascapartic, the Cactus Wren) and photographic-memory vocabulary (Hal and the OED) reward, but do not require, a translator's exhaustive research

  • Crux: encyclopedic-design
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [S — DE] The frame: Wallace was a revelation because “sein sprachlicher Genauigkeitsfetischismus neue Welten erschließt” (his linguistic precision-fetishism opens up new worlds — gloss ours). [interview part 1]
    • [S — DE] Hal Incandenza, “den Jugendlichen mit dem photographischen Gedächtnis, der das Oxford English Dictionary auswendig lernt” (the youth with the photographic memory who learns the Oxford English Dictionary by heart — gloss ours), forced Blumenbach to consult “enzyklopädische Wörterbücher aller möglichen Wissensgebiete” (encyclopedic dictionaries of every possible field of knowledge — gloss ours); this is, he says, an ordinary condition of all literary translation “und wird im Fall von David Foster Wallace und Infinite Jest allenfalls quantitativ noch einmal gesteigert” (and in the case of Wallace and Infinite Jest is at most quantitatively heightened once more — gloss ours). [interview part 7]
    • [S — DE] The ascapartic word-hunt: Wallace “beschreibt in Infinite Jest beispielsweise einen Mann als ascapartic” (describes a man in Infinite Jest as ascapartic — gloss ours), a word absent from the OED, the 1962 Muret-Sanders and Webster's Unabridged, found by chance in a 1906 Muret-Sanders and traced on to a 1594 Shakespeare quarto. [interview part 6]
    • [S — DE] The Cactus Wren crux: the dead whirlpool bird, “Ein Zaunkönig vielleicht.” (a wren, perhaps — gloss ours), turns out via a readers' forum (“»My vote is for the cactus wren«”) and Wikipedia to be Arizona's state bird — a buried allusion “wie sie vor hundert Jahren von Autoren der klassischen Moderne wie James Joyce, Ezra Pound und T.S. Eliot entwickelt wurde” (as developed a hundred years ago by authors of classical modernism like James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot — gloss ours) that characterizes the Phoenix Cardinals footballer through his state loyalty. [interview part 8]
  • Notes: The clearest IJ-internal contact point in the piece — the novel's dense, precise construction attested from inside by the person who had to rebuild every register. The ascapartic anecdote and the Cactus Wren anecdote both recur in the sibling Blumenbach primaries (Spiegel 2009 turns on ascapartic; the trashpool interview carries the whirlpool-bird story) — this is the fullest printed version of the wren story, adding the readers'-forum email and a monograph author's wren/Orin homophony theory (see Accuracy / cross-references). Because it is the same author, this convergence is corroboration of the fact, not independent corroboration for slug purposes. The Orin whirlpool passage is reproduced only in German (Blumenbach's own published rendering, novel-in-German-translation class); it is not pinned to a scene number here. The Cactus-Wren-as-Arizona-emblem reading and the wren/Orin homophony are two competing interpretations Blumenbach reports without adjudicating — logged, not routed to any allusion or naming question — an observation held on its own.

CONNECTION: The Anonymous Alcoholics become the novel's positive centre of meaning precisely because their rituals are self-consciously broken — the game, played long enough despite inner refusal, becomes earnest — and Wallace fills even his negative figures with empathy, a reading of Infinite Jest as an earnest, anti-ironic interior view of depression

  • Crux: sincerity-definition · irony-vs-recovery
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [S — DE] The AA frame: “Die Anonymen Alkoholiker werden trotz all ihrer oft parodierten Sektenhaftigkeit zu einem, wenn nicht zu dem positiven Sinnzentrum des Romans.” (the Anonymous Alcoholics, despite all their often-parodied cultishness, become one, if not the, positive centre of meaning of the novel — gloss ours), while “Alles andere wird nach guter alter Postmodernistenweise durch die Ironiemühle gedreht” (everything else is run through the irony-mill in the good old postmodernist way — gloss ours). [essay intro]
    • [S — DE] The paradox-mechanism: the AA rituals are “auf paradoxe Weise in sich gebrochen” (broken within themselves in a paradoxical way — gloss ours), so that fragmented but again agency-capable subjects can form; one is to know “die Verlogenheit der Beichtrituale” (the mendacity of the confession-rituals — gloss ours) and practise them anyway, and if one plays the game long enough despite inner refusal, “dann wird aus dem Spiel irgendwann Ernst” (then at some point the game becomes earnest — gloss ours). [essay intro]
    • [S — DE] Empathy for the negative: he has no single favourite figure “weil Wallace ja auch negative Figuren voller Empathie schildert” (because Wallace after all depicts even negative figures full of empathy — gloss ours), Poor Tony Krause the artificial-heart-stealing junkie included. [interview part 16]
    • [S — DE] The depression reading: Infinite Jest is “eine 1.000 Seiten lange Innenschau der Depression” (a thousand-page interior view of depression — gloss ours) that tells depressed people “»Du bist nicht allein.«” (you are not alone — gloss ours). [interview part 17]
  • Notes: Reception/oeuvre-scoped support for the earnest, recovery-serious reading of the novel against the ironist framing — consonant with the archive's large sincerity-definition lane and its irony-vs-recovery neighbour. The AA-opening is Blumenbach's prefatory reading set up to justify the passage choice, not merely a plot summary: he explicitly names the AA as the positive centre and describes the irony-vs-praxis mechanism. irony-vs-recovery is the sharper of the two cruxes touched and is offered as a co-crux, not asserted as an adjudicated fold. The “Du bist nicht allein” span is Blumenbach's own characterization of the novel's message (in guillemets in the source), not a located novel quotation — it is his firsthand framing, not novel-authority. No IJ plot/ending crux is engaged.

CONNECTION: Wallace's polyphony — every figure speaking in an idiosyncratic register, error rendered correctly wrong — is a prose-design fact the translator must reconstruct voice by voice; the passage-comparison is register-craft testimony at the sentence level

  • Crux: prose-tempo-design
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — DE] “Eine weitere Erschwernis war die Polyphonie des Romans, die Tatsache also, dass alle Figuren auf je eigentümliche Weise sprechen” (a further difficulty was the polyphony of the novel, the fact that all the figures speak in their own peculiar way — gloss ours), plus its varied text-sorts and technical languages. [interview part 13]
    • [S — DE] The error-craft: Marathe misses idioms “haarscharf” (by a hair — gloss ours) and Randy Lenz over-reaches, so that “Falsches richtig falsch zu übersetzen, ist eine Kunst für sich.” (translating the wrong thing correctly wrong is an art unto itself — gloss ours). [interview part 7]
    • [S — DE] On where rhythm comes from: the rhythm of a passage “bildet sich manchmal erst beim ersten Überarbeiten am folgenden Tag heraus” (sometimes only forms during the first revision the following day — gloss ours). [interview part 4]
  • Notes: A mentions-grade sighting on the register-only translator-craft tier prose-tempo-design already carries (the blumenbach/spirale sentence-craft evidence tier; adjudication #13, REGISTER-ONLY). Blumenbach speaks to character-voice and register construction, and to sentence rhythm forming on revision; he does not argue the design inference about the novel's tempo as such — do NOT upgrade past mention. The passage-comparison and the nationality-change decision are the vivid exhibit here, but their core is translation-scoped and has NO home slug (see do-not-coin).

Themes

Translation as visible craft and decision (the three-stage passage-comparison; the standard-German crib made only to understand; the rejected North-German dialect; the nationality change from Irish to Swiss and the published Baseldytsch; Wirkungsäquivalenz as the governing aim; “Das muss kesseln!”); language as world-disclosure (the Wittgenstein epigraph; Genauigkeitsfetischismus opening new worlds); the encyclopedic embedded knowledge (Hal and the OED; the ascapartic dictionary-and-quarto hunt; the Cactus Wren / Arizona-state-bird allusion; research feeding interpretation over translation); polyphony and error-craft (Marathe's near-miss idioms; Randy Lenz's malapropisms; bonafide → bonerfied; translating the wrong thing correctly wrong); the Anonymous Alcoholics as the novel's positive centre and the paradox of self-broken rituals (irony-mill vs. earnest praxis; the game that becomes earnest); empathy for negative figures (Poor Tony Krause); Infinite Jest as a thousand-page interior view of depression (the “Du bist nicht allein.” message) and Wallace's place in Auerbach's line of deepening realism; Explosionen (Joelle van Dyne, SCHMAZ; the films where a lot of shit blows up); compensating translation and untranslatable words (petrichor); the translator's models (Harry Rowohlt, Ingendaay, Heibert, van Gunsteren, Detje; one idol, Luther); the autobiographical grain of all translation; and Welthaltigkeit / worldliness as what German contemporary prose could learn — a prejudice against German navel-gazing that he stages and then recants.

Cross-references

  • blumenbach-trashpool-2011 — the sibling long translator interview (]trash[pool 2011). The whirlpool Cactus-Wren story and the night-work/newsgroup research method overlap; this mokita piece carries the fullest version of the wren anecdote (the forum email; the wren/Orin homophony theory) and adds the passage-comparison and the nationality-change decision the trashpool interview does not. Same author, so agreement corroborates the facts, not the slug.
  • blumenbach-spiegel-2009 — the other German Blumenbach primary (Der Spiegel “Zehn Wahrheiten”, 2009), which turns on the same ascapartic word-hunt; this piece gives the fuller trail (1906 Muret-Sanders → 1594 Shakespeare quarto). The three German/English Blumenbach primaries are the archive's Blumenbach cluster.
  • esposito-ij-around-the-world — the English companion where Blumenbach reappears at length (the Grimm-dictionary method, sales); convergent with this piece's account of the translation's encyclopedic demands.
  • nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista — the Italian translator primary, a useful contrast: Nesi corresponded with Wallace by fax; Blumenbach reports no contact at all and works dictionaries, forums and expert friends (here a Basel historian, an ornithologist friend, a Wallace-readers' forum).
  • The published Basel-German passage (US 507f.) is the concrete artefact this piece documents: the AA speaker's Irish dialect carried into Baseldytsch — a translation decision (nationality change) with no parallel elsewhere in the archive's translator sources.

Notable passages

Blumenbach's words unless marked; German is the verbatim anchor, the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). Source guillemets »…« reproduced as printed. The three German renderings of the AA passage and the German Orin-whirlpool passage are Blumenbach's own translation variants (novel-in-German), quoted here as printed variants, never as Wallace's English.

  • “in ein unmarkiertes Standarddeutsch” (into an unmarked standard German — gloss ours) — the first crib, made only to understand the passage.
  • The three renderings, first lines, as printed:
    • standard German: “Ich war seit unzähligen Jahren ein amtlich beglaubigter Kloschüsselbespritzer.” (I had for countless years been an officially certified toilet-bowl-splatterer — gloss ours).
    • North German: “Ich hadde seid zich Jaahn jesusmäßich die Renneridis.” (rendered in a Hamburg / Lower-Saxon dialect — gloss ours).
    • Basel German (as it stands in the book): “Als aine, wo alli Aabeehysli versprützt, bin ych scho männgs Joor bekannt gse.” (the published Baseldytsch version, “(US 507f.)” — gloss ours).
  • “»Har Par«” — the puzzle of the closing lines, which “konnte es nichts anderes bedeuten als »Higher Power« / »Höheres Wesen«” (could mean nothing other than Higher Power / Higher Being — gloss ours).
  • “schubst das den Leser aus der Fiktion” (shoves the reader out of the fiction — gloss ours) — why a North-German-speaking Irishman fails; “seine willing suspension of disbelief gerät an ihre Grenzen” (his willing suspension of disbelief reaches its limits — gloss ours).
  • “Kann der nicht auch aus der Schweiz, genauer gesagt aus Basel kommen?” (couldn't he also come from Switzerland, from Basel to be precise? — gloss ours) — the nationality-change decision; the result stands “wie sie jetzt im Buche steht” (as it now stands in the book — gloss ours).
  • “ein massiver Eingriff in das Werk” (a massive intervention into the work — gloss ours) — the objection he recalls; his defence: “Das muss kesseln!” (it has got to sizzle — gloss ours).
  • “»Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.«” (Wittgenstein, quoted by Blumenbach) — the epigraph to his method; Wallace was “eine Offenbarung” (a revelation — gloss ours) because “sein sprachlicher Genauigkeitsfetischismus neue Welten erschließt” (his linguistic precision-fetishism opens up new worlds — gloss ours).
  • “der das Oxford English Dictionary auswendig lernt” (who learns the Oxford English Dictionary by heart — gloss ours) — Hal Incandenza; and “Falsches richtig falsch zu übersetzen, ist eine Kunst für sich.” (translating the wrong thing correctly wrong is an art unto itself — gloss ours) — on Marathe and Randy Lenz.
  • “Ein Zaunkönig vielleicht.” (a wren, perhaps — gloss ours) — the whirlpool bird; the forum email “»My vote is for the cactus wren«” and the finding that research here “dient weniger der Übersetzung als der Interpretation” (serves interpretation more than translation — gloss ours).
  • “das Schönste Mädchen Aller Zeiten (SCHMAZ)” (the German for P.G.O.A.T. — gloss ours) — Joelle van Dyne; he likes films “»wo jede Menge Scheiß in die Luft fliegt«” (where a whole lot of shit blows up — gloss ours; Unendlicher Spaß 428).
  • “»Du bist nicht allein.«” (you are not alone — gloss ours) — his summary of the novel's message to depressed readers, Infinite Jest being “das Bewusstsein eines ganzen Kontinents und das Nervensystem einer ganzen Epoche” (the consciousness of a whole continent and the nervous system of a whole epoch — gloss ours).
  • “Erdung. Welthaltigkeit. Das Einbauen von Realia.” (grounding; worldliness; the building-in of real things — gloss ours) — what German contemporary prose could learn.

Accuracy notes

Cite-as-written throughout (orthography and typography preserved as printed).

  • The dead bird is the Cactus Wren, and the two readings are left open. Blumenbach reports two competing interpretations of the Orin whirlpool bird without adjudicating: (a) the Kaktuszaunkönig / Cactus Wren as Arizona's state bird, a modernist buried allusion characterizing the Phoenix Cardinals footballer through state loyalty; and (b) a monograph author's proposed homophony, in Blumenbach's own words: “Der Zaunkönig heißt auf englisch wren, und a wren klingt fast wie Orin” (the wren is called wren in English, and a wren sounds almost like Orin — gloss ours). Recorded as presented; not resolved here. The whirlpool-bird scene is not pinned to a scene/page number in the source.
  • “Har Par” = Higher Power. The AA speaker's “»Har Par«” is the phonetic mangling of Higher Power; Blumenbach renders it “»Höheres Wesen«” and, in the Basel version, “Heechere Wäse” — reproduced as printed.
  • The published page cite. The Basel-German version carries “(US 507f.)” = Unendlicher Spaß pp. 507f.; the Explosionen film phrase carries “(Unendlicher Spaß 428)”; the “»Tütchen«” anecdote cites Unendlicher Spaß 1357. These are the German edition's pages, cite-as-written; the source gives no English page numbers. The AA monologue itself is the White Flag meeting testimony at pp. 351–352 of the English text.
  • Source typography inconsistency (cite-as-written). The Tellkamp quotation (line 418) opens with a left-pointing « (U+00AB) where the piece elsewhere opens German quotations with the right-pointing » (U+00BB): “«schon von Herbstklarheit durchsponnenen Augusttage«”. A defect in the source text, not ours; not quoted in this note beyond this notice.
  • Date of composition vs. republication. The interview and essay first appeared in Drift – Zeitschrift für Recherchen, Ausgabe 1 (the piece prints no date for it; a Literaturinstitut-Hildesheim project, Edition Pächterhaus); the mokita.de republication is dated 24 July 2017, which is the date this note uses.