Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • The Black Spider

    And why not do evil that good may come? – as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. (Romans 3:8)

    Die schwarze Spinne is an unsettling tale that dramatizes the terrible consequences of moral cowardice. The author, Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius (1797-1854), wrote under the pious pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf.

    I’d been meaning to read it for a while – to be honest, ever since I bought it at a bookstore in Bern 15 years ago – and finally got around to it thanks to the New York Review of Books sale, which was offering Susan Bernofsky’s English translation. I read it side-by-side with the original, which means that I let her do the heavy lifting where nineteenth-century Swiss peasant vocab was concerned, but also that I can assure you her translation is both accurate and well-written. English-speaking readers will have no trouble getting caught up in the action – it doesn’t have that stilted, “translated” feel.

    Read this book with a furry animal so you don’t get too scared.

    It gets off to a slow start, with a framing story about some hardy Emmental folk celebrating a baptism. This portrait of a well-ordered society provides an essential foil to the central tale of horror, in which medieval peasants, desperate to fulfill their brutal landlord’s impossible demands, make a deal with the devil – hoping, as always, to avoid paying the price, which in this case is an unbaptized baby.

    But the payment comes due and most of them resign themselves, callously calculating the value of one life compared to the whole community, or the insignificance of their individual contribution to the crime.

    What they end up with after a few turns of the plot is a plague of spiders from Hell. The arachnid host eventually conglomerates into one giant, glowering embodiment of evil that terrorizes the villagers, killing more of them each day with its fiery bite. It might just be possible to capture the spider and trap it somewhere, but anyone brave enough to do so is certain to die in the process.

    The mood and details of this part of the story feel more like a channeled nightmare than a consciously planned novel. Sometimes it also has the wild exuberance of a scary story invented by a child: like the part where a knight is riding around looking for the spider, people are screaming and running from him in all directions because in fact the spider is on his head; in the chaos he and his horse tumble over a cliff and finally the spider’s feet burn through his helmet and into his brain.

    The spider is a perfect metaphor. It starts out as millions of tiny things and turns into one big thing. It seems to be everywhere and nowhere. You never know when it will jump on your face or run across your foot. You’re not safe in your home, and certainly not safe while sleeping. It’s the Black Death. It’s the evil lurking in everyone’s heart. It’s the knowledge that your neighbors might rat you out to the secret police and tomorrow you could be in Room 101.

    This is why the part I found most unsettling was the coda to the horror story: the spider has been sealed up for generations (and it’s noteworthy that the spider can’t be eliminated – only confined). Everyone knows where it is, but it can’t be seen…and reckless young people start fooling around with it, flinging food at the door of its prison, prying around it with knives, joking about letting it out.

    At this moment in history, which feels like a pivotal time where anything could happen, how many of us are taunting the spider? Prying at that door “ironically”? Wondering if it’s really that bad or if it’s even there at all? The spider hears you. It’s purring. Walk away. 

  • What the Internet is for

    Did you know the Internet was not actually created in order to drive people insane and make them hate each other? It’s true.

    Back in the nineties, most of us thought of the Internet as a bigger, better version of your local library. It was a research tool with the additional perk of email. Plus a few zany websites that you could either chuckle at or ignore.

    Nobody thought it would turn into The Machine That Ruined the World. Well, I did, but I say that about every new thing so no one paid attention to me.

    Recently I found something that reminded me of why anyone ever thought the Internet was a good idea: the database of Yiddish Penny Songs.

    In the olden days, say 1980, if you saw one of these songs mentioned in a book or heard about them from your Grandpa, and you were interested, you’d think, “Maybe I’ll hear one of those someday…” and then years would go by. You might bump into one in the sheet music section of a used book store. That’s nice, but do you understand Yiddish? If not, you won’t get much out of it. You could buy it and hope that someday you’ll meet someone who can sing and translate it for you. But the most likely outcome, unless you get out the phone book and start calling random synagogues to ask if anyone there is (1) able and (2) willing to come to your house to sing a song in Yiddish and translate it for you, is that it will sit around in a box, unsung and uncomprehended.

    With the Internet, all it takes is one dedicated scholar to fix that whole problem for everyone. Please visit her website and look at her YouTube playlist where she sings the songs and provides excellent English subtitles, and say to yourself: truly, this is what the Internet is for.

  • Deitsch at the pharmacy

    I was pleased to see that my local pharmacy offers interpreting services not only to speakers of run-of-the-mill Deutsch but also to speakers of “Deitsch,” i.e. Pennsylvania Dutch:

  • Does Yoda use German syntax?

    Long, long ago, I read a list of rules for a Star Wars drinking game. “Take a drink every time Yoda speaks in German syntax,” it decreed.

    But how often does Yoda actually use German syntax? Let’s go through some of his words of wisdom and see how many drinks that rule would get us, assuming we take one drink per German-inspired sentence, and don’t count sentences where the English and German word order would be identical. Sentences with distinctive Yoda syntax are in bold.

    Yoda: Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is.

    I don’t think we get any drinks out of this one. (Real German syntax: Mourn them not. Miss them not. The shadow of greed is that.)

    Yoda: Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they [yes!]. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will [nope], as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.

    We get 1 drink. German syntax for the second bolded phrase is “forever will it your destiny dominate, it will you consume.”

    Yoda: Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.

    0 drinks! It should be “Powerful have you become, the dark side sense I in you.”

    Yoda: Ready are you? [I think that’s German enough. “Bereit bist du?” works if “ready/bereit” is the word you want to emphasize, and you’re kind of skeptical: “Oh, you’re ready, are you?” 1 drink.] What know you of ready? [2 drinks.] For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. [close but no – “trained” needs to go at the end.] My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained [close again – but now the conjugated verb, “is”, belongs at the end]. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. [“This one have I a long time watched” would be more German.] All his life has he looked away [“looked” should be last]… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. [I don’t think so.] Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. [I’ve encountered this word order in German, so we could take a sip, but “A Jedi craves these things not” would be more conventional.] You are reckless.”

    2.5 drinks, I guess.

    Yoda: Truly wonderful the mind of a child is. [Nope. “Truly wonderful is the mind of a child.”]

    0 drinks.

    Yoda: Size matters not. [1] Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. [2]

    2 drinks.

    So to sum up, with six Yoda speeches, including some long ones, you only get five drinks, maybe six. If I remember this game correctly, “a drink” was a swig of beer, not a shot of 80 proof vodka, so you can listen carefully to Yoda’s syntax for quite a while and still drive home.

    People associate Yoda with German syntax because they’ve heard that in German “the verb goes at the end.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that. Depending on what else is going on in the sentence, German verbs bounce around like students at a drinking party.

  • The sound of German

    What does German sound like to your average speaker of English? Not great, apparently.

    In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise, which I’m currently reading on the recommendation of a friend, the main character attends a German lesson and behold: “When [the teacher] switched from English to German, it was as through a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.”

    Whoa, whooooa Don, calm down! It’s just another West Germanic language.

    In Neither Here nor There, Bill Bryson describes German as “coarse and bestial” (offering “Lebensgröße” or “life-sized” as supporting evidence) and declares that German words for food sound like “the noises of a rutting pig.” Examples include “Portion Schlagobers,” which is a portion of whipped cream.

    Is “whipped cream” really a term of such delicate beauty that it puts “Schlagobers” (or the more usual “Schlagsahne”) to shame? If your native language is English, you might think so. But that’s only because when you say “whipped cream,” you picture a delightful dessert. Say it a few times and try to forget what it means. “Whipped cream.” That’s a heck of a consonant cluster in the middle – ptcr – and we usually don’t consider those aesthetically pleasing. “Toilet brush” sounds prettier than “whipped cream.” Now consider that “Schlagobers” sounds lovely to German speakers for the same reason “whipped cream” does to English speakers: because of the light and fluffy concoction they envision when they say it.

    One of the reasons I enjoyed deleting my F***b*** account was that my so-called friends kept pasting this video on my wall:

    I could respond to this at length, but instead, here’s a perfect video response from “Easy Languages”:

    It all depends on how you say it. Well, that and some other things. What determines whether we find another language beautiful or not?

    Partly the sound patterns we’re accustomed to from our native language. English speakers seem to really dislike the voiceless velar fricative – the “ch” in “Bach.” Many languages have it but we generally regard it as a strike against them in the beauty department. It’s the reason why Bryson calls Dutch “a series of desperate hacking noises.” But to people who grow up with it, it’s just another sound in their language, which can give off friendly, elegant, tragic, cute, derisive or angry vibes according to the speaker’s mood.

    In the case of German, we’re also influenced by the countless films where German soldiers goosestep into Poland barking orders at terrified civilians, or smack brave resistance fighters with their leather gloves before torturing them mercilessly. You know the drill. But if you need a reminder of that sound, here’s the late Bruno Ganz (RIP) yelling in Downfall.

    Now let’s hear something totally different, sticking with Bruno Ganz for the sake of comparison.

    Does this German sound as “scary” or “ugly” to you as the Downfall scene? If so, could that be based more on your feelings about history than the actual sounds coming out of his mouth? What if we could get some input here from an English speaker whose opinions were completely unaffected by WWII because it hadn’t happened yet? Here’s one that’s readily available: Mark Twain in The Awful German Language, 1880. He spends most of the essay arguing that German grammar and syntax are needlessly complex and convoluted, but here’s what he has to say about the sound of it:

    “I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a Schlacht? Or would not a consumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word Gewitter was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion — Ausbruch. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell — Hölle — sounds more like helly than anything else; therefore, how necessarily chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to the dignity of feeling insulted?”

    Well, well, well. So German’s not harsh enough.

    These attempts to try to pin down a definite “feel” for the sound of a given word are pretty futile, by the way. If the sound of “hell” were as intrinsically dreadful as Twain implies, we wouldn’t name sweet little girls “Helen.”

    I could go on for a few more pages, but I should probably stop here with some closing advice: try to appreciate each language on its own terms. They all sound different, and everyone thinks their own language sounds nice.

    Also, here are a few of the words that (IMHO) sound nicer in German than in English:

    dragonfly Libelle
    chocolate Schokolade
    love Liebe
    paper Papier
    pretty schön
    branch (of a tree) Ast
    branch (of a company) Filiale
    egg Ei
    microwave Mikrowelle
    instruction Anleitung











  • I’m slightly acidic

    While cleaning out a desk drawer I found these amusing machine translation errors I’d noted down months ago. So here they are (sorry about the line breaks within words):

    Mensch das ist super lieb.Human that is super nice.Man, that’s really nice.
    Ich war nur ehrlich und habe jetzt den Salat.I was just honest and now I have the lettuce.I was just being honest and now I have to deal with the consequences.
    Liebe Frau KnopfDear Mrs. ButtonDear Mrs. Knopf
    Ich bin leicht sauer.I’m slightly acidic.I’m a little angry.
    Darüber bin ich sehr erbost und weiß aber auch das [sic] Fehler passieren können.I’m very angry about that and white but also the mistakes happen.I’m very angry about it, but I also know that mistakes happen.

  • Let’s Go: tenth-century Germany

    Long before Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Let’s Go – long even before Baedeker – there was this handy German phrasebook for travelers from Francia, with the German translated into Vulgar Latin:

    I can show you all this thanks to Wilhelm Braune’s Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, which is in the public domain.

    You might think this doesn’t look like German. Well, it was a very long time ago. It’s hard to think of anything that looks the same now as it did in the tenth century.

    But take a close look and sound it out – you’ll see it’s German. It starts with a list of body parts, moves on to some polite questions like “Where did you find a place for the night, friend?” (15) “What country do you come from?” (20) “What did you do there?” (22), then veers into more dangerous territory with “Hit him in the neck” (38), “Go out” (40), and “Dog’s ass in your nose!” (42). Then the accusations start flying: “Why did you not come to matins?” (60) “You lay down with a woman in your bed” (62) “Upon my head, if your lord knew you were sleeping with the woman he would be truly angry at you.” (63) A trip to tenth-century Germany can go south pretty quickly.

  • Fun with syntax

    Here’s a nice example of a common sentence structure in written German:

    Obwohl er eine andere Vorlage geplant hatte, erschien ihm die in ihrer Verdoppelung die Bildfläche vertikal teilende geometrische Form interessant genug, um sie weiterzuverfolgen.

    Literally: Although he an other template planned had, seemed to him the in its doubling the picture surface vertically dividing geometric shape interesting enough, to it further to follow.

    Decent translation: Although he had planned the template differently, the doubled geometric shape dividing the picture vertically seemed interesting enough for him to continue working with it.

    (If you have any quibbles about that final version, bear in mind this sentence was part of a paragraph and my adjustments made sense in context.)

    For Mark Twain, these kinds of sentences were among the targets of his ire; see this example from “The Awful German Language”:

    Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet…

    But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met…

    By the way, “The Awful German Language” does contain some errors, one of which you might spot in the sentence above. I’ve never gotten around to writing about them, though, because I expect such a piece would be tedious to write and equally tedious to read.

    Far from being awful, this sentence structure is actually useful in German because it saves you from choppy sentences broken up by relative pronouns and commas. So although I found it a little irritating at first, I’ve come to appreciate it.

  • They Thought They Were Free

    This 1955 book by Milton Mayer, reissued in 2017 by University of Chicago Press with a helpful afterword by Richard Evans, is worth your time if you are interested in human beings.

    Mayer, a Chicago native, worked as a freelance journalist and taught Great Books seminars with Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins (he gets a few mentions in Alex Beam’s excellent survey A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books). Descended from German Jews who had fled to America after the failed revolutions of 1848, he also belonged to the Society of Friends and coined the phrase “Speak truth to power.”

    They Thought They Were Free  is based on a project he undertook in Germany with the support of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (Theodor Adorno et al). He settled in Marburg (called “Kronenberg” in the book) and conducted a series of lengthy interviews with ten former Nazis in the area, hoping to get a detailed sense of how “a typical German of small status” developed into a National Socialist.

    He told them he was a Professor from America who wanted to learn about what life had been like in Germany during the war. His approach was friendly and humble — he arrived at their homes on foot, bringing gifts, and listened sympathetically to whatever they had to say. Sometimes their children played with his. He never told them he was Jewish or that he had access to their denazification records, which would have been a bit of a conversation killer. Surprisingly, he didn’t speak much German and believed this to be an advantage: if his subjects could feel they were talking down to him, teaching him to say “auf Wiedersehen” and whatnot, they would feel less intimidated and be more likely to speak freely (he did bring along an interpreter).

    The resulting book has compelling personal stories and valuable insights. It is definitely worth reading. However, it also gets bogged down in musings on national character that will seem tiresome and cliché to most readers nowadays. I actually lost patience with the second half and didn’t finish it.

    At its best, though, the book offers the kind of individual moral histories that everyone can learn from:

    But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. […] But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. […] Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department and the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

  • Senta spinnt

    The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra put on an excellent concert performance of Der fliegende Holländer (The  Flying Dutchman) last week. Soprano Melody Moore brought the house down with her powerful singing and her spirited characterization of Senta.

    Speaking as someone with a degree in Complaining About Wagner, I must admit I really like this opera. It’s probably my favorite Wagner opera — and yes, I know that means I’ll never win the Wagner Snob of the Year award, but that’s OK. Superfans who attain enlightenment by boring themselves to death at Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal are welcome to it.

    One line jumped out at me from the spinning scene (go to 46:00 if it doesn’t take you straight there):

    Mary, who’s trying to keep the girls on task, says to Senta:

    Du böses Kind! Wenn du nicht spinnst,
    vom Schatz du kein Geschenk gewinnst.

    (You naughty girl, if you don’t spin,
    you’ll get no gift from your sweetheart. )

    It’s mildly amusing because in modern colloquial German, if someone “spins” it means they’re crazy. Du spinnst = you spin = you’re nuts! (Whereas in Wagner’s time a crazy person was “toll” but nowadays that would mean they’re cool.)

    I wondered how the best free machine translator, namely DeepL, would handle this. Behold:

    If you’re not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.

    And Google Translate says: If you are not crazy, from the treasure you win no gift. (wrong and awkward)

    This is a reasonable error for MT to make because it’s entirely possible that every single time it’s encountered “du spinnst” in a text, “you’re crazy” has been the correct translation. But it’s still wrong. I tried giving it some more context in case it had been programmed to recognize names from classic literature:

    MARY (to Senta): You evil child! If you are not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.

    No luck. You’ve probably also noticed the other big error here: “Schatz” does mean “treasure” but in this context it means “sweetheart.” In a similar vein, DeepL translates “I love my sweetie pie” as “Ich liebe meinen süßen Kuchen” (with “süße Torte” and “süße Pastete” as equally clueless alternatives).

    It’s interesting to consider how much effort you, as a human, have to expend to understand what is going on in this scene and determine what the correct translation of “du spinnst” would be — practically none. Whereas the best MT, despite its speed, has no idea what a spinning wheel is, no concept of how and why words acquire new meanings over time, and no ability to think, “Is this a proverb? Is it from a fairy tale? An opera? I’d better check.”

    And actually, you might come out of The Flying Dutchman thinking Senta’s a little crazy. But DeepL doesn’t think at all.

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