Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)

    Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman by Nancy B. Reich

    If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin:

    The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.

    The one who finally had the nerve to sit down first after 11 minutes was sent to the Gulag, of course. But what interests me about this passage right now is that 11 minutes seemed like an insane amount of applause to all involved.

    Think about that, and then consider: at a concert she gave on February 27, 1837 in Berlin, Clara Wieck got an hour and half of thunderous applause.

    An hour and a half! That’s the time it takes to watch a full-length film, and Clara Wieck made people want to spend it banging their hands together. That’s how good she was.

    In Clara Schumann, The Artist and the Woman, Nancy B. Reich explains how she became one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. Her father, the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, zeroed in on her as the most talented of his children and dedicated his life to making her a great musician and a star.

    Here are the things Clara Wieck was allowed to do as a child:

    • Play the piano
    • Take long walks
    • Eat
    • Sleep

    I guess we can also include “write in her diary,” although often it was her father who did so – in her voice. “Father arrived by express coach at seven in the evening,” he wrote in one entry, “I flew into his arms and took him right to the Hotel Stadt Frankfurt.” Wieck was so possessive about his daughter’s childhood diaries that she was forty years old by the time he agreed to relinquish them to her.

    Wieck was not only possessive and controlling but also fierce – Robert Schumann once visited his home to find him dragging one of Clara’s younger brothers around by the hair as a punishment for substandard violin playing. “Am I among humans?” wondered Robert in his own diary.

    At home with the Wiecks

    So, given a range of options, most of us wouldn’t choose Friedrich Wieck as a dad. To be fair, though, by applying his merciless training to her natural aptitude, he did succeed in making Clara a musician of the highest order. Hence the hour and a half of applause.

    Unsurprisingly, Wieck was loath to allow any other man to take his Clara away and hated Robert Schumann with a passion (he also ended up hating the guy he invited over to distract her from Robert Schumann). Clara and Robert had to sue him for permission to marry; Wieck submitted a statement to the court to the effect that Robert “could not help Clara with her career since he was socially inept […]; that he crippled his finger through his own stupidity; that he lied about his income; that he had been badly brought up and displayed an indescribable egotism and unlimited vanity; that he was a solitary drinker and drank to excess, and that he did not really love Clara – he wanted to use her for his own purposes and live off the money she earned as an artist.”

    Also interesting is his assertion that Clara, “having been trained as an artist, was unfit to run a home.” This reminds me of Piero Melograni’s biography of Mozart, where he argues that the popular conception of Mozart as practically incapable of functioning in society (cf. Amadeus) comes from his family’s attempt to convince themselves and anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get along without them. Perhaps it’s always that way with child prodigies.

    This book gives a thorough account of Clara as a musician, teacher, and composer. It also includes juicy gossip, like what a dead weight of a husband Robert eventually became with his mercurial (literally?) moods and inability to handle….anything, really, before he finally broke with reality altogether (Wieck wasn’t entirely wrong about him); or everything you ever wanted to know about Clara and Brahms. Peter Schickele’s Interear Telecommuniculture Phone ™ sketch, where the dial-up request for a Schumann symphony includes the option, “If you would like to hear this piece as the composer would have written it if he had known that Brahms had the hots for his wife, press 3,” left teenage me with the impression that this was a long-simmering love triangle. But Brahms only met Robert and Clara about 6 months before Robert attempted suicide and went to live in a padded room.

    Brahms was there with Clara when Robert died two years later.  They had a deep and fruitful relationship and he probably was in love with her, although he was probably also in love with her daughter Julie. Life is complicated.

    Anyway, this book is well researched and well written, and it’s still in print, so there’s no excuse for you not to read it. You can also listen to this:

     

  • RIP Ray Furness

    The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews.

    He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name  tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came over all skittish and bolted across the room. Luckily our paths crossed again and he asked me in his usual booming voice what I was studying  — he was of course very happy to hear (faintly) that it was German. He asked me about myself and I mentioned my Shetland sheepdog; in every significant conversation we had over the next 6 years, he would ask, “How is your little dog, Tuppence?”

    He was our tutor for first-year literature and I’ll never forget the day when, about 10 minutes into class, he realized none of us had actually read the assigned book. He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you’re naughty children, aren’t you?” he said, “Well, no need to waste my time with you, I’m going to the pub.” And he put his coat on and walked over to The Central, leaving us to exchange sheepish glances.

    If you passed a room where he was teaching, you knew it because some over-the-top comment like “I MEAN LADIES! WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO SHARE YOUR HUSBAND WITH A DEAD MAN??!?” would be distinctly audible through the door.

    His German Expressionism class was a highlight for most honours students, who really got what they came for on the days when he read aloud from Georg Kaiser’s Gas or Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord.

    In my third year, at a dinner for students in another tutor’s Nietzsche module, someone called him a misogynist so I popped by during his office hours soon afterwards to say, “Hi, Professor Furness, are you a misogynist?” He said he loved women and to prove it, he invited me in for several glasses of sherry and picked my brain for gossip, which was exactly what I had been hoping for.

    Ray Furness was in tune with everything that was chthonic, decadent, fatalistic, grandiose, disjointed, or existentially troubling in German arts and letters. You could rely on him to know everything about every famous German or Austrian who had ever gone mad or shot himself in the head. But he was a very nice person. If there’s a heaven, I’m sure he is there playing ping-pong with Max Schreck…or something like that.

    Yours truly with the professor at his retirement party (Siegfried’s funeral march was playing in the background)

    Books by Ray Furness

     

  • These pants.

    More avant-garde poetry brought to you by a machine translation system that is still learning the ropes:

    I put my son on my son,
    no. 6,
    and he scratched herself,
    thought it was all about this pants,
    I thought that it comes from these pants.
    I am still sending a picture of these pants,
    I am still sending pictures of these pants,
    I am still sending pictures of these pants,
    I still send photos of them.
    Maybe the pants came from the pants.

    (This output is dramatically different from the source, which was longer and didn’t mention pants or pictures nearly this much. Poor grammar/punctuation in source probably threw the machine into a panic.)

  • An appreciation of Aileen Derieg

    In 2007, I was a frumpy housewife in small-town Ontario with two children running in all directions and two German degrees gathering dust in the attic. My career up to that point had consisted of a couple of poems one of my professors had seen fit to publish, an annual review of the German legal market which was lengthy but posed few stylistic challenges, and a decision to move to the margins of civilization to focus on having babies, canning beets, and feeding a woodstove.

    “I know you’re dreadfully busy,” wrote an old friend on Facebook, which I used to check in between changing diapers, sealing mason jars, and flinging logs onto the fire, for in those days Facebook was still fun and I was still there, “But I have this family friend who is a translator and has too much work, do you think you could possibly help her out?”

    The translator was Aileen Derieg and I was delighted to heed this particular call to adventure. She sent me the first job: an earnest meditation on building bridges, literally and figuratively, and what St. John Nepomuk could teach the EU. “Aileen Derieg has drunk champagne with you!” Facebook cheerfully notified me after I sent her my translation. That was about the best feedback I could have hoped for, so our collaboration continued.

    And it turned out Aileen Derieg was about the best person one could ever hope to collaborate with. Not only had she established an enviable network of clients through years of highly competent work, but she was also thoughtful, patient, rational, open-minded, gracious, helpful, and – crucially in my case – understanding about the ups and downs of childcare and their impact on deadlines.

    For years, she had been converting the densest, most intricate German prose into clear and readable English. Behind her back, those of us to whom she was subcontracting would sometimes trade frustrated messages. As one of her other assistants wrote to me in 2008: “I am despairing! My text is incomprehensible! Impossible! AAAARGHARGHARGHRGHAGHGAHRGHAGRHGAAAAGH. I have given up trying to understand the text, I am just painstakingly translating every sentence word by word…” But Aileen inhabited a lofty realm where such texts were the norm, and she translated them with aplomb.

    One thing that became obvious when any of us asked Aileen for help disentangling webs of critical theory was that she had the utmost respect for all her clients and never adopted a mocking or dismissive attitude towards their work. Perhaps she was merely an early adopter of the maxim, “Dance like nobody’s watching, email like it’s going to be read out in a deposition someday,” but I believe she truly was filled with saintly goodwill. No matter how complex the style of a text or how surprising its content – she handled it with a sincere desire to understand it and communicate its message in English. This attitude, along with all the specific useful feedback she gave me over the years, taught me what I needed to know to go forward.

    Aileen is retired now, and I will think of her with gratitude every day. Her very talented son, Christopher Hütmannsberger, and I will be available to serve her client base. And now that she’s not drowning in book projects, I might pepper her inbox with thorny translation questions every day. Watch out, Aileen!

    Aileen distributes kiwi cocktails to her successors at the retirement party

  • Three translations of Parzival

    Translating Wolfram’s Parzival has got to be a total nightmare, though it’s probably also fun.

    His style is, by his own admission, comparable to a startled hare darting this way and that. This applies to individual sentences but also to the entire narrative. Some questions you may ask yourself when reading Parzival include: Did we already meet Plihopliheri in a previous chapter or was that Plippalinot? Is everyone in this book related? How much cousin marriage is going on here? Where did those guys come from and why are they attacking that castle? Why are we talking about the neutral angels again? How many times will I have to read this sentence before I understand it? And many more.

    There are three published prose translations of Parzival: a joint effort from 1961 by Helen Mustard and Charles Passage (who aren’t characters from Toast of London but probably should be), a 1980 Penguin Classics edition by A.T. Hatto, and a fairly recent effort by Cyril Edwards for Oxford World’s Classics (2004). No one in our time has been insane enough publish a rhyming-couplets version. [Update: in fact, there is a new verse translation. See here.] Jessie Weston did it in 1894, but translation standards were looser then.

    I have a soft spot for Cyril Edwards’ translation because when he was working on it, he came to St. Andrews to speak to the German medievalists. He gave us a very informative presentation about his own choices and how they compared to previous editions. I particularly remember how proud he was to have found the most accurate possible translation for “ramschoup” in Book IX. Apparently after laborious research he determined it was “purple moorgrass.” Our professors thought this would sound oddly specific in context – other translators were content to call it “straw” and it’s hard to imagine one character telling another, “I don’t have furniture but you can sit on that pile of purple moorgrass over there…” – but he couldn’t bear for his research to have been in vain and insisted on keeping purple moorgrass because that’s what ramschoup is! And indeed, there it is on p. 204 of the book: “Then they went back to lie on their purple moorgrass, by their coals.”

    Purple moorgrass.

    Having recently skimmed all three translations, I suspect Mustard & Passage is the most readable. However, research into medieval literature and culture is always uncovering new things and solving little mysteries, so the fact that it came out in 1961 probably means it has more errors than the other two. These are unlikely to matter if you’re reading it for fun but if you’re a grad student, watch out.

    Hatto’s has the most prosaic feel – he tends to collapse sentences or shift their parts around to avoid some of Wolfram’s twists and turns.

    Both Hatto and Mustard/Passage tried to calm the startled hare of Wolfram’s style to make the reading experience less confusing. Edwards, on the other hand, says in his introduction that “this translation, in the interest of trying to convey something of Wolfram’s stylistic originality, will give the reader a rougher ride than its predecessors.”

    Here are some excerpts to give you a sense of the different translations. First, from the prologue:

    Mustard and Passage: I mean to tell you once again a story that speaks of great faithfulness, of the ways of womanly women and of a man’s manhood so forthright that never against hardness was it broken. Never did his heart betray him, he all steel, when he came to combat, for there his victorious hand took many a prize of praise. A brave man slowly wise – thus I hail my hero – sweetness to women’s eyes and yet to women’s hearts a sorrow, from wrongdoing a man in flight! The one whom I have thus chosen is, story-wise, as yet unborn, he of whom this adventure tells and to whom many marvels there befall.

    Hatto: I will renew a tale that tells of great fidelity, of inborn womanhood and manly virtue so straight as never was bent in any test of hardness. Steel that he was, his courage never failed him, his conquering hand seized many a glorious prize when he came to battle. Dauntless man, though laggard in discretion! – Thus I salute the hero. – Sweet balm to woman’s eyes, yet woman’s heart’s disease! Shunner of all wrongdoing! As yet he is unborn to this story whom I have chosen for the part, the man of whom this tale is told and all the marvels in it.

    Edwards: A story I will now renew for you, which tells of great loyalty, womanly woman’s ways, and man’s manliness so steadfast that it never bent before hardship. His heart never betrayed him there – steel he was, whenever he entered battle. His hand seized victoriously full many a praiseworthy prize. Bold was he, laggardly wise – it is the hero I so greet, woman’s eyes’ sweetness alongside woman’s heart’s desire, a true refuge from misdeed. He whom I have chosen for this purpose is, storywise, yet unborn – he of whom this adventure tells, in which many marvels will befall him.

    There’s plenty to comment on here but I’ll just point out one thing: both M/P and Edwards have “storywise” where Hatto has opted for the more ordinary “to this story.” Wolfram’s word is “maereshalp” which is almost certainly his own neologism. “Storywise” is a solid translation and makes your ears perk up in the same way as the original.

    Here’s what it sounds like when Lady Adventure knocks on the narrator’s heart:

    Mustard and Passage:

    “Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to come into your heart to you.” – Then it is a small space you wish. – “What does that matter? Though I scarcely find room, you will have no need to complain of crowding. I will tell you now of wondrous things.” – Oh, is it you, Lady Adventure?

    Hatto:

    “Open!” – “To whom? Who is there?” – “I wish to enter your heart.” – “Then you want too narrow a space.” – “How is that? Can’t I just squeeze in? I promise not to jostle you. I want to tell you marvels.” – “Can it be you, Lady Adventure?”

    Edwards:

    “Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to go into your heart.” – That’s a narrow space you want to enter! – “What of it, even if I barely survive! You’ll seldom have cause to complain of my jostling! I want to tell you of wonders now!” – Oh, it’s you, is it, Lady Adventure?

    Big differences here in how Lady Adventure’s long response is translated. Edwards’ version might be closest to the original (“waz denne, belibe ich kume?* min dringen soltu selten clagen: ich wil dir nu von wunder sagen“) but Hatto’s sounds the most like something you might actually want to read aloud.

    Which reminds me – the ideal way to experience this story is to sit with some friends and hear it recited. After all, according to Wolfram, it isn’t even a book and reading is for losers.

    Forget reading – ladies like a man who rides around with axes on his head

    But however you experience it, a long engagement with this story will feel like an exhaustive tour of a Gothic cathedral that leaves you spent but filled with admiration.

    Photo credits: baby hares by Jang Woo Lee, purple moorgrass by Elke Freese, Wolfram von Eschenbach in the Codex Manesse at: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0294

    You can access a verse translation by A. S. Kline for free here!

    *(And btw I’ll admit to not being sure what “belibe ich kume” means – anyone want to enlighten me there?)

  • German adjective endings in English

    The phrase “the Romanische Café” caught my eye in an English-language book about Berlin and I got so stuck on this phrase that I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the paragraph.

    Why? Because I would have written “the Romanisches Café” for logical reasons, but the version above also makes a kind of sense and I couldn’t stop turning it over in my head.

    In case you don’t speak German: the problem is that German adjectives have different endings depending on gender and case, so with no article it’s “Romanisches Café.” With the definite article it’s “das Romanische Café.” Meanwhile, people who are in the café are “im Romanischen Café.”

    My personal feeling about adjectives that are part of names is that in English they should take their strong nominative ending, the one that tells you the gender of the noun – in this case, “The Romanisches Café” with a neuter “s.” Why? Because in German, the reason you can leave the “s” off the adjective when using the definite article (das) is that the article provides the “s,” which is essentially the (nominative) marker of neuter gender. The English article “the” never provides that kind of information about German words, obviously, so when you preface a German phrase with “the,” it feels like you aren’t using an article, or you’re using one that’s not doing its job. Therefore your default form should be whatever form the name would take in German with no article. The Neues Rathaus, the Englischer Garten, the Alte Pinakothek.

    But apparently there’s disagreement on this point. A Google search for “the Englischer Garten” turned up 2900 results while “the Englische Garten” yielded 1840 (despite quotation marks the results were somewhat imprecise and I wouldn’t be surprised if the split is closer to 50/50). Books that are searchable in Google Books similarly disagree on whether it’s “the Romanisches Café” or “the Romanische Café.”

    I assume the reasoning behind the latter is that you’re using a definite article, and in German you wouldn’t pair a strong adjective ending with a definite article, so why would you do it in English? Although doesn’t that put you on a slippery slope to writing things like “Bertolt Brecht spent much of his time in the Romanischen Café?”

    Are you a translator who’s thought about this issue? I’d love to read your comments!

    Update 6/6/2019: Here’s another good example: The Vienna Technical Museum mostly uses its German name, Technisches Museum Wien, on the English pages of its website. Note the adjective ending on their name in this English sentence: “With five interactive stations, the Technische Museum Wien goes on tour.”  [I shortened that, btw. Here’s the page.]

  • Easy for humans, hard for computers

    Machine translation can do impressive things, as I’ve noted before. However, there are some things humans do easily that would be very difficult (perhaps impossible) to build into MT programs.

    I’m part of an ongoing machine translation post editing job for a client who needs to translate large amounts of customer feedback coming in every day. In theory, MTPE is perfect for this because it can handle a high volume of text cheaply and the client does not need the translations to be beautifully written – they just need to get a basic understanding of the customer feedback.

    However, because this is feedback from the general public, it has a lot of little problems that turn out to be big problems for the MT:

    1. Spelling errors

    The general public is really lazy about capitalization, which is a pity because capitalization is the only thing that lets MT know if a German-speaking writer means “they” (sie) or “you [formal]” (Sie). At least 50% of the people who type this feedback write “sie” when they should be writing “Sie,” and the MT has no choice but to translate it as “they,” because it’s ultimately just a pattern-matching machine. But as a human, it’s usually easy for me to tell from the context which one the writer means.

    Typos are another source of misunderstanding. In one of my jobs a respondent had typed just two letters in reverse order, turning “Zahnbürste” (toothbrush) into “Zahnbrüste” which the MT interpreted as “dental breasts.” Not a bad guess for a machine, but humans can see right away what kind of error this is and what the correct translation should be.

    Major typos just show up on the target side unchanged because the MT can’t interpret them at all. 90% of the time I can figure them out quickly.

    1. Autocorrect

    There’s no way for the MT to figure out when someone writes a company to complain about substandard “girls” that they actually meant “forks.” Humans are good at context clues.

    1. Poorly expressed ideas

    If you’re not using punctuation, you don’t speak the language you’re typing in very well, or you’re just too angry to construct a coherent sentence, the MT is going to translate your comment as a crazy word salad, e.g.:

    “9 months prior has I will go to the Media and the way in which you handled this üb he England, I can also not the process started I do I go to bild newspaper in the order to the internet to my attorney I have never before a customer hang 1 ¾ year, I repeat it’s totally shameless I have sent back the questionnaire now and receive a reminder, the [sic], they know even if the eingeganen not an is; it’s a bottomLess outrageous only pass is its motto it’s not my problem it’s really shameless two weeks, I give you still danns 14 days, I give you still then”

    Comments from people who struggle with German show up now and again in this job. One of them began “Where whore does it say you can’t use this product on tattooed skin?” At first I thought the commenter was insulting the customer service rep (“Where, whore, does it say…”) but I concluded it was probably something like, “Where the hell does it say…” based on a series of judgements MT doesn’t have the mental flexibility or experience for.

    So never fear, human translators, even if MT takes over most of the translation business, there will always be work for you.

    [This post was updated on 9/4/2018 to include some good examples that crossed my path.]

  • Two songs

    On Sunday I volunteered to sit in a basement for several hours doing very little. I forgot to bring something to read so I jotted down a couple of Lieder and had a go at translating them. The results, after some fine tuning at home, are below. Both of these could be improved – if you think of good alternatives, pop them in the comment box!

    Singability was a priority here, so some choices were based on considerations like which vowels go best with high notes.

    First – because it’s finally spring in Wisconsin – Erstes Grün (First Green) by Justinus Kerner (music by Robert Schumann):

    Du junges Grün, du frisches Gras!

    Wie manches Herz durch dich genas,

    das von des Winters Schnee erkrankt,

    o wie mein Herz nach dir verlangt!

     

    Schon wächst du aus der Erde Nacht,

    wie dir mein Aug entgegenlacht!

    Hier in des Waldes stillem Grund

    Drück ich dich, Grün, an Herz und Mund.

     

    Wie treibts mich von den Menschen fort!

    Mein Leid das hebt kein Menschenwort;

    Nur junges Grün ans Herz gelegt,

    macht, dass mein Herze stiller schlägt.

    		 O young green shoots, O fresh green grass

    Hearts turn to you for cure at last,

    Ailing from winter’s ice and snow,

    How my heart longed for you to grow!

     

    You break out of the sleeping earth

    and fill my weary eye with mirth!

    Silently in the forest glade,

    Green, let me kiss each leaf and blade.

     

    From men I flee, their words are vain!

    No human word can heal my pain;

    With young green things upon my breast

    Ah, only then my heart can rest.

     

    Then there’s Das verlassene Mägdlein (The abandoned girl) by Eduard Mörike (music by Hugo Wolf). Some imprecise rhymes here, but that’s usually better than rhymes that are too cute, especially when the speaker is this miserable:

    Früh, wann die Hähne krähn,

    eh die Sternlein schwinden,

    muss ich am Herde stehn,

    muss Feuer zünden.

    Schön ist der Flammen Schein,

    es springen die Funken;

    ich schaue so darein,

    in Leid versunken.

    Plötzlich, da kommt es mir,

    treuloser Knabe,

    dass ich die Nacht von dir

    geträumet habe.

    Träne auf Träne dann

    stürzet hernieder;

    so kommt der Tag heran

    o ging er wieder!

    		 Up when the rooster crows,

    ere the stars have faded,

    now I must light the stove,

    toiling unaided.

    Flames cast their golden shine,

    the sparks leap and glow,

    lonely I stare and pine,

    in deepest sorrow.

    And then, unfaithful boy,

    then I remember

    the dream I had of you

    last night in slumber.

    Tear after tear I shed,

    down they flow together;

    thus dawns the day ahead

    can’t it be over?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV3Pnwu19OQ

  • Ask your doctor if the blood of a virgin is right for you!

    A summary of the medieval story Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue. If you enjoyed the now-defunct website The Toast, you might like this too. If not…I have other posts. Go here if you’ve never seen an American pharmaceutical ad.

    Is this you?

    Are you covered in disgusting sores? Losing fingers and toes? Suffering from gangrene and blindness? Afraid your nose will collapse? Then ask your doctor if the blood of a virgin is right for you!

    The lifeblood of a virgin of marriageable age is an exciting new treatment from Salerno Pharma.

    You’ll notice a difference as soon as the knife is plunged into her innocent heart. Before you know it, you’ll be back to doing all the things you love – Riding! Jousting! Falconry! Playing the lute!

    This could be you!

    So don’t wait – find a girl to sacrifice and start living your best life ever – TODAY!

    *Side effects of sacrificing a virgin may include dry mouth, crippling guilt, PTSD, and an eternity in Hell. Some users may experience revenge murder by girl’s family. Do not use The Blood of a Virgin if you already suffer from nightmares or insomnia.

    Heinrich: What?

    Pharma rep: What?

    Heinrich: That last part was really fast…what did you say?

    Pharma rep: Oh nothing, just some random words. If you’re not sure about the treatment, look, I have a coupon. Our doctors in Salerno are just great. You’ll be so glad you did it!

    Heinrich: OK: you’re saying if I go to Salerno and have a doctor stab some young lady in the heart, while I just sit there and watch, I’ll be cured and I can go back to running my estate and doing everything I used to do? How do I even arrange this thing? Can I kidnap an orphan who is definitely a bad person?

    Pharma rep: Actually, she has to sacrifice herself willingly, otherwise it doesn’t work.

    Heinrich: &#%@$!@#*%$#%#&! Nobody’s going to do that! Get lost, I have mud to wallow in.

    Peasant girl: I could help you

    Heinrich: You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.

    Girl: I want to die

    Heinrich: Girl, you’ve been nicer to me than all my noble friends. I’m not going to kill you! Go help your mom card wool.

    Girl: Mom, I totally want to die

    Mom: Carding wool’s not that bad, honey.

    Girl: No, to help Heinrich and then I’ll go to Heaven – Win-win!

    Mom: Well I don’t know about that dear…

    Girl: I want to go to Heaven! What’s the point in waiting? This place is, like, a complete vale of tears

    Mom: Ask your father.

    Heinrich: So you’re really sure you want to do this?

    Girl: YES!

    Heinrich: You don’t want to turn around? We can turn around.

    Girl: NO!

    Heinrich: Fine. When we get to Salerno, let’s have some Limoncello. It’s pretty good, it might even make you want to live, ha ha….

    Girl: SHUT UP I WANT TO DIE

    Schola Medica Salernitana

    Heinrich: So I guess this it is, girl. Thanks for helping me when I was down and also agreeing to be murdered…you’re the best. I’ll nail a piece of your sleeve to my shield for tournaments.

    Girl: Whatevs

    Doctor: Lie down here, girl. You’re going to feel some pressure…

    Girl: AMEN

    Doctor: Oh wait this isn’t the right knife…where’s the really, really sharp one?

    Heinrich: STOP! No, no, no. I can’t do this to you, girl. Get up.

    Girl: WHAT NO PLEASE KILL ME

    Doctor: You still owe me 200 ducats for my time.

    Heinrich: Back to Swabia, then…

    Girl: Coward! I hate you!

    Heinrich: You know, I feel better. A lot better. Look at my hands! Do you think God is rewarding me for being selfless?

    Girl: Why are you even asking me things

    Heinrich: I’m cured! Let’s think about what this all means.

    Girl: Do we have to

    Heinrich: God punished me with leprosy because I was too worldly. And you, girl, honestly you could stand to be more worldly. You know what would balance this all out? If we got married.

    Girl: OK that makes a kind of sense

    THE END

    Image citations: 1. Medieval leper bell at the museum Ribes Vikinger, Ribe, Denmark 2. Hartmann von Aue in the Codex Manesse, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0364 3. Sheep pen from Luttrell Psalter, British Library 4. Man riding donkey in the Penitential Psalms, from The Dunois Hours, France (Paris), c. 1339 – c. 1450, Yates Thompson MS 3, f. 162r British Library 5. Can’t find a specific citation for this one, just a statement that it’s in the public domain. 6. Donkey, man loading bag. England c.1236. Harley 3244 British Library 7. Royal MS 6 E VI, f. 104r British Library

  • On the German standard of living (ca. 1960)

    As a graduate student, my mother had to take some German and her textbook was Deutsch für Amerikaner by C.R. Goedsche and Meno Spann, published in 1960. I’ve been leafing through it off and on.

    This week’s fiction in The New Yorker is all about people trying to express themselves in an intermediate German class, so this might be a good moment to offer the Internet an excerpt from Deutsch für Amerikaner. Here Fred Fletcher, a Minnesotan studying in Germany, and his pals Bill and Larry discuss household appliances and other fascinating topics with their German friend Wilhelm. (Translation mine – this is a hasty translation where the stilted style of the original will come through. It’s a foreign-language textbook, after all. The stiffness of expression is part of the charm.)

    ***

    Bill: Of course I am homesick. I want to see skyscrapers again and eat in a restaurant with air conditioning, and last winter in my often-cold room, I dreamed of our beautiful centrally heated houses in Wisconsin.

    Wilhelm: You could also complain that we Germans often don’t have a telephone in our houses yet, no refrigerators, washing machines, televisions or whatever else the comforts of modern life demand. In America, of course, you have all that in almost every house.

    Bill: And why do you not have it here in Germany?

    Fred: You must ask “not yet” because it won’t be long before the Germans also have everything we have in America. It’s only a question of time. The old houses in Germany do look romantic, but it’s hard or impossible to modernize them. In the new houses central heating, air conditioning, etc. are being built in, and they’re springing up like mushrooms.

    Wilhelm: You talk as if Germans were Americans. But we have our cultural traditions and you aren’t familiar with them. Perhaps the German does not wish to go along with material progress. Have you ever thought of that?

    Fred: I have considered this question in detail and am convinced that the German will not resist modern progress. He wants our standard of living and with this standard of living he will change his life, he will Americanize it.

    Wilhelm: We Germans are proud of our wine, which generations of vintners have cultivated through the centuries. For us, that is part of a high standard of living. You Americans are proud of your bathtubs.

    Fred: A shiny enamel bathtub into which hot and cold water flow in unlimited quantities is just as much a cultural product as a good Rhine wine that has almost two thousand years of tradition behind it.

    […]

    Larry:  …it’s nice that some young German man, instead of spending hours in a night club, puts his skis over his shoulders and goes to the Alps with a friend or girlfriend. Such a young man is healthy, strong, has a feeling for nature and […] muscles, and his girlfriend likes him or loves him because he is “a natural person.”

    Fred: […] Why didn’t you add that this girl’s mother does the laundry by hand because that’s how Grandma did it, that the girl doesn’t wear makeup like American girls, etc.? Let me tell you something. This girl will soon buy herself a washing machine. In a fashion journal influenced by America she will learn how she has to put on makeup and do her hair to show more “glamour” (there’s no German word for that) and then she will prefer a slim young man who takes her to a night club in his sports car to the romantic with his strong muscles and his deep feeling for nature.

    ***

    Well! Sorry, Germans of 1960: The American way of life is coming for you!