Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Translators in Space, part III: Embassytown

    China Miéville is a socialist who hates Tolkien. He’s also a little scary looking. His books are worth reading, though, even if you’re a reactionary who loves Tolkien.

    I’ve read two of his novels, The City and the City and Embassytown. The former has an intriguing setting (two cities that share the same space, where residents of one have to “unsee” residents of the other) but the plot is a fairly ordinary detective/noir story. Embassytown is more exciting, especially for linguists.

    Embassytown is an enclave of mostly human foreigners on a distant planet populated by giant insect-like creatures with two mouths. Their language, which is called Language (!), requires two words to be spoken simultaneously. In addition, the creatures (the Ariekei or “hosts”) are not capable of understanding speech unless it has a mind behind it – so you can program a computer to speak Language to them, but they won’t understand it. Many of them also seem unaware that the noises humans make amongst themselves are a kind of language.

    The system humans ultimately developed in order to communicate in Language was to breed identical twins who are kept perfectly in sync. They spend their lives as Ambassadors and go by one name, with half of the name applying to each of them: CalVin, for example, or LuCy. One of them speaks as the top mouth, the other as the lower one.

    The native speakers of Language, the Ariekei, also lack the ability to lie. This includes not being able to use similes unless they have literally occurred in the real world: in order for anyone to be able to say, “You look like the cat that ate the canary,” an actual cat would have to have been seen eating an actual canary on at least one occasion.  This gets us into the topic of why their language is called merely “Language” — it connects to their thoughts in such a direct, primal way that they don’t have enough distance from it to use it untruthfully, or indeed to call a thing by another name. If you are literally not able to say that the sky is yellow, for example, you probably also lack the capacity to learn another word for blue, like “azul.” If in your childhood you are told “This is a table,” and later in life you begin to call it “ein Tisch,” are you, in some sense, lying? Speaking another language and lying both require you to put some distance between things and the words that refer to them.

    Because of the way they experience language, hearing lies is extremely exciting for them. The Ambassadors periodically hold a Festival of Lies where they stand in front of an audience of Ariekei and say whatever manifest untruths come to mind. “The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed intoxicated, literally lie-drunk,” says the human narrator (and one-time star of an Ariekene simile that had to be staged so it could be spoken).

    The intoxicating effect of lies on the hosts foreshadows the cataclysm that occurs when an unusual ambassador couple with a different kind of mental connection arrives on the planet and begins to speak to them. It is a gripping (and pleasantly disturbing) story with lots of food for thought.

    Ursula K. Le Guin called this book “A fully achieved work of art,” and if that’s not enough to recommend it, I don’t know what is.

     

  • Nazi Summer Camp

    In 2015 someone contacted me from Radiolab asking for help with research for the episode “Nazi Summer Camp“. This was quite a thrill because I’ve long been grateful to this fun and informative show for preventing my children from bickering on long car trips.

    What they wanted was a summary of one chapter of a German book about POW camps in the US during the Second World War. They were still deciding which aspects to focus on, so they were gathering information from different sources. In the end, no specific information from my summary made it into the show, but I was happy to be part of the research process.

    The chapter gave a detailed account of German POW life at Fort Hunt, source of many anti-torture anecdotes. When James Mattis told Trump, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better” than the torturers, he was building on a tradition that goes back to the easygoing interrogators at Fort Hunt.

    Although POWs were not tortured there, they were subjected to a lot of secret surveillance. Their cells were bugged and monitored by a team of eavesdroppers, many of whom were Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. They worked in shifts and noted the POWs’ conversations by hand on forms, often in a sort of shorthand, but quite complete. When the conversations turned to especially relevant topics, the monitors started a tape recorder. With regard to what should be recorded, the adage was, “When in doubt, press button.” At the end of their shift the monitors transcribed important passages from their recordings. They learned precise coordinates of numerous bomb targets in Germany, technological details about various weapons, vehicles and machines, and much about the structures and practices of the Wehrmacht. What they learned the most about were the individual German soldiers.

    I enjoyed translating the transcripts that were quoted in the book. Here is a soldier explaining to his cellmate what the formal interrogations are like:

    G: So one of those guards comes charging in holding a piece of paper and calls out someone’s name, but always with English pronunciation. And then you have to go out, and then you go through the halls to a room and usually an officer is sitting there. And you can’t do a Hitler salute there.

    P: No, no.

    G: And then he asks a ton of questions. For example: Are you a member of the party? What do you think of Adolf Hitler? What do you think of the Jewish question? And then he wants to know other stuff.

    Most prisoners felt they were treated fairly and enjoyed the plentiful food and relatively comfortable conditions. However, some reacted with deep distrust. Helmut Engelbrecht told his cellmate: “Like I just told you, this is how Nordic people squeeze it out of you. The Russians, they let you starve and then cold shower, hot shower, cold shower, hot shower, until you’re half mad and you’ll tell them everything willingly. But here they try it with devious tricks, nice on the outside and on the inside – the craziest techniques and listening systems and whatever other kinds of shit.”

    Prisoners were not supposed to know they were being recorded, but some guessed. 22-year-old submarine lieutenant Peter Leffler from Braunschweig explained to his skeptical cellmate:

    Leffler: They’re recording our conversation now.

    Cellmate: Oh, I don’t believe that. The thing with recordings, that would cost a whole lot.

    Leffler: What do you mean, it doesn’t cost a lot to make records.

    Cellmate: OK, listen, it’s theoretically possible but pretty difficult in practice. Imagine, we’ve been here together for a long time, with a record running 12-15 hours?

    Leffler: No, there’s someone sitting by it, listening, and whenever it gets interesting, he turns it on.

    Cellmate: Oh, well that’s…I get it.

    Leffler: In Danzig I was at a broadcasting studio once, and this is exactly what the rooms look like.

    Meanwhile, SS Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda willingly told his cellmate about how he and his men had shot unarmed American POWs on the western front. Shortly afterwards he thought to ask:

    Swoboda: Could there be a microphone hidden in this room?

    Cellmate: Yeah, nobody knows. But I have nothing to hide.

    Swoboda: No, I just wondered. I don’t actually think there is one.

    Officers, men with specialist technical knowledge, or soldiers who had been involved in intelligence were the most likely to suspect bugging. Their cellmates often didn’t believe them. One simple infantryman responded, “Where’s a built-in microphone here? Where would something like that be? […] You’re crazy, that’s a myth.” A marine lieutenant was sure it was impossible: “Here? No, there are no microphones here, I know. […] Look, some man would have to sit there all day, listening all the time. Or they have to broadcast it by radio, onto records. Wouldn’t work, you can’t do it.” Most discussions about eavesdropping came to that conclusion: “There’s no microphone here.”

    They were there, and sometimes they picked up conversations that ran like a film script:

    J: If only we could get out of this shithole and back to Germany.

    H: They’ll get nothing out of me. They could keep me here a year and they wouldn’t know more than they do now. And in the meantime the war would be over and they’d have to let me go.

    J: You know, last night I woke up suddenly and I thought, hey, what’s going on? I was at home. I saw it all so clearly.

    H: Watch out. (guard going by)

    J: He’s gone. You have to be careful here, like a lynx.

    H: Yes, yes.

    J: Open the window again.

    H: Man, then it gets so cold in here.

    J: It’s just as cold in here. When you touch the radiator, you stick to it. It’s that cold. Are you hungry?

    H: It’s OK.

    J: You’ll start to feel it tomorrow and the day after.

    H: I believe you. When did they take you out?

    J: Yesterday.

    H: And you haven’t been back in?

    J: No, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a Nazi or Anti-Nazi camp. Then I said it was the same to me – whether I was a Nazi or Anti-Nazi, as a German I wasn’t going to tell him anything. He could do whatever he wanted. Then he locked me up here. But let’s not get down in the dumps. We can thank God things came out this well for us.

    H: Yes, I was lucky.

    J: So was I.

     

     

  • The Lady in the Hymnal

    I grew up in a mainline Protestant church, where my family always spent the organist’s intro to a given hymn checking on who wrote the words, who composed the music, what country they were from, and when they lived. If we spotted someone who was famous outside of church, like Haydn or Arthur Sullivan, there was a chance for some gleeful pointing and whispering before we belted out the first few bars.

    Do this often enough and you will find one name popping up with alarming frequency: Catherine Winkworth.

     

     

    Germany is to hymnals what China is to Wal-Mart. Remove all the German tunes from an old-fashioned hymn book and you will be left with a sad little pamphlet. And in many cases, it was Catherine Winkworth who did the translation that allows us to sing them in English. Occasionally I have heard a really solid German hymn tune and wondered if I could be the one to provide an English text for it, but no – Catherine Winkworth had beaten me to the job, every time.

    So I fell to wondering: who was this lady? I found her book of hymn translations, Lyra Germanica, on Amazon. My brother was kind enough to buy it for me for Christmas:

    guinea pig provided for size reference

    It contains the translations and a preface by her. To learn about her life, however, I had to look elsewhere. A few websites offered basic biographical information, but to know what kind of a person she really was, you need to go to Google Books and read the memoirs of her sister, Susanna. In summarizing them, I was going to say, “I read them so you don’t have to!” But in fact, this is an extremely interesting book, so if you enjoy my summary, go read the whole thing.

    Born in London in 1837, Catherine was raised in a family of devout Evangelicals with a rural background reminiscent of a George Eliot novel, except that none them turned out to be an odious hypocrite. Her maternal grandfather was banished from home by his father at age 18 “for becoming a disciple of Whitefield, and refusing to join in any worldly amusements.” Catherine herself was a good, intelligent and pious child. At 8, she was noticed by a family friend sitting with a Bible on her lap and reading the Sermon on the Mount aloud to her younger siblings. “What, Kate,” asked the friend, “Reading the Bible to your brothers?” “Yes,” she replied, “But I try to choose the parts that are suited to their capacity.”

    Her family valued education very highly and was well connected in religious and literary circles. Catherine and Susanna were passionate about learning everything they possibly could in theology, the sciences, and humanities. Their mother died rather suddenly after preparing too vigorously for a dinner party. They ran the household until their father took a second wife, a superfan of Lord Byron who apparently excelled at her hobby of making realistic dollhouse furniture.

    This was their cue to leave home and have some adventures – Catherine went with an Aunt to Dresden, where she had lessons in German and music, as well as visiting art galleries, the theater, and the opera (both of the latter being dominated, at that time, by members of the Devrient family, whose acting troupe Susanna’s book describes as “the best actors of Germany, perhaps for tragedy the best of any country”). Upon her return to England Catherine was in a state of intellectual ferment: “Her early beliefs had been rudely shattered and she was at this epoch much inclined to replace them by the worship of Art and Culture. Goethe was her chief instructor and guide, and her philosophy was a chaos.” However, she eventually settled into an ordered Anglican existence in the mold of Charles Kingsley.

    It was Susanna who first expressed an interest in translation, specifically a book on the life of Niebuhr. When she mentioned this to the German diplomat Baron von Bunsen, he jumped at the opportunity to mentor her, encouraging her not only to translate the book but to add original research of her own. To this end he carted her off to Bonn and made her do scary things like ask the world’s foremost Niebuhr expert questions in German at dinner in front of other distinguished Germans. On the plus side, she got to waltz with the Prince of Prussia.

    Shall we dance?

    Meanwhile, Catherine also tried her hand at German to English translation, including “some German hymns that Susie and I are fond of, and [I] don’t succeed very well, but I like doing it.” Soon she was translating a hymn a day and succeeding rather better. They were published as Lyra Germanica and sold out within two months. Fan mail poured in.

    “Mein liebes Fräulein Winckworth,” wrote Baron Bunsen, to whom the work was dedicated, “Das Herz treibt mich Ihnen Deutsch zu reden, da Sie mir meine deutschen Lieblingslieder, die heiligen Gesänge meines Volkes so herrlich verstanden und wiedergegeben haben.” The prominent Unitarian James Martineau thanked her for introducing them “to the English reader with the least possible drawback from passing out of their own language.”

    A typical letter from Catherine to Susanna from around the time she began translating:

    “First of all, I must read Mill’s Political Economy some day; and then I want to learn Latin and Greek and Drawing, and perhaps I shall have to translate, and then there will be occupation enough; and so as I said, I am very well satisfied with my prospects; though, according to the doctrines M. and Mrs. P. are preaching to me at the moment, I ought to be very unhappy, because I’m not married, nor likely to be at present. They have been going on at me so about it, in a regular married woman style, which I hate.”

    The Winkworth sisters never did marry, but they knew everybody: Charles Dickens (“has a very rapid decided way of talking, and is excessively full of fun and spirits”), Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (“Well, altogether he is simply the most wonderful-looking man I ever saw in my life. He may be any height he likes, he is so thoroughly manly-looking, you do not think of it”), French socialist “little” Louis Blanc, Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and Charlotte Brontë (“One feels that her life at least almost makes one like her books, though one does not want there to be any more Miss Brontës”), as well as everyone who was anyone in the English clergy, e.g. John Henry Newman’s younger brother Francis Newman (“a beautiful face and winning smile”) and F. D. Maurice (“I like him because he is so despotic”). They were highly active in the Sunday school movement, which in those days was much more significant than getting children to cut construction paper in a church basement.

    Film buffs used to enjoy playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” History buffs should start playing “Six Degrees of Catherine Winkworth.” In fact, I would wager that in every Victorian miniseries you’ve ever seen, there is a woman in the background who looks like an extra but is actually playing Catherine Winkworth. She’s one of the most important Victorian ladies no one – apart from the hymnal nerds – has ever heard of.

  • The Unbelievable Ride in a Crazy Airplane (and other films)

    Sometimes translation is straightforward. Sometimes, especially in the arts and entertainment sector, translators make significant modifications to their source material. Compare the English and German versions of these titles of popular films from the eighties and nineties (back translations in italics).

    The funniest German film titles are those that take a simple English title and turn it into a long, touchingly earnest explanation. Of these, the prime example is:

    Airplane! = Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug (The unbelievable ride in a crazy airplane). Thanks, translators – now I know exactly what to expect from that film!

    Or they keep the English title but append a little explanation:

    Backdraft = Backdraft – Männer, die durchs Feuer gehen (Backdraft – men who go through the fire)

    Gremlins = Gremlins – kleine Monster (Gremlins – little monsters)

    Top Gun = Top Gun – sie fürchten weder Tod noch Teufel (Top Gun – they fear neither death nor devil) (a common saying to describe fearlessness, and also used as the German title of the 1966 film “Lost Command”)

    Sometimes they’re just very different:

    Sixteen Candles = Das darf man nur als Erwachsener (Only adults can do that)

    The Emperor’s New Groove = Ein Königreich für ein Lama (A kingdom for a llama)

    Also amusing are those that are just way more prosaic than the original:

    Saving Private Ryan = Der Soldat James Ryan (The soldier James Ryan) — whoa! That sounds exciting!!!

    Meet the Parents = Meine Braut, ihr Vater und ich (My bride, her father and I)

    There are, of course, also some that are exactly the same:

    Back to the Future = Zurück in die Zukunft (Back to the future)

    Among the films I searched through to compile this list, one jumped out at me, namely:

    The Princess Bride = Die Braut des Prinzen (The prince’s bride)

    Now…the book on which the film is based is called “Die Brautprinzessin” in German, so why did they change the film title? Wikipedia won’t tell me why, and what I’d like to think is that some loser just misheard or misread “Princess” as “Prince’s.” I’ll go on thinking that until someone tells me otherwise.

    Why, you might ask, did I choose films from the eighties and nineties? Partly because I haven’t paid much attention to films since 2000, but also because it seems translation of film titles is becoming less frequent and, when it occurs, is more straightforward (or else it follows the pattern of Backdraft, Gremlins, and Top Gun, i.e. Real Title + Explanation). In these lists of Oscar-winning films from 2014 and 2015, you will see only a few titles were translated. Internet databases and constant international communication mean fewer unbelievable rides in crazy airplanes, and more Airplane!s. Ah, well.

  • Metaphors that make you go WTF?

    With regard to Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen, “Lessing, who had just held up his own newly published Emilia Galotti as a model of how a stage-play should be constructed, was bitter; he exclaimed angrily that Goethe had filled sausage skins with sand and sold them as rope.”

  • Don’t even think about it….

    A friend took this photo at Karlstein Castle in the Czech Republic. It seems they don’t serve my kind in there.

  • Most people have a cold.

    I do have a cold. I powered through it during Christmas preparations but spent the Feast of Stephen in bed. And that’s where I’d be today, as well, if there weren’t things to do.

    Most people have a cold in one of my favorite poems: Weltende, by Jakob van Hoddis. Good old Raymond Furness of St. Andrews read this one to us in a German Expressionism lecture and I thought it was just the most delightful little apocalyptic poem ever. Seriously disturbing in a way, but also darkly comic with its blunt descriptions of catastrophe and its wry juxtaposition of everyday annoyances and huge disasters. The last two lines, which have the exact same meter in the original, are “Most people have a cold. / The railroads are falling from the bridges.” The end!

    Here it is in German:

    Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,

    In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei,

    Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei

    Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.

    Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen

    An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.

    Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.

    Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.

    A couple years ago I thought about trying to translate Weltende. But after ruminating on the first line, especially the word “Bürger” (“bourgeois”? “burgher”? something else?), for half an hour with no progress, I got to thinking about what it would be like to write an Onion-style article based on each line of the poem. And I did it. Like most of the funny things I write, it was only slightly funny. Here’s the first one (notice how I tried to make the guy seem as consistently bourgeois as possible):

    AREA MAN LOSES HAT
    John Burger, a manager at a local store, was surprised when a strong wind carried his hat away last Tuesday as he was heading into Starbuck’s Coffee on Main Street. “It literally just flew off my head,” said Burger, 41. He added, “Maybe my head is too pointy.”

    So it went on in that vein, with mixed success.

    There are a lot of translations of Weltende into English and I don’t love any of them, except for this one by Rolfe-Peter Wille, which is accompanied by an insightful essay.

    Meanwhile, Google Translate sez:

    The citizen flies from the pointed head the hat, In all the air it echoes like shouting, Roofers fall off and go in two And on the coasts – one reads – the flood rises. The storm is here, the wild seas pluck On land to crush thick dams. Most people have a cold. The railroads fall from the bridges.

  • Translators in Space, part 2

    The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

    “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s permission.” (Matthew 10:29)

    In the not-too-distant future, an observatory in Puerto Rico picks up some chorales broadcast from the Alpha Centauri system. In response, a party of Jesuits and lay nerds sets out with the latest space travel technology (something to do with asteroid mining) to find and explore the singers’ planet, landing there in the Earth year 2039. The planet, Rakhat (did Russell think up this planet’s name while looking at a hat rack?) turns out to be not so very different from earth, with a human-friendly atmosphere and similar categories of plant and animal species. But unlike Earth, it has two species with language – predators and their prey who both evolved to stand upright, speak, and make stuff.

    The vegetarian Runa speak Ruanja, a melodious language with good vowel/consonant balance. Their pronouns reflect their herd mentality: Runa refer to themselves only as “someone” or “this one” (“Someone’s heart is glad”, “This one is called Chaypas”) and have two forms of the first person plural: “One is exclusive of the person addressed. It means we-but-not-you. The other is we-and-you-also. If a Runao uses the inclusive we, you may be sure it is significant and you may rejoice in a friendship.”

    Spatial concepts determine much of their grammar. The Jesuit star linguist and another team member spend their days pinning down the rules, for example that there are two declensions: one for things that occupy space and can be seen, the other for things that are inherently nonvisual (e.g. concepts such as “hope” or “affection”) or for things that occupy space but are not currently visible. If your friend is where you can see him, he takes the first declension for items that occupy space. Once he leaves, however, he becomes subject to the second declension, which leads one character to wonder “if a blind Runao would always use the nonvisual declension”. (I think I can answer that, actually – No, because in general the blind talk the same way people around them do. They don’t scrupulously avoid visual language. A blind Runao would change your visual/nonvisual declension based on whether you were nearby or not.) Words that seem to refer to objects often turn out to denote the spaces created by those objects, such as the empty space inside a vase. In addition, “there is a word for the space we would call a room but no words for wall or for ceiling or floor, as such. It’s the function of an object that is named. You can refer to a ceiling, for example, by noting that the rain is prevented from taking place in this space because of it.” I find this really implausible – creatures who build houses together are likely to have simple words for the component parts – but who’s to say how weird an alien language might be?

    This alien thinks Hawaiian grammatical gender is really implausible

    Russell worked out Ruanja in great detail; readers can suppose she built up a substantial file on its grammar and vocab, only some of which made it into the book. She gives us a taste of the carnivores’ language, K’San, but not as much detail. What stands out about K’San is that it has a lot of glottal stops, and its grammar is fiendishly difficult (for English speakers, at any rate).

    The Sparrow includes some stomach-turning sexual violence, the reason for which is only fully explained in the sequel, Children of God. (It hinges on a miscommunication between two speakers who overestimate their mutual understanding.) Apart from language issues, these books explore faith and doubt, friendship and love, the ethics of eating, and of course all the usual sci-fi space travel questions. With minor quibbles (e.g. the dialogue can be too cute at times) I enjoyed both of them.

  • Translators in Space

    My first blog post!

    Went to see the film Arrival the other day and was predictably gratified by the centrality of a linguist/translator. A pretty good film, but if emotional violin music and soft-focus footage of babies make you cry, be prepared to exit the theater wiping your eyes and sniffling, to the alarm of those cinema-goers waiting to replace you.

    After leaving Arrival and drying my face, I thought about other stories featuring communication between humans and aliens. There happen to be three on my shelf, so I’m going to review all three, and here’s the first:

    Eifelheim by Michael Flynn

    A spaceship crashes in the forest near a small German village in 1348. The aliens inside are essentially large, highly evolved grasshoppers. Some are technicians, some scientific explorers, others tourists, and they are lost. The villagers are a lovable lot who are just dying to demonstrate to you, the reader, that the Middle Ages were not nearly as bad as everyone likes to think.  The parish priest, in particular, is really a super nice guy and – importantly for someone about to make first contact with an advanced alien race – superbly well-educated for a random pastor in the sticks.

    By the time Dietrich, the priest, gets a chance to converse with them, the aliens have already developed a translation program. It turns out they have been sneaking into the village to plant audio/visual bugs in strategic locations so their translation software can record and analyze the villagers’ speech.

    The little speaker box they use as an interpreter is, at least for me, the most delightful thing in this book. Dietrich initially believes it contains a brownie or sprite (a “Heinzelmännchen”), and although the aliens explain that “There is no small man. The box himself speaks,” the name sticks.

    As one would expect from the circumstances, the Heinzelmännchen communicates imperfectly. Dietrich has to help fill in gaps in its vocabulary. Its lack of intonation means questions often end in  ” – question”. Its phrasing is awkward and marked by literal translations from German into English. It doesn’t “translate”, it “oversets” (übersetzen); it says “Greet God” (Grüß Gott) for hello and “it gives” (es gibt) for “there is”; it asks “What means ‘tongue’?” instead of “What does tongue mean?”

    If you think about this too hard it will start to blow your mind because the phrasing that makes the machine sound a little off is actually correct in the language the machine is supposedly translating into. But somehow it works. I think Flynn’s decision here is designed to give us two impressions: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in Germany!  German words and phrases also pepper the speech of the human characters, but in such a way that it feels more like local color than awkwardness. I don’t think Eifelheim has been translated into German, but anyone who tried would find it a challenge to reproduce these effects. My suggestion would be to hit the Middle High German textbooks and find some obsolete grammar and syntax for the machine to use (and some quaint phrases for the humans). This would give readers the impression that: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in the Middle Ages! Which is probably about the best you can do.

    The book also explores the larger problems of communication between creatures with different cultures and technology. “The fluid that drives our ship jumped in an unexpected manner and ran down the wrong mill race,” says one alien. “Certain items burned. Ach! I do not have the words to say it; nor you the words to hear.” The aliens are not sure what to make of Dietrich’s pronouncements at the intersection of philosophy, theology and science. To his speculation about whether there is “a fifth element through which the stars move,” or whether “heavenly motions can be explained by the same elements we find in the sublunar regions,” the alien can only respond, “You are either very wise, or very ignorant.” The humans talk eagerly of Jesus Christ, the lord who came from the sky, took their form, and taught them things, and will return someday – does this mean he is an incredibly advanced alien, a being of pure energy who knows the art of inhabiting a foreign body? If so, wonder the stranded grasshoppers, could he save them? He can save anyone, say the humans, but what exactly does that mean? And inquiries about when precisely he is coming back are answered with frustrating vagueness. True mutual understanding requires much more than grammar and vocabulary.

    Eifelheim hits a sweet spot for anyone who likes German, translation, medieval history, philosophy, Catholicism, and science fiction (in other words, me), but you needn’t be a specialist in any of these to enjoy it. A well-researched, funny, touching, and ultimately heartbreaking adventure, it deserves to be more widely known.