The population of Fürth transfixed by the 1000th-anniversary marathon. And also the half-marathon:
Added later (see comments):
The list of winners shows these are Wolfgang Vogt (born 1959) from Düsseldorf fire brigade and Andreas Engelhardt (born 1981) from Fürth fire brigade, who finished 94th and 90th respectively. Both took about 3:15 hours for the course. There were 1407 runners and the last one took 6:32 hours. Photo taken at 11:36.
Letter from a firm that works with amazon.de:
Sehr geehrte Margaret Marks,
vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.
Der voraussichtliche Liefertermin für die von Ihnen bestellte Ware in unserem Hause wird der 736-0098127-8790569 sein. Wir bitten noch um etwas Geduld.
Sobald die Ware in unserem Hauptlager eingeht, wird sie auf dem schnellsten Wege in den Versand gegeben. Natürlich erhalten Sie hierüber wie gewohnt eine Versandbestätigung.
Bei weiteren Fragen stehen wir Ihnen gerne zur Verfügung.
Mit freundlichem Gruß
Reply:
Sehr geehrte Frau XXX,
danke für die Antwort.
Muss ich mich wirklich bis zum 736-0098127-8790569 gedulden? Es kommt mir sehr lange vor.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Margaret Marks
Reply:
Sehr geehrte Margaret Marks,
vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.
Das stimmt, das ist eine sehr lange Zeit. Sorry, so sollte das eigentlich da gar nicht stehen, da hat der Fehlerteufel zugeschlagen. Gemeint war: 26.06.2007 – 28.06.2007
Bei weiteren Fragen stehen wir Ihnen gerne zur Verfügung.
Mit freundlichem Gruß
Here we see the Fehlerteufel, which can more or less only zuschlagen in German, and the German usage of Sorry, which must have some cachet.
Someone on ProZ wanted to translate Eingreifreserve into English. The public prosecutor’s office at Frankfurt am Main has one. It consists of eight public prosecutors and mainly concentrates on white-collar crime and organized crime. I thought of task force, but now I see they have created a Task Force which gives general support in all areas. So really one should translate Eingreifreserve as task force and Task Force as backup force or something, but I suppose that might be confusing. Beck aktuell:
Die staatsanwaltschaftliche Task Force soll die Eingreifreserve bei der Generalstaatsanwaltschaft ergänzen, die aus acht Staatsanwälten besteht. Während die Eingreifreserve fallbezogen mit dem Schwerpunkt der Wirtschaftskriminalität und der Organisierten Kriminalität tätig werde, bewirke die Task Force eine umfassende personelle Unterstützung vor Ort. So könne ein Mitglied der Task Force beispielsweise eingesetzt werden, um einen erkrankten Jugenddezernenten bei einer Staatsanwaltschaft vorübergehend zu ersetzen.
beck-aktuell-Redaktion, Verlag C. H. Beck, 21. Mai 2007.
The Independent.ie reports:
A FORMER SS officer convicted of murdering hundreds of civilians in Rome during the Second World War was cleared yesterday to leave house arrest every day to work, sparking outrage among Jewish groups.
Erich Priebke (93) was told by a military judge that he was free to leave his flat in Rome to work as a translator at his lawyer’s firm in the city. Under the terms of his detention, Priebke was also able leave the office for “essential requirements,” the judge said.
Erich Priebke was trained in the hotel business but started his linguistic career as an interpreter for the Gestapo in 1936. Thence he became a civil servant and from February 1941 was a liaison officer with the Italian police in the German Embassy in Rome. He is under house arrest (if he were younger it would be prison – he was born in 1913) for his part in the murder of 335 Italians in 1944 (the Ardeatine Caves massacre).
Thanks to Derek, who reports at www.flefo.org:
Even more remarkable is the storm of protest from Jewish organizations suggesting that SS Hauptsturmführer Priebke (rtd.) is using his employment as a translator in order to prepare his escape. I suppose they fear that he might be planning to cross the Alps on foot under cover of darkness and get back to his old friends in Germany.
John Wells links to a German phonetics weblog, Phonetik. It is anonymous (Dirk Olbertz is responsible for blogger.de, not for the blog – see comments). It has a particular interest in the pronunciation of foreign names – for instance, it would have us pronounce Marilyn Monroe in the U.S. rather than the British way. My old Wells Phonetics dictionary gives three British versions and one American ending.
I wonder what he or she would think of the Germanization of Rosamunde Pilcher? (You have to register to comment, and my old antville registration doesn’t seem to work, and in any case I write too many rubbishy comments).
LATER NOTE: the Phonetik blog has kindly commented on this – see note to my earlier entry.
My attention has been directed (thanks, Trevor) to an entry in a Guardian Unlimited blog by Lee Rourke, headed ‘What goes into a great translation?‘ and dealing with Michael Hofmann’s new translations of Kafka.
The difference is noticeable from the very first line, so immediate are Hofmann’s translations. For instance, and to use Kafka’s most famous opening sentence, here’s Hofmann’s offering:
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”
Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended.
Now a new translation every couple of decades may be a good idea, but the way this is phrased does tend to throw a ripple through one’s BS detectors. Kafka writes a plain sentence – were those other translators so wide of the mark? And the praise of the term cockroach also seems misplaced.
It is the word “cockroach” that tickles me the most. At first it seems incongruous (as pointed out in Nicholas Lezard’s recent Guardian review). But it is clever. In the original Prague-German, Kafka uses the word “ungeziefer” which literally translates as “vermin”. Kafka wanted to denote the marginalised, detested individual. Hofmann could have used the word “vermin” but, though still denoting something to be looked down upon, it would have taken us away from the crucial image of the insect (although it is interesting to note that when Kafka contemplated his story being illustrated he envisaged a picture of a man lying in the bed and not an insect). So Hofmann uses the word “cockroach”, the duality of which is unmissable. A brilliant stroke.
Hmph. It’s a problem for the translator that Ungeziefer is rather unspecific and leaves the reader to create an image. But the later behaviour of the insect implies it can eat some things that Gregor turned his nose up a couple of days earlier, but other things it can’t eat, whereas a cockroach could presumably eat anything. It has the sense of vermin, but not the sense of vulnerability. Beetle or bug would make more sense.
So this entry has produced some great comments, starting with Killigan:
“as, one presumes, Kafka intended” … That “one presumes” kind of undercuts the grand evaluative pronouncements on the quality of the translation. Have you read him in German?
“It is, most importantly, Kafkaesque.” Was Kafka’s writing Kafkaesque in the first place? That adjective means something along the lines of “nightmarish, alienated, dark”, a reduction or distortion which completely overlooks the matter of Kafka’s style or non-style, which is what you would have it refer to.
“Particles”, and especially “the very particles”, sounds suspiciously like literary pretension itself. What charlatan said that? Deleuze, perchance?
I love the ‘Kafkaesque’ remark. Can I manage to be Marksesque?
Killigan quotes Nabokov on the cockroach question in great detail. Rourke replies somewhat lamely, ‘I have read this story many times; it was never Kafka’s intention for the reader to take this tale literally (you know that).’ If literalness doesn’t matter, why don’t we translate it as a spider, then? Cockroach shmockroach.
I can’t say anything about Hofmann’s translation, but there are a number of the less famous renderings of the first sentence here. And although one may quibble (vermin isn’t countable in my English [actually, it’s a collective plural – see comments]), none of them look as if they greatly embroidered the text.
As for the rest of Kafka’s work, which Hofmann has apparently also translated, it should be of interest that the Muirs, for instance, did not have the original text at hand. I remember hearing that Malcolm Pasley gave a talk on Kafka – in the 1950s – and afterwards a woman came up to him and said she had a suitcase of Kafka manuscripts in the attic. Which Pasley published, and it made him. In Wikipedia, scroll down to Publications and dates. And it says of the translations:
After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published — The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.
That’s where Hofmann is interesting, when he translates the pre- or post-Brod versions of The Trial, The Castle and America.
Trevor found this via Conversational Reading, which has had a couple of interviews of literary translators this month and will be having more.