The death of Erwin Wickert, aged 93, was reported recently. Nearly all the German papers gave the impression that his career started in 1955, thus www.tagesschau.de. Der Tagesspiegel has more, and so does Wikipedia.

Last year I bought his Mut und Übermut. Geschichten aus meinem Leben. I got it secondhand from abebooks.de. It cost 80 eurocents – the postage was 1.95. This was on a tip from Trevor, who had encountered Wickert in another incarnation.

It’s interesting to read excerpts from a life spanning the Nazi period. There’s period as an exchange student in the USA in 1935, when it was still isolationist, including a talk with a professor of politics comparing the style of the USA and Nazi Germany; crossing the country on goods trains with the hobos (with photos); in Japan in October 1945, an encounter with an American soldier who, on a six-month course for officers, had stayed in the same room Wickert had had at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

I didn’t find an English obituary of any length, but Dickinson College a couple of years ago linked to a Deutsche Welle article in English, ‘There is Good and Evil in Every Nation’ on Wickert and John Rabe.

LATER NOTE: An interesting article on Wickert by Sherri Kimmel in the Dickinson Magazine, the magazine of the college Wickert attended in the USA, based on her interviews of him at his home in Germany in recent years (see comments).

OFFICE OF THE PRINCIPAL ATTORNEY
WILLIAMS & TERIWAYA LAW CHAMBERS,
28FARTHERSSTONE STREET, EC180SY,
LONDON.

Sir/Madam,

Compliments of the day . I must solicit you confidentiality and assure you that
I am contacting you in good faith and this proposal will be of mutual
benefit. I am Barrister James Williams (Esq.), a legal practitioner and
personal attorney to my client, late Mr.Robert , Unfortunately, he died with
the family and also with the whole passengers aboard, in Plane crash. CONCORDE
PLANE CRASH[Flight AF4590 ] on the 25TH JULY,2000. You may read more stories
about the crash on visiting these websites:

One knows this is spam for several reasons, but this is perhaps especially unconvincing to a legal translator familiar with London. No time to count the errors.

expatica.com reports that the publisher of the translation into Galician of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime has cancelled the contract with the translator:

María Reimóndez, who translated the story about a 15-year-old with autism for Rinoceronte Editora, says that her employer cancelled her contract because she refused to hand in a sexist translation favouring the use of the masculine gender over the feminine in words where English uses a neutral form.

The publisher, Moisés Barcia, accuses her in turn of systematically changing neutral words for feminine ones, thus introducing a bias into the novel.

The publisher has now translated the book himself and the parties have instructed lawyers. There isn’t enough evidence in the articles I’ve seen to form an opinion.

By the time the Daily Telegraph got the story, the translator had been ‘sacked’ and the case taken to court.

“As we corrected her text, we realised that she was systematically translating neutral words into feminine ones, and masculine words into feminine or neutral forms,” said Moisés Barcia, the editor at Rinoceronte. “She chose to make the narrator’s pet rat a female, even though its name was Toby,” he said. In another instance she changed “men” to “xente”, meaning people.

I’d like to know more about the contract. How many of these divergences really went too far? How much did the author know about the problem when he agreed with the publisher that the translation was unacceptable? Did the publisher really say it had been a breach of contract for the translator to want the translation to appear without her name on it? It sounds as if she might have said, ‘Change these things, but don’t put my name on the translation’.

expatica again:

Reimóndez denies having made such changes and says that cancelling her contract was illegal. Barcia argues that she requested not to have her name appear on the modified translation, and that this constitutes a breach of contract.

Kauderwelsch (a great series of small books that give a summary of the grammar, terminology and cultural background of a huge number of language) Galicisch (Galizische) Wort für Wort

It was reported in the Guardian this week that the French regret the decline of the semicolon and blame it on the increasing use of English. See Céline’s translation weblog and Baroque in Hackney.

The French term is point-virgule, the German Semikolon or Strichpunkt.

Why is it not Punktstrich, you ask? Well, I have seen a German writing a semicolon, and they really did do the comma before the full stop.

Confirmations and even denials welcome.

I wish Deutsche Telekom would sue c2c railways in the UK and not waste its time on Engadget Mobile.

This picture of Upminster Station shows, both in the mirror reflection and outside it, attempts to introduce magenta and grey. On the c2c site you can see one of their originally turquoise and yellow trains with some splashes of uncertain magenta on it. One almost wishes for graffiti.

Via Handakte WebLAWg

A few days ago, near Oldenburg, a 33-year-old woman died when the car she was a passenger in was hit by a 6-kilo lump of wood dropped from a motorway bridge .

A drawing of a group of young people who were near the bridge at the time has been widely circulated today and huge numbers of police are searching for the perpetrator or perpetrators.

I suppose whoever did it did not expect the consequences.

It reminds me of the English case of Hancock and Shankland. They were striking miners and during the strike they dropped a larger concrete block – 21 kg apparently – from a motorway bridge, apparently to stop a taxi taking strike breakers to work. The taxi driver was killed.

They were convicted of murder, but on appeal the sentence was reduced to manslaughter (I think this was involuntary manslaughter, that is, fahrlässige Tötung, not voluntary manslaughter or Totschlag). This was because the English definition of murder includes the possibility of carrying out an act the natural consequence of which is death, and the court – the Court of Appeal and later the House of Lords too – did not think that death was a natural consequence.

Wikipedia has the story.