Extended Translation Project (German) 1

College of Arts and Law
Bank of Assessed Work
Academic Year: 2014/15
Department/School: Modern Languages
Module Title: Translation Studies - Extended Translation Project
Module Level: M
Method of Assessment: Translation and commentary
Marking Criteria: Arts & Law Postgraduate marking criteria
Date Added to Bank:
Extended translation project (German) 1

The University of Birmingham
English Language and Applied Linguistics
Extended Translation Project submission
MA Translation Studies
Title: German-English translation/ commentary

Maja Haderlap- Engel des Vergessens

Contents
Brief…4
Source text…5
Target text…18
Commentary…24
37Bibliography…56
Appendix 1…59
Appendix 2…60

Brief
Seagull Books is looking to publish Maja Haderlap’s novel Engel des
Vergessens as part of its ‘German List’ series, since the text has won a
number of prestigious literary awards and has already been published in
two other European languages. The publishers have requested a sample
translation of the text.

Source text
Extract 1

Extract 2

Extract 3

Extract 4

Word Count: 7498.

Target text
Angel of Oblivion
5 Extract 1
Grandmother motions to me with her hand, I should follow her.

We go into the pantry through the smoke kitchen, where there is
an open fire for cooking.
Old smoke clings to the roof like dark, greasy resin. It smells of
freshly-baked bread and
10 smoked meat. A sour haze hangs over the troughs in which scraps are collected
for the pigs.
The soil is like clay, and on the most well-trodden parts, it’s shiny
like it has been polished. In the pantry, Grandmother skims
hardened pork dripping from a jar and spreads it in the roasting
dish, then puts a spoon into the apple jam and removes a whitish-
grey layer of mould, which she throws away. The Slovenian word
Malada is written on the apple jam
15 labels which she had stuck on with a mixture of flour, milk and spit.
Her Malada is dark brown and tastes bittersweet.
She gives me a handful of eggs in my skirt, which I hold up. In
the draught, flakes of soot come off the walls in the smoke kitchen and
settle on the loaves of bread which are stored high up on a wooden
rack. Under the open fire, next to the front door, lies a small pile of 20
swept-up ashes.
Grandmother works in the kitchen. The dishes she prepares taste

of the kitchen, of the dark, poorly-lit grotto that we cross several
times each day. It seems to me that everything edible takes on the
colour and smell of the kitchen. The bacon and the traditional
Carinthian
25 buckwheat flour, the lard and the jam, even the eggs reek of soil,
smoke and sour air. While cooking, Grandmother issues special
qualities to the dishes. Her meals have a hidden power, they can
connect this life and the afterlife, heal both physical and mental
wounds, they can make you ill.

30 I drink malt coffee out of the beaker that is kept hidden for me at
the bottom of the kitchen cupboard. You’re too big for the beaker,
she says, but I’ll prepare it for you as long as you want me to. I lie
down on the kitchen bench to take myself out of her field of vision,
and sip
the freshly-made coffee. Much too big, Grandmother repeats. If
someone comes, put it on the floor straight away.
35
Grandmother thinks my mother is too inexperienced for the
kitchen. Grandmother says she has no idea how to cook, and what
the nuns taught her in school doesn’t work in our house. She also
doesn’t know that there is food for the living and the dead, that you
can heal or ruin people with specially-prepared dishes, in fact that’s
something she doesn’t want to believe.
40 Whereas I take Grandmother’s word for it and turn the handle
enthusiastically when she roasts the beans for the coffee. I listen to her
when she tells me about how many people she cooked for at home back
then, when there were still maids and servants and lots of children. She
says she also stole food for herself and for others, she looked through
potato peelings for anything that seemed edible, back then when she
washed the cooking pot, it was lucky, she 45 says, that she ended up
there, in the kitchen, in the camp, I know.
Extract 2
I am so exhausted that I begin to withdraw from my senses. I

wonder why nobody thinks to
50 say a protective spell for me as well, to protect me from too much
danger. Why everyone forgets to spread protective words over me,
so that I would stay preserved from this reality that makes me
shudder with each new incident. I could grip every hand, huddle
against every tree and every animal that I pass by. I talk to the
calves and strike at the indifferent cows when I herd them from the
field to the barn.
55
Grandmother motions to me repeatedly, I should come to her, she
has to tell me something. She asks me whether I would like to stay
over with her in the little cabin, if I would be happy to share the bed
with her. I would, I want to! But only if your mother doesn’t object,
notes Grandmother with a faint, triumphant quiver in her voice, you
must ask her, of course.
60 Sometimes I ask Mother without speaking to Grandmother
beforehand. I simply invite myself to Grandmother’s house. I don’t
want to be alone.

Grandmother’s bedroom is a place of memory, a queen’s cell, in
which everything seems to
be submerged in a milky liquid, a breeding cell, in which I am fed
on Grandmother’s nutrient
65 fluid. I am formed in this nucleus, as I will only realise years later.
Grandmother establishes my sense of direction. From that point
on, there is no getting past the marks she has left. My senses will
transmit Grandmother’s vibrations to the world and see the
potential for destruction in everything. They will wait for lucky
coincidences, for the few moments in which change is possible,
since salvation must be hoped for and prepared for, but without 70
fortunate circumstances, it crumbles into nothing.
From the moment when Grandmother decides to let me share in

those two years of her life, those that marked her most deeply, the
booklets The Women of Ravensbrück and What’s that got to do
with me which she had brought with her from the memorial at
Ravensbrück lie on
75 the bedside table, next to the arnica tincture and the bitter
absinthe. Sometimes Grandmother hands a booklet to me, requesting
that I read it to her. I sit down at the old kitchen table and read: in
Ravensbrück there was: the camp commander, the preventive detention
camp leader, the administration officer, the labour deployment leader,
the Gestapo agents from the Political Department, the camp doctors, the
SS nurses, the female executive commander, the 80 female overseers
and the SS guards.
Give it here, says Grandmother, and tugs the book towards her
impatiently, I’ll show you the overseers. She flips through the book
and points her finger to a group of women standing in the dock.
She points out a young, blonde woman, she was the worst, she
says. She had a dog
85 that hounded the prisoners if they collapsed during roll call. She
can still see that bloodhound to this day, how it pulls on its leash
before taking a leap at an exhausted woman. A Polish woman from
her block had been bitten by a dog. She had actual holes in her
legs. A Polish doctor rinsed the wounds with urine. She advised
the women to rinse their wounds with urine, it helped, there was
nothing else available, no bandages, nothing at all.
90 It was this overseer, says Grandmother and put her index finger
on the woman’s face, which vanished underneath it. She was very
young and very wicked, really depraved. God, the things people
do, Grandmother bursts out and spits on the photo. Then she
wipes the pages with her sleeve so that they don’t stick together.
Sometimes she spits on the photo of the SS camp doctor, who
represents in her mind the SS

95 doctors that she encountered when she was brought to the camp
infirmary. What this doctor did to women, čudno, čudno, says
Grandmother, and again means terrible when she says strange.
She believes that because of these two books, nobody can claim
that her stories are made up anymore. Nobody can call me a liar
anymore, she says.
100 Occasionally she pulls a red, stained booklet out of the desk
drawer. My camp book, she says and opens the notebook, look, inside
the front cover I’ve written knjiga od zapora Maria H., the prison book of
Maria H. She was given the notebook by a fellow prisoner on the way
home. She in turn had received it from a Frenchwoman. She had torn out
a few pages, but look, says Grandmother, I started to make notes in
Prenzlau. On 28th April they drove us out 105 of the camp, the journey
was wonderful, she read aloud, čudovita, because again the
Slovenian word for terrible didn’t cross her mind. They had been
driven along by the SS at the front, going north or in a circuit, she
recounted. Nobody knew where. She can barely remember the first
day, as she was so weak that Gregorička had to carry her. One
time that she can still remember, they went through a never-ending
forest, the dead and the exhausted
110 lying everywhere, alongside burned-out vehicles, munitions.
Gregorička had got hold of a wheelbarrow, put her in and pushed
her along. Then came May 1st and the SS had disappeared, as
though they had dissolved into nothing. Thunder and cannon fire
all around. The women wandered along the battle lines in groups.
Her group spent the night in a pigsty.
The Russians had shot at the sty, only when a woman walked out
wearing the striped
115 concentration camp clothing did the Russians realise that it was
concentration camp inmates in the sty. Then they slaughtered a pig
and prepared food for everyone.
The next day they had moved on, devastation everywhere, the
villages bombed, planes had flown high above them. They had
searched for clothes and anything edible in the abandoned houses.
A woman from Ljubljana had led her group, they stayed with her
because it meant
120 that the Slovenians would be taken home in a group. The
Slovenians waited until mid-August for the journey home. The
Austrians wanted to slog their way home from the moment the
fighting stopped, says Grandmother.
As soon as Grandmother begins to undress, I also start to take my

clothes off.
125 She sits on the bed in her undershirt and loosens her thin, plaited
hair that she had tied into a knot at the back of her head. I kneel
down behind Grandmother on the bed and start to comb her hair.
Her thin, grey hair falls between her shoulder blades. She
alternates between putting her left and right hands on the part of

her head that I am combing. Careful, she says, careful, and
sometimes, after a sigh, it was 13th November, when she entered
the camp. The
130 women, who had been driven on foot through Fürstenberg with
her, had to undress after arriving at the camp. In the first hour there
was already an air-raid warning. Naked, they had to wait two hours
until they were examined. Then they had their heads shaved. As
soon as she says shaved, she pushes my hand away, as though I
had touched her hair without
permission. With a few quick hand movements she makes a plait
and fastens it into a knot
135 again with a hairclip. She sighs. She had to lie on a table, she
says, they gave her an injection in the vagina, it burned beyond
belief and was probably because of women’s troubles. One woman
had just had hers, it had run all down her legs. The men in uniform
looked at her as if she were an animal, she was older of course.
The younger ones had had problems because of their beauty, they
were fetched from the twelfth block, in which they had been locked
up for
140 four weeks, and brought back distraught. Every day in the morning
and evening, two hours of roll call, confusion, crying, it took a long
time for them to count everyone, and the disparaging looks, what
we were still worth, what work we were still suitable for.
I catch myself scouring Grandmother’s figure in search of the
looks that they examined. I see the foreign eyes spreading over
her body like a net and consider whether there are traces
145 left on the skin from the terror. But the horror doesn’t show itself. It leaves no
visible scars.
Grandmother’s body sticks out like a skeleton; the diagonal
collarbone, the shoulders, the protruding tip of the spine at the
bottom of the neck bone, the ribcage, the upper arm bone, over
which the skin stretches like loose gauze. She has no muscles
anymore and no bosom, look, she says, and lifts her undershirt, my
bosom is one big wrinkle. I look with one eye, but
150 Grandmother purses her lips and says I shouldn’t be horrified by
an old woman. She had seen many naked women in her life, there
you stopped going to any trouble. She had seen women in all
possible conditions, my God, she says, old and young, frail and
beaten, whose skin hung down in shreds, dead women who had
had skin like paper, like yellowed paper, she says, you could have
peeled them off their skeletons. At first she had to clean the
latrines, you
155 can’t imagine how it stank. The smell stuck to her, she couldn’t
even wash herself. Angela Piskernik, the professor from
Eisenkappel, had got herself very worked up about her stench, but
what could she have done? Dirt is dirt and shit is shit, says
Grandmother.

She runs her hands over her thighs, which are covered up to the
knees in cotton underwear, and tries to stretch her back, using her
legs to support herself. She asks me to take off her
160 stockings. I get off the bed and pull the woollen stockings off her
legs. The pattern of her garter starts to show on her lower leg,
Grandmother says her legs have swollen up a lot since the camp.
In the camp it had started with swollen, heavy legs, with pains in
her joints and bones, so that sometimes she could barely stand.
She asks whether I want to look at her painful big toe. I bend down
to her feet.
165 Your big toenail looks like a boiled sweet, I say, and
Grandmother laughs at the comparison. Like a sweet, she says
amused, I didn’t know I had sweets on my feet! Her skin
is bluish below the knees, the capillaries hover over her calves and
shins like a mesh and cover her feet in a maze, it looks like a river
delta.
Before we lie down, shall we have some biscuits, Grandmother
asks after a pause.
170 I nod and she fetches a tin of biscuits out of the kitchen
cupboard. She likes the crumbly ones best, that melt in the mouth
instantly, she says, and unwraps her false teeth from the tissue
she has left on the little bedside table, as always. Grandmother
only uses her teeth for eating. After Grandfather’s death she
decided not to wear false teeth anymore, whatever for, she says,
she’s not going to get a man now anyway. The teeth should be
within reach, she
175 often puts them in the pocket of her apron. False teeth are mostly
useless in your mouth, she claims.
Extract 3
180 Father hasn’t come back. I walk back up the road and shout
cautiously, ati, Father, but the water from the creek swallows up
my cries. At the end of the plain I notice a dark patch on the slope.
As I get closer, I see Father lying on his back in a pile of snow.
Are you not well, I ask, should I fetch help?
Let me rest, Father says. Just let me rest. I don’t want to go on, I
just want to rest.
185 You’ll catch cold, I say, you’ll get frostbite, you have to stand up! I
don’t have to do anything at all, says Father, I’m staying here.
Sveršina showed me how to do it. Sveršina can sleep in the snow
like a partisan, and I can do it too.
And your gloves, I ask.
Under my head, says Father.

190 My patience runs out. I reach for Father’s hand and pull him up,
get up, get up, I scold him, but Father lies down in the snow again
and folds his arms. If everyone’s going out of control, why don’t I
too, I think desperately, and I scream, imitating Hitler, stand up,
comrade! What are you playing at, get up, get in line, move, march,
march! And I raise my hand in a Hitler salute. Father laughs a
laugh that sounds like shouting. He stands up straight away and
195 salutes. Heil Hitler, he says and shakes, with laughter this time. I
turn around, goose stepping, and start belting out a partisan song.
Father staggers behind me and cries, Heil Hitler, Heil
Hitler, ta je pa dobra, that’s good, that’s really good! I manage to
get the tractor started before he gets in and sits down. I carry on
singing the partisan song tirelessly, even during the journey,
because I’m afraid that Father will want to get out again as soon as
I stop. But he’s 200 satisfied with my plan. He laughs, conducts,
sings, raps me on the shoulders and repeats, the
two of us, we’re the real idiots, we’re the fighters for freedom and
bread!
At home, in bed, I can’t fall asleep for ages. The room is cold, I’m
chilled to the bone and the cold gives me a rash on my arms and
legs. The frost has crawled under my skin. It wants to
205 spend the winter in my body, it seems to me, and I’m too exhausted to refuse.
In the night I dream that I run away from home. I wait for a train
which is heavily delayed coming up the mountain, and just catch
the last carriage. I lie face down on the roof of the last
compartment so that we can get up the steep mountainside faster,
because the man who doesn’t want to let me go is lying in wait
below the mountain top and wants to pull me out of
210 the moving train. He has carried out a bloodbath in our house. He
has slain all the children and slit their throats. And my father
mustn’t see me, he mustn’t know anything about me. I see him
underneath me inside the compartment, lying in a hospital bed,
and worry that he might fall out of bed. He is very small and very
delicate.
215 The journeys between Vienna and my hometown evolve into

expeditions through time, trips through different time periods and
versions of history that exist alongside each other. The closer I
come to my hometown, the more I get the feeling that I am
travelling into the past, and the further away I get, the faster the
hours and days fly by. In this back and forth I feel like I’m being
hurled through time, that I’ve fallen out of the future or that I’m a
late arrival.
220
Once I start studying, I see the social and political factors behind
Father’s cries for help. I start to think in terms of public contexts.

I’m certain that it is this country’s attitude towards the past that
makes our family histories seem so strange and unfold in such
loneliness and isolation. They have almost no connection with the
present. Between the alleged and actual
225 history of Austria there stretches a no man’s land, which you can
get lost in. I see myself swinging back and forth between a dark,
forgotten section of a cellar in the house of Austria and its bright,
well-furnished rooms. Nobody in the bright rooms seems to
suspect, or to be able to imagine, that there are people in this
building who have been locked away by politics in the cellar of the
past, where they are attacked and poisoned by their own
memories.
230
In a Slovenian anthology I unexpectedly find two poems by Katrca
Miklav, my grandfather’s sister who had been saved from the
concentration camp, and am strangely touched. As though a foetus
of memory, forgotten until now, had moved in my thoughts. I am
frightened that it exists. I read in the annotations that three days
before her death, Katrca had written a few
235 poems on little scraps of paper and passed them on to a fellow
prisoner from Eisenkappel, Angela Piskernik, whom she believed
would appreciate the lines of poetry since she respected the
written word. After the war, Angela published the poems in a
Slovenian cultural journal. So they could stay preserved, it says.
240 After being published several times in journals, my first poetry

collection is going to be released. I can hardly believe it – a book
that brings my Slovenian poems together into something bold that
could give my life as a student a new direction. It would force me
into more clarity, more precision, I hope. It would delay the
disappearance of the Slovenian language from Carinthia, I think
enthusiastically, creating the illusion that this language still
245 has a function.
Cultural and political considerations are easier for me than saying I

in my texts. My I doesn’t say I. It plays on its own stage. It speaks in
encoded languages, it is hidden under old and new costumes, at random
it tries on the clothes of languages that it likes or that appear suitable in
250 the search for its true face. It rummages in the depths of
explanations and meanings.
Relentlessly I practise at least hearing the sound of my thoughts,

recognising it among the multitude of other sounds. As soon as I
perceive it, it gets lost, because it is too weak, because it is
drowned out by the clamour of voices, by the struggle to get myself
together.

255 Convinced all the same that I’ve heard the sound, I can no longer
get away from it, constantly seek an encounter with it, yearn for a
collision in which sparks fly and we could conceive a melody that
unites us in wondrous fashion.
260 In my third year, Father writes me one of his rare letters. Hello,
Mic, he writes. He is alone at home, Mother is at a spa. So he had
to write me a letter and ask me how I am. He’s not well. He sends
me the post that was sent to my old address, and money. I should
do what I want with it. He finishes with the sentence, was really
nice, best wishes from the worthless one, od ničvrednega, he
writes, as if he had crossed himself out with the signature.
265
At the start of the summer, a boyfriend brings me back home.
Father is beside himself.
Once the man has said goodbye and Mother has shown me her
new flowerbeds, Father locks the front door of the house and
leaves us standing outside. He shouts from the kitchen window
that he doesn’t want to let a tramp and a whore like me into the
house. I’m so hurt
270 that I threaten to call the police if he doesn’t let us in the house
immediately. I can do without a father like you, I scream.
Report me if you want, Father yells back. If all you can think of is
reporting me, you can stay outside, and your mother too.
He’s jealous, Mother says, we’ll wait and climb in through the
kitchen window later. I
275 wonder if I should feel sorry for myself or if the situation is too
bizarre to be taken seriously. To my relief, the kitchen window is
ajar. Mother leads me into the garden once again, and when we
come back the door is locked as before. I find an old milking stool
in the shed and place it under the window so I can climb over the
flowerpots on the window sill and into the kitchen.
280
Father sits on the bench by the hearth in the living room and looks
through the south-facing window at the ditch on the opposite side. I
walk up to him.
Give me the key, I say. He throws me a wild, reproachful look.
Go away, he hisses, go off to the police!
285 Where is the key, I ask forcefully.
Here, he says and throws the front door key on the floor.
I pick the keys up and look at Father askance.
Go off to the police, clear off, he says.

At this moment I am overcome by a wild, rebellious anger. Not on
my watch, I think, not
290 on my watch! I walk up to Father on a sudden impulse and stroke
his head twice with my hand. I stroke his hair gently, as if I were
carrying out an experiment. Father’s head gives way under my
palm. His head lowers to his chest as though his neck muscles had
suddenly stopped working. He swallows a sigh, yes Mic, he says,
yes, and then, fucking life, kurc, pa to življenje!
295 For a moment I’m appeased. I could smile, but the smile on my
face turns into a mask of outrage, indignation and compassion. It’s
so easy to break Father, I think briefly, so easy. But
I underestimated him, because Father won’t let himself be changed
by me.
In the night I’m standing in a bathroom in front of the sink and have
been instructed to
300 administer a pill to every man who enters the room. I think I know
the men who come in. I give each of them a pill, which they take willingly.
Immediately afterwards the men double over from cramps and die. After a
while I start to have doubts about my killing mission. I don’t want to have
to keep watching them kick the bucket. A man I don’t know comes
towards me. It’s the man I’ve been waiting for. We embrace each other
and sink to the floor
305 in complete devotion. A window opens above the sink. Half of my
relatives look in and point their fingers at us. I stop the lovemaking
and walk around the corner into a palace hall in which a large table
is decorated festively. Mother and Father sit at the head of the
table and invite me to dinner.
310 Extract 4
On the day of Father’s funeral, the pallbearers appear early in the

morning. They are the hunters from Lepena. We eat next to the
deceased, whose coffin was closed by this point, it’s soup again.
Pepi says the old prayer one more time. The coffin is pushed
through the living
315 room window and placed on the threshold. The dead man is called
upon to take leave of his home and from his family. With slow
steps he is carried over the farm, and once again he is called upon
to break away from his meadows, fields and hills.
After Mass, as the gravedigger lets Father slide into his grave and
the coffin reaches the
320 ground, I think I hear someone breathing out, a breath which
springs out either from me or the coffin. A breath that really erupts

out of a small, dark throat and blasts off into the distance. Terrified,
I look into the grave. Is that my sigh of relief or is it Father’s, is it
my relief at having finally got his death behind me, or is it Father’s
faltering, amassed, suppressed breath which is now getting air,
which breaks loose from any kind of grip and
325 floats away?
Agreed, I agree, I think during the drive into town.
I dream that the place I’m fleeing from is frozen. The sky is a
glacier in which the ditch in the valley appears as a mirage. Crystal
edges weave cracks of light through the icy surface. A
330 frozen airborne tank has enclosed the valley, which lies beneath
and remains confined. Crabs, snails, jellyfish, leeches, worms and
dappled amphibians crawl above the frozen surface. The water
which has settled on the hills, trees and houses is starting to move
in its crystal disguise, which, protecting itself, has nestled into
everything loose and flaky. The next
moment, at the slightest breath of wind, it will evaporate, blow
away, scatter and drain away, 335 I think. Nothing can remain as it
is.
Later I hear a noise rushing from the bottom of the ditch, getting
louder and louder, and suddenly see the water rising. I say to my
brother, come on, we have to go, we have to leave the house! We
hurry up to the woods, over the hill with the old plum trees, like
back when Father followed us with the gun. We observe how the
house fills with water, hear the rock
340 break down deep in the mass of the mountain. The mineral
deposits are washed away, nothing more goes up, the tunnels are
flooded. Then the water drains away and we return to our living rooms.
Water marks and streaks of earth stand out on the walls, the flood has
painted itself on the wall. The windows are closed and the panes
undamaged. I am surprised that the windows were able to withstand the
torrents of water, and say to my brother, we have 345 to clean up, clean
everything up!
After Father’s funeral, my contemplation turns into numbness.

350 Standing at his grave, I force myself into the familiar silence, the
open-endedness that defined our conversations.
At home we sit opposite each other, each sibling complaining
about their own father, each with their own father figure around
their neck, and stare at each other, tired from the weight of our
father, exhausted by the stories and memories, which, when we tell
each other, always

355 sound like accusations, you don’t know at all, or, you have no idea
what Father and I, and so on. And the different echoes and
sensations, the changing rebellion, grief mixed with
disappointment.
Mother has reached the peak of an exhaustion lasting for months,

if not years, that makes her
360 wander around the house again, tense and irritable. She thinks
she’s over it, thinks she has reached an ending. She feels
responsible for everything and underappreciated by us, as
witnesses to her struggles. She kept Father company as he died.
His last look was meant for her, she says and shudders with
dismay, with everything that is unresolvable and unpronounceable.
365
I child of Father and my childhood father, ridiculous, just ridiculous,
to chain myself and my life to the past, to the old pain, because of
him, to put myself at risk, I think and want to leave everything
untouched, to push the repressed, the binding, the burdensome
away from me. I should be able to lie around for a while, I decide,
and get older by myself.
370
But I’m not left alone. In Carinthia, which has forgotten about itself,
I learn not to forget. The ground on which I stand must have a
hidden underbelly that is saturated with what has been, from which
I seem to grow, into which I am thrown back. Constantly recurring,
the country lapses into a frenzy in which it conjures up a history
which is nothing other than a phantom of
375 justification, in which it considers itself to be in the right. Everyone
who was caught under the wheels of National Socialism remains
excluded from this self-portrait.
Sometimes my thoughts scare me, everything is still there, I
think, everything. Everything festers, visibly or invisibly, audibly or
silently within me and around me, as though I’m a flashing microbe
of consciousness, a wheel that becomes a bouncing ball and
chain, a field
380 that blossoms or disintegrates. I seem to be stuck in the centre of
the contrast that was brought about by Nazism and the resistance
to it from the people of this country, the contrast which is absolute
like pain. Only the ones who suffer from it can feel it.
385 In Father’s little bedside cabinet, where his worn-out clarinet is, I
find Mici’s blue songbook and, stored underneath, my
Grandmother’s red, stained camp book.
I sit on the bed in a daze. The little inheritance lies heavy in my
hand. The enthusiastic Mici noted down letters in verse, songs and
poems in her little book for her lovers and for her aunts Katrca,

Urša, Leni, Malka and Angela, the language written down as an
ecstasy of
390 sound, as interrupted singing. The only thing that’s left of her.
I start to read Grandmother’s camp book, which I often held in my

hands as a child.
Memories of Grandmother’s room awaken, memories of the
unusual, milky light in which the inconceivable events she told me
about dissolved in many moments of closeness, which
395 circulated in the air like fine dust, and one night later were already
neglected subjects, as if she had never stirred anything up.
At the beginning, Grandmother writes in neat handwriting, her

words are clumsy, intended not for writing, but for telling. Although
she could barely write, and the sentences are often
400 misspelt or ungrammatical, she must have been convinced that she had to
record her story.
Je bilo u tork opoldne 12 Oktober je locitev od hise in od temalih
Sinov Tonček in Zdravko.
Toje bilo hudo zamene ker jas nisem kriva nic. It was midday on
Tuesday 12th October, when
I was separated from the house and from the little boys Tonček
and Zdravko. That was bad for me because I’m innocent, writes
Grandmother.
405 She was detained in Eisenkappel prison for two hours, then
proceeded to Klagenfurt, after three weeks, on 2nd November, at six in
the morning, from Klagenfurt to Maribor. It was wonderful, čudovito, she
writes, how the children in the street spat at us and screamed terribly. In
Maribor they were still given an evening meal, turnips and potatoes. At
three in the morning there was good coffee and good bread. You could
take a slice of bread, a bit of 410 curd cheese and a spoonful of jam as
provisions for the journey to Vienna. In Vienna, Ven, Grandmother writes,
she had to sleep on the cement floor. The food was bad, there was only
potato soup, but no spoon, she had to slide the bits of potato out of the
soup with her finger. Ten days later they carried on towards Prague,
Prak, Grandmother writes, as they had been infested with bugs, the food
was bad, no evening meal, only a small amount of coffee in the
415 morning, then on and on, no food, no water, to Berlin. They had
been left without food for one night and one day. Still, it was good
that she was ill and couldn’t swallow because of her sore throat.
Then they proceeded to Ravensbrück, it was strange there, she
notes, humans are not animals!
420 For the sad events that would occur in the time that followed, as
she notes, there are no words. For one and a half years in the
concentration camp, she needs just three small sides, then she

writes rajža, the journey, on 28th April, referring to the beginning of
the odyssey that brought them to Lepena months later. On 14 th
May, Mirow, the first place name before Wesenberg and
Rheinsberg, already in erratic handwriting that foreshadows her
agitation.
425 The names of the places where she stays or travels through on the
journey home, she writes down by ear. The longer the journey
home goes on, the more the names of the towns and villages are
broken up. She writes in the moving cattle car, later in the train
compartment. The places of survival look bombed out, how the
cities might have looked, from those
Grandmother talked about. 15th August, Dresden, Tresten, writes
Grandmother. After some
430 barely decipherable names, Bratislava appears, spelled correctly,
then Budapest, on 24th August Subotica, was in high spirits, she
writes. There was lots of meat to eat and a lot of brandy, the 25th
spent in the bath, danced and celebrated at the weekend, like she
told me, later she writes Belkad, by which she means Belgrade,
nice town, Grandmother states, 30th August a sad morning at the
train station in Zagreb, then Vellenje, and Slovenkrac for Slovenj
435 Gradec, then Hrevelje for the Hrevelnik estate in Lepena. She
concludes her travel report with the half-sentence, home that was
fear yes or no, doma toje blo strah jabol ne.
I place the photos that she passed on to me on my desk.

Grandmother’s feelings rush
outwards in her early years. She looks at the camera with the
confidence of a farmer’s
440 daughter. Her pride and her arduously subdued cockiness are
almost palpable. In the 1920s she wears bright dresses and
patterned blouses, whose collars are all lined with lace. After
several miscarriages she seems more serious and plump. As a
married woman, she wears dark dresses with cotton stockings on
special occasions or smart suits with leather bags, leather gloves
and custom-made shoes. In summer she tries to cover up her thin
hair with straw hats
445 and cast a little shade over her severe face, like she told me once.
Then I was still proud, she said, but already aged from the work,
the grind.
After the war, Grandmother’s eyes glow inwardly. Her smile looks
tired, exhausted, never lively again. Compared to earlier, her
posture has lost its assurance. The straw hats are replaced with
headscarves, which are tied exactly under her chin so that the tip
of the
450 headscarf protrudes stiffly from her neck. In her elegant
headscarves of shiny viscose or silk, she imagines something. She
has lost a lot of weight and wears cardigans or waistcoats under
her suits because she is always too cold. In the wedding photos,

with her angular face and her large, hook-shaped nose, amongst
the cheerful company she seems like a relic from the past that
doesn’t want to submit to the present. Her figure makes it look as
though she has been
455 repeatedly expelled from life, then fetched back, and had resumed
her life, if not out of joy, at least out of loyalty, not out of the
deepest conviction, but out of duty.
At home Grandmother wears a cotton headscarf knotted at the
neck, shabby dresses, stockings and patterned aprons, which are
replaced with satin aprons and smarter blouses only on Sundays
and public holidays. There was a time when she believed she had
to
460 represent something, later I felt like I was cancelled out, she says. The photos
also show
Father’s transformation from child to adolescent. How his face
changed following
Grandmother’s arrest and the police interrogation, how his childlike
nature withdrew into something hard and bitter and then
disappeared, as though the wound placed itself within Father and
occupied him like a foreign body.
465
One time I tell Tonči about Grandmother’s camp book and my
helpless circuits around the family’s past. He likes hearing about it
and brings me a folder, remarking that he thinks Grandmother’s
records are in good hands with me.
470 In the folder, under old bills and letters I find Grandmother’s school
report from 1914, in which it is mentioned that she had been
excused from 256 half days of classes, and had 23 half days of
unexplained absences. How many days did she go to school
altogether? I find the
Klagenfurt regional court’s recognition from December 1947 that
property confiscated by the Third Reich would be returned to its
rightful owner, to my grandfather Michael, including
475 Grandmother’s spoon from Ravensbrück and her Certificate of
Residence, issued on her 41st birthday, on 6th September 45, after
her return from the concentration camp; letters from her friends
from the camp as well, her request from 1950 to be granted
“Opferrente”, monthly compensation for wrongful imprisonment, the
Carinthian state government’s decision that her request to be
awarded the money had been rejected by the Carinthian
commission, as the
480 official medical report concerning damage to her health could not
be established in the required format; then Grandmother’s appeal
against this decision, written by someone literate, the list of
ailments from which she suffered due to her time in the camp,
nervous disorders, shortness of breath, painful and swollen legs

and joints, she was unable to work for days at a time, severe
headaches, heavy cramps during menstruation, all of which she
had
485 told the police officer on duty who had composed the survey report,
she notes, and I imagine the situation, where Grandmother had to
describe her suffering to a disinterested police officer who doesn’t
speak Slovenian; the response from the Ministry of Social Affairs in
Vienna, end of May 1951, that she had been awarded the
Opferrente, Grandmother’s inquiry on October 6th 1951 as to why
her Opferrente had not been paid out, addressed to the office
490 of the Carinthian state government, a letter from November 1953 to
the Carinthian state government asking why the compensation for
wrongful imprisonment she had been awarded had not been
transferred, the response from the Carinthian state government
that the decision to pay compensation for wrongful imprisonment
had only been made final in October 1953 and would be submitted
to the Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs for payment, then, one
495 page later, the house blessing as well, surprisingly written by Great
Grandmother, which is so powerful that it can protect people from
storms, thunder and lightning, fire and hail, curses, slander and the
plague, but not from anything else.
The protective barriers that I tried to stack up between myself and

my family collapse all over
500 again. For a moment I fear being completely overrun by the past,
losing myself under its weight. Then I decide to bring together, in
written form, the strays, the remembered and the told, the present
and the absent, make myself new from the memory, write myself a
body that
could be put together from air and opinion, from scents and smells,
from voices and sounds, from the past, from the dreamed and from
traces.
505 I could retrieve the irreversible and find that it has returned in a
different form, that it has changed itself and me. I could restructure
those who have fallen apart or scattered, in order to let what is
underneath shine through. I could surround what has been with an
invisible body that seals it in and conquers it.
510
I decide to go to Ravensbrück, to the camp I had traversed so

many times in my mind that I think I know it. I want to pace through
Grandmother’s story once again, in order to say farewell to a
familiar place.
515

On the date Grandmother arrived in the concentration camp, I
enter the Strasse der Nationen in Fürstenberg an der Havel, the
road which leads to the camp.
The autumn landscape around me is repellent, it seems like the
past but is in fact the present, nothing but the present. I think of
Grandmother’s eyes, which might have flitted
520 across this landscape on the evening of November 13th. Did she
have time at the end of her journey to observe it, to have a good
look at the yellowish-brown, grey Brandenburg autumn, the yellow
leaves of the birch trees hanging off the branches like coloured
streamers? After a long time walking, the lake, Schwedtsee,
appears to my right with its stark, unmoving surface. All of a
sudden the commandant’s office is in front of me.
525 The first look through the camp gate, the bleakness, the square
which is empty of barracks, the black gravel, the rusty-red leaves,
the camp roads vacated, one lonely road lined with poplar trees.
The roll call area seems smaller than I had imagined, almost
modest in size. As a child, when
530 Grandmother told me about it, I had seen a vast field that stretched
to the horizon, a world of prisoners and dead people.
I circle the empty, flattened site of the former farm building. The
bath for the admission procedure, now a grass stain, the prisoners’
kitchen, the roll call area, now a field of gravel, the site of the
barracks, now nothing more than a patch of grass, block five to
seven is written
535 on the board, the sixth block, the political block, a spectre from
grandmother’s story, stood in the middle, behind the lime tree that
wasn’t there in those days. The Jewish block eleven next
to the twelfth block, in the front row the infirmary, behind it the
industrial courtyard, the tailoring shop. The Siemens site for regular
employment, the men’s camp and the camping site where people
waited to be gassed are neither visible nor accessible. The cell
prison, the
540 brick trinity of death, survived. It is now a museum, in which
Katrca’s verses are shown off above the names of the
Yugoslavians who died in Ravensbrück. The crematorium, the
cemetery, the gas chamber marked with a memorial stone,
survived as well.
Grandmother’s breathing lingers in my ears, as she spoke.
Čudno, čudno, what can happen to people, she said.
545
In the record office I find the list of arrivals from the evening of the
13th November 43, my
Grandmother’s name and prisoner number, the names of her
neighbours, of Paula

Maloveršnik, of the Pegrin farmers, the Kach women, Maria and
Anna Rotter, Polish women,
Jewish women, a Czech woman, I find the list of arrivals from 30 th
November 43, the day
550 Mici was brought to Ravensbrück. She was transferred together
with 64 women from Leipzig, by preventive detention prisoner
transport because of overcrowding in the police prison in Leipzig, in
a special transport to Fürstenberg. With her were women from
Ličkov,
Dnjepropetrovsk, Krowno, Krasnodar, Kursk, Glauchau, Karlovy
Vary, Wurzen,
Kaliningrad, Prague, Ebensee, Vienna, Pörtschach, from Ebriach,
from Lepena, from Koprein
555 and Waidisch, Magdalena from Kölich, the Mozgan farmer, Paul
Maria and her daughter, Paul Amalia, the Grubelnik Johanna from
Ebriach. I find Malka located with the Poles in block book sixteen.
In Ravensbrück the women from the trenches met with women

from all over Europe, dragged
560 from the Carinthian border into the centre of the war, in which the
lives of European women crossed paths, brought from the
seclusion of Carinthia into the jaws of death. What did the women
from the trenches have in common with the women from Poland,
Czechoslovakia, the Jewish women from Italy, Romania, Hungary,
with the women from France, Belgium,
Russia, Ukraine, Croatia, Latvia, Austria, Germany, Norway,
Serbia, Slovenia, Holland and
565 Denmark, the gypsies, what could they tell, originating from this
place where they had realised the scale of the war? I want to
imagine that the camp women could do more unifying things than
each formulate and dare to think about national histories.
I leave the camp grounds. I feel no relief as I let the door of the
commandant’s headquarters
570 close behind me, no sigh of relief, no comfort. This is the place that
had an impact on Grandmother, in whose magnetic field she lived, by
which she oriented herself, which defined her and to which her feelings
were drawn. Now the spectre is disappearing behind my back, a tiny
apparition, a fragile surface dissolving at the edges, under which the
history becomes dark, in which Grandmother’s stories sound like echoes
from long ago.
575

The angel of history will have flown over me. Its wings will have
cast a shadow over the camp grounds. I wasn’t able to see its
horrified face in the twilight, only briefly thought I had heard the
flapping of wings, heard a gust of wind in its angels’ wings, in
which the storms of the future were caught.
580 For a moment I feel like a child from whom time has run away,
time which slips behind me like an invisible, ponderous glacier over
everything that has ever happened, which buries everything that
seems unshakeable under it, ground and crushed. With every step
I go deeper into the present, bumping and crashing into me, I can
hear my voice, the voice of a friend who has not emerged from the
tangle of sentences for a long time, who stayed hidden.
585
The angel of oblivion must have forgotten to remove the traces of
the past from my memory. It has led me through a sea in which
fragments and remains swam. It has let my sentences collide with
drifting ruins and shards so that they hurt themselves, so that they
sharpen themselves. It has removed the little picture of an angel
from above my cot once and for all. I
590 won’t catch sight of this angel. It won’t have a shape. It will
disappear into books. It will be a story.
After many years, Grandmother comes back into my dream. I

hadn’t expected her and feel
595 caught out. She sits on the forest path behind our house and has
woven funnel-shaped canopies out of the wool she has spun, with
which she captures voices. They look like nerve cell trees. She
says she has already caught a few voices in her net. You just have
to be patient and not give up hope. The woven funnels are bigger
than her. I step towards her.
Grandmother uses her hand to indicate that I should be quiet. Not
so loud, she says, otherwise
600 you can’t hear anything.

Commentary
1. Brief
I have chosen to translate four extracts from Maja Haderlap’s 2011

novel Engel des
Vergessens as a sample translation to be sent to Seagull Books,
who will publish the novel in English. The novel has won numerous
literary awards, such as the Rauriser Literaturpreis and the Bruno-
Kreisky-Preis, while an extract from the text won the Ingeborg-
Bachmann-Preis in 2011. Although the prize-winning extract from
the novel has since been translated on the New Books in German
website, the entire work is yet to be published in English. However,
the text has already been published in French and Italian, and is
currently being translated into English for publication in 2016
(Stefan Diezmann, personal correspondence, 19th May 2015).
Seagull Books was chosen as the publisher since it regularly
publishes English translations of German-language novels as part
of its “German List” series (Seagull Books, 2015). Furthermore,
Seagull has previously published translations of a number of texts
that have similarities to Engel des Vergessens. Several of the
‘German List’ texts from the likes of Ingeborg Bachmann, Jurek
Becker and Franz Fühmann concern the Second World War, while
Seagull has also published German-language works from writers
with Eastern European backgrounds, such as Becker and Melinda
Nadj Abonji. I chose four extracts from the novel, from the
beginning, middle and end of the text, all of which are yet to be
published in English. I chose the four extracts in order to
demonstrate the wide range of stylistic features and translation
issues present in the source text. Additionally, the four extracts
chosen provide an insight into the content and overall themes of
the novel.
2. Translation-oriented source text analysis
Engel des Vergessens is a work of fiction by the Austrian author

Maja Haderlap. The work is partially based on the author’s own
experiences, with Haderlap stating “das Faktische sind die
Mosaiksteinchen, die dem Text zugrunde liegen. Was ich über
Verwandte und Nachbarn erzähle, ist tatsächlich passiert”

(Haderlap 2014, cited in Vansant 2014: 94). However, the author is
also keen to stress that the novel is a work of fiction, and not an
autobiography
(ibid.). According to Christiane Nord’s writing on communicative
function, the primary function of the ST is “expressive”, where “the
stylistic choices made by the author contribute to the meaning of
the text, producing an aesthetic effect on the reader” (Nord 1997:
38). As an expressive, creative text, the primary aim of the author
is to create an effective work of literature. The text was published
in German-speaking countries in 2011 by Wallstein Verlag, a
respected independent publisher of German-language fiction and
non-fiction. The intended readership of the ST is readers of
serious, literary fiction – the book has received acclaim from Die
Welt and the author Peter Handke, and has won a number of
German literary prizes. The text is fairly high-register and features
many of the hallmarks of expressive literature, such as unusual
metaphors, complex sentence structures and sophisticated
language, but generally does not require specialist knowledge.
However, Austrian German is used at numerous points in the text,
so certain words or phrases may be unfamiliar to some German
speakers. Small parts of the text are written in Slovenian, but are
almost always given a German translation. Additionally, certain
references in the text may be unfamiliar to readers – for example,
the text makes brief references to Slovene partisans during the
war, and the status of the Slovenian language in Carinthia. It is
unlikely, however, that this would have a significant impact on the
reader’s overall understanding of the text. The text assumes that
the reader will have some awareness of the role of the Nazis and
their use of concentration camps before and during the Second
World War.
The function of the target text will essentially be the same as the
ST – the TT will be an expressive work of literature, to be
published in 2015 by Seagull Books, an independent publisher
which has published a number of works by respected German-
language authors. Like the ST, the TT will be marketed to readers
of sophisticated, literary fiction – Seagull
Books tends to publish serious, “highbrow” literature rather than
popular fiction. The target reader is perhaps less likely to be aware
that Carinthia is a region of Austria with a number of
Slovenian speakers, and may also be less familiar with some of the
novel’s major themes, such as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”
(coming to terms with the past) and Austria’s post-war attitudes to
National Socialism. On the whole, this should not affect the
translation process too greatly, but the text does feature a number
of specific Austrian and Slovenian cultural references that will be
unfamiliar to an English audience, meaning that adaptations or
additional explanations may be necessary at certain points in the
target text. As with the ST, the target reader will be expected to

have some awareness of the Nazis and the concentration camps,
but it is highly likely that the target reader will have sufficient
knowledge of these subjects to understand the story.
3. Overall approach
There is disagreement among many translation theorists regarding

the best approach to literary translation. A number of notable
theorists argue that literary translation should be source text-
oriented, prioritising the unique voice and mode of expression of
the author above all else. Antoine Berman (2012: 241) has
criticised the homogenisation and “naturalisation” of literary texts in
translation. He argues that literary translators frequently tone down
the most unique, creative aspects of texts in order to render them
more accessible to the target reader, with the result being that the
impact of the original writing “tends to be effaced” in translation
(ibid.: 251). These views influenced Lawrence Venuti’s theory of
“foreignisation”, which was an approach I considered initially for the
project. In a foreignised translation, the translator aims to
“recognise the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts”
(Venuti 1995: 41). Venuti (1998:10) suggests that the reader of a
literary text should always be aware that they are reading a
translation, potentially creating an “alienating” experience as the
target text ignores the conventions of the target language and the
needs of the target reader. While it is true that the author’s unique
voice is important in an expressive literary text, I decided that the
translation approaches favoured by Venuti and Berman would not
be suitable for my project. Since I am translating the text for
publication by Seagull Books, the TT must follow the conventions
of this publisher. Having read a translation of
After Kurukshetra, a Bengali text by Mahāśvetā Debī, which was
published by Seagull Books, I found that the text was very lucid
and readable. While the source culture was not entirely effaced
from the text – for example, cultural references such as “janavritta”
and “rajavritta” were retained without additional explanation – I felt
that the text on the whole did not suggest that a foreignising or
alienating approach had been used (Debī 2005: 10). I also
consulted another book published by Seagull – Fly Away Pigeon,
the English translation of
Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Tauben fliegen auf. Again, while the
translator has not completely ffaced the unique style of the ST
author, the text as a whole could not reasonably be described as
“alienating” or overly difficult to read.
Another similar approach I considered was Peter Newmark’s

“semantic translation”. Although his ideas are less radical than

those of Venuti and Berman, Newmark (1988: 16) also emphasises
the importance of remaining faithful to the original author and
source culture, stating that “serious imaginative literature” should
be “translated closely, matching the writing, good or bad, of the
original”. Yet in being so faithful to the source text, semantic
translation prioritises “plain one-to-one translations” in expressive
texts wherever possible (ibid.: 36). Although Newmark is correct
that the author’s voice is important in expressive literature, I felt
that utilising the rigid “one-to-one translations” that Newmark
recommends for semantic translation could easily result in a TT
that is less fluid and idiomatic than the ST, and so I decided
against semantic translation.
An alternative approach recommended by Newmark when

translating any kind of text is
“communicative translation”. According to Newmark,
communicative translation prioritises creating an “equivalent effect”
in the TT, rather than the more literal approach favoured by
semantic translation (ibid.: 45). While communicative translation
still places an emphasis on accuracy and on faithful translation, it
allows the translator more freedom than semantic translation,
ensuring that the TT is “comprehensible to the readership” (ibid.:
47). While Newmark has expressed a preference for semantic
translation when working with serious literature, a number of other
theorists favour Newmark’s “communicative translation” for
expressive texts. Sergio Viaggio (2008: 185) is one theorist who
recommends communicative translation for literature, stating that
“semantic closeness should never be the translator’s main
purpose…what he should at all times strive for is equivalent
aesthetic effect”. Albrecht Neubert (2003: 71) has also pointed out
the importance of communicative translation, writing that “literary
as well as non-literary translations have communicative intentions
or functions” which must be respected by the translator. Taking all
of these views into consideration, I decided that communicative
translation would be the best overall approach for the project –
Newmark recommends that the translator stays as loyal to the
source text as possible, thus retaining elements of the author’s
own style and the source culture, but communicative translation
also gives the translator freedom to ensure that the text will be
accessible to the target reader. As Susan Bassnett (2011: 18)
points out, “most translators want to produce works that are going
to be read, and they want to write well” – a communicative
approach means that the translator can prioritise the creation of an
effective work of literature in translation.
4. Anticipated problems

There are a number of translation problems associated with literary
texts. The primary concern is producing an effective work of
imaginative literature in English – Clifford E.
Landers (2001: 8) states that a literary translator should aim to
“produce a translation that approximates the SL text or stands as a
literary work in its own right”. To do this, the translator must pay
attention to numerous aspects of the ST – such as the author’s
writing style or use of imagery and metaphors – all of which
present potential problems in Engel des
Vergessens. In addition, Haderlap’s text presents the issue of
conveying specific cultural references and language that is specific
to certain countries or regions. The punctuation and sentence
construction is also very distinctive in the ST, as the author often
favours lengthy, comma-heavy sentences and does not use
speech marks. This may cause problems when translating into a
language where such stylistic choices are very unconventional.
5. Issues Encountered
5.1. Word level
5.1.1. Regional language
At several points in the text, Haderlap uses language which is

specific to certain countries or regions. Austrian German is used to
describe food items in two of the four extracts, while other Austrian
words such as “Spitalsbett” (line 353) and “Nachtkästchen” (line
622) are also mentioned in the ST. This presents a translation
problem as a direct English translation of Austrian vocabulary will
inevitably lose its Austrian connotations. Due to this, Clifford E.
Landers (ibid.: 117) argues that “the translator must recognise that
dialect, at least at the level of one-to-one transference, is
untranslatable”. However, while precise equivalents may be difficult
– or even impossible – to achieve, there are ways of representing
country- or regionspecific language in translation that take a less
literal approach. For example, Sándor Hervey
(1995: 85) states that “cultural transplantation” can be a successful
solution to the problem, replacing region-specific or culture-specific
aspects of the ST with language that is specific to a particular
region in the target culture, such as a Cockney accent or rhyming
slang in
English. However, Hervey (ibid.) also writes that “this might be
quite inappropriate in the light of the contents of the ST” – in the
case of Haderlap’s text, it is arguable that the content and themes
of the entire novel are too heavily rooted in Austrian and Slovenian
history and culture to be replaced with regional English variations.

Alternatively, Maria T. Sanchez (2009: 202) suggests that brief
additions or explanations in the text may be better solutions, giving
the example of “he/she said in his/her regional dialect” as a
potential addition to dialogue, in order to communicate that a
regional accent or dialect is being used.
Austrian German features in dialogue once in the second extract of

the ST. This is when the word “Malzzuckerl” (line 273) is used by
the narrator. While ordinarily, Sanchez’s solution could resolve the
problem of Austrian German in dialogue, here it is not an
appropriate solution. It is implied earlier in the extract that the
conversation is in fact in Slovenian – so even though an Austrian
word is used in the novel, the characters would not actually be
speaking German with Austrian accents or in an Austrian dialect. In
addition, this word presents another translation problem due to the
fact that “Malzzuckerl” is also a culturespecific reference – an
Anglophone reader will probably not be familiar with “malt sweets”
or “malt bonbons”. Therefore, merely indicating that the narrator or
her grandmother is speaking with an accent would not be sufficient
to make the translation of this word comprehensible to the target
reader. Although “Malzzuckerl” could be translated as a
“traditional Austrian sweet” or “Austrian malt sweet”, I felt that
these options would not be appropriate since it is necessary to
create convincing dialogue – an Austrian would be very unlikely to
say in conversation that something resembles “a traditional
Austrian sweet” as opposed to simply “a sweet”. As a result, I
decided to sacrifice the effect of the Austrian German here in
favour of prioritising the image that is being conveyed – the idea
that the grandmother’s toenail looks like a sweet. Therefore, I
translated “Malzzuckerl” as “boiled sweet” (line 165) in order to
ensure that the simile would be easily understood by target
readers.
At other points in the text, the Austrian German could be

considered a vital aspect of the ST that must be represented in
translation. Peter Fawcett (1997: 120) explains that “literature often
uses social or regional variability as a means of characterisation”,
the effect of which would be lost if the translator does not attempt
to convey this in the TT. This loss of effect would be particularly
significant at the beginning of the text, since the use of language
allows the ST reader some insight into the novel’s setting – Austria
and Carinthia are not mentioned by name until much later in the
text. With certain words that appear early in the text, the problem
can be solved using what Clifford E. Landers (2001: 94) terms
“interpolation”, where the translator adds “a parenthetical word or
phrase” by way of explanation for an unfamiliar term. In the first
extract, the word “Heidenmehl” (line 29) is used instead of the
standard German “Buchweizenmehl”. This can be translated
simply as “buckwheat flour”, but whereas the ingredient is

commonly used in Carinthia to make a regional dish called “Sterz”,
buckwheat flour is not so popular in the UK (Ichkoche.at, 2015).
Therefore, I decided to use interpolation here, translating the word
as “traditional Carinthian buckwheat flour” (line 25). While this is a
slightly wordier solution, it has two advantages – allowing the
novel’s setting to be made more apparent while also giving the
reader a small insight into the source culture.
5.1.2. Slovenian language
The Slovenian language appears at numerous points in the text,

distinguished from the German with the use of italics. Almost every
time that Slovenian is used, the narrator translates the Slovenian
directly into German – for example, “knjiga od zapora Maria H., the
prison book of Maria H” (line 152-153). Since the German
translations can easily be rendered in English, I have opted to
replicate the use of the Slovenian language in my translation, in
order to retain the ST’s cultural links to Slovenia in the TT.
Furthermore, Seagull’s English translation of Tauben fliegen auf
replicates Abonji’s use of Serbo-Croatian in the same way,
suggesting that my choice complies with the conventions of the
target publisher (see Appendix 1).
Although the use of Slovenian generally did not provide significant

translation issues, there is one notable point in the text where the
narrator does not give an obvious explanation of a
Slovenian word. On the very first page of the novel, the word
“Malada” (line 14) is used. While the German-speaking reader
could easily infer the meaning of the word – in this case, the
“Malada” is the “Apfelmarmelade” (line 12) which is mentioned in
the previous sentence
– it may not be completely clear to all readers that “Malada” is the
jam. There is also another problem with the use of the word
“Malada”, linked to the previously mentioned fact that the novel
uses language specific to Austria, Slovenia or Carinthia in the
opening pages in order to convey the text’s setting. While German
readers will not necessarily know that “Malada” is a
Slovenian word, they will at least be aware that it is not German.
Yet without further explanation, English readers with no knowledge
of the German language may not recognise that “Malada” is not a
German word. To combat these problems, I have translated the
beginning of the sentence as “The Slovenian word Malada is
written on the apple jam labels” (line 14-15). In this way, I have
retained the use of the Slovenian language while also making it
clearer to the target reader that a language other than German is
being used. By preceding

“labels” with “apple jam”, I have made the link between the
“Malada” and the “Apfelmarmelade” more obvious in order to avoid
any potential confusion as to what
“Malada” is.
5.1.3. Cultural references
The majority of cultural references in the source text also relate to

the use of Austrian German or Slovenian, which I have discussed
in previous sections. However, there are three notable concepts in
the text which are not Austrian German, yet are culture-specific
terms – the “schwarze Küche” (line 3), the “Auszugshäuschen”
(line 78) and the “Opferrente” (line 782). Since these terms do not
have direct English equivalents, it is necessary to find a way of
making these concepts comprehensible for the target reader.
To find a solution for cultural references, I consulted Clifford E.

Landers’ advice on translating words specific to the source culture.
Landers (2001: 94) suggests three possible ways of dealing with
cultural references – footnotes, omission and interpolation.
However, Landers (ibid.) criticises the use of footnotes, suggesting
that they “break the flow, disturbing the continuity” of a text, while
also noting that they are much less common in English literary
translations than they are in other languages such as French. Due
to this, I decided against using footnotes in my text. When referring
to “omission”, Landers (ibid.: 95) does not mean deleting the
reference completely, but instead omitting an explanation, thus
“leaving the reader to his own devices”. While Landers (ibid.)
argues that this may be “the best alternative” in some cases, such
as with references to money, not all theorists agree. Peter
Newmark argues that a communicative, explanatory approach is
the only possible way of dealing with culture-specific terms. He
writes that simply transferring culture-specific phrases to the TT
without explanation “blocks comprehension, it emphasises the
culture and excludes the message”, going as far as to suggest that
“it is not a translation procedure at all” (Newmark 1988: 96).
Instead, Newmark (ibid.) states that the “most accurate translation
procedure” is what he terms “componential analysis”, an approach
closely related to Landers’ interpolation, where the translator adds
a brief explanation to the source text term.
As previously mentioned, I decided that interpolation was the best

option for conveying the use of Austrian language early in the text.
Similarly, I felt that interpolation was also the best method for
representing the cultural reference “schwarze Küche” at the
beginning of the text. Omission here is not a satisfactory solution
as even if the target reader understood the

German, a “black kitchen” or “smoke kitchen” gives no real
indication of what the “schwarze
Küche” actually is. Therefore, in order to make the target reader
understand the reference, a brief explanation was necessary when
the kitchen is first mentioned. I opted for a similar solution for the
word “Opferrente” in the final extract. While dictionaries give
“victim’s pension” as a translation, I felt that this was not a suitable
solution. The “Opferrente” was a regular payment made to victims
of the concentration camps, whereas the word “pension” might
lead an English audience to think that the money would be
received after retirement.
Consequently, I gave a brief explanation of the “Opferrente” to
clarify the term when it first appears in the text, while only referring
to the “Opferrente” or “the money” once the reader knows what the
term means.
The word “Auszugshäuschen”, however, did not require

interpolation. The word has no direct English equivalent, being a
type of small house often found on farms in German-speaking
countries. However, the word is used near the beginning of the
novel, where the narrator writes that she no longer sleeps “im
Schlafzimmer der Eltern im Auszugshäuschen” (Haderlap 2011:
13). In this first instance, I would most likely use interpolation, with
an explanation along the lines of “the little house/cabin on the
farm”. However, this first mention is not in my chosen extracts, and
as demonstrated with the “schwarze Küche”, once interpolation
has been used, later references to the same word or phrase can
be more succinct.
Therefore, I have translated “Auszugshäuschen” as “the little
cabin” (line 57), since somebody reading the whole text in
translation would already have had an explanation of the term.
5.1.4. Official names and titles
There are two points in the text where a number of official names
or titles are given in
German. The first occasion is when a list is given of the various
titles of concentration camp guards at Ravensbrück. The second is
in the final extract where Austrian political ministries and
organisations are mentioned, such as the “Kärntner
Landesregierung” (line 806) and the
“Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung” (line 811).
To translate the names of concentration camp guards, I looked at a

number of comparable texts to see how other translators have

dealt with this issue. I found that literary translations sometimes
weave both the German and English names into the text – for
example, the
English translation of the Imre Kertész novel Fateless includes the
phrase “the block commander, or, as they called it, Blockältester”
(Kertész 1992: 97). However, this same novel refers to the “work
commandant” in inverted commas with no reference at all to the
German title (ibid.: 107). Similarly, non-fiction texts are somewhat
inconsistent with their references to camp guards. Rochelle G.
Saidel’s text on Ravensbrück refers to the “Oberaufseherin” (line
114) and “Aufseherin” as “Oberaufseherin (female executive
commander)” and “Aufseherin (Nazi female overseer)” (Saidel
2006: 15, 28). However, the text also refers to the
“Lagerkommandant” only as the “camp commander” (ibid.: 23).
Marc
Buggeln (2014: 197) also gives no German name for the camp
commander, yet also gives no
German name for the “Aufseher”, using only the English term
“overseer”. By contrast,
Buggeln (ibid.: 12) does offer both German and English when
referring to the
“Schutzhaftlager”, opting to refer to the “preventative detention
camps (Schuzthaftlager)”. Following these examples, one
approach to translating the list in Haderlap’s novel would be to give
the German name only for the more obscure titles such as
“Schutzhaftlagerführer”
(line 111), while leaving the more generic names such as “camp
commander” in English. However, this is not an entirely satisfactory
solution since the names come in a long list, so the inconsistency
would be particularly striking, whereas if the references were more
spread out – as they are in the aforementioned comparable texts –
such inconsistency would be less noticeable. As a result of this, I
decided to make all of my translations of the camp positions
consistent – and since all of the comparable texts refer to at least
an English name, I decided that the best solution would be to
translate all of the names into English, using the names and titles
given by comparable texts wherever possible. Since the guard
names are not absolutely vital to the reader’s understanding of the
text overall, I felt that this would be sufficient for the target reader
to get a general idea of the positions that are identified in the ST.
For political organisations, I looked again at comparable texts in

order to find a suitable solution. In informative texts,
“Landesregierung” is frequently translated as “state government”,
with an encyclopedia of German culture referring specifically to the
“state government of Carinthia” with no reference at all to the
German title (Sandford 1999: 413).

The translation of “Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung” is
complicated slightly by the fact that the ministry has changed its
name several times, and so is often referred to by slightly different
names in both English and German comparable texts.
Furthermore, the text itself refers to it as the “Sozialministerium”
(line 801) slightly earlier in the extract. However, whether or not the
texts refer to this exact name or a slightly modified version, they
tend to give a literal English translation without mentioning the
official German title, although it is usually prefixed with “Austrian”
(Falkner 2002: 168, Ritter and Deveson 2011: 135). Due to this, I
decided to follow the example of these texts and use “Austrian
Ministry of Social Affairs” (line 494) in my translation.
5.1.5. Specialised language
There are three points in the text where the author makes use of
particularly specialised vocabulary, which can cause problems in
translation. A literary translator will not necessarily have the same
approach to specialist language as a translator in fields such as
medicine or law, due to the fact that literary texts have an
expressive, rather than informative, function.
Marcel Thelen (2010: 34) explains that “in specialised
translation…the translator is almost
‘forced’ to give a standardised equivalent in the target text” to avoid
potential
misunderstandings or mistranslations. By contrast, the translator of
a literary text must create an effective work of literature, even if this
means not communicating the most precise, literal meaning of the
ST. Therefore, using exact TL equivalents of specialist ST terms
may not always be necessary, and could even have a negative
impact on the readability of the translation – Pratima Dave Shastri
(2011: 12) notes that in literary texts, “the translator must focus
more on the sense than the words of the SL text”.
The first example of specialised language in the ST can be found

at the beginning of the second extract, where the narrator refers to
her “Empfindungskörper” (line 65). Online translation sites such as
Linguee proved to be unhelpful with this particular word,
suggesting only “body of sensations” as an English translation –
“body of sensations” is not likely to mean much to an English
reader. In order to find a better solution, I researched uses and
explanations of the word, discovering that a number of books and
websites state that the
“Empfindungskörper” is often known by the name “Astralkörper”
(Georg 2014: 107). The translation of “Astralkörper” as “astral
body” appears to be more common than “body of sensations” in

English, since Google Books offers texts written in English on the
“astral body” and the term has its own English Wikipedia page.
However, “astral body” is still a fairly specialised term in English
that is not well-known to those unfamiliar with the revelant
philosophy or psychology, meaning that a translation such as “I
begin to withdraw from my astral body” may not be understood by
a lot of readers. Consequently, I chose to disregard the specialised
vocabulary in favour of a slightly freer translation that
communicates what the original German is trying to express – that
the narrator is so tired that she is losing all sense of perception and
feeling. Therefore, I decided to translate the phrase as “I begin to
withdraw from my senses” (line 49), since this is much easier for
the target reader to grasp while still essentially transmitting the
meaning of the original expression.
In the second extract, there are examples of specialised medical

language when the grandmother mentions a number of bones.
While many of these have well-known English equivalents, such as
“collarbone” or “ribcage”, two of the bones mentioned give only
highlyspecialised equivalents when translated into English – the
“Dornfortsatz” (line 237) and the
“Halswirbel” (line 237). “Dornfortsatz” is translated by online
dictionaries as “spinous process”, while “Halswirbel” translates as
the “cervical vertebra”. To ensure that these were correct
translations, and also to discover exactly what the “Dornfortsatz”
and “Halswirbel” are, I consulted a German physiotherapy website.
The site offers diagrams of the spine indicating where the
“Halswirbel” is and also explains the “Dornfortsatz”, which is a
section of each individual human vertebra that connects muscles
and ligaments (PTinfo, 2015). While the dictionary translations of
the two words appear to be correct, they sound very specialised in
English and would most likely not be understood by target readers
without any background knowledge of osteology. Taking this into
consideration, I translated “Halswirbel” as “neck bone” (line 147),
as this has the same meaning as “cervical vertebra” but will be
understood far more easily by the target reader. The “Dornfortsatz”
in this case is the spinous process that connects the neck bone to
the top of the spine, so I chose to translate the word as
“tip of the spine” (line 147) in order to clarify that this is the part of
the skeleton to which the text refers.
The final example of specialised vocabulary comes in the last

extract in the narrator’s dream, where she writes of hearing the
“Erzkörper” (line 557) breaking down. The dictionary translation of
“Erzkörper” is “ore body”, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “a
connected mass of ore in a mine or suitable for mining” (Oxford
Dictionaries, 2015). As with the previous examples, “ore body” is
not something that is likely to be familiar to the target reader, while
it is arguable that even paraphrasing the dictionary definition in a

translation such as “the mass of ore” would not be sufficient to
ensure that the target reader will understand what is being
described. Therefore, I have simplified the reference considerably
in my translation, referring only to “the rock” (line 339). While this is
far less specific, and far less specialised, than the literal translation
of “Erzkörper”, I felt that this solution made the
English text more fluid and readable than a sentence including the
term “ore body” or “mass of ore” would have been.
5.2. Sentence level
5.2.1. Punctuation in dialogue
One distinctive feature of the ST is the unconventional use of

punctuation. This is particularly apparent in sections with dialogue,
as Haderlap chooses not to use speech marks to indicate that a
character is speaking, preferring instead to separate dialogue from
narration with commas, sometimes also adding “sagt Großmutter”
or a similar expression. Since it is very unusual in English to not
use speech marks for dialogue, it could be argued that the
translator should put speech marks in the TT in order to render the
text easier to understand. However, this would mean sacrificing the
author’s unique voice and mode of expression, which should be
prioritised in the translation of an expressive text wherever
possible. While informative texts may need improving if they are
factually incorrect, Judy Wakabayashi (2008: 224) suggests that
for literature, “‘improving’ on the original gives a false impression”
of the ST author’s writing, thus misrepresenting their work.
When deciding how to translate the unusual punctuation and

dialogue, I first looked at a sample translation of an extract from
Engel des Vergessens, which is available on the website of New
Books in German. In this translation, the translator chooses to
distinguish dialogue from narration by italicising the dialogue in the
TT (New Books in German, 2015). While this makes the dialogue
slightly easier to recognise, I felt that this was not an entirely
satisfactory solution for two reasons. Firstly, as previously
mentioned, the TT should aim not to tone down or encroach on the
unique voice of the ST author – the author could easily have
italicised all of the dialogue in her text had she considered this
appropriate. Secondly, the author does use italics at a number of
points in the text, but aside from exceptions on lines 778, 881 and
899 of the ST, this is only ever done to signify the use of the
Slovenian language. Therefore, a translation in which all dialogue
was italicised would result in the Slovenian no longer being

distinguished from the rest of the text, whereas in the ST the
author clearly wishes to separate the Slovenian from the German
through the use of italics. As a result, I decided against the use of
italics in my translation outside of the phrases which the author
chose to italicise.
Aside from the translation from New Books in German, I also

consulted other comparable texts to see how the translators chose
to represent unconventional punctuation when writing dialogue.
The texts I chose were the novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon
repariert by the
Bosnian author Saša Stanišič and its English translation How the
Soldier Repairs the
Gramophone, and Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Tauben fliegen auf,
published by Seagull Books as Fly Away Pigeon. Like Engel des
Vergessens, the novels are written in German but are closely
related to Eastern European history and culture. The texts are also
comparable to Engel des Vergessens as the authors write dialogue
in the same way as Maja Haderlap, preferring to separate dialogue
from narration with commas instead of speech marks. In the
English translations, the translators replicate the unconventional
dialogue in the original text, resulting in long, comma-heavy
English sentences (see Appendix 2). Since these comparable
literary translations have retained the source text authors’ unusual
method of representing dialogue, I have chosen to do the same in
my translation, following the punctuation of the German text at all
times in sentences where dialogue is included.
5.2.2. Sentence length
While I have retained the comma-heavy sentences for dialogue,

there are other sentences throughout the text that feature no
dialogue yet continue for several lines. The translator must
therefore decide whether or not the sentences should be divided
and restructured in the target text. Peter Newmark (1991: 64) notes
that one of the problems of translating from German to English is
that “German has longer sentences which sometimes have to be
divided”. However, when determining how to translate lengthy
sentences, the translator must ascertain whether or not the
sentences are long simply due to the conventions of the source
language, or due to the author’s own writing style.
The most significant example of a lengthy sentence in the ST is the

sentence spanning from line 773 to line 818. A sentence of this
length would be extremely uncommon in English, yet is also
somewhat excessive in German – this indicates that the sentence
length is due to the personal style of the author, not because the

German language dictates that the sentence should not be divided.
In contrast to this sentence, there are several examples of
sentences which are much shorter than those found in the majority
of the text, for example between lines 173 and 180. The presence
of shorter phrases at certain points in the text is a further indication
that the frequent use of lengthy sentences cannot solely be due to
the conventions of the German language. For the most part,
therefore, I decided to prioritise the
communication of the author’s writing style by retaining her
punctuation and overall sentence length as far as possible in my
TT.
5.2.3. Word order
When translating between German and English, it is important to

take into account the differences between the two languages in
terms of word order. A notable difference between English and
German is the position of the subject – Klaus Fischer (1997: 95)
notes that “the
English subject tends to occupy the first position” in a sentence far
more frequently than it does in German. Due to this, I decided to
change the word order in a number of sentences in my translation
in order to prioritise the subject. For example, rather than translate
“in dieser Keimzelle werde ich […] geformt” (line 90-91) as “in this
nucleus I am formed”, I opted for “I am formed in this nucleus” (line
65) – while the former is also a valid, grammatically correct
translation, the latter sounds far less unusual in English.
In some cases, it may be advisable not to put the subject in first

position in English. In the sentence beginning “nackt hätten sie
zwei Stunden lang warten müssen” (line 206-207), the word “nackt”
does not need to be in first position but is placed there for effect, in
order to emphasise the conditions that the prisoners had to face.
To alter the position of the adjective in the TT would arguably
render the sentence less effective, as the impact of the word
“naked” would not be so strong if it were placed in the middle of the
sentence. Therefore, I have chosen to begin this sentence with the
word “naked” (line 131) in my TT, in order to recreate the impact
that the word has in the ST.
Another difference between English and German is the proximity of

the subject to the verb in a clause. Fischer (ibid.) points out that, in
contrast to German, “the verb follows the subject immediately” in
the majority of English clauses which contain both a subject and a
verb. Yet there are points in the text where keeping the subject and
verb together would result in a less effective TT. For example, the
sentence “die Frauen, die mit ihr zu Fuß durch Fürstenberg

getrieben worden seien, mussten sich nach der Einlieferung
ausziehen” (line 203-205) includes an entire subordinate clause
between the subject and the conjugated verb relating to it.
However, translating the sentence in English as “the women had to
undress after arriving at the camp, who had been driven on foot
through Fürstenberg with her” does not make sense without
making further changes to the text, such as repeating “the women”
at the start of the second clause to clarify that the “who” refers to
the women and not the camp. Yet repeating “the women” places a
greater emphasis on the noun “women”, whereas this emphasis is
not present in the original German. As a consequence, I decided
that the best solution in this case was to retain the order of the
German clauses, despite the fact that this meant separating the
subject and verb.
5.3. Text level
5.3.1. Similes and metaphors
Since the ST is a creative work of literature, there is an abundance

of similes and metaphors throughout the text. Newmark suggests
several solutions for translating metaphorical language. He writes
that translating metaphors literally is not always an effective
solution, arguing instead that “finding another metaphor” that fits
the target language can often be more convincing than attempting
to replicate unusual images from the ST in the TT
(Newmark 1998: 40). However, in Haderlap’s text, there is a
noticeable theme running through a number of the images she
uses. For example, similes and metaphors such as
“Nervenzellenbäume” (line 972) (“nerve cell trees”),
“Bewusstseinsmikrobe” (line 615) (microbe of consciousness),
“Erinnerungsfötus” (line 389) (foetus of memory) the grandmother’s
“Keimzelle” (line 91) (nucleus) and the “Fremdkörper” (line 762)
(foreign body) that is said to invade the narrator’s father are linked,
as each of these words has biological connotations. Due to this,
Newmark’s solution of finding alternative metaphors is not ideal for
these words, because finding different images or metaphors would
potentially mean losing the thematic links between these images.
Alternatively, Newmark (ibid.) states that “reducing [metaphors] to
sense” is an option, though this inevitably results in the images
“losing their emotive force”. Since my aim is to recreate the
intended effect of the ST in my
TT as far as possible, I decided against a solution that would
lessen the impact of Haderlap’s use of language. As a
consequence, I chose to keep my translations of these metaphors

as close as possible to the original German words, in order to try to
retain the connotations of the ST images.
5.3.2. Ambiguity
Due to the frequent use of metaphors in the ST, there are times
when the intended meaning of the author is unclear. This presents
a problem for the translator as a choice must be made between
attempting to accurately convey writing that is often confusing and
highly metaphorical, or interpreting the text in order to convey it in
clearer, less ambiguous language. In the former case, the
translator risks alienating the target reader and creating an
incoherent TT, while in the latter case, it could be said that the
translator is simplifying or misrepresenting the original text.
Simplifying or clarifying ambiguous passages would make the text
“comprehensible to the readership”, in keeping with Newmark’s
theory of communicative translation (Newmark 1988: 47). On the
other hand, Tomás Albaladejo
(2004: 451) argues that “ambiguity is a constitutive feature of
literary language” which has the purpose of “enriching the literary
text”.
At one point in the ST, the narrator writes of the “Ich” (line 411) in
her writing, beginning an extended metaphor where she talks of
her “I” as speaking encoded languages and trying on costumes. In
this paragraph, the intended meaning of the author is somewhat
unclear and open to interpretation. However, although
communicative translation recommends making the text easily
comprehensible, the translator should also try to create an
equivalent effect in the TT, and a translation that eschewed
Haderlap’s metaphorical writing would fail to convey the more
unconventional aspects of her writing style. As a consequence, I
chose to avoid interpreting the passage and instead translated the
paragraph as literally as I could, in order to communicate the
unique style of the ST author.
Later in the text, the narrator begins a sentence with the phrase
“Ich Vaterkind und mein Kindvater” (line 593). This phrase uses an
unconventional sentence structure and also features two
compound nouns, “Vaterkind” (father-child) and “Kindvater” (child-
father), which are not commonly used in the German language.
Due to this, the meaning of the ST phrase is fairly ambiguous.
However, it is evident from this phrase that the narrator intends to
highlight the relationship between herself and her father, who is the
focus of the paragraph which follows. Again, my aim with this
phrase was to replicate the effect of the ST phrase in my
translation. Since the ST expression is very unusual and would be

quite striking to a German-speaking reader, I attempted to make
my translation sound equally unconventional in
English. Therefore, I retained the unusual sentence structure in
English, saying “I child of Father and my childhood father” (line
366). Additionally, the English phrase clearly indicates that the
narrator is ruminating on her relationship with her father, while still
keeping the ambiguity of the original German, thus providing as
close an approximation to the ST phrase as possible.
5.3.3. The novel’s title
A particularly significant image in the text is the “Engel des

Vergessens” (line 956), which appears at the very end of the novel
and is also the novel’s title. Since the title of the novel is the first
thing the target reader will come across, it is important that an
effective name is chosen.
Articles written online about Maja Haderlap in English tend to

translate “Engel des Vergessens” as either “Angel of Forgetting”
(The British Slovene Society, 2014) or “Angel of Oblivion” (New
Books in German, 2015), yet neither of these are ideal solutions.
“Angel of Forgetting” is the most literal translation of the phrase,
but “forgetting” is very rarely used as a noun in English.
Consequently, this title sounds far more unusual in the target
language than “Engel des Vergessens” does in German. By
contrast, “Angel of Oblivion” sounds more idiomatic than “Angel of
Forgetting”, yet is a slightly less accurate translation, since
“oblivion” would ordinarily be translated as “Vergessenheit” rather
than “Vergessen” in
German. Since neither of these solutions are faultless, an
alternative option would have been to not translate the German title
and instead choose a different title in English. However, this
solution is complicated by the fact that the “Engel des
Vergessens”, as well as the related “Engel der Geschichte” (line
939) are both named at the end of the novel. This creates a link
between the closing paragraphs and the title of the entire work,
which would be lost if the novel were to be given a different name.
Furthermore, the novel has already been published in Italian and
French under the names L’angelo dell’oblio and L’ange de l’oubli,
both of which are literal translations of Engel des Vergessens,
demonstrating that other translators have not considered it
necessary to alter the title of the work.
My final decision with regard to the title was to use “Angel of

Oblivion”. While it is not quite as precise a translation as “Angel of
Forgetting”, I felt that it was a far more powerful title in English,

which still manages to convey the theme of memory that is key to
the novel as a whole.
6. Conclusion
The ST chosen for the project was very challenging, presenting a

wide variety of translation issues which illustrate the range of
problems a literary translator faces when attempting to translate a
creative text. The project has shown that a significant amount of
research must be undertaken in order to translate a literary text
effectively, whether it be finding an appropriate way of rendering
complex language and imagery, or searching for a suitable
translation for objects or concepts that are rooted in the source
culture. On the whole, I believe that the overall translation strategy
for the project was an appropriate choice, as a more literal
approach would have inhibited the text’s intended function as a
convincing work of expressive literature that could be published by
Seagull Books. However, I did feel that at times it was necessary to
deviate from what Newmark recommends in his communicative
translation approach, since I felt it was also important to convey
Maja Haderlap’s unique voice and writing style in the TT to some
extent. The project has demonstrated that following a suitable
theoretical approach for a translation is hugely beneficial when
attempting to ensure consistency with regard to difficult translation
decisions and also when attempting to ensure that the translation
choices are appropriate for the brief. Nonetheless, it is clear that
the translator must also be able to consider other options and
recognise when an alternative approach may be more effective for
a specific problem.
Word Count: 7480.

Bibliography
Source text
Haderlap, M. (2011) Engel des Vergessens. Göttingen: Wallstein

Verlag.
Secondary literature
Albaladejo, T. (2004) ‘Similarity and Difference in Literary

Translation’ in S. Arduini and R. Hodgson (eds.) Similarity and
Difference in Translation. Rimini: Guaraldi, 449-474.
Bassnett, S. (2011) Reflections on Translation. Clevedon:

Multilingual Matters.
Berman, A. (2012) ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, trans.

L. Venuti, in L. Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd
edn, London and New York: Routledge, 240-253.
Fawcett, P. (1997) Translation and Language. Manchester: St

Jerome.
Fischer, K. (1997) German-English Verb Valency: A Contrastive

Analysis. Tübingen: Narr.
Hervey, S. (1995) Thinking German Translation: A Course in

Translation Method. London and New York: Routledge.
Landers, C.E. (2001) Literary Translation: A Practical Guide.

Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Neubert, A. (2003) ‘Some of Peter Newmark’s Translation

Categories Revisited’ in G.M. Anderman and M. Rogers (eds.)
Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters, 68-75.
Newmark, P. (1991) About Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual

Matters.
Newmark, P. (1988) A Textbook of Translation. Hemel Hempstead:

Prentice Hall International.
Newmark, P. (1998) More Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon:

Multilingual Matters.

Nord, C. (1997) Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist
Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Sanchez, M.T. (2009) The Problems of Literary Translation: A

Study of the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation from
English to Spanish. Bern: Peter Lang.
Shastri, P.D. (2011) Fundamental Aspects of Translation. New

Delhi: PHI Learning.
Thelen, M. (2010) ‘Translation Studies: Terminology in Theory and

Practice’ in B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and M. Thelen (eds.)
Meaning in Translation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 31-62.
Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics

of Difference. London and New York: Routledge.
Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of

Translation. London and New York: Routledge.
Viaggio, S. (2008) ‘Semantic and Communicative Translation: Two

Approaches, One
Method’ in M.L. Larson (ed.) Translation: Theory and Practice,
Tension and
Interdependence. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing, 172-187.
Wakabayashi, J. (2008) ‘The Translator as Editor: Beginnings and

Endings in JapaneseEnglish Translation’ in M.L. Larson (ed.)
Translation: Theory and Practice, Tension and Interdependence.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 224-
234.
Comparable texts
Abonji, M.N. (2012) Tauben fliegen auf. Munich: Deutscher

Taschenbuch Verlag.
Abonji, M.N. (2014) Fly Away, Pigeon, trans. T. Lewis. London:

Seagull Books.
Debī, M. (2005) After Kurukshetra: Three Stories, trans. A. Katyal.

New Delhi: Seagull Books.
Kertész, I. (1992) Fateless, trans. C.C. Wilson and K.M. Wilson.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

New Books in German http://www.new-books-
ingerman.com/129002/Uploaded/SampleTranslation_12spr_
Haderlap.pdf Accessed 21st August 2015.
Stanišič, S. (2006) Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert.

Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag.
Stanišič, S. (2008) How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone,

trans. A. Bell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Dictionaries
Oxford Dictionaries, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com Last

accessed 27th August 2015.
Other resources
The British Slovene Society,

http://www.britishslovenesociety.org/literary-evening-withmaja-
haderlap/ Accessed 4th September 2015.
Buggeln, M. (2014) Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Falkner, G. (2002) ‘Austria’s Welfare State: Withering Away in the

Union?’ in G. Bischof, A. Pelinka and M. Gehler (eds.) Austria in
the European Union. New Brunswick: Transaction, 161-179.
Geistschule, http://geistschule.de/niederes_Selbst.html Accessed

30th August 2015.
Georg, J. (2014) Mit Rute und Pendel: Auf den Spuren des
Unsichtbaren. Dillingen: Queißer Verlag.
Google Books,
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Projection_of_the_Astral_B
ody_1929.html?id=Z3hR U7_mCVEC&redir_esc=y Accessed 30th
August 2015.
Google Books,
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Astral_Body_and_Oth
er_Astral_Phenome.html? id=jM5ndKawkBQC&redir_esc=y
Accessed 30th August 2015.
Ichkoche.at, http://www.ichkoche.at/heidensterz-rezept-1974
Accessed 22nd August 2015.

New Books in German, http://www.new-books-
ingerman.com/english/1036/335/335/129002/design1.html
Accessed 4th September 2015.
PTinfo,
http://ptinfo.de/inf01022005001/pt5320010/faq/faqallgemein/wirbesa
eule.html Accessed 22nd August 2015.
Ritter, G.A. and Deveson, R. (2011) The Price of German Unity:

Reunification and the Crisis of the Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Saidel, R.G. (2006) The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück

Concentration Camp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Sandford, J. (1999) Encyclopedia of Contemporary German

Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Seagull Books,
http://www.seagullbooks.org/index.php?p=book_list&cat_id=MTE1
Accessed 21st August 2015.
Vansant, J. (2014) ‘Als Wildwuchs der Mehrheitssprache: Interview

with Maja Haderlap’. Journal of Austrian Studies 47 (3): 24-33.
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_body Accessed 30th

August 2015.
Appendix 1

Taschenbuch Verlag, 172.
“Wir fahren in die Schweiz, svájcha, haben Sie zu uns gesagt,

nachdem sich Onkel Móric an einem Nachmittag in Ihre Küche
gesetzt hat, die Papiere, a papírokat, auf den Tisch gelegt hat, die
er auf der Botschaft in Belgrad abgeholt hat.”

Abonji, M.N. (2014) Fly Away Pigeon, trans. T. Lewis. London: Seagull
Books, 115.
“We’re going to Switzerland, svájcha, that’s what you told us,

Mamika, when Uncle Móric sat down in your kitchen one afternoon
and laid on the table the papers, a papírokat, that he’d got from the
embassy in Belgrade.”
Appendix 2

Taschenbuch Verlag, 140.
“Genau, sagt Benno, entweder man ist Höhlenmensch oder

kultiviert, so blöd sind wir inzwischen, dass wir das glauben, mach
die Ohren zu, wenn’s dich nicht interessiert, ich rede sowieso in
erster Linie zu den Schwestern, ihr beiden, wir suchen noch Leute,
die bei unserer Mediengruppe mitarbeiten, wir sammeln
unzensierte Informationen, auch Geld, damit wir die einzige noch
unabhängige Zeitung in Sarajevo unterstützen können, und euch
könnten wir gut brauchen, ihr könnt doch Serbokroatisch, das
würde uns helfen, sagt Benno, schaut uns fragend an. Kein Wort
können wir, sage ich.”
Abonji, M.N. (2014) Fly Away Pigeon, trans. T. Lewis. London: Seagull
Books, 93.
“Exactly, Benno says, you’re either a caveman or you’re civilized,

we’ve become so stupid, we even believe that, so don’t listen if
you’re not interested, in any case, I’m mostly talking to the sisters,
you two, we’re still looking for people to work in our media group,
we’re gathering uncensored information, money too, so we can
support the last independent newspaper in Sarajevo and we really
could use you, you speak Serbo-Croatian, that would help, Benno
says and looks at us inquiringly. We can’t speak a word, I say.”
Stanišič, S. (2006) Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert. Munich:

Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 57.

“Der achte, rief Walross und warf das siebte Glas über die
Schulter, ist für meinen Kleinen, bloß darf er noch nicht, ich
verwalte das so lange”.
Stanišič, S. (2008) How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. A.

Bell. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 43.
“The eighth, cried Walrus, throwing the seventh glass over his
shoulder, the eighth is for my little lad here, only he can’t legally
drink yet, so I’ll just have to manage it for him”.

Feedback
General comments- Translation
Understanding of ST (including command of subject matter and terminology in

technical texts, or appreciation of stylistic devices in literary texts):
Your understanding of the ST is generally very good. There appear to be just a few
places where you have misunderstood the ST (e.g. TT, line 263) or do not quite
convey the sense of the ST accurately in your translation (e.g. TT lines 428-29, TT
lines 452-54). Occasionally your TT is slightly imprecise, e.g. ‘farmer’s daughter’
(lines 440-41) for ‘Großbauerntochter’ (line 715) which does not quite explain
Grandmother’s confidence. You show good appreciation of the stylistic devices of
Haderlap’s text, e.g. in your efforts to reproduce punctuation and sentence structure
(for example, the passage from Grandmother’s diary in Extract 4 which is very
disjointed).
Compliance with TL discursive conventions (e.g. grammaticality, fluency,

familiarity with genre conventions):
Your TT generally reads very well and fluently, as intended. You tend to rephrase the
ST where necessary, e.g. in your translation of extended German adjectival nouns
(ST lines 364-65, TT line 219). Very occasionally you could do more to make it
sound more idiomatic (e.g. ST lines 1-2).
Conformity with translation brief or approach as described in the commentary:
Your translation is appropriate to your hypothetical commission. You seem to

implement your chosen approach (communicative translation) well.
Presentation:
The TT is well presented on the page. It is easy to compare ST and TT. A very minor
point: sometimes your dates appear superscript and sometimes not (e.g. ‘28th April’
but ‘May 1st’ on p. 19).
General comments- Commentary
Organisation:
Your Commentary is very well organised. There is logical progression between the
sections, e.g. as you move from ‘Word level’ to ‘Sentence level’ to ‘Text level’.
Rationale for translation project, choice of text and approach:
Your choice of text is excellent: it presents a suitable level of difficulty, and you are to
be commended for choosing to translate some of the novel’s trickier passages. You
have constructed a very plausible and well-justified hypothetical commission. You
have given careful consideration to your approach – you describe how you consulted

a range of relevant Translation Studies literature as well as comparable texts – and,
given your brief, your overall strategy of ‘communicative translation’ seems
appropriate
Analysis of ST features, translation problems and solutions:
You carry out a good analysis of the ST. You then identify a range of translation
issues and discuss these in depth. You show that you carefully weighed up different
solutions to translation problems, on the basis of thorough research, and kept your
overall ‘communicative’ strategy in mind as far as possible when deciding on
solutions. There is perhaps a bit of confusion in section 5.1.1 when you seem to
suggest that using Austrian vocabulary/regional language is the same as ‘speaking
with an accent’ (p. 39) but this is a minor point. Also, is ‘Nachtkästchen’ (not
‘Nachtkasterl’, which clearly is!) an Austrian term?
References and engagement with academic literature:
You have done excellent research: you have read widely and identified a good
amount of relevant literature. You use academic literature well to support your
translation decisions. It is very good that you contacted Stefan Diezmann. You show
good critical engagement with what you have read. For example, you follow
Newmark’s strategy of ‘communicative translation’ as your overall approach but
show that you sometimes deviated from his recommendations and you justify your
reasons for doing so (e.g. p. 52).
Presentation:
Presentation is excellent. You write well in a clear, appropriate style. The

bibliography is also very clear and neat.
Overall:
This is an excellent Commentary – very well done.
Mark for Translation: Bare Distinction
Mark for Commentary: Good distinction
Overall Mark: Mid Distinction

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College of Arts and Law

Bank of Assessed Work

Academic Year: 2014/15

Department/School: Modern Languages

Module Title: Translation Studies - Extended Translation Project

Method of Assessment: Translation and commentary

Marking Criteria: Arts & Law Postgraduate marking criteria

Date Added to Bank:

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended Translation Project submission

Title: German-English translation/ commentary

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Grandmother motions to me with her hand, I should follow her.

Grandmother works in the kitchen. The dishes she prepares taste

Extended translation project (German) 1

I am so exhausted that I begin to withdraw from my senses. I

Extended translation project (German) 1

From the moment when Grandmother decides to let me share in

Extended translation project (German) 1

As soon as Grandmother begins to undress, I also start to take my

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

215 The journeys between Vienna and my hometown evolve into

Extended translation project (German) 1

240 After being published several times in journals, my first poetry

Cultural and political considerations are easier for me than saying I

Relentlessly I practise at least hearing the sound of my thoughts,

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

On the day of Father’s funeral, the pallbearers appear early in the

Extended translation project (German) 1

After Father’s funeral, my contemplation turns into numbness.

Extended translation project (German) 1

Mother has reached the peak of an exhaustion lasting for months,

Extended translation project (German) 1

I start to read Grandmother’s camp book, which I often held in my

At the beginning, Grandmother writes in neat handwriting, her

Extended translation project (German) 1

I place the photos that she passed on to me on my desk.

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

The protective barriers that I tried to stack up between myself and

I decide to go to Ravensbrück, to the camp I had traversed so

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1

In Ravensbrück the women from the trenches met with women

Extended translation project (German) 1

After many years, Grandmother comes back into my dream. I

Extended translation project (German) 1

I have chosen to translate four extracts from Maja Haderlap’s 2011

2. Translation-oriented source text analysis

Engel des Vergessens is a work of fiction by the Austrian author

Extended translation project (German) 1

Extended translation project (German) 1