Translating Ingeborg Bachmann's "The Thirtieth Year" (Das dreißigste Jahr)

The Austrian post-War poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is not as famous outside of the German-speaking world (and even within the German-speaking world) as some of her later counterparts, such as Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel prize, or Peter Handke, who according to Jelinek should have won the Nobel prize. Bachmann's work is read less often in English than that of Swiss author Max Frisch, with whom Bachmann was romantically linked. When W.G. Sebald issued a book of essays on Austrian literature (Unheimliche Heimat), he wrote about Handke at length without mentioning Bachmann once. When I tell my English-speaking friends I'm reading Bachmann, their stares are blank. "Never heard of her." "Sounds interesting."

Photo credit: Bayerischer Rundfunk

This is not to say she is some obscure figure. She was part of the Gruppe 47 -- the most meaningful literary project of German authors in response to the crimes of World War II -- and there is a major prize named after her -- the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Her poetry is highly regarded and as widely read as poetry can be. Her poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit is required reading in Austrian and German schools. Her legacy is one of immense moral authority and highly critical assessments of her too-complacent post-Nazi society.

But there's no shaking the impression that Bachmann lurks in the background of the prominent voices of 20th century German literature, fairly or unfairly, likely a result of her gender, her relatively short life (she died in a fire in Rome, probably addicted to barbiturates), and her overwhelming moroseness. Her most famous poem begins with the line "Es kommen härtere Tage" -- harder days are coming. Her major story "Das dreißigste Jahr" (1961) opens with an anonymous character who awakens, Samsa-like, "an einem Tag, den er vergessen wird, und liegt plötzlich da, ohne sich erheben zu können" (on a day he will forget, and lies there, unable to lift himself). The critic Reich-Ranicki describes a Bachmann so sheepish and sombre that her poetry reading was barely audible, even after achieving acclaim.

So when my husband turned 30 this month, and my colleague Michael Redeker referred me to her story about turning 30, I returned to Bachmann's language for the first time since college, when I read her in Thomas DiNapoli's class on 20th century German women authors and was awestruck by her poetic power. I imagined giving the story to my husband as a birthday present, though its darkness hardly suits the occasion of his good fortune and cheer. I realized his German skills wouldn't get him through a story of this length, which at 44 pages is no whopper but with its highly poetic, trance-like prose still demands close attention. I sought a translation from here in Zürich, where I live, and found nothing, so I ordered one, but it's out of print. I sat down and started translating myself.




It's tough going. Let's take the first paragraph:

When someone turns 30, everyone insists he is still young. This man himself, however, though unaware of any outward changes, develops a sense of uncertainty; it no longer seems right to him to lay any further claim to youth. And one morning he wakes up, on a day he will forget, and finds himself suddenly lying there, unable to get up, hit by hard beams of light and stripped of any defense or vitality against the day ahead. As he protects himself by closing his eyes, he sinks back and drifts off into a state of being blacked out, taking every lived moment with him. He sinks and sinks, and the scream does not come out aloud (this, too, taken from him, everything taken from him!), and he falls down into bottomlessness, until his senses swoon, until everything is dissolved, extinguished, and destroyed -- everything that he thought himself to be. Once he has regained consciousness, with thoughts trembling and having returned to a physical form, to being a person, one who will soon get up and enter the day as he must, it is then that he discovers in himself a wonderful new ability: The ability to remember. He doesn’t remember the way he once would have, caught off guard by a memory or remembering because he tried to recall this and that; no, now it is with a painful force that he remembers all the years, shallow ones and deep ones, and all the places that he absorbed over the years. He casts the net of remembrance, casts it over himself and catches himself, captor and catch at once, casts it over the threshold of time, of space, to see who he was and who he has become.

I'm a sucker for this kind of imagery. I'm besotted with stories of losing the self, of coming unglued from the world, of the inability to yield to the world even as you're forced to yield -- while losing the will to yield to the world, even when interested in yielding.

How to render the German? I quickly came across a few problems.

• Wenn einer in sein dreißigstes Jahr geht:
• "einer" means someone. Is this someone so male that I can call him someone, or are women someone too? "When a man turns 30" would be the wording for a story about men. This is the story about a man, and Michael Redeker referred me to Bachmann's propensity to write in a man's voice given the overwhelming minority of women in the literature of her milieu. The very first sentence poses a pronoun problem.
• Is "turns 30" too mundane for the more poetic "in sein dreißigstes Jahr geht"? Is "enters his thirtieth year" too dusty-stuffy for this story, which in German does not seem so stuffy by any means?
• Ihm ist, als stünde es ihm nicht mehr zu, sich für jung auszugeben:
• Is "laying a further claim to youth" too remote and assumptive for "sich für jung ausgeben" -- passing oneself off as young?
• Er wirft das Netz Erinnerung aus, wirft es über sich und zieht sich selbst, Erbeuter und Beute in einem, über die Zeitschwelle, die Ortschwelle, um zu sehen, wer er war und wer er geworden ist.
• An extraordinary sentence. The English is not so hard, but what about the surprise alliteration that comes about when you take "cast, catch, captor" for "werfen, ziehen, Erbeuter"? Given how poetic this prose is, I opted in favor of the alliteration.
• The central image is the "Erbeuter und Beute in einem" -- you are remembering yourself, which means you are hunting for a memory to hold onto, you are in a position of power to use memory to determine who you are, but you are prey to the vicissitudes of memory, and you must become whatever memory gets caught.
• I don't want to cross fishing language (das Netz werfen) with hunting language (Erbeuter) too boldly if I can help it. Thus the choice of "captor and catch at once."

The last line reminds me of the writer Hugo Zuckermann (like Bachmann, Austrian, though I wonder if she ever read his few poems), who wrote in the poem "Widmung"

Ein Sünder war ich, unverstand'ne Schuld
Band meine Hände, wie ein Eisenring
— Der Mann ist elend, der sich selber fing
Ins harte Netz der lähmenden Geduld — 

For a reading at my wedding, I translated this as

A sinner I, I failed to understand
The guilt that cuffed my hands with rings of steel 
-- Lame is the man who, patient, starts to reel
The line he hooked himself to as he stands --

Striking how they both write, with analogies to fishing, of going out seeking and catching yourself in your own trap!

This idea courses through the entire story. We set out when young to determine who we are. We have many possibilities, and sift through the ones and the others and the many shifts. By the time we're 30 (an arbitrary mark, useful all the same), we find we now are, with growing finality, one settling version of our possible selves. And with panic, remorse, and languidness, we relent to that self. This capitulation, this desperate late re-situating, is for Bachmann a given in society. The villains situate themselves with cheer, while the heroic resist, and fail. Because this is universal, it is pardonable, if tragic. Bachmann's story is not one of rage, neither against the unwilling succumbers nor the willing ones, but one of quiet seething and finally survival.

Yet it bears pointing out that the story "The Thirtieth Year" was published only fifteen years after Auschwitz. If for Adorno it was barbaric to write poetry after the holocaust, then for Bachmann it was barbaric not to, which is to say: barbaric not to at least account for all the compromises, all the smallness, all the complacency and acclimatizing to a world of such horrors. The agonies here are internal -- Bachmann's true sphere of focus -- and all the while they whisper at the real ones, the agonies outside.