Mr. Blumenbach, a little over ten years ago you caused a sensation with your translation of David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest”. Was Joshua Cohen’s ‘joke’ a similar challenge? And how long did it take you to do that?
I started the translation in 2015 and finished it in 2020 after several breaks. “Witz” is as complex as “Infinite Jest”, but Cohen has a different poetry. Wallace depicts thought processes by delinearizing language through annotations, digressions, graphics, mathematical formulas in the text, and other scientific representation techniques. Cohen goes beyond the one-sidedness of standard language in a different way: it is conveyed through various rhetorical devices such as assonances, alliteration, compounds, neologisms, homonyms, multilingualism and persiflage of quotations, but also through infinitely long, occasionally flawed grammatical constructions “up to the limit of charged with meaning,” as Ezra Pound once said. “Joke” is a flood of meaning.
Literary works of art are sometimes difficult to summarize in blurbs or reviews. Have you been able to form a concept of “joke” along the lines of “This novel is about . . .”?
To put it bluntly, one can say that “the novel defends itself against the sentimentalization of the Holocaust” or that it satirizes the violent history of the twentieth century with the opposite sign. But that doesn’t say much. Of course, one can also prepare locations, plot lines and characters, but these elements of conventional narrative texts fade into the background or disappear in the fog of rhetorical speed. The lyrical or dream-like quality is actually more important: “Witz” is largely a prose poem – and especially in the last part a prose poem of horror that is difficult to bear because it is paradoxical. It is hardly a coincidence that the novel repeatedly alludes to Celan’s “Todesfuge”, which is about the incomprehensible mass murder in a comparable way with almost incomprehensible linguistic beauty.
While many contemporary novels today focus on content, often on poorly fictionalized themes of debate, “Wit” is deeply formalistic, firmly anchored in literary modernity. What does that mean for the translator?
I have to realize that the dynamism of the form is often more important here than the informational value of the words, phrases and sentences. For me, for example, Cohen’s constant changes of style register are formalistic or modernistic. I would distinguish the following tones: the relatively “normal” story of the Israelien family, the high religious tone of holy scriptures, the low religious tone of more or less concrete descriptions of individual holidays, rites, prayers, etc., satirical descriptions of the world situation, self-contained Showpieces, type comedies and cliché parodies, finally the parlando furioso of a tendentially asemantic but highly musical babble. Since Cohen went through the postmodernist school, he stages a brittleness in these narrator voices, and a high-pitched passage can be commented on in the same sentence by a kind of flippant stand-up comedian.
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