In the summer of 1959, I completed my first novel, The Tin Drum, in Paris. But following on last week’s extremely long series of posts on BEA, and my “confrontation” with Pantheon editor Erroll McDonald, I found this anecdote in Grass’s intro to the new translation a pretty inspiring picture of what publishing used to be like: More on Breon’s new translation in a minute. Each new version offers, not a better reading, but a different one, one that foregrounds new aspects of the text, that sees it through new eyes, that makes it new. A translation is a reading, and every reading is necessarily personal, perhaps even idiosyncratic. We translate great works because they deserve it-because the power and depth of the text can never be fully revealed by a single translation, however inspired.

The works that are never retranslated are those we only care to read once. What impels us toward new versions is not the weakness of existing translations, but the strength and richness of certain works of literature. It is precisely the mark of a great work of art that it demands to be retranslated. The most common question I was faced while working on this new Tin Drum was, “What was wrong with the old one?” This question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of literary translation. Not that the initial translations were always bad, but the book is a bit racy (and difficult), and a number of the original translations omitted lines, paragraphs, etc., or just didn’t quite capture the nuances of Grass’s unique style.īreon Mitchell puts it best in his afterword to the new translation: To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The Tin Drum, the novel-which, to continue the trend started above, is arguably Grass’s greatest achievement-the novel is being published in new translations around the world. (This event is part of the 2009 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium, the subject of which is “Interpretive Perspective and Translation.” The symposium is only open to translators, scholars, and the like, although German lit/translation enthusiasts are encouraged to contact Lisa Lux lux at chicago dot goethe dot org for more information.) And Grass, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, is arguably Germany’s most important post-War German writer. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been gorging myself on Gunter Grass novels in preparation for the panel I’m moderating tomorrow with Krishna Winston ( Crabwalk), Breon Mitchell ( The Tin Drum), and Michael Henry Heim ( My Century, Peeling the Onion)-arguably three of the best German-English translators working today.

The tin drum writer