Word: grass
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dredge up from his memories and fantasies occurs in the form of a surrealist TV show glimpsed past his tormentor's ear. Meanderings into Starusch's early love life, barely suppressed feelings of violence and real or imagined career in reinforced concrete multiply, not always fruitfully for the reader. Grass, who has long admired Herman Melville, sometimes seems bound to do lightly for dentistry what the author of Moby Dick did for whaling. Symbols clang. Tartar on the teeth, one gathers, is Evil?"calcified hate." Parallels are drawn?and stretched?between pumice (for cleansing) and pumice (for building), and between...
...Grass's intention is broader than one at first suspects. Local Anaesthetic, in fact, may go down in history as the first novel to turn the dentist's chair into an allegory of life. Absolutist revolutions, religions and moralities have all foundered on the problems of pain and how to cure it. Now Grass's dentist steps forward, an apostle of technology, a priest of the "relative." He reduces philosophy to Seneca plus hygiene. He is the exact fulfillment of Spengler's prophecy that absolute engineering is man's historical destiny...
...like women: If I faithful they are not beautiful, if beautiful they are not faithful. The real test of a translator's skill, however, is not one of truth v. beauty but of workable compromise. That is a particular challenge in the case of Günter Grass, whose writing is generally regarded as remarkably hard to translate. Fortunately Grass's publishers managed at the very beginning to find one of the world's most talented translators for the task. He is Ralph Manheim, 63, a multilingual American who lives in Paris. He won the P.E.N. Translation...
...part, a translator's job is to act as a sensitive and knowledgeable link between alien cultures. The incredible range and idiosyncrasy of Grass's language make extraordinary demands on any translator. Heaps of new coinages are typical in Grass's books, as with "Knochenberg" (bone mountain), which Grass used to describe the enormous pile of human bones lying outside the processing plant in Dog Years. Leaps of Grass's imagination incongruously link references to obscure moments in Polish and German history, folklore, pop songs and blasphemous echoes from the Catholic Mass (relics of Grass...
...Grass is much given to parody. Hitler's military jargon, for instance, is spoofed in delusive GHQ commands sent out to recapture the Führer's lost German shepherd, Prinz, as the Third Reich crumbles. Sample: "On the JüterbogTorgau line, projected antitank trenches are replaced by Führerdogtraptrenches." Often the bristliest bits in Grass's prose derive from what critics refer to as "thing magic" (Dingmagie), those long inventories of physical objects that Grass compiles to retrieve German from abstraction and the swarms of technical terms he uses, mostly derived from...