Word: manheim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BOUND TO VIOLENCE by Yambo Ouologuem. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 182 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...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 Prize in 1964 for Grass's The Tin Drum and has just received this year's National Book Awards prize for translating Céline's Castle to Castle...
After wrestling with Oskar's stonecutting experiences in The Tin Drum, for example, Manheim finally gave up. "You've got to find a German-American stonecutter who can get the terms right in both languages," he wrote the publisher. The publisher did. Manheim made it through ex-Potash Miner Grass's scenes from Dog Years with the help of special dictionaries. But in translating Local Anaesthetic, Manheim had tremendous trouble with the highly technical language of dentistry used by Grass, who has made a study of the subject. "Many of the words," Manheim admits, "just weren...
...translator, of course, especially if his author knows both languages involved (as does Grass), can win every time. In German, the last line of Local Anaesthetic is "immer neue Schmerzen," or always new pains. Manheim translated it as "There will always be pain." For his taste, Gunter Grass finds that far too full of resignation...