Word: tinned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...principal personification of his distrust, his key corrective agent, as well as Grass's most famous character, is Oskar the dwarf, the protagonist of his first novel, The Tin Drum. The book sold more than 1,500,000 copies around the world (about 600,000 in the U.S.), as appalled and fascinated readers in 16 languages absorbed the dwarf's devastating, knee-high view of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Oskar's "sing-scream" could shatter glass. His magic drum carried him back and forth in time. One of his best tricks was breaking up Nazi rallies...
...typically grim, fairy-tale props in Dog Years (1963), for instance, were magic spectacles that allowed postwar German children to see exactly what their innocent parents were actually doing between 1939 and 1945. The cruelest metaphor for greedy indifference occurs toward the end of The Tin Drum, when Oskar's father is killed in his grocery cellar by occupying Russian forces. His body falls across the path of some ants that have set up supply lines to a smashed sack of sugar. "The ants found themselves facing a new situation," Grass wrote, "but, undismayed by the detour, soon built...
...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...
...Ouyen, tin guards on the legs of hospital beds protect patients from the rodents, and wags joke that they now have the world's only 18,000-hole golf course. Some farmers, their fields chewed to stubble, have been forced to feed their sheep by hand. Set out in barnyards, baited, water-filled drums fill up with as many as 1,000 drowned mice a night. Yet so far not even Victoria's Vermin and Noxious Weeds Destruction Board has come up with a really effective solution. One woman whose supply of the Pill was eaten by mice...