By Siobhan O’Leary The 2010 Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig Book Fair Prize) for fiction, non-fiction and translation were announced last week. Five titles per category were selected for the longlist by seven editors and literary critics. As reported by the Goethe-Institut, (which also supplied the descriptions below) this year’s winners were: For fiction: Georg Klein, for Roman unserer Kindheit(Rowohlt), the fantastic …
Is There an Untranslatable Book?
By Edward Nawotka Today’s lead story describes the process of translating David Foster Wallace’s supremely complicated novel Infinite Jest into German. The translator, Ulrich Blumenbach, had no input from the author himself, but was nevertheless dealing with a book that involved “a massive text, its pages are riddled with acronyms and American pop-culture references, as well as dialects, characters with …
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating Infinite Jest into German
By Amanda DeMarco “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to …