A meeting with my editor, Ritchie Robertson

With a couple of other family visits already in the diary, a late-August trip to the UK seemed to offer the perfect opportunity to sit down and discuss my progress on my translation with the editor of the Oxford World's Classics Thomas Mann series, Ritchie Robertson.

(On my way to the UK, during a four-hour gap between the arrival of my Lyria train in Paris and the departure of my Eurostar for London, I saw these two reminders on my way to lunch with my friends, author-translator Nicolas Richard and musician-author Julie Bonnie.)

Ritchie Robertson was Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford until 2021, is a specialist on the Enlightenment, editor of "The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann" (2002) and gave the 2020 Thomas Mann Lecture at the ETH Zurich. He is a fellow of The Queen's College, University of Oxford, which is where I stayed overnight and revised my list of questions before we met while looking out over the front court.

In accordance with my translation plan and our agreement, I'd sent Ritchie three translation blocks. The first two, each tackling 200 pages of the German text, he had edited well before our meeting, so it was a matter of clearing up any outstanding issues and stubborn headscratchers; the third section was slightly shorter and took us up to almost the precise midpoint of the novel – the end of Chapter Five and the "Walpurgisnacht" section.

The trickiest conundrum is still the one encountered in Thomas Mann's Preface, which echoes in varying forms throughout the rest of the book: the lack of a satisfying counterpart in English to the German "kurzweilig", which is the opposite of "langweilig" or "boring" – approximtely: "making time seem short" and "making time seem long". But more about that in my next post...

For this blog I did a reading of the passage describing Hans Castorp's arrival in Davos. He takes the train across Germany through "mehrerer Herren Länder", which I'd translated by "all kinds of country", but it kept playing on my mind, as these things are wont to do, and one day the phrase "through many duchies and counties" popped into my mind. It picks up on the "lands of various lords" in the German and sets it in a very English context. Excessively so? Ritchie wasn't completely convinced.

A bugbear since the infancy of my translation, "Saaltöchter" ("dining-room daughters") is the name given to the waitresses in the sanatorium dining hall. It makes Hans Castorp laugh, largely because it sounds dated and very Swiss to him, partly because they aren't anyone's daughters (waitresses are still often referred to as "Serviertöchter" – from the days when a restaurant would be a family affair).
My translation group in Zurich had given me ideas such as "dining-room damsels" and "female porters" to convey the word's old-fashioned ring, but I'd plumped for "waiting girls". Ritchie's challenge: why was this funny enough to make Castorp laugh? After batting some suggestions back and forth, one seemed to capture the vaguely medieval sound – "girls-in-waiting". We both liked it.

Moving on . . . Counsellor Behrens, the chief doctor at the Berghof sanatorium, repeatedly contrasts the two cousins, the soldierly Joachim and the civilian Hans Castorp. When he first meets the newly arrrived Castorp, he remarks that he has "nichts so Waffenrasselndes wie dieser Rottenführer da". So "not as sabre-rattling as this ... here". "Rottenführer" is a complicated term and a problematic one too because as well as meaning "gang foreman" on the railways, it was also a rank in the Waffen SS, albeit three decades after "Der Zauberberg" is set. It isn't so much the leadership qualities of Joachim that Behrens is commenting on here, which could be rendered by "troop leader", but his aspirations to join the army and fight. "Hussar" was what we came up with.

"Hospitant" is a term that is applied to Hans Castorp in his early weeks at the sanatorium, ontrasting him with more long-standing residents and even guests; later, after he has been admitted following a successful examination (i.e. he is ill), the narrator increasingly uses the word for other, more recent arrivals and for Hans Castorp's relatives when they come to visit. I could have translated it as "visitor", but that would be to sacrifice its educational significance: a "Hospitant" is what French universities call an "auditeur libre" – someone who sits in on lectures – or the equivalent of someone seconded to a company or organisation to learn how it operates. "Visiting student" seems to embrace Castorp's status of a curious learner – which is, after all, the backbone of the novel – who gradually gains maturity and wisdom.

Hans Castorp repeatedly compares his fascination for Clavdia Chauchat with the traditional path of a young man of his social standing who marries a "gesundes Gänschen dort unten im Flachlande". What does this mean? A "healthy goose": down-to-earth, unpretentious, unsophisticated – the opposite of the sick, slinking, exotic woman from Dagestan "beyond the Caucasus". "Fit filly from the flatlands" had a nice ring to it and so I put it to my translation group. Too erotic. Ritchie was initially agnostic but by the third mention of the term, he had overkill. Out with the animal metaphors then, but the alliteration has been retained: "a lusty lass from the lowlands".

We discussed many other things during our work session, but we thought we might have cracked one very tough nut right at the end of the day and, crucially, it is related to one of the novel's structuring themes – time.

Chapter Six begins with a section titled "Changes" and this section begins thus:

"Was ist die Zeit? Ein Geheimnis, – wesenlos und allmächtig. Eine Bedingung der Erscheinungswelt, eine Bewegung, verkoppelt und vermengt dem Dasein der Körper im Raum und ihrer Bewegung. Wäre aber keine Zeit, wenn keine Bewegung wäre? Keine Bewegung, wenn keine Zeit? Frage nur! Ist die Zeit
eine Funktion des Raumes? Oder umgekehrt? Oder sind beide identisch? Nur zu gefragt! Die Zeit ist tätig, sie hat verbale Beschaffenheit, sie »zeitigt«. Was zeitigt sie denn? Veränderung!"

The problematic word here is the verb "zeitigen", which contains the German word for "time" – "Zeit." Now there are English words that contain "time" – "betimes", "timer", "timely" – but none of them are verbs or only ones like "to time someone out", which isn't useful. Ritchie suggested translating "zeitigen" by "hasten along", but there's a danger of forfeiting the common root.

A longstanding translator's stratagem is to shift the effect onto a different component of the sentence – for example, you can reverse an adjective-noun pairing. Here, the solution we came up with was to translate the word "tätig" – "active", "busy" or "operative" – as "hasty" so that it chimes with "hasten along". This produces the following:

"What is time? A mystery—immaterial and omnipotent. A condition of the visible world, a motion coupled and combined with the existence of bodies in space and their motions. But would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion if there were no time? You may well ask! Does time depend on space? Or is it the other way around? Or are they identical? Ask away! Time is hasty; it has the force of a verb; it hastens things along. What does it hasten? Change!"

Does it work? Only time will tell. We were both pretty pleased with our joint solution. Such is the power of working collaboratively – and having an editor with such a mastery of the German language.