Now here’s a book I’d like to have translated! The Central Library in Amsterdam recently became home to Karina Schaapman’s Muizenhuis, or Mouse House. Karina built this fantastic setting for her story about Sam and Julia, two little mice, and the book is packed with pictures of the many different rooms in the mansion. Imagine a handmade doll’s house, but with over a hundred different spaces – and its own storybook. Karina blogs about the Muizenhuis here in Dutch and here in English and the book is about to be published in Australia and New Zealand as Mouse Mansion. Anyone who wants to visit the real Mouse House should head to the children’s section of the Central Library in Amsterdam and spend some time studying the house and trying to spot Sam and Julia. What a marvellous project!

Eerdword also kindly posted a blog piece that I wrote about Voytek, my experience of translating Soldier Bear, and why that bear’s “hotter than hot”: Voytek: A Bear with a Tale.

Here’s a picture of the real Voytek/Wojtek, with one of the Polish soldiers who looked after him:

And here’s the piece I wrote for Eerdmans:

I’m still gently reeling from last week’s exciting news that Soldier Bear, my translation of Bibi Dumon Tak’s book Soldaat Wojtek, has won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for “the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States” – which really is quite a mouthful.

Kathleen Merz from Eerdmans emailed me to say that the award had gone to Eerdmans and Soldier Bear. Seconds later, a message appeared on my Facebook wall from Roxie Munro, a friend and fellow member of the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators. It was soon followed by lots of other messages from friends who loved the book and the bear and, like me, were delighted to see a translation from the Dutch gaining recognition in the States. There was tweeting, there was Facebooking. . . The bear was everywhere!

One of the nicest emails I received was from Bibi Dumon Tak herself, who was just as pleased as I was that the translation had won such an honor from the American Library Association. Bibi also mentioned that a DVD has recently come out in the UK about Wojtek, and she added that, “Dat beest is hotterdanhot,” which I suspect I don’t need to translate.

Bibi is absolutely right. The bear certainly does seem to be a very hot property right now. My mother-in-law just sent me a newspaper cutting from The Times (London, January 5) featuring a color photograph of the “grizzled, beery hero of Monte Cassino,” with his customary bottle of beer, and describing his wartime adventures. The article says that the Wojtek Memorial Trust is planning to commemorate Wojtek, “one of the most unlikely heroes of the Second World War,” with a bronze memorial in Edinburgh and “is in talks to send a copy of the statue to Warsaw and to recreate the heroic homecoming that his Polish comrades always dreamed of providing.”

My mother-in-law is in fact from Edinburgh and actually remembers, as a girl, seeing Wojtek when he was a resident of Edinburgh Zoo. She loved reading Bibi’s story of the bear’s life, and I’m sure she’s not the only person to have been in tears at the end of the book. At that time, when he lived in Edinburgh, Wojtek’s Polish name often appeared in the British press as ‘Voytek,’ and we kept this spelling for the translation, as we thought it’d be a little more straightforward for young American readers.

Another familiar name appeared in the Times article: Aileen Orr, the author of Wojtek the Bear, Polish War Hero, which I kept by my side as I translated. It’s a fine read and covers some of the factual background to the bear’s tale and the story of the Polish soldiers in WWII. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in finding out more about Wojtek and his companions, although it must be said that there is some debate about the accuracy of the facts surrounding Wojtek’s story. Wojtek has many fans who are devoted to him and there are a few different versions of the “facts” doing the rounds.

The article in The Times finished by mentioning some facts that aren’t open to debate: “Ms Orr is hoping to raise £500,000 for the bronzes and to fund two scholarships at Edinburgh’s Royal Veterinary School — one for a Scottish student and one for a Pole.”

So it seems that this marvelous creature, who died in 1962, is still having a positive effect on people’s lives in 2012 and beyond. That bear – yes, he’s hotter than hot!

Thanks to Wojtek and his friends for the story, to Bibi for telling it so well, to Philip Hopman for the outstanding illustrations – and to Eerdmans for publishing the book!

The second day was dedicated to translation workshops, with groups of different language combinations occupying the classrooms of the Vossiusgymnasium for the day. I moderated a session on translating YA literature and we worked on a section of Erna Sassen’s Dit is geen dagboek, a first-person, diary-style narrative with a sixteen-year-old protagonist who is furious at his mother for committing suicide. Lots of emotion. Lots of swearing. Lots of ‘youth speak’. And plenty of references to chatting online, texting, and so on. We certainly had a lot to talk about. Did the author succeed in capturing an authentic voice? Could we replicate that voice in English? It’s always surprising to see how much variety there is in eleven translations of the same text.

Photo: Barbara den Ouden

I rounded the weekend off on Sunday with a great group of children’s writers and illustrators at our annual SCBWI Christmas drinks party, this time at KHL. As most of us are freelancers, it’s the closest we get to a work Christmas do. It’s so energising spending time with people who are fizzing with such great ideas and plans for fun projects – and perfect for extending the shelf life of this particular translator!

Today, at the Vertalershuis in Amsterdam, I met up with a bunch of fellow literary translators and we chatted over tea and birthday cake about translation, publishing, contracts – and cake.

And last weekend saw the first ever conference of the Dutch chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators: The Netherlands and the Big World Out There – Publishing inthe Global Market.

Writers and illustrators (and a translator!) came from the Netherlands, France, Germany and the UK to listen to talks and attend workshops with publishing professionals including Martine Schaap from Ploegsma in Amsterdam, Ben Norland, the executive art director at Walker Books in the UK, award-winning author and illustrator Doug Cushman, app developer Omar Curiëre, writer and creative writing instructor Sarah Blake Johnson and agent Erszi Deàk from Hen & Ink Literary Studio.

It was a fantastic weekend of chatting, listening, eating, drinking, all around the theme of children’s books. I hosted a panel discussion about the place of children’s books in the global market (does the ‘global market’ exist?) and about the transferability of books from one country/language/market to another. We didn’t reach many conclusions, but we certainly had a lot to talk about, and the discussion continued that evening when we all headed out for an Indonesian rijsttafel at Sampurna by the floating flower market.

The organisers of the conference, Mina Witteman and Rachelle Meyer, deserve huge praise. They’re already talking about repeating the event next year and I certainly hope they do. Even the most independent of long-distance freelancers enjoys a little professional socialising every now and then…

And the reviews are already coming in. Here’s one from Vogue UK. Ah, a little bit of reflected glamour can feel rather good when you’re a lonely translator!

I have left my hometown of Amsterdam to come to Berlin for a few weeks to work on my translation of Cees Nooteboom’s book Berlijn, his account of his time spent in Germany from the years before the fall of the Wall until the present day. A native speaker of English, I have swapped my Dutch-speaking surroundings for a German-speaking environment. I am translating a Dutch book about Germany, sitting at a computer in Berlin, turning Dutch words about Germany into English words about Germany. Being in Berlin, as Nooteboom was, gives me the opportunity to visit the places he saw here, to see them not only through his writing, but with my own eyes.

One of the locations I knew I had to visit was the small village of Lübars, still part of Berlin, but as Nooteboom writes in his book, practically countryside. The writer sometimes used to go out to Lübars to escape from the city and the book describes his subsequent visits to the village and the changes that he sees as the political climate changes. Lübars was in the West, but only just. Although I was accustomed to the familiar photographs of the Wall dividing the urban landscape, Nooteboom’s account of the Wall in such rural surroundings somehow came as a surprise to me. He talks about the village pub, about girls riding horses, about fields and streams – and, cutting across the landscape, the incongruous Wall and its guardians. In his words, which are also, in a way, my words:

“I often visit Lübars, which is like a real village. It’s an illusion, as if there were lots of countryside stretching out all around. Two village pubs, a pump, a small church, a few graves. I walk out of the village along a path I’ve discovered. The first time, I came to a small river. I stood looking into the water, dark-coloured, fast-flowing, swaying water plants, the thought of fish. And that was when I noticed the sign. It said that the border ran down the middle of that river. The Wall might have been some distance away, but the other side, those dry reeds, that scattering of trees, that was the land of the Others. Now I saw the water differently. It was no more than a couple of metres wide, but the middle of that moving, transparent element was the border. That’s not something you should spend too much time thinking about, but I still did. East water, West water. Absolute nonsense, but still, that border is real. And it’s there. I carried on walking, up a hill. From there, I had a good view of the Wall. There were two of them. Between them was a kind of anti-tank ditch, loose sand, earth, soil. The strip of land rolled away into the distance. I walked on to where I would encounter the Wall; it was not made of bricks or concrete at that point, but of transparent steel mesh. A hundred metres beyond, in front of the other Wall, was a tower. A small car stood beside it. Then a window opened in the tower. I could see the silhouettes of two men. One of them directed his binoculars at me and took a good look. A one-way process. He could see me perfectly well, but I couldn’t see him. What did he think he was going to see when he looked at me? Why was he looking? I stood there for a while, experiencing the strange sensation of allowing myself to be looked at. I wanted to know what the man was thinking, but I never would. I didn’t want to know what he thought about me, but what he thought about himself. There was no way of knowing. Was he looking out of a sense of duty, conviction, boredom? Did he believe in what he was doing? There was, as far as I could tell, no human possibility that anything could ever occur between those two walls, not in that place, and certainly not starting from my side. So what was the point of watching? Did he spend hours of unutterable boredom in the tower? Or was it pure conviction? Did you go to that tower as you would to a job you enjoyed doing? What I really wanted was to go up into the tower and have a quick chat with him, but there was no chance of that happening.” (Nooteboom, Berlijn, p. 41)

My own visit to Lübars, all these years later, took me into the countryside. A quiet village, a somewhat gentrified village pub, fields, dogs, horses. No Wall. If you knew where to look, you could see where it had been. In fact, the cleared land of the death strip makes an excellent place to take horses out for a gallop. The stream, the river, where once a border ran down the middle, still flows along, turns into marsh, gets caught up in small pools. It divides the landscape and, at some points, makes it difficult for the casual walker to reach Lübars, but it’s no longer a political boundary, only a physical obstacle.

On one of his more recent visits to the village, Nooteboom spotted that the sign in the river indicating the border had gone, but the post it had been nailed to was still there. I didn’t see any post. It’s probably long rotted away, but perhaps I didn’t know where to look. That border, that solid Wall, the death strip, the guards, they have all vanished from the landscape, leaving behind the church and the pump and the pub, as they have existed for centuries.

Following Nooteboom’s descriptions in his book, I located a spot where he must have walked or stood. I took my copy of Berlijn, with Simone Sassen’s photograph of the Wall at Lübars, and held it up against the landscape to compare that same location, then and now. Lübars with the Wall; Lübars without the Wall. Where once that impenetrable concrete structure stood, there is now a line of trees and hedgerow.

I’m writing this piece on 30 September, International Translation Day. Translating Dutch into English, translating a person’s experiences, translating myself from one country to another. I translate the words and the places become even more real to me; and the words are somehow a little more my own when I follow the author and see what he’s seen.

Yesterday, I followed him to Berlin’s Museumsinsel, the Museum Island, where most of the city’s top museums are located. I saw ‘Schinkel’s giant marble dish’ in front of Das Alte Museum; Nooteboom witnessed members of the press climbing into this dish for a better view of the demonstrations that preceded the fall of the Wall. I saw the Pergamon Altar and statues of Anubis. However, one small exhibit made a large impact on me, a tattered piece of papyrus in Das Neue Museum, written on 18 April, 134 BC, and described as a ‘receipt of wages from a translator of the Trogodytes’ tribe’. Somehow, this evidence of the more mundane side of the translation profession seemed so much more personal and close to home than any surviving translations of literary texts. Translation may not be the oldest profession in the world, but translators have certainly been around for a very long time indeed. And perhaps that’s something to think about on International Translation Day.

Cees Nooteboom wrote these words in 1989, when he moved from Amsterdam to live and work in Berlin at the invitation of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Now, twenty-two years later, I have followed the author’s path from the area bounded by Singel and Herengracht in Amsterdam, and come to Berlin to work on a translation of his book Berlin. I’ve been out on reconnaissance in the area around my temporary home and established the lay of the land. I’m even developing something of a routine, which involves lots of reading, writing and revising, interspersed with forays and scouting expeditions into the surrounding city to check out sites mentioned in the book.

Part One of Berlin deals with Nooteboom’s experiences throughout his first stay in the city, from early 1989 to June 1990, a time, of course, of immense change and upheaval, which saw the fall of the Wall and the reshaping of Europe. Parts Two and Three of the book feature his impressions of Berlin and how he perceives the city and the country to have changed and developed during his subsequent visits and stays in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, taking us through the 1990s and almost up to the present day.

I’ve lived in Germany for four years in total, but had visited Berlin only twice, in the early 1990s, and I realised that if I was going to be working on this book, I needed a refresher course on the city. So I packed up my laptop and am now spending a few weeks in Berlin’s Tiergarten district, visiting places and refreshing my own memories. And yes, it feels like a different city. In the eighteen years since my last visit, the city has undergone a transformation: buildings have disappeared and new ones have taken their place. Brandenburger Tor has acquired neighbouring buildings that seem intent on muscling in on the tourist action. Potsdamer Platz is no longer a dusty wasteland, but is lined with shiny temples to commerce, and tall blocks that boast the label of ‘APARTMENTS’, lettered in gold.

As often happens, since I started thinking about Berlin, I’ve heard from lots of friends and acquaintances on Facebook, on Twitter and indeed in real life who love Berlin, have just been to Berlin, are planning to visit Berlin soon or have a friend who’s here now. A contact put me in touch with a local literary translation group and I met up with the members at a restaurant in Kreuzberg. A friend of a friend is putting on a theremin performance in Kreuzberg – I missed her when she last visited Amsterdam, but I’ll be able to catch her in Berlin. Edward van de Vendel, a great Dutch children’s writer, is currently visiting Berlin to participate in the city’s literature festival, as is Kader Abdolah, the well-known Dutch-Iranian author. I’m even considering finally going to see the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, who are in Berlin for the Jewish Cultural Festival. In Amsterdam, I suddenly saw Berlin everywhere. Now I’ve swapped Amsterdam for Berlin, a little bit of home appears to have followed me here.

Another pleasant Amsterdam–Berlin connection was meeting up with some Germany-based members of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Barbara Lalicki, from Harper Collins in New York, was coming to talk to the Amsterdam chapter of the society and I was disappointed that I’d be missing her visit, but then I found out that her only other stop in Europe would be with the society’s chapter in Berlin. So I was pleased to have the opportunity to hear Barbara talk and to meet some fellow members of the society. Having checked out the location, I also realised that the bookshop where we would be meeting was just around the corner from Wolff’s Bücherei on Bundesallee, which Nooteboom visits for a reading in his Berlin:

“Monday evening. Hilde Domin is reading at Wolff’s Bücherei. Poems, sketches from her life. A long life, she is almost eighty, with the ruthless indomitability of people who have lived through all kinds of things. Small, fragile, without her spectacles, a voice like glass. Fled Germany in 1933, gained a doctorate in Florence on a predecessor of Machiavelli, a rosary of exile, Italy, driven away again, England, Santo Domingo, a life of poems, poverty, different houses all the time, nothing could break her. In the book she signs for me, Aber die Hoffnung, she underlines the word ‘Aber’ three times.” p. 102

I stopped off at Wolff’s on the way to my meeting and found a fine old German bookshop with beautiful displays and a friendly shopkeeper. It’s no longer called Wolff’s Bücherei, but otherwise it was just as I’d imagined. Wolff’s Bücherei is now Der Zauberberg, just one more very small change in a city that has seen so many.

Nooteboom ends Part One of his book on 30 June, 1990, with the following words: “when I return, everything will be different, yet still the same, and changed forever.” He refers back to this thought when he embarks upon Part Two of Berlin , which deals with his first return to the city:

“It was in itself not a difficult prediction to make. The Wall would be gone, but the familiar buildings would still remain, the two parts of the city would, I thought, slowly move towards each other, along with the people who lived there, newspapers would disappear and new ones would take their place, West Berlin would become busier and busier, and in the East the signs of capitalism would start making inroads.” p. 273

Specifically, Nooteboom refers to the Belvedere in the gardens of Sanssouci in Potsdam, the former summer palace of Frederick the Great. In the final photograph in Part One of Berlin, taken in 1990, the Belvedere is a dilapidated ruin, its masonry and pillars crumbling, filthy and overgrown. When Nooteboom revisited the site upon his return to Berlin in Part Two of his book, he found that the building had changed:

“I recently visited the Belvedere again. It was no longer the open, wounded ruin it had been since the war, dismantled, violated, weeds among the pillars. Its decay was wrapped up like one of Christo’s buildings, the desecration now invisible. The signs of war will disappear from it, it will no longer serve as a memento; on the contrary, if it ever resurfaces from beneath those black rags, it will gleam, a model of classical architectural style, a showpiece. Yet it will also be a little dead, like an actress with a facelift.” p. 267

And indeed, I called in on the venerable lady only yesterday, in September 2011, and found her looking still glamorous, but a little tired. The structure is beautiful, but, twenty years after her treatment, she appears to be in need of a little top-up.

Some things, however, don’t change so much. A couple of days ago, I happened upon another literary haunt that receives a mention in Part One of Berlin: the Buchhändlerkeller on Cramerstraße, where the author went to see Kerstin Hensel (‘small, severe, extremely minimalist clothing, hair like Brecht’s, the shorn head of a nun, born in 1961’) read from Hallimasch, her book of short stories. The Buchhändlerkeller is still there; the programme still offers readings.

When I found the Buchhändlerkeller, I was on my way to Goethestraße, where the author lived during his extended stay in Berlin. The Goethe-Apotheke he describes is still there too – as Nooteboom mentions, it’s been there since 1900. But Nana Nanu, ‘with its artificial flowers and ice-blue nylon animals in the window display’ has gone, as has Zum Wirtenbub, a ‘gloomy bar’ that the author never visited, but where he always heard people playing dice when he went by. Fortunately, however, for me as a translator, the facade of the building where he lived appears to have remained the same and I can confirm that is indeed the colour of ‘solidified mud, or desert soil, at any rate something involving earth, and dry, jagged – it would hurt your hand if you were to rub it.’

So, I’m going to stay in Berlin for a few more weeks, translating, thinking and ready to spot more connections between Amsterdam and Berlin and the past and the present. So much has changed, yet so much has remained the same.

Berlin by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Laura Watkinson, will be published in 2013. He talks about it in this interview:

I took part in a fascinating weekend workshop for literary translators in Leuven, sponsored by the Expertisecentrum Literair Vertalen. It was aimed at literary translators from Dutch into English who also work from Flemish, which is of course essentially the same language, but with a few important differences. As a group, we discussed translation issues in texts by Louis Paul Boon, Dimitri Verhulst, Geertrui Daem and also an excerpt from a Flemish graphic novel, De tweede kus by Conz. Els Aerts from the Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren came to talk to us about Flemish graphic novels and language expert and newspaper columnist Ludo Permentier hosted an interesting session about the differences and similarities of the different varieties of Dutch.

Then it was over to UEA in Norwich for the literary translation summer school at the British Centre for Literary Translation. I joined the German group for a fun, collaborative week of translation. We worked with translator Shaun Whiteside and author Sabrina Janesch to produce an English excerpt of Sabrina’s beautiful novel Katzenberge. At the end of the week, the different groups on the course came together to present our work in what felt like an end-of-term show. I don’t think we showed ourselves up too badly, but the Japanese-English group put on a proper performance, including a Mancunian rendition of the text and even a bit of slapstick, as one member of the group gamely broke a raw egg on his head to simulate the author’s own attempts to describe the sound of smashing eggs. Now that’s real dedication to the craft.

The Japanese-English group, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt. The egg has yet to hit the translator!

So, after two very enjoyable busman’s holidays, I’m now spending a few weeks in Berlin on another extended working break. I’ve been concentrating on my translation of Cees Nooteboom’s Berlijn for a number of months now and, having decided it was time for a research trip, I’ve exchanged Amsterdam for Berlin, where I’ll be following in Cees’s footsteps and polishing those words…