At PEN Atlas Otto de Kat writes 'about the risks and benefits of using history in the novel', in Imagining the past -- a few notes on the art of the historical novel.
That's reasonably interesting, but his piece also includes the best anecdote demonstrating the value of a good translator (and just how much that job involves) I've come across in a while:
That's reasonably interesting, but his piece also includes the best anecdote demonstrating the value of a good translator (and just how much that job involves) I've come across in a while:
(I)n my last novel, News from Berlin, Emma Regendorf is arrested at her home by the Gestapo. They drive her to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and they pass the Potsdamer Platz. Emma notices that the clock on the Platz is working as usual. And at that point I mention in the novel the peculiar form of the clock, namely its four sides, each with an individual clock-face. It is 1941, and the clock has always been a sort of landmark, placed there in the twenties. But what I didn't know was that it had been removed from the square in 1939 (and it was brought back after the war), so in 1941 there was no clock with four sides. My German translator, Andreas Ecke, the most dedicated and capable translator a writer can wish for, dryly informed me about that fact. He saved me from a few letters...That may be fairly common knowledge even in present-day Berlin, but it still seems like an awesome catch to me -- setting the bar pretty high for fellow-translators.