German Translation Exercise: The New Sorrows of Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf
A retelling of Goethe's Werther story set in post-war Germany, detailing the struggles of the youth in that time.
Edgar Wibeau, at 17 years old, has run away from home to test himself in the real world. He comes across a copy of Goethe’s Werther, with which he uses to compare and contrast his own experiences in life. He meets Charlie, who belongs to another community where he might find acceptance. He tries to prove himself, but only realizes that going it alone will be his downfall when it’s too late.
This novella will be the first work that has previously been translated into English that I am aware of. I saw it on my last trip into NYC in the bargain rack of the Strand Bookstore, which usually has a few diamonds in the rough. It’s certainly burned me before; I’ve picked up a couple novels that began as works in English, which are utterly useless to my readership, but were fun to flip through and mentally translate as a light brain workout rather than a full-on session like this book provides. I figured it was okay to move ahead with this example given the subject matter and how it relates to the blog. One last thing to note is that the novella is so short that, at 108 pages, it doesn’t actually have chapters. I chose to stop at a sort of arbitrary break in the narrative. If you want to continue reading this story, feel free to pick up one of the other translations floating around out there.
The New Sorrows of Young W.
Note in the Berlin Times from the 26th of December:
The young Edgar W. was finally found in critical condition on the evening of the 24th of December in an isolated cabin at the colony of Paradise II in the city district of Lichtenberg. The police’s investigations only came to an end by chance after he had been living in an unregistered property, and had been unsafely tinkering with electric machinery.
Obituary in the Berlin Times from the 30th of December:
On the 24th of December, an accident took the life of our young colleague Edgar Wibeau. “He had so much left to accomplish!” -Director of the VEB WIK Berlin Union.
Obituaries in the Frankfurt Guardian from the 31st of December:
The tragic accident that befell our unforgettable young friend, Edgar Wibeau was totally unexpected. “His life is not forgotten!” -Principal of the school at VEB Hydraulics of Mittenberg.
“I could hardly believe it when I learned about the news of the death of my beloved son, Edgar Wibeau on the 24th of December.” -Else Wibeau
“When did you last see him?”
“In September. During the end of September. The night before he left.”
“Didn’t you think of organizing a manhunt?”
“Well, if you’re going to start blaming me for this, then what about you? Your son has hardly received as much as a postcard from you in the last year!”
“Excuse you! Last I heard, you didn’t want him to have anything to do with me, given my lifestyle…”
“Oh that’s just rich, isn’t it? Not going to the police was maybe the one right thing I did. Even that ended up being wrong, but at first I just felt finished with him. He put me in an impossible situation between his school and his work. The son of the principal, who had been a model student up until then, suddenly nosedived into delinquency with a 1.1 GPA! He abandoned his apprenticeship! He even ran away from home! But all of a sudden, news steadily began to trickle back. Not to me, of course, but to his friend Willi, on cassette tapes and in a strange voice. It was so grandiose. Eventually Willi let me listen to them. The whole situation was so bizarre, even to him. While he was certainly still somewhere in Berlin, he wouldn’t tell me his exact location. That detail was cleverly omitted from any of the tapes. Anyway, it showed us that Edgar was healthy at the very least, even working to some extent and not just slacking off. Later on a girl came along, but they broke up. She had been married to someone else! The whole time he was here at home, he showed little interest in women. Even at that point, it still didn’t feel like a matter for the police.”
Okay, I’ve heard enough. Stop it. That’s total bullshit, I had plenty of game with the ladies. In fact, I’d started all the way back when I was fourteen. I couldn’t say anything about it then, but now I have no shame. I used to hear all kinds of things about it, but nothing was for certain. Once I did learn about it, I wanted to know everything about it: that was my nature. My first was Sylvia. She was almost three years older than me. I only needed an hour or so to get around to her. I figure I must have been pretty good at that time for my age, and I hadn’t even developed my charisma to its fullest, and didn’t have my iconic pronounced chin. I’m not saying this in order to give you a false idea, guys, that’s just how things were. A year later, things became more clear to my mom. She worked herself into a real lather over it. I could have pissed myself laughing, but instead I made puppy-dog eyes like I always did. I believe that that’s where the mess really began.
“What do you mean he became a delinquent?”
“He broke his teacher’s toe.”
“His toe?”
“He threw a big iron plate at his foot, some kind of base plate. I was so shocked, I mean…!”
“Is that really true?”
“I wasn’t actually there to see it, but Flemming– that’s the teacher– told me, and he’s been there forever. Totally reliable guy. He was there at the school early in the morning to check out the quality of the filing on some of the plates. While the boys went on filing, he noticed that Edgar’s neighbor, Willi, had already finished his plate but hadn’t done any of the filing himself, but fed it through a machine. In the production line the base plates were all done by machine, naturally. Willi had swapped out his plate for this one and was showing it off. Naturally, it’s perfect to a hundredth of a centimeter; much more precise than one can dream of doing by hand.
Flemming told him, ‘you got that off a machine.’
Willi responds, ‘from what machine?’
Flemming shot back, ‘one of the machines in room 202.’
With a knowing grin, Willi denied everything, ‘oh, they’ve got machines in there? I didn’t know that, sir. I can’t remember the last time I was in that room, but on my tour of the school I figured that those were for laying eggs.’
That, of course, was the magic word for Edgar; they’d worked out the whole routine beforehand: ‘So, we’ll say that there is a machine there. I can accept that. But it begs the question, why do we have to scrape away at these base plates with our files? And us, in our third year…”
Oh, of course I said that. No objections here from me, but it was off the cuff, not rehearsed. I knew that Willi and the others had planned it, but I’d wanted to stay out of the argument, as always.
“Flemming then said, ‘ What have I always told you since you’ve arrived here? I have always said: Here you have a piece of iron! When you’ve turned it into a clock, you have learned everything you need to know from me. Not earlier, and not later.’ That’s always been his motto.
Then, Edgar replied, ‘but we didn’t want to be clockmakers, even back then.’”
Flemming had had that coming for a long time, believe me. That wasn’t just his stupid motto, his entire attitude towards work had come straight from a pre-industrialized world: there, we were stuck in the Middle Ages. Up until then I’d been pretty good about keeping my mouth shut.
“And after he’d said that, Edgar threw his base plate at his foot with such force that he broke a toe. God could have struck me down with a thunderbolt right then and there. I didn’t want to believe it at first.”
I’ll admit to that, other than two little details. First of all, I didn’t throw anything. With a plate like that, I didn’t need to. It was heavy enough that anyone’s fucking toe would have broken from it falling on them, which is what actually happened. Secondly, it wasn’t right after I said that. Instead, Flemming let out one more cute little remark first. He totally freaked out and said, “Oh, you’re the last one I’d expect to hear that from, Wiebau!”
That set my mind to it. That’s when I decided to let that hunk of metal fall on his foot. What an insult, “Edgar Wiebau!” As if he hadn’t heard my friends say “Edgar Wiebeau” every other weekday of that semester. That’s like saying Weber instead of Werther. I mean, if a man doesn’t have the right to hear his name pronounced correctly, then he has nothing, right? Otherwise, it doesn’t have any value. Maybe some others don’t exercise that right, but my name matters to me. And this wasn’t a one-time thing, either—it had gone on for years. Mom didn’t mind either way being called Wiebau. She was of the opinion that the mispronunciation had become so commonplace, and it wasn’t going to kill her and most of all, that everything she had accomplished at work was under the name Wiebau. Naturally, everyone who knew her as Wiebau would call me Wiebau as well! Some of you might be thinking “Oh, what’s wrong with being called Wiebau? You could object if it were Himmler or Hitler, that would be really rotten, but so what? Wibeau is an old Huguenot name, anyway. That’s hardly something worth breaking Flemming’s poor toe over. That’s really rotten.” Eventually it became clear to me that nobody wanted to talk about the lack of educational merit, but instead prattle on about the plate and the toe. Sometimes, I just get heated and dizzy, and I do things that I couldn't remember afterwards. That was the inheritance of my “Huguenot name,” or maybe it was too high blood pressure.
