Found in translation

The long and winding road to becoming a bilingual writer

This post is by Frank Joussen.

Frank is a former German teacher and writer whose credits include poetry, short stories, and anthologies. Read more about Frank here.

Many connotations, puns, nuances are lost in translation. We all know that. That said, I see many chances in translation – when you are translating your own work. In this essay, I would like to share with you how long my journey took and what was involved in becoming a bilingual author.

Yet am I allowed to call myself a “really” bilingual author? According to the kind of German literary criticism I grew up with, including critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the clear answer should be “no”. These critics’ theory was that good literature could only be written in the author’s native tongue. Exceptions were only made, as far as I remember, for writers who emigrated and became totally fluent in English. For example, the Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, who started to learn English when he was twenty. Or the German-American author Erich Fromm. He was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He fled from the Nazis to the U.S.A. and henceforth wrote all his books in English.

A more recent example is the American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Born in London, with Bengali parents, Lahiri became an American citizen and wrote her first prizing-winning short stories and novels in English. In 2012, she emigrated to Rome where she has been living since with her Italian husband and their two children. For a longer period of time she wrote only in Italian. Meanwhile she switches between English and Italian. For instance in her two most recent publications: The essay “Translating Myself and Others” (2022) and “Racconti romani”(also 2022; English title: “Roman Tales”), a book of short stories. In Lahiri’s case, marriage to an Italian (in 2001), immigration to Italy (in 2012) and immersion in a different culture can explain her success in bilingual writing.

What about me then? – I grew up with British and American pop culture, especially films and music. Therefore I wrote my first poems and song lyrics in English. If you have never heard of the bands I worked with in my late teens, you are forgiven. The BP-Band (a group of young police officers) and the KJG-Band (a group that was part of a big Catholic youth organization) were locally successful. Yet of all the recording sessions, only one tape has survived. What generally happens, or doesn’t happen, to such school bands is beautifully described in Bryan Adams` song “Summer of 69” with one important exception, that at the time we actually did think we would go far! My interest in the English language was further enhanced by a four-week visit to my aunt, uncle and cousin in New Jersey when I was fifteen. Later I had an American girlfriend. After graduating, I studied Anglistics. Yet I have never stayed in an English-speaking country for more than six weeks at a time.

So how come I get so many ideas for texts in English? It depends on the language I am thinking in, which often happens to be English. “Happens to be” is a phrase I choose here because it is not a deliberate decision which language you think, or, for that matter, dream in. It is a subconscious process. – So I have found the first answer to my question why I could be a bilingual writer: A phrase, a pun, a rhyme starts the writing process. I run to get pen and paper. If attaining them is impossible, I start writing in my head. Especially when rhyming I find it pretty easy to memorize this new text. In the past, 99 per cent of the time this happened in English.

Fast forward to the present. Nowadays I may start a text in English or in German. Maybe I subconsciously blocked my native language in favour of English in the past. Now I don’t. My theory how this change – the widening of my linguistic possibilities – came about is as follows: Enraged by the open-pit mining and the resulting social and environmental problems in my town, my region, I started to write a cycle of poems – once again in English. Then I realized that this topic would find a wider and a much more local audience in German. Therefore, I wrote German versions. While translating my own texts I often discovered how the originals, though partly already published in international magazines, could be improved. First in the German translation, then in the English version.

“With a little help from my friends”, especially from my very meticulous editor, Debbie Hubbard, these bilingual poems became a book, which I often present at readings. Meanwhile my editor and I are working on a second bilingual book, a selection of travel poems, many of which have been previously published in English- and German-speaking literary magazines. The tricky bit is the translation of metric, rhyming poetry, in the case of my travel poems a Shakespearean sonnet. I have now more or less finished the German version and even find it slightly better than the English original. However, I have not received any feedback from my editor, yet.