A terrible translation of Musil

Robert Musil. Intimate Ties. Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2019. 207 pages. $16.

Peter Wortsman, in an afterword to his translation:

I took up the challenge, in part as a project to propose to the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur to land a fellowship in Vienna.

I got the fellowship and fumbled through the translation.

“Fumbled”: I’ll say.

I thought I was in trouble on the first page of “The Culmination of Love,” the first of two novellas that form Vereinigungen (1911), or Intimate Ties. Tea is served. “They” are shutters:

Like a pair of dark, serenely lowered eyelids, they hid the glimmer of this room in which the tea now trickled from the matte silver pot into two cups, flung open with a quiet clang and then holding still in the shaft of light like a twisted, transparent column of soft brown topaz.

The cups are flung open? No, it must be the pot. But who flings a teapot open to pour? And what kind of teapot clangs — and clangs quietly? Is it the pot that’s holding still in “the shaft of light” like a topaz column? No, that must be the tea. And about “the” shaft of light: what shaft?

I struggled through this book — I was interested. The depiction of psychological extremity made me wonder whether Musil might have influenced Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood ends with a woman and a dog in a scene reminiscent of what’s suggested in this volume’s “The Temptation of Saint Veronica.” So I struggled.

I was grateful to find, after reading, a review by the translator Michael Hoffman, “Musil’s Infinities” (New York Review of Books, March 26, 2020). Now I know why I was in trouble from the first page:

Everybody makes mistakes occasionally, and, no question, this is a difficult book — but these are elementary mistakes. They are the sort of misunderstandings that bespeak a translator not equably accompanying an author on their way together so much as looking around and wondering in a blind panic where he can have got to. They are mistakes that make of German — where many short, everyday words exist in more than one sense — a sort of German roulette. In the opening scene of the first story, Claudine pours tea. “Aufschlug,” given as the perplexing “flung open” (like a door?), is the sound made by the tea being poured; “Strahl ” is a column of liquid, not a “shaft of light.”

And so on. And so on. Hoffman tallies many mistakes in translation and faults Wortsman for Instinktlosigkeit — a lack of instinct. Hoffman also takes Wortsman to task for cheesy alliteration and awkward anachronisms: “Then Claudine got antsy.” I’d call it a lack of sprachgefühl, a lack of feeling for words. Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance, as David Foster Wallace wrote.

I’ll point to two other kinds of error in Wortsman’s prose. One is the consistent use of like for as. From Garner’s Modern English Usage:

In traditional usage, like is a preposition that governs nouns and noun phrases, not a conjunction that governs verbs or clauses. Its function is adjectival, not adverbial.

From Intimate Ties:

She looked up to find her fellow passengers joking around cheerfully and harmlessly, like when you see a light and decipher the shapes of small figures at the end of a dark tunnel.

And:

She felt it stirring something up in her, like when you walk by the seashore, unable to fully fathom the roar of every action and every thought torn in the fabric of the moment.

I could go on. Seeing these sentences in such an elegantly designed book (Archipelago books always look elegant) is a small adventure in cognitive dissonance, like when you see someone wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes.

Seeing spelling errors is worse. Intimate Ties gives us at least two homophone mistakes: “the great painstakingly plated [plaited ] emotional braid of her being” and “an amiable mean [mien ].” There’s also swopping for swapping, as in “swopping empty niceties,” and, yes, swopping is a British spelling of swapping, but this translation is by an American writer, and the publisher is in Brooklyn. Sheesh. They’ll get no pass from me.

I go along with Michael Hoffman, whose translations of Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and other writers have given me much pleasure:

Intimate Ties is one of those regrettable publications that hurts the reputations of everyone connected with it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and even the luckless publisher, Archipelago.

And our household is out $32, having bought two copies for our very exclusive reading club. Elaine, who can read German, was beside herself when reading Wortsman’s Musil alongside the original. The sad thing: this translation is the lone translation of ‌Vereinigungen into English. I doubt there’ll be another anytime soon. But I’d like to read one by Michael Hoffman. His review already proposes an alternative title: Conjunctions or Associations.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

[The Oxford English Dictionary dates antsy to 1950. “Like when you see someone wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes”: if there’s any doubt, the like here is for comic effect. We’re really out $64, as we also bought two copies of Wortsman’s translation of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Maybe it’s a better job.]