On Not Translating "The Tin Drum"

Long, long time ago...I can still remember how "The Tin Drum" used to make me cry...

Well, not, it didn't; that's a lie.  I never cried over Gunter Grass's magnum opus.  I did write my senior thesis on it when I was doing a double major in German and English in college (and indeed, that was a long, long time ago). For some occult reason, Barnard doesn't offer a degree in comparative literature; hence, the double major.  As I recall, I wrote about death and funerals in the novel, after realizing that not a single character in the book dies in what could be described as an even remotely natural fashion - and trust me, there was plenty of material.

I recently picked up the familiar (once you've written a thesis on it, the thing is practically engraved on your heart - Mary Tudor famously remarked that when they opened her up for the autopsy, they would find Calais - the English outpost in France that was lost under her reign - written on her heart; the coroner who gets me is going to find something that reads like a short list of the Harvard Classics) tome and settled in for an entertainingly macabre read.  I suppose one could make a case for saying that Grass is an unsung pioneer of Teutonic Magical Realism. Impossible things are always happening in his books, and the reader is asked to swallow quite a lot.  To begin with, there's the protagonist, Oskar, who announces in Chapter 1 that he is writing his memoirs from his bed in an insane asylum, thus establishing himself as that character so dear to the hearts of twentieth century novelist - the untrustworthy, antiheroic, first-person narrator who is saying, "Trust me." (You're right -you've met him before, in a Ken Kesey novel.)  Generally speaking, when you start off with this set-up, Social Critique is about to descend on you, like a 50 lb. bag of wet laundry falling from the clear blue sky.

Oskar would have us believe that, at the age of three, he made a deliberate decision that he would stop growing, because the grown-ups surrounding him were...well, the whole first half of the book is set during the rise of the Third Reich, so - need I say more?  He therefore stages an accident (trap door, root cellar) to explain his failure to thrive, and thereafter communicates primarily by rat-a-tat-tatting on the red-and-white toy tin drum of the title. (Red and white are also big themes, since the book is set in Gdansk/Danzig, and the Poles are trying to keep the place under the red-and-white Polish flag rather than cede it to the red-and-white flag with the big black spider in the middle belonging to the opposition.)  Oh - one more unbelievable thing about little Oskar.  He can, and does, shatter glass by screaming at it.

I like grotesques.  My favorite building in my own neighborhood is on 110th Street and features a quartet of lolling, moping degenerates, rendered into stone by some deranged architectural sculptor, who would do Quasimodo proud.  I like Angela Carter novels, with their cast of caricatures straight out of a Tim Burton movie and their wacky, opium-dream-like, S&M flavored scenarios.  So I was all set for an enjoyable re-read.

By the time I was partially through the first chapter of the English translation by Ralph Manheim, which is the original translation and therefore around 50 years old, I found myself wanting to look up things in the original German edition to see how the Manheim text compared for accuracy and for overall flavor (for lack of a better word).  I was dissatisfied.  Unaware that a new translation by Breon Mitchell has hit the shelves and is being lauded as the best available translation, I toyed with the idea of translating the book myself, and I read on from there with an eye towards the somewhat daunting project of rendering its 734 pages into an English version that I would want to read.  To this end, I vacillated between the English and the German texts like a distracted little pendulum, clicking my tongue in tut-tutting reproof at some of Manheim's more outré misdemeanors.

But I ultimately decided against it.  Why? Not because there was already a new translation on the market - I did not, in fact, discover this until about 15 minutes ago, while writing this post and looking up the name of the original translator online.  (At which point, of course, I said to myself, "Well.  Good thing I abandoned that project on the drawing board.  Wouldn't I have wound up feeling silly!)

No, I'm afraid that the reason was much simpler than that.  It was, in fact, the fear that I would lose my reason, were I to take this novel to my heart and spend the next couple of years absorbing myself in it so completely that I would eat, sleep, dream, and breathe The Tin Drum.  By the time I was a quarter of the way into it, I was saying to myself, "How is it that I never realized before that this is really a very sick and depressing book?"  It must be that one's perspective changes as the years go by; I used to find the misadventures of Dostoevki's characters rather merry.  Now, I just think I'd cross the street if I saw them coming.

The reason that Oskar is spinning his tales from a mental ward is that, obsessed with nurses and their white uniforms with the little red cross on the bosom, he has found himself accused of doing away with one Sister Dorothea, whose dismembered finger has been discovered among his possessions.  (That finger, Oskar's drumsticks, and a number of other fairly crude phallic symbols pop up their little heads almost as frequently as death, the funerals, and the red-and-white imagery.  When Herr Grass finds a symbol he likes, he sticks with it.)  Of course, Oskar claims he simply found the finger lying around somewhere (in point of fact, he puts the world's oldest excuse for missing homework in reverse and asserts that a dog gave it to him).  Charmed by its visual similarity to those phallic drumsticks that he's always playing with, Oskar simply tucked it into his pocket and strolled home.  Whether the reader wants to believe him or not is each individual's call; even in fiction, however, the authorities apparently had a hard time digesting that story.

Meditating on Sister Dorothea and her disjointed digit reminded me of an incident from my own past - again, long, long time ago.  The summer of my junior year, in fact. I was doing the summer study abroad thing and had pushed my Eurail pass to its limits - which, in my case, was the Aran Isles, off the western coast of Ireland. (I had seen Man of Aran on PBS and had read J.M. Synge, so there ya go.  Literature junkies will go practically anywhere, once they've read about it in a work of fiction.)

I came off the ferry, toting my enormous red backpack, and trudged along until I found a B&B that had a vacancy.  The B&B's owner, it seemed, was away, but had left its administration in charge of a neighbor, who assured me that I would sleep very well, as there was only one other guest staying there at the moment, a quiet gentleman of middle years. From Germany, she believed.  She undertook to pop in from her own house next door and put a breakfast in front of us in the morning.

The next morning, I was at the deserted breakfast table, having just had a plate of eggs and a rasher of bacon set before me, and was trying to choke down the unpalatable stuff that passed for coffee in Ireland of the early 1980's.  I was, of course, reading at the table; the book in my hand was the highly-recognizable paperback edition of Die Blechtrommel.  Since I was planning to use it for my thesis, I was getting an early start.

My fellow-lodger entered.  I glanced up, found him intolerably old and not at all attractive to my 21 year old eyes, murmured, "Guten Morgen," and went back to my book and the execrable coffee.  Perhaps I was showing off a bit - I probably elevated the book slightly, in order to make it quite clear that I was smart in not just one, but two languages.

My companion burst into a positive torrent of German.  He was enchanted to meet me, and still more enchanted that I spoke his language so fluently.  What was I reading?

I raised my eyebrows and the book slightly higher.  "Die Blechtrommel.  D'you know it?"

He burst into a cackle, and literally rubbed his hand with glee.  "Do I know it?  Ha! Gunter Grass!  I know him!  I went to school with that fellow!  Ha!  A troublemaker!"

"Oh?"  I glanced down at my book, on the back of which was a photograph of the author.  It looked remarkably like my interlocutor.  "In what way, a troublemaker?"

He grew downright gleeful.  "Oh, it's better not to say.  Tell me, are you travelling alone?"

I allowed as how I was, which seemed to put him into an even better mood.  He rambled on and on, still in German, interrupting himself, repeating himself, explaining himself, digressing in a dozen directions, rambling back to what a coincidence it was to find a young lady sharing his temporary residence, a young lady who was reading that particular novel, a novel by that particular troublemaker Gunter Grass, whom he remembered so well as being a troublemaker from his own days as a schoolboy...

At last, feeling in his shirt pocket, he exclaimed that he must have lost his sunglasses, why, yes, his sunglasses were missing, deuce take it, now where could they be? Ah - he had it - he must have left them on that rock, the rock he'd been climbing yesterday, that very scenic and beautiful rock with the extraordinarily beautiful command of that very scenic vista.  Dash it all, he'd have to go back to that rock, that dratted, that wonderful rock, go back and see whether his sunglasses were still there!  And wouldn't I like to come along, and help him hunt for his sunglasses?

By now, all the 21-year-old-girl-who-has-gotten used-to-being-sexually-harassed-by-lecherous-middle-aged-men in me was raising its hackles, silently screaming CREEPER!  And it wasn't just, regular, run-of-the-mill creepiness.  There was a disturbing note of obsession to his insistence that I accompany him to this secluded spot far away from the village. His refusal to take no for an answer grew more and more alarming, and it was with some difficulty that I convinced him that I had other plans that Simply.  Would.  Not.  Wait.

I decided, as I rambled about the island sweetly alone at last, that I was going to make a point of it to avoid my fellow-lodger.  Whether or not he was the man in the picture, I neither knew nor cared.  All I cared about was that I was spending a second night alone in an otherwise empty house with a Creeper.  The other B&B's were full-up, or I'd have grabbed my gear and moved on the spot.

That night, I slipped into my room without encountering him.  I was almost asleep, when I thought I heard something stirring on the other side of my locked door.  Did I hear the doorknob being tested, ever so gently?  I couldn't be sure.  It was a long time before I fell asleep.

In the morning, I waited until I heard the front door's bang announce that my troublesome troublemaker had left before coming out to have my own breakfast.  As I sat and consumed yet another cup of vile coffee, I re-read a particular section of The Tin Drum, the chapter entitled The Fiber Rug, in which Oskar attempts sexual intercourse with Sister Dorothea, fails to achieve an erection, and slinks away in shame and humiliation. Then I skipped ahead to the chapter where he acquires Sister Dorothea's finger, a chapter called, appropriately enough, The Ring Finger.  (Oskar insists that it was delivered into his hands by an overly zealous dog, who apparently mistook it for a ball during a game of Fetch.)

There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and accurately when detached, when alienated form the center.  It was a finger.  A woman's finger.  A ring finger.  A woman's ring finger.  A woman's ring finger with an attractive ring on it.  Between the metacarpus and the first finger joint, some three-quarters-of-an-inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be chopped off.  The section was neat, clearly revealing the tendon of the extensor muscle...Despite the line of dirt, or rather of earth under the nail, as though the finger had been obliged to scratch or dig earth, the nail seemed to have been carefully manicured...The finger felt cold, and its peculiar yellowish pallor also suggested coldness.

Decidedly, I would not go out hunting sunglasses that day.