Kendra Atleework interviews prolific translators Katy Derbyshire and Susan Bernofsky…
Fernweh – German
The opposite of homesickness. Stronger than wanderlust. A deep longing for faraway places.
Fern: Old High German ferni—meaning far, distant
Weh: Old High German: meaning pain, suffering
Two country bumpkins step blinking out of the train station and into Berlin.
“Look at us,” I say to Patrick. “We’re two country bumpkins in Berlin.”
We’ve come because Berlin looms like a legend 800km to the north of our little city. Because Patrick—Badisch son of the wooded hills and green quiet—has never looked over the glass-walled chamber of the Bundestag (parliament), never walked across the gray vastness of Alexanderplatz, never drunk a beer in a metal bar next to a friendly patron whose tee-shirt reads FUCK ME JESUS.
“What’s a country bumpkin?” asks Patrick.
Because we do not share a mother tongue, our conversations often go like this. I tell him it’s a Landei, the literal translation of which is ‘countryside egg’—a reasonable description for the two of us, our clothes and shoes Black-Forest-practical, as if we might at any moment turn around and flee back to the familiar.
Some weeks before, in a cafe back in Freiburg, we read a book together. Patrick read the original by Judith Hermann while I read the translation, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything.
“The story is a protective space for the narrator, cushioning her like the shell of a nut,” writes Katy Derbyshire in her translation.
A story is also a space for the reader, a space as intimate as the smooth interior of a nutshell. While we read, sometimes Patrick showed me a passage in his book. After one year in Germany, I live my life in translation. Every day I combine sounds in a way that conveys necessary information and, to my ear, nothing more. I can go to the doctor. I can absolve myself when my Pfand bottle causes a jam in the machine.
But in German I drop the emotional weight of words spoken in a mother tongue, the personal and generational memory imbedded in etymology. When I looked at the words in Patrick’s book, I could understand the information imparted there. But the space of the story, that nutshell guarding its undertones of meaning, remained closed to me.
This is why translator Susan Bernofsky,…