translating words of abuse

The language with which we abuse people is harsh and unfair, but sometimes colourful as well.
Just now I'm looking at the German word Einfaltspinsel. Einfalt means naivete or simplicity. Push it a little and it means stupid. To break that down even more, a Falt is a fold or pleat, so Einfalt is a single fold or pleat.
A Pinsel is a brush. That makes an Einfaltspinsel a single-fold brush. Except brushes don't have folds, they have hairs, so an Einfaltspinsel is a single-hair brush.
Neat, eh? Who came up with that one? A master painter shouting at a hopeless apprentice? Though maybe the apprentice only had a different way of seeing and applying paint. The word first appeared in print in 1732.
In the dictionary, Einfaltspinsel translates as nitwit.

If you are planning a trip to a German-speaking country and packing a few words of abuse to toss around, I don't know how current Einfaltspinsel is. It can be found online if that's an indication.

The frog comes from my old copy of Grimms which I'm using for something else I'm writing. He's a happy frog, isn't he? Ready for spring as we all are in the unending cold that winter has been.

Back to work...

kaiserschmarrn or emperor's mess

By an emperor's mess, I'm not referring to politics or history--a Kaiser is an emperor--but an Austrian dish called Kaiserschmarrn. It looks like scrambled eggs except that it's made with pancake batter.

I grew up knowing that if you wanted pancakes, but didn't feel like standing at the stove and flipping them, you could dump the whole bowl of batter in the pan, let the bottom brown, and then scramble the mess, turning the bits and pieces until they were browned. It makes for a chunky mess but it's faster than making pancakes and it tastes the same. It's served with jam, compote or sprinkled sugar. 

It's called Kaiserschmarrn because it was a favoured dish of Kaiser Franz Joseph I (1830 - 1916). He wasn't the Austro-Hungarian emperor whose assassination led to WWI, but close. He helped botch relations with Serbia and it was a Serbian nationalist who assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir presumptive, which, if you follow the thread, led to WWI. That's a loose interpretation. I'm talking pancakes here. Whatever else History wants to remember Franz Joseph I for, he was also fond of these messed-up pancakes.

Schmarrn might mean folly or nonsense. Or it relates to the simple messed-up pancakes peasants in 800 B.C. made with hand-milled flour, eggs and rendered fat, and called schmer.

Amazing how linguists earn a livelihood discussing the possible etymology of a word--and what people ate so long ago. I'll have to remember to become a linguist in my next life. I'm getting ready by learning how to say "pen" in four languages. Pen, stylo, kugelschreiber, boligrafo. One of the rare words that's the same gender in all the languages that (so perversely) assign gender to inanimate nouns.

A few weeks ago, when R and I were in the Gaspé, we found a plum tree laden with plums. This is unusual because it used to be believed that the summer on the coast was so short, there was no point in growing anything as delicate as raspberries. Forget fruit trees. However, our neighbours are devoted gardeners who plant all kinds of vegetables and fruit in strategic locations where the plants and trees get a maximum of sunlight and a minimum of exposure. Their's was the plum tree, but they had already boarded up their house and left the coast to return to their winter home. R and I grabbed bags and picked the plums. I cooked some of them down to a thick compote--and remembered Kaiserschmarrn.

I didn't have a recipe--and no access to internet--but it's pancake batter, right? As with pancake batter, there are simpler and fancier versions. You can use cream instead of milk. You can brown them in butter or in oil. You can separate the eggs, beat the whites and fold them into the batter.

I decided to do the egg white thing because it gave me a chance to use the vintage eggbeater a friend had bought for me at a flea market a few years ago when I didn't have $3 in my pocket and he did. Since we have no mixer in our house out in the Gaspé, I brought the eggbeater--in case I ever want to... make piles of whipped cream?

I took a picture of the Kaiserschmarrn too, but it looks so messy--and perhaps unappetizing unless you've smelled it cooking--that you'll just have to take my word for it: it's a great way to make pancakes all at one go. Try it. Just keep turning all the pieces till they're all cooked through. Serve with peach jam, plum compote, maple syrup...

Okay, fine, here's a picture I took off the internet.

new german fairy tales / but grimms not forsaken yet

This is very exciting for someone like myself who loves the fantastic fatalism of old-time fairy tales. A manuscript of German stories, collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810-1886), have been found in an archive in Regensburg, Germany where they were locked away. What a fitting plight for fairy tales--locked away then discovered. All we're missing is the wooden barrel or treasure chest.

In fact, the stories were discovered a few years ago but they are only now being translated into English which is why it's made news in The Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany

I have ordered a copy of a selection of the stories published in German by Erika Eichenseer in 2011. I'm wondering... am I allowed to translate a couple of these stories and post them here--since I'm not being paid? Will I get slapped with a copyright charge? Anyone know how this works?

I'm not sure I like how the article in The Guardian, quoting Eichenseer, compares these new stories to Grimms' fairy tales as if the latter are stuffy with "literary gloss". There are many, many versions of Grimms'. The copy I have, published in 1957, sounds very folksy to me with its dialogue in dialect and nonsense rhymes. Apparently the newly discovered stories are more charming and rough and authentic. (Interesting concept, authentic.) Well, I can't wait to read them to see.

I will note that the particular story of a maiden who escapes a witch by turning into a pond, which Eichenseer states does not appear anywhere else in European fairy tales, does indeed have a parallel in Grimms'. I'm referring to the Grimms' story "Fundevogel".

Two children who are inseparable are trying to escape a mean-minded cook, who wants to boil one of them for her supper. She sends three servants into the woods to find the children who have run away. When the children see they're being chased, one turns into a rosebush, the other the rose on it. The servants return to the house and tell the cook they couldn't find the children, only a rosebush with a rose on it. The cook screams that they should have torn the bush in two and brought the rose home. She sends them off again and as the children see them coming, they once again swear eternal loyalty to each other. One turns into a church and the other the crown inside it. Again the servants return home and again the cook screams at them. They should have broken down the church and fetched home the crown. Convinced of their utter stupidity, the cook sets off after the children herself. One child becomes a pond, the other a duck swimming on it. When the cook sees the pond, she bends down to drink it but the duck swims across the pond to snatch the cook by the nose and pull her in where she drowns.

I have not yet read the Schönwerth stories, but it seems to me the developments in this story bear some similarity to the one used as a unique example in The Guardian. I am not about to toss my Grimms' aside.

cycling / translating Grimms in a grim mood / Fundevogel

I didn't bring my camera when I went cycling today so I couldn't take a picture of the river which was rippling blue, poplar leaves flipping their little skirts in the breeze, herons perfecting their profiles on the rocks.
There's only so much I can shove into my hip pack which is all I take when I'm cycling. There are the keys to unlock the gate and get back into the house. Change purse with money in case my electrolytes or blood sugar bottom out. I have been known to carry an empty change purse. A couple of tissues to blow my nose and mop the sweat off my face--not in that order. Lip balm because it's this girl's best friend. A roll of compression bandage in case I fall. I'm a bleeder. A fall could be messy. A cell phone would be useful in the event of an accident, but I don't have one. Some form of bike repair tool would be useful too, but I would never trust a bike I'd repaired myself.
All to say that there is no room in my overstuffed hip pack for a camera too. You will have to believe me when I write that cycling by the river as it opens out against the horizon has great salubrious effect on a grim mood. Is it the view? The exercise? Expending all that brooding energy on pedalling until you've sweated so much that your face stings with salt. There's no energy left for the  black hole questions that have no answers.

Being in a grim mood might be the ideal time to tackle another Grimms' fairy tale. I started translating one a few weeks ago but lost interest. I liked the drawing (see above) more than the story. That set mouth, walking with purpose in her over-large clogs, eyes closed because she knows where she's going without having to look. No neck. Shoulders rounded from the weight of her task.

The illustration belongs to a story called Fundevogel, a word which doesn't exist in German and has no equivalent in English. I tried to solve that--for my own purposes, if not the stringent criteria of the Internationales Übersetzungsgericht that meets biannually in Zurich. I began by breaking apart the word as one does with German.

Here let me insert that I always tip my hat to Jeffrey Eugenides who called German a language of train-car constructions. It's the perfect description. If you're looking for the exact quote, it's somewhere in the 500+ pages of the novel, Middlesex.  

Funde are findings as in a murder investigation. Vogel is a bird. If I were to translate Fundevogel literally--Bird Findings--you might wonder if I meant Bird Droppings. The word that makes more sense is foundling, not findings. In German, the word foundling is Findling. If the brothers Grimm had used Findling, the German title would have been Findlingvogel, which sounds way too jingly. Fundevogel has a nicer rhythm.

The story opens with yet another of the wicked, negligent, slovenly or simply invisible mothers so prevalent in Grimms. I came across a comment in a novel the other day, in which a character calls Grimms' portrayal of mothers sexist. Is it? It's not flattering, no, but maybe the brothers Grimm are telling us something about mothers who don't want to be mothers and find themselves saddled with demanding, squalling bodies. Not surprisingly, who do they punish? Those same children. Of course, those kind of mothers only existed in long ago Germany.

In this story, the mother fell asleep under a tree with her baby. A bird snatched the child from her lap   and carried it to a high tree. The mother isn't mentioned again--how she felt when she woke up, whether she looked for her baby, whether she continued on her way through the forest, thankful not to have to carry the baby any longer. She was only necessary in the story to explain the presence of the baby.

The story is repetitive with everything happening three times and incidents being described once, when they happen, and again when one character recounts what he or she has seen to another character. I lost patience translating it. The message or moral is worthy of the best and worst novels: Stick by your friend and you'll live happily ever after.

I've said friend and not lover, because it's never clear in the story if the foundling is a boy or a girl. It's called an "it".

Do you know this? There are three genders in German, masculine, feminine, and neuter. The word child is neuter. Das Kind. The child who is found in a tree is an "it". When it's referred to by name as Fundevogel, it's called he--because the word Vogel (bird) is masculine. That's got to do with grammar, not genitalia. Throughout the story it's never clear whether the child found in the tree is a boy or a girl. Nor, for the purposes of the story, does it matter.

Note that many things are "it" in German. A book, a car, a dress, a picture, an animal, a horse... Neuter sounds value-laden, but in fact there's no shame in being neuter in German--not when a book, a horse, and a dress are neuter.

This makes me wonder about writing in German within the LGBT community. Whether it's easier or more complicated than in languages where the only available genders are masculine or feminine. ???

more about berlin

I'd said I would write more about the art we saw in Berlin. And the subways.

Subways, you think. So what about subways? We'd gone to the land of das Auto. Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen. I was brought up believing that German-made cars were the only automobile worth driving. My father still drives a Volkswagen. For the only year of my life that I owned a car, it was a VW bug.

Given that background, I had high expectations of the Berlin subway. I assumed the trains would whizz faster and more soundlessly than the trains in Montreal. They did not. In fact, it would hard to decide which subway cars rumble worse, Toronto's or Berlin's.

What I loved was seeing above-ground trains moving past pre-Industrial Revolution façades.

This next one is surely a reconstruction of something historical that was bombed in WWII, but you can't keep thinking like that when you're in Berlin or you don't know where to look next.

I like cities with rivers and bridges and canals too. This bridge is called Oberbaumstrasse Brücke.

Ober means over. Baum means tree. Strasse is a street, except that in this case it’s a bridge. The bridge is a street that goes over the trees. Technically, I suppose it’s more important that it goes over the river, but Overtheriver Bridge would be too weird a name, even for matter-of-fact Germans.

Often, when we walked by the canal, there was snow. (As a footnote, R tells me that this past March was the coldest in Europe in 130 yrs. So... not just me being neurotic. It was cold. On the other hand, we're living in a time of climate change. Whatever's happening now, get ready, because it will only get worse.) Here's a picture from our last day when it got a bit warmer and the sun stayed for more than 0-2 hours. Did I  mention this yet? In Germany, weather forecasts come with predicted hours of sunshine per day. The weather forecasts in Germany are no more accurate than anywhere else, but I guess they like having another category.

We saw a lot of art in Berlin--excuse me, Art.

I will not pretend to begin talking about Art. What I often notice are the people looking at Art. I listened in on some kids who’d been taken to the museum to learn what to look for. They sat on the floor in front of a large abstract. Now, I have always assumed that one isn’t meant to see figures in an abstract. If there are figures, then it’s a figurative painting. Abstract art is about colour, lines, harmony… Isn't it?

In this world-renowned gallery in the big city of Berlin, the teacher—who wore a beret!—was asking the kids what shapes they could see in the medley of colours. One boy saw some hatched lines that he thought was a railroad track. Another decided a yellow blob could be the sun. One sweet thing piped up that she saw two raindrops. I loved that she saw raindrops. Some people, seeing the two side-by-side drop shapes, would have said teardrops. I’m sure.

I got a kick out of this woman who’s looking at a Henry Moore as if she walked up against a mirror.

Near our hotel there was an elementary school. The Grade Sixers had been taken to a museum to look at Picasso and had done copies with all the clothing in fabric collage. Okay, the idea must have been the teacher's, but the kids did a great job and had their projects on display in the school windows.

In the courtyard beside the school was the entrance to one of Hitler's bunkers. During the day, there was always a lineup of tourists to get inside. Eingang zum Bunker. I don't know what bothered me more: the fact of the bunker or the people who wanted to get inside.

berlin in march, 2013

We went to Berlin in March. It's a city full of history. The capital of Prussia, the Nazis, the Holocaust memorials, the Berlin Wall, the Stasi. Berlin is chockfull of tourist sights with signposts to lead the way.

R and I saw some sights, avoided others. We did not go to Checkpoint Charlie. We did walk along the Karl Marx Allee.

We headed through neighbourhoods and down the backstreets. There was grandiose modern architecture, blocky Communist buildings, sometimes jazzed up with paint, fairytale steeples, ruins left in place to remind you.

Did I mention how cold it was? Colder than in Montreal. We warmed up in the cafés which were charming and Old World, even with the clack of laptop keys and ambient techno music.

This café is empty because, believe it or not, people preferred to sit outside. Okay, the sun had come out, but it was only about 3C. We noticed that too in Berlin: the outdoor café tables always had what I first thought were tablecloths draped over the backs of the chairs. Well, sure, I thought. It's way too cold to sit outside. But they were blankets. People sat with them draped across their laps or around their shoulders, cocooned inside them.

And since I'm on the subject of cafés, let me mention the bathrooms. The decor was always interesting, sometimes featuring boudoir furniture, tables you could stand at (why?), marble floors, curious paper towel dispensers. I started taking my camera when I went to use the facilities.

Have you zoomed on that frame?

I asked R about the men's washrooms and he told me one featured a ten-foot porcelain trough with running water that washed away the urine. One bathroom had a soccer ball and goal contraption in the urinals so you could... try to make a goal with your stream?

Here we are in yet another café--my favourite travelling buddy.

The restaurants were cozy too. This one served German/Austrian cuisine—dumplings with schweinebraten, dumplings with venison, spätzle with cheese, red cabbage soup. Yes, that's snow in the square outside.

The quality of the food was very high. True, German cooking is heavy on starch and not every restaurant had a vegetarian option. But there were restaurants that were 100% organic. I was especially impressed by the variety and choice of organic fruit and veg in ordinary grocery stores. Sure, when I travel, I go to grocery stores. I like a fruit bowl in my hotel room. With real fruit, please.

Next post I'll write about kids being taught how to look at abstract art. And subways. I was fascinated by the subways in Berlin.

kick start german

I came to Berlin because I wanted to hear some German. In Montreal I get the odd German movie, the occasional chance meeting. I´d hoped to ease into it gently. We landed at Tegel airport and discovered that our bags hadn´t made the trip from Heathrow with us. Jetlagged, not yet sure how to phrase the problem, I accosted a man leaning on a broom who directed me links dann rechts dann links dann wieder rechts to the Lost & Found. The L & F is the best kept secret at Tegel airport. I had to ask several more times. I decided that asking in German would make the person feel more kindly disposed toward me. Who knows? Someone finally gave the names of some shops that made more sense than all the rights and lefts. I don´t follow directions too well. There was already a long line up. The glass door was to be kept closed. The sign said so. No one was to enter unless someone came out. Presumably there was always someone in there to come out. The line moved only slowly. A woman about 7 months pregnant lay on the bench. There were smudged nose and fingerprints on the glass. R had said he would rely on me to talk German. He was. I just hadn´t expected to have to start so quickly.
Anyhow, anyhow. We´ve seen lots of interesting things in Berlin so far. The best yet was the Kathe Kollwitz museum. Google her.
Our bags were returned this morning.

what to keep in these pockets

A friend, M, sent me this from Berlin. It's the size of a small notebook. She has many delightful ideas as to what I might keep in the pockets: paper sleeves of needles; bits of thread; a spare button; fortune cookie messages; guitar picks... She bought it in a shop near the Museum of Things.
I want to go to this museum with its tantalizing name, as well as this shop, as well as to visit her in this city she has grown to love. I've never been to Berlin.
I keep the thing upright on a bookshelf behind my desk. When I first opened the envelope, before I read her letter with its suggestions, I thought of locks of hair. The pockets would be just the right size. I could fold the locks in tissue paper so they wouldn't get mixed up. Not children's hair. Where would I get that? I was thinking of past lovers.
This has nothing to do with numbers--whether I've had enough to fill all the pockets or whether I've had too many. It's more to do with a feeling I sometimes have that it's too bad there's nothing left from all those good and messy times. You get so involved in someone's life, listen to their stories, compliment their mother's ill-fitting dress, maybe never meet a family member and hear all about why, know whether they take sugar in their coffee or drink it black--and then, poof! they're gone.
I was once married for three years and the only object I've got left from that time is his copy of As I Lay Dying with his Grade 13 notes: "Define any words or terms that need definition. Tell clearly what the subject of essay is."
I used to have jazz LPs I bought while I was with the man with gleaming straight black hair. Where are those LPs now?
For two years I lived with a man who was going bald at twenty-two. I came home one day and found him asleep on the sofa with a cabbage leaf on his head. He'd heard that stopped hair from falling out. I'm glad he never heard the one about sleeping with a raw steak on the head. If I'd kept a tuft of his frizzy hair, it would now be a relic of something that no longer exists.
It would be nice to have a lock of R's hair (though he's not a past lover; very much in the present) when it was still brown. Some years ago, when he got a new passport, the agent at the desk crossed out BROWN and wrote GREY. I like his grey hair. Lately I'm catching up, though mine's going white.
For lack of locks, I'm keeping the pockets empty. Behind me, where I sit writing, maybe they'll catch the trail of sentences that escape me. It will be a practical version of a dream-catcher. The design does look very practical and efficient, doesn't it? Very German.
Too bad I don't play a musical instrument, because I like the idea of guitar picks best.    

translating german letters

A few weeks ago R announced that he'd volunteered my services. Oh yeah?!  I had no idea which services he meant, but I like to be consulted. We discussed this aspect of my character for a while.
Equally stubborn, R came back to the issue at hand.
He works in the administrative offices at a cemetery. That day an elderly woman had come in to arrange burial of her son's ashes. He'd died in Germany. She was Romanian, married to a British man with whom she'd moved to Canada. He was now dead. Her son had died too. She was bereft. She wept. She'd received a letter which she couldn't understand because it was in German. R had assured the people at the funeral home that I would translate it.
Once upon a time I studied German. I read Goethe, Eichendorff, Kleist, Zweig, and Böll in the original--but that was more than a few years ago. I have family in Austria, but when have I last been to visit? I understand German grammar. I can use a dictionary. But my German isn't fluent or current. I'm more comfortable with Grimm's fairy tales than a newspaper article.
Nor had R had seen this letter. He didn't know if it was typed or handwritten. If typed, it could be an official document with those architectural German words that require the linguistic equivalent of a calculator to understand. If handwritten, I might not be able to decipher the writing. Was the letter one or five pages long? How had the man died? What if it was a suicide note? Me, too, I have a heart for elderly women whose only remaining relative dies in a foreign country, but I would never have agreed to translate a document without knowing the details.
R was astounded that I wasn't even curious. When I told a couple of friends, they couldn't believe it either. Nobody understood my resistance. But hey, I've had other German letter experiences which have left me wary.
The first happened where I work in a hospital. It must have been one of those rare days when I remembered to wear my name tag. A Jewish patient commented that my name was German and asked if I spoke German. I said a little. He told his family who later approached me. Their father had received a letter from Germany. I agreed to tell them what it said. The next day they brought it. I began to translate out loud as I read. This was a letter offering their father restitution for having worked in a labour camp in the 1940s. The sum was pitiable given what he'd lost. The family was outraged. I don't blame them. But within moments, having no one else at whom they could rant, they began to accuse me. I spoke the disgusting language of these disgusting people who had committed this crime. By association, that made me disgusting. Big scene in the hospital hallway. Kill the messenger. Leave no witnesses.
The next time I was asked to translate a German letter was when a medical secretary where I work called to say that her doctor had received a letter. It was a page long, handwritten, with no return address. Signature illegible. I agreed to stop by the office when I was at work.
I'd learned not to read out loud until I'd perused the whole letter. The writing was loopy and not always easy to follow. I gathered that the doctor had spent a weekend with a woman. She remembered various parts of his anatomy fondly--aesthetics and use. The soundtrack for their romps was Neil Diamond. She claimed she missed the doctor and thought of him often while listening to Neil Diamond. The description of how she consoled herself was graphic. I never learned this kind of vocabulary, but I got the gist of it. Fingers and verbs and yearning.
The doctor had a clinic that day and was rushing in and out of the examining room, patients in tow. He's a good guy. He's married. I didn't want to embarrass him. I asked if he'd been to a conference in Munich. Not for a while. I said this woman missed him. But there's a whole page, he insisted. She must have said more than that. Hm... yeah... do you like Neil Diamond? If that gave him a clue, he didn't show it.
Does that explain my reluctance to translate this cemetery letter? But okay, I agreed.
The letter was two pages, typewritten, on official letterhead from graveyard facilities in a German municipality. It was the bill for the man's cremation. Quite simply a bill. But in German. The date of the letter, the date of the cremation, the date that payment was due was repeated several times. The name of the municipality and the facilities were repeated. With each recurrence, the act was described with different words: commit the remains to fire, render the body to ashes, cremate, incinerate--as if several different events had happened. The bill was itemized, though there was only one item on the list. One body cremated.
Translating was easy. I reproduced the two pages, miming the original format.    
Last week a car pulled up before the cemetery offices. R was asked to come outside. The Romanian woman stepped out to give him a bottle of wine for me.
Nice. So maybe I will translate a letter again.