Samir Grais tells Rania Khallaf about translating novelist Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Player, the novel said to have earned her the 2004 Nobel award for literature Released by Miret following the Frankfurt Book Fair, where publisher Mohamed Hashem bought its translation rights, Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Player (1983), the novel believed to have earned her the 2004 Nobel award for literature (the results of which were announced in the course of the aforementioned fair in October) has solicited not a little controversy in local cultural circles, especially after it became known that Jelinek has repeatedly expressed strong anti-Arab sentiment. A 428-page volume beautifully translated from the German original, the book was at the centre of numerous discussions during the last round of the Cairo Book Fair as well. "She's attacked by her own people," says Samir Grais, the professor of German literature who undertook the translation, "because her work is full of pornography. She also has a tendency to indulge in superficial, and sometimes very local themes." She is also a harsh critic of the people in question, he went on: according to her complex Freudian logic, Austrians put the blame for Nazi atrocities on the Germans, failing to acknowledge their guilt. Yet she remains one of the most influential writers in contemporary world literature, a brilliant explorer of female sexuality, sadomasochism and human cruelty. A shocking book, The Piano Player is typical of her work: in an astoundingly dispassionate tone, it depicts the brutal power play between the repressed protagonist and her mother, who seeks to control every last detail of her personal life. In 2001 Austrian director Michael Haneke turned it into an acclaimed movie starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. "The movie only really focused on one aspect of the piano player's life, and the novel deals with many," Grais says. "It was an account of her failure to have a normal sexual relationship with one of her students. But it was very well received, especially outside the German-speaking world." Commenting on the movie is one thing, however; translating the book quite another. The Piano Player presented Grais with several all but debilitating challenges: "The greatest problem was the way Jelinek manipulates everyday words and expressions; it's very hard if not impossible to render such wordplay in a different language (the way in which "Bach" is used in such a way as to imply the flowing of both a stream and the musician's work) -- but it's the principal feature of Jelinek's style. Her sense of language is very special; this I felt as a huge responsibility when I set out to translate her work... "The next major difficulty was sarcasm and irony -- how to convey the sarcasm, the mechanisms of which differ from one language to the next; her ironic citations of classical German literature, too, are very contextual -- a well- known romantic line of Goethe acquires a peculiar edge in an intensely sexual situation, for example -- again, something that doesn't come across when you translate that line. So it was deeply rewarding to realise that some readers, novelist Montaser El-Qaffash for example, actually enjoyed the sarcasm. It means I somehow managed to get across the spirit of the novel." It is not autobiography, he insists; rather the outcome of Jelinek's attempt at freeing herself of her mother's control. Thanks to a grant from the Literary Translators Institute in Straelen, on the Dutch border, Grais was able to complete the task in only three months, having started shortly after the award was announced in October. And he has no clear intention of going through the same experience again: other books by Jelinek play with language even more: "For now just let me catch my breath." Grais studied German at the Faculty of Al- Alson, Ain Shams University; and Mustafa Maher, Egypt's most prolific literary translator from the German, was among his professors. Maher became his role model, and after earning his MA in Germany -- the topic concerned the challenges of German-Arabic translation -- he began publishing translations of German short stories; a book by Wolfgang Borchert appeared with the General Egyptian Book Organisation in 1998. He has since translated Erich Kaestner and Ingo Schulze, author of the international bestseller, Simple Stories : "This novel was published in more than 20 languages. It deals with an important transitional period in German history, the period that followed unification and the impact it made on inhabitants of the former East Germany. In a way I saw it as a kind of equivalent of economic liberalisation under Sadat's open-door policy -- a complex transition from socialism to capitalism. "The problem with translating literature from German to Arabic," Grais goes back to the perennial question, "is always lack of funds. This is why it takes me years to find a publisher for the work I do -- books often stay in my drawer for a long, long time. Heinrich Boell's stories, for example, appeared only this year with the Syrian house Al-Mada. Still, the financial reward for me is insignificant -- taking into account that I live in Germany." Even The Piano Player could only appear with aid from Litrix, a German publishers' initiative supporting the translation of German literature: "Litrix is a new and ambitious project: every year it focuses on a target language. Indeed I hope Arab cultural organisations will follow in its footsteps." The Arab board of trustees who help choose material for translation includes, as well as Grais, Heba Sherif and Hoda Eissa: "A list of newly released titles is published on the Internet, along with synopses and excerpts from select books. In 2004 the target language was Arabic, the Arab world being Frankfurt Fair's guest of honour. This year it's Chinese, but translation to Arabic will continue for another year yet." But notwithstanding its many benefits -- Litrix included -- living in Germany proved no help in meeting Jelinek: "She tends to stay away from people. She did not even receive the prize in person, because she has a fear of crowds. A psychiatrically disturbed person -- that's how she describes herself in every interview she gives. The day it became known that she won, she hated the fact that her small apartment became full of people. 'That you'll get lost' is how she responded to a journalist's question regarding what she wished. But I had no pressing reason to contact her" in pursuing the work. "She takes no interest in her work being translated and has expressed surprise that any such translation should've been undertaken at all -- she thinks of her work as of no concern to non-German speakers. I do believe she's wrong there, at least as regards The Piano Player, which is so deeply European it could've been set in Sweden or France. And it's as relevant to gender relations in the East." There is more to her being a Nobel laureate than her being a Jewish woman, in other words: "Only someone who hasn't read her work could claim that she won the prize for no other reason. Her writing has nothing to do with Judaism, nor is she so unequivocally Jewish -- her mother is a Christian, her father a Nazi collaborator who ended up in a mental asylum. That said, there might be something to Jelinek's comment that the prize honours her gender rather than her work -- the Nobel committee had intended to award a female writer in 2004." But this is not to say that German literature is popular among Arabs: "Despite the surge of translations thanks to the Goethe Institute and Litrix, German literature in Arabic is only available in limited numbers, compared to English or French for example. There are many reasons for this, the main one being that, since World War II, German authors have tended to focus on the war and Nazi guilt, things that have little relevance for Arab readers -- this is the reason why Patrick Sueskind's The Perfume was so successful. But equally, those qualified to translate from the German have been very few; for many years there were only three: Mustafa Maher, Abdel-Ghaffar Mekkawi and Abdel-Rahman Badawi. A new generation has emerged, it is true, but they are in dire need of financial and other support most of the time, you can't count on their efforts in isolation from the institutions..."
