Katy Derbyshire

Straelener Übersetzerpreis 2018

der Kunststiftung NRW

Dankrede

And suddenly the music stopped. And they played one of those time-to-go tunes. Right when she almost had it. Right when she was ready to lead. And we danced a while longer in silence, in the empty café. It must have been ten minutes, from beginning to end. I bet they’d never seen that before, two fine ladies like us, mature ladies, fine ladies with their endless waltzing… and us floating around that baroque 1870s or whatever parlour. And then the crooning from the speakers at the end. We were just short of kicking up a real fuss, the two of us. Just short of throwing glasses. Because our hair and our skin were touching. Because all we were doing was dancing. ‘There’s such a lot of world to see…’

And then we let go of each other. ‘…Moon River, and me.’ [Aus: Clemens Meyer, Bricks and mortar. - London : Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016. S. 357-358]

My favourite chapter in Im Stein is called ”Sag beim Abschied leise Servus”. In English “My Huckleberry Friend”. It’s about two older women who work as prostitutes and who may or may not – because it’s that kind of book – end up getting tipsy together on pear brandy and dancing a waltz. Clemens very kindly gave me a copy of the chapter’s first page from the galley proof, pre-framed and signed, for my fortieth birthday.

When people ask me what the book is about, I often tell them: it’s about sex workers and the men who make money out of them. In statistical terms, it’s actually the other way around. Most of the pages are about landlords and pimps and policemen and clients and fathers and politicians. But throughout the novel we hear women’s voices, melancholy or funny, bored, horrified, amused, interacting with their clients but also with each other, often telling us about their female friends. These women work in adjacent rooms and keep each other company during their down time, laugh together, share drugs and drinks and skin care tips, and may or may not waltz together after several rounds of cake and pear brandy. This is a book that takes women seriously. And despite a great deal of debate over the difficult title, I managed to sneak in a secret extra female: Bricks and mortar is classic Cockney rhyming slang for daughter. I like to point this out because I suspect I’m the only person who notices.

I’m wary of drawing comparisons here – I don’t really want to say that women in publishing are like sex workers. But what I do feel is that women in the publishing industry also work really hard and are also very supportive of each other. We’ve seen that over this past year in particular, with women in America sharing the names and misdeeds of “shitty media men” and raising their voices against those who abused their power. Let’s hope German women follow suit, having made a good start by addressing sexism at creative writing schools. But it’s not just self-preservation. Last year we launched the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, celebrating books by women that make it into English – against all odds, with only a quarter to a third of translated fiction in the UK being female authored. The shortlist offered a wealth of delights, from literate polar bears to Irish poets to a triste Polish village. The hope is that readers and publishers alike will soon be clamouring for more as-yet untranslated women’s writing. And here come my first thank-yous: to my friend and colleague Rachel McNicholl, for sharing the work of imagining the prize and making it real, and to Chantal Wright for the heavy lifting of making it happen at Warwick.

Women have supported me every step of the way in my literary translation career. It starts with the foreign rights departments here in Germany. It was Kerstin Schuster, formerly at Fischer and now at Droemer, who gave me my first break. When I read Clemens’s debut novel Als wir träumten I cold-called Kerstin and told her I loved it so much I really needed to translate it. That hasn’t happened yet – it will and I’ll be a much better translator by then than I was at that point – but Kerstin recommended me to someone else, which got me my first book translation contract. Myriam Alfano and Elisa Diallo have worked tirelessly, sipping lukewarm water in airless book-fair halls to persuade publishers to buy other Fischer books including Bricks and Mortar. Katrin Scheel and Judith Habermas at Schöffling and DuMont have also championed books I loved and got me work.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great writers for a week every summer at the BCLT Summer School: Nino Haratischwili, Daniela Dröscher, Kristof Magnusson, Rasha Khayat, Esther Kinsky and soon Sandra Hoffmann. I’d like to thank them for making those weeks a real education and a joy. I’ve translated some amazing women writers, including Heike Geißler, Olga Grjasnowa, Angela Steidele, Annett Gröschner, Inka Parei and Felicitas Hoppe. Thanks to them for trusting me not to mangle their work.

And of course my fellow translators! What would we do without each other? We’d only be half as good at our work, that’s for sure. The literary translation world is the most supportive community I’ve ever been part of. Whether that’s because it’s female-dominated is anyone’s guess, but I do need to thank all the translators in here and out there, and at our Berlin translation lab in particular, for their help dealing with words, writers, publishers, contracts and life in general.

Nearly finished now, and helter-skeltering into Academy Award style. I’d like to thank the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen for this great honour and the freedom from financial pressure this prize will buy me. Thank you to the jury for choosing me and to Regine Peeters for her hard work making this evening come together. Thank you, Julia Franck, for the laudatio. Thank you to Jacques Testard at Fitzcarraldo Editions for his impeccable taste and editing, and to Clemens Meyer for writing so incredibly well and stepping back to let me take charge now and then. Clemens has always championed my work, as my spies around the English-speaking world inform me, and I’m very grateful for that loyalty.

And thank you to my mum for coming all this way and for teaching me to enjoy books and words and for setting a great example. After Simon’s speech, I’m looking forward to cracking open the pear brandy and maybe waltzing with all of you.