How I ended up sitting uncomfortably in a theater full of white people laughing at how black people talk.
I recently saw Bruno Ganz read from Christian Hansen’s German translation of 2666 at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, home of the Berliner Ensemble. Bruno Ganz is an actor probably most famous for playing Hitler in Downfall (Der Untergang).
I guess you could say I have an interest in oral interpretations of 2666. I first read it in early 2009. Then last summer, I listened to the whole thing again as an audiobook (narrated by John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick, and Grover Gardner.) And it was superb. So when I heard about Ganz’s reading, I decided to take a look.
Though I’m sure it’s magnificent in Spanish, I found that English has a rich enough cultural exchange with Spanish-speaking countries that a wide variety of kinds and levels of Spanish speech could be depicted in the translation. Not so in German. There just isn’t as much contact between the two languages. As if German’s steamroller effect on the idiom wasn’t bad enough, Bruno Ganz is a 300-year-old Swiss man. And he reads like one.
Bruno Ganz
And of course, while various kinds of black American speech can be rendered very naturally in English, they sound quite artificial in German. To make things worse, the excerpt Ganz read concerned the black journalist Luck who, among other things, telephones his boss and interviews the last member of the Communist Party in Brooklyn. All three of these men’s speech is, in different ways, distinctly African American. And every time Ganz pronounced a German rendering of some African-American expression, the audience laughed. Loudly.
I admit, the book is sometimes funny, the characters humorous in their idiosyncrasies. But not really in a laugh-out-loud way. Or at least not that much. Many Germans aren’t used to hearing African American congressmen, pastors, professors, and writers. For them, African American speech comes from American movies and hip-hop music. It’s exaggerated, exotic, and and exists only for entertainment.
Add to this the fact that Germans haven’t developed the American sensitivity to racial differences, and suddenly this writer finds herself sitting uncomfortably in a theater full of white people laughing at how black people talk. As performed by a white man.
I don’t blame Christian Hansen in any way for the translation’s ‘flatness.’ I think it simply has to do with how German has developed, and the lamentable fact that German culture tends to absorb the stupidest parts of American culture then treat them as representative of the whole.
This text by Amanda DeMarco is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
