Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

INTERVIEW WITH BREON MITCHELL AND UWE TIMM:COLLABORATION BETWEEN TRANSLATOR AND AUTHOR[An interview conducted with the German novelist Uwe Timm and his translator Breon Mitchell at Indiana University,May 2003]By Rainer SchulteRS: Breon, how did you develop your relationship withUwe Timm while you were working on the translation ofhis novel Morenga?BM: The first thing I think of when I translate is whatsort of questions I can ask that would be meaningful andnot simply make my job easier, a job that I should bedoing myself. So I try first to do as much work as I canto avoid unnecessary questions and leave only those thatI actually have real difficulty in figuring out. But I do tryto contact the author early.RS: Morenga is a novel that relies heavily on historicalfacts. Thus, what research did you initiate before youthought about contacting the author?BM: One of the specific questions for me was what partsof the novel might be factual material taken from historyor actual printed documents where I might find anEnglish equivalent translated at that period. That is thesort of thing that is sometimes difficult to know withoutasking the author.RS: At this point, we should ask Uwe to give us a shortintroduction to the background of his novel, Morenga, toget a sense of thehistorical events thatbuild the subjectmatter of the novel.Breon MitchellUT: To begin with,it’s a historicalnovel, based onfacts. I knew rightfrom the start that Ididn’t want to writea documentary,although that was aperiod when documentarieswerebeing written.Instead, I wanted towrite a book thatalso took a fictional approach to the material. It was preciselythe combination of fact and fiction that interestedme. The novel is about a rebellion in the former Germancolony of South West Africa between 1904 and 1907,when Germany was a colonial power, when the Hererosand the Hottentots rose up against the Germans. So thereare things in it that a writer would never have made up.If they had been invented, you would think the authorhad gone too far. For example, the vocabulary of punishment,when the Germans discuss techniques for floggingthe African natives. Those are things that are takendirectly from historical documents. There were othermatters, however, that seemed to me to demand fictionaltreatment. For example, the figure of Gottschalk, a veterinarian,who arrives in Africa and is changed by it;how he first experiences it, how it alters him, and howthose alterations are revealed in his character. That is allfictional; the protagonist of the novel, Gottschalk, is afictional character. And there are other straightforwardlyfictional elements dealing with the country’s history. Forexample, there are three tales that are, so to speak, borneby oxen, that tell us about the country.Uwe TimmRS: Breon, could youelaborate on how yourcollaboration with UweTimm came about andwhat you did when thetwo of you were workingtogether?BM: It was a great dealof fun to translate thisnovel, because Ilearned a lot from it. Iknew very little of theperiod, very little aboutGermany’s colonialhistory. So I readbooks, articles, andessays and tried tounderstand as much asTranslation Review 1