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ecause that was the version that English-speaking missionariesin Africa would have used. I found the equivalentpassage in the case of actual quotations, and simplyquoted the King James version, and that is a beautifultranslation, but there were also passages in which Africancharacters, for example one called The Prophet, write ina biblical language that is neither standard English norGerman, but a biblical language deformed in a way thatis very powerful and striking. To reproduce that language,I had to give it a Biblical flavor and yet makesure it didn’t sound simply like an English pastor or missionary.It had to sound like a native using the Englishlanguage in a Biblical way.RS: How was the book received in Germany when it wasfirst published?UT: It was reviewed very positively. It was very wellreceived. Very good reviews.RS: So far, there has only been one review published inthe The New York Times.UT: Yes, that is correct.BM: Morenga was first published in 1978, and it was abook ahead of its time, in terms of both its style and itssubject. Instead of becoming outmoded, it’s becomemore and more relevant as the years have passed. This isseen partly in the fact that it was reissued several times.This translation is based on a new edition that reflectssome authorial revisions, published in the year 2000. Soit is both an older novel in a sense and yet a new novel.What has happened in America is also quite interesting:most books that catch on in America in universities areread because they are translated into English. This is abook that first found acceptance in America in the universitiesamong students of German and was requiredreading in graduate courses here at Indiana University inpost-colonial literature. Two years before this Englishversion appeared, the MLA had a special session devotedin German to Morenga, and Uwe came to New York, andWashington University, St. Louis, and I think four differentprofessors gave papers on the novel. So in a sense,this is a case in which the English market and Englishreading public are catching up with a novel alreadyknown and already read in German departments here inthe United States. It is certainly important and relevanttoday. What I am hoping is that now English Departmentgraduate students, who are quite interested in post-colonialliterature, will begin to read it too.UT: Perhaps I might add a word here. Something thathas always pleased me is that when this novel appeared,Morenga was rediscovered in Namibia. He had beentotally forgotten. Only the victor’s story was known. Hehad been completely erased. And he was discoveredagain. Historians started studying his life, and his sonwas located, who had survived the massacre. There’s aGerman documentary film about this son. So Morengawas recovered for Namibia. We can only hope, now thatthere is an English version, that it will also be read morewidely in Namibia.RS: I would like to make another observation that mayor may not be related to your novel. Günter Grass hasjust published his novel Crabwalk and Jörg Friedriechhas published his book Der Brand (“The Fire”), both ofwhich have cause quite a stir in Germany and abroad,since both texts deal with what the British, theAmericans, and the Russians have inflicted on Germanyduring World War II. Has this something to do with thenotion that all of a sudden we are trying to show on theone hand what the British and the Americans and theRussians did to Germany and here what the Germans didto the indigenous Hottentots in West Africa?UT: Of course that was a part of Germany’s repressedhistory when the book first appeared twenty-five yearsago. Most people didn’t know there had been a rebellion,they knew that Germany had colonies, but not muchmore. The novel has always been in print, it’s gonethrough various editions, I should send them to you,Breon, because it’s very interesting. The editions varied.The book was always in print, but it also helped open upa discussion in Germany, to get it under way. That was aside effect, but my primary interest was simply to write anovel that manages, by means of language and withinlanguage itself, to describe something that’s quite difficultto grasp, the notion of the foreign. And to advance alittle our sense of the consequences it had, the foreign,the Other, always looked down upon and seen as inferior.Those are the roots buried in this novel. They’re buriedin all European nations, by the way. The cruelty in theBelgian Congo is indescribable. The French in Algeria,and the English, have acted with unbelievable brutality.These are deep roots that go back to an understandingthat permanently elevates itself and degrades others inforeign countries. And to extend that into language itself,we still see it today in everyday things, this standarddegradation of others simply because they are different,Translation Review 5
and we see how that is expressed in language, that what’sI was trying to do and that was a part of this work. That’swhy it’s important that Breon has given so much of histime, energy, and effort as a translator to bringing all thisout in the English language. It’s not just a matter of makingthings clear to the reader, not just translating themeaning, he could sit down and do that in a month, it’sthat he brought out the phenomenon of how languagedetermines emotions, shapes them and changes them,this historical phenomenon anchored in language itself,that’s what requires so much work.BM: There are so many levels on which this book isinteresting for American readers, even American readerswho know very little about German history. The novelmanages in a very complex but striking way to operatesimultaneously on at least three different levels. One ofthose levels is to recreate the history of the German colonialexperience in the war against the Hottentots in 1904,an extremely interesting historical level that Uwe openedup to the German people, and, as he said, to theNamibian people, who had forgotten Morenga. But thereis a second level that is unavoidable: the whole questionof genocide and the Konzentrationslager, the concentrationcamps. You cannot help but think of what happenedduring the Nazi period to the Jews, which seems foreshadowedby the sorts of things that were happening inAfrica. And there seems to me a third level as well: weknow there are Gastarbeiter, Turks and others, inGermany now, and that the country is having a great dealof difficulty in dealing with this. So to my mind, thenovel takes place in 1905, perhaps in 1936 or 1937, andin 1978, and in the year 2000 as well. And all of this ispresent simultaneously. This is not simply a Germanproblem, it’s a human problem, it’s about history andhow we treat others. In post-colonial literature, there isan interest in the historical relationship between a dominantpower and a people that has very little power. Andthis is what comes out so strongly in this novel. Thebook appears shortly after the war in Iraq and isreviewed as a novel about a dominant power that attacksa small defenseless nation, one that can’t possibly hopeto stand up against it.RS: I would like to have Uwe follow up on a questionthat Breon mentioned earlier. This is a revised version ofthe original novel. What prompted you to either rewritecertain passages or add certain passages? How was thenovel modified and why?UT: Not in any major way, but there were revisions, Ialtered a few things when I read through the novel again.The book was, after all, written over 25 years ago, andthere aren’t many books that are still being sold, read,and discussed after 25 years. I took the opportunity of anew edition with DTV to go through it again, and I thinkin two places I struck out passages that just seemed toolong. For example the report to the Prussian Academy ofSciences by Dr. Leonhard Brunkhorst. I based this on anactual document, but one that, given the academic styleof the time, was simply too long-winded. I found thisdocument interesting because the author was consideringvarious methods of rendering colonialism more modernand efficient. What was the modern form of colonialism,the present-day form if you will, how could it be mademore efficient. He objected to the tradition of flogging,to shooting people. He praised English colonial politics,which did in fact differ greatly from that of the Germans,the English were far less involved than the Germans,who thought they had to establish order by flogging andthe like. Well, that was one of the places where I found Icould cut passages without losing what I wanted to convey.As we grow older, we develop a different sense oftime, and I find that in general I have less patience. Ican’t say exactly, but I think I struck out some pages.Other than that I made only minor revisions. I can’t thinkof anywhere else that I rewrote longer passages. So theywere minor revisions, where I thought, oh, my god, thepast perfect, that bothers me now in this passage, I’ll justtake it out.BM: When the publishers at New Directions got mymanuscript, they saw that there were parts of it thatseemed to be official military reports and diary entriesand so forth and they were having difficulty as they readdistinguishing what was what. So they said, we want tosee the German, the designer wants to see the Germantext, and I sent them the German edition to look at. Well,it goes pretty much straight through, with breaks ofcourse, but with a single type size. The New Directionsdesigner decided to put some of the collage-like materialinto smaller type, thinking it would be easier to read. Iwonder whether you thought this was a good idea, Uwe.UT: I think it’s really a very good idea. I must say thatthe English edition is much better than the German one.That’s because of the typography. I think it’s very welldone, it’s an excellent solution, and if there’s a newGerman edition I would try to get them to do the samething. The text of Morenga is easier to read in the6 Translation Review
Page 2: TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 66, 2003TABLE
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