‘From legal tomes to handgun manuals: translating Ferdinand von Schirach’s Punishment’
Translating Punishment was really enjoyable. Ferdinand von Schirach is a hugely accomplished author, so I knew the book’s twelve crime stories would approach the theme of punishment in striking and innovative ways. Each features ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: a defence lawyer grappling with terrible ethical dilemmas, a supermarket manager caught up in a drugs deal, a broken mother taking murderous control of her life… The tone of the tales ranges from the gruesome and blackly humorous to the deeply moving and philosophical, which gave my translation skills a very good workout.
There were some interesting challenges. The first was making sure I thoroughly understood the German legal system and got details such as court procedure or ballistics right. I cross-referenced terminology in legal texts and in earlier translations of von Schirach’s work by the great Anthea Bell, spent hours poring over the manual for the Browning Hi-Power handgun, including a wonderful illustration of all its moving parts, and researched medical terminology for certain types of injuries (a few brisk walks were required afterwards!)
The second challenge was capturing the economical style that’s so typical of von Schirach’s prose. I had to resist the impulse to augment the text, for example by adding conjunctions like ‘but, so, because’ where the original intentionally left the reader to join the dots. And I soon realised that the style was deceptively simple: certain phrases tucked away at the beginning of a story might take on extra significance by the end (like ‘the right side’ in the story ‘The Wrong Side’). So I really had to keep my eye out for those extra layers of meaning – sometimes on the third or fourth pass.
A final, very fun task was making sure that the last line of each story, which sometimes contained a twist, really hit the mark in English. This involved finding a particular combination of vocabulary, word order and rhythm – a bit like a comic sharpening a punchline. And of course, others played a key role in helping me to hone the translation: the author himself, who patiently fielded all my questions, my wonderful editor, Abigail Scruby, and eagle-eyed copy editor Nick de Somogyi.
Six of the stories from Punishment have just been adapted for TV by a group of talented directors, and premiered at this year’s CANNESERIES festival. It’s thrilling to see the characters I know so well being brought to life on screen.
Punishment is published by Baskerville / John Murray Press
