How does imagination play into your translation practice? If we start to understand both reading and translating as acts of creation, perhaps we can put behind us fraught notions of loyalty and fidelity, and start realising that re-reading and re-translating are key efforts in keeping a text alive over time.
This is only an excerpt, but I was left with a feeling of tragedy and cynicism. How do you come away from the story? Having accepted multiculturalism on a surface level, their own biases and prejudices were often left unquestioned and unresolved. As it turns out, meaning well is certainly not enough to build a fairer society for everyone; on the contrary, it risks making you complicit in ugly, ugly actions.
This plays out later in the story when Nenne accuses Manu of being racist, a charge that Manu vehemently rejects. Whilst she repeatedly interrogates her feelings, including her attraction to violence, it is my impression that she always falls somewhat short of fully grasping the sense of the tragic events unfolding in front of her. Nevertheless, the author always portrays their shortcomings with kindness since, after all, failing to fully understand the other might just be the most human experience of all.
The story and the collection go much deeper than that, interrogating with profound awareness characters who appear to be mostly unaware. Manu is compulsive in naming the details of a street scene, singling out trees and tram tracks.
To what extent is Remmert drawing attention to the way temporal and geographical facts can construct an identity? How do these facts integrate into the overall narrative?
