Translating Maxim Biller's Moralische Geschichten into English

Abstract

Born in Prague in 1960 to Russian-Jewish parents, Maxim Biller emigrated to the GDR with his family as a child, where he became a leading German satirist and provocateur, a novelist, playwright, short story and essay writer. Perhaps due to a perceived lack of relevance, he has remained undertranslated in English.

Translating Biller equivalently is a complex task, culturally and linguistically.

Given that Biller’s themes deal heavy-handedly with individual and collective ‘identities’, traditional and new anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, terrorism, and Arab-Israeli conflict, his abrasive irony and subtle moments of truth-telling in the midst of outrage-inducing offence is becoming not less but increasingly relevant, particularly as European anti-Semitism rises, conflated with anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, and as militant Islam comes closer to impacting on our comfortable, insu-/iso-lated New Zealand lives.

With people of Jewish descent constantly wondering if their friends would hide them in their attics, a friend commented recently that before hiding someone in his attic, he would want to know if they were deserving; being persecuted does not necessarily make someone ‘nice’ or ‘worthy’. Many would certainly agree that Biller does not deserve to be hidden, which raises questions about the value of human life and whether it is something intrinsic conferred at birth or something to be earned. Whom would you hide and why? A Shi‘ite Muslim, an Israeli, a Somali man suffering the psychological disturbances of war, a rehabilitated former-paedophile? What would cause you to change your ‘identity’ or allegiances? These and other topics, both conventional and controversial, call for complex translation choices.

Combining domesticating and foreignising translation methods, this thesis attempts to give Biller a credible voice in New Zealand English – one I hope challenges anglophone readers as unapologetically and profoundly as it does in German.