In response to:
How To Read Elfriede Jelinek from the July 19, 2007 issue
To the Editors:
Tim Parks has done an admirable job introducing the readers of The New York Review to 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s translated novels [“How to Read Elfriede Jelinek,” NYR, July 19]. By necessity, this focus presents less than half of Jelinek’s works.
As specified by the Nobel Commission, she was honored for “her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays….” Her texts for the theater (over a dozen prior to the committee’s decision) are widely acknowledged as pioneering what is now known as “postdramatic theater” (by definition something to be avoided by American mainstream theater). They have been staged in pathbreaking productions by leading directors at the most prestigious theaters in Germany and Austria. In tandem with her novels Jelinek’s plays are vital to the appreciation of her linguistic strategies in the staging of the cultural drama inside language.
Aside from the practical, commercial reasons for the absence of productions of her plays in translation, their omission in Tim Parks’s discussion—even as a passing reference to her major works for the stage—reflects a prevailing attitude in Anglo-American criticism toward drama as separate from, if not inferior to, “literature.”
For the record, Greed, though the last novel published before the Nobel decision, was preceded by a far more “ambitious,” “difficult,” and substantial work: The Children of the Dead, which is widely acknowledged as Jelinek’s magnum opus. (The American translation of the 666-page novel, to be published by Yale University Press, is currently in progress.)
Finally, a translator’s quibble: durchhalten is not the standard German for suppressing a bowel movement. It would be zurückhalten (holding back)—a parental admonition every German-speaking child remembers from long car rides with the family. Characteristically, Jelinek distorts a mundane idiom for a deliberately childish pun in tune with senility that suggests the generation that was exhorted by Hitler to durchhalten—”stand fast”—at Stalingrad. (Nazi propaganda plays and films intended to inspire the populace to “stand fast” are called Durchhaltestücke, stand-fast-plays.)
In that context it would be worthwhile to further examine the meaning of provincialism in literature. Historically this has been a problem of translatability of some of the most brilliant Austrian writers from Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy to Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti to H.C. Artmann, Ernst Jandl and the Vienna Group—whose texts satirize the performative force of local habits of speech. It should be remembered that Wittgenstein turned to Nestroy for the motto of his Philosophical Investigations: “And anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much bigger than it really is.”
Gitta Honegger
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
My thanks to Gitta Honegger for this generous response and above all for her elucidation of the use of durchhalten in the pun that I looked at as an example of translation problems in Jelinek’s novel Greed. I had, of course, consulted German friends when suggesting that this was a standard phrase for suppressing bowel movement …
