The art of translation
Boston College Associate Professor of German Studies Daniel Bowles received some welcome news recently, when he learned that the English-language version of Swiss author Christian Kracht’s novel Eurotrash—which Bowles translated from its original German—has been longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
The annual prize, split equally between author and translator, recognizes fiction from around the world that has been translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. Eurotrash is one of 13 titles—representing novels and short story collections—on the longlist. The six-book International Booker Prize shortlist will be released on April 8, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on May 20.
Eurotrash follows the odyssey of Christian, a jaded writer who embarks on a tragicomic road trip with his elderly mother and her ill-gotten wealth. The novel has received plaudits from major reviewers such as Publishers Weekly and The Times (U.K.), which included it among the “Best Books of 2024.”
“It’s a tremendous and humbling honor to be recognized, together with the author,” said Bowles, who is working in Hamburg, Germany, this semester. “For a translator, the International Booker Prize is as close to the Nobel Prize for Literature as one can get, so I’m pretty excited. To have been involved with one of 13 books chosen from among 154 nominations from all around the world is also immensely gratifying.”
For Bowles, the experience of working with Kracht has been an honor in and of itself: They’ve collaborated on several translations, beginning with Kracht’s 2012 novel, Imperium, which earned Bowles the Goethe-Institut’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.
“Christian is a leading voice in contemporary German literature and already enjoys a strong following in the German-speaking world, so I’m all the happier to be a part of this recognition of his work among Anglophone readerships,” said Bowles. “Having written Imperium, he was looking for a translator and contacted me to gauge my interest after he’d read my translations of two books by Thomas Meinecke, which he’d enjoyed. At the time, I was already a fan of his first three novels so there was no question in my mind whether to send him a sample.
“Once it was official and I had completed a draft, he traveled to Boston the weekend before the 2013 Marathon bombing to look through the manuscript with me. Because of the lockdown order, we spent the week holed up inside reading the manuscript aloud to one another, from beginning to end. That started a tradition we’ve kept going to this day. I have enormous respect for the beauty of his writing in German, and he rightfully keeps his writing process private, so I only ever see the German original once it’s in corrected galleys.”
Bowles’s job goes beyond the more familiar idea of what a translator does: making words in one language understandable for people who speak or read in a different language.
“With ‘literary translation,’ there’s the implication that the translator is dealing with a work of art, shepherding and transforming it from one language into another, from one culture to another,” he explained. “Literature is, after all, art: an artful use of language in written form. But every linguistic culture has its own aesthetic proclivities, its own ways of producing and judging literary art. So, it’s vital to understand and recognize what those are and to find ways to render them in a different language where they convey a similar feeling, tone, atmosphere, meaning, and so forth. It’s not just about the words but about contexts, subtexts, and aesthetics, too.”
Reading—“deeply, carefully, and a lot”—is a must for an effective literary translator, said Bowles.
“When I was in high school, I was very fortunate to have literature teachers who helped me develop a sense for the aesthetics of language and who encouraged my lifelong enthusiasm for reading. And I’m very lucky to be here at Boston College where my research and teaching involve making sense, with my students, of that documentation of human cultures and creativity and wisdom in literature. That’s valuable practice and opportunity for encountering the formativeness of literature as art. The best part? There’s always more to read and grapple with.”
Bowles is already at work on the translation of Kracht’s newest novel, Air, which is being published in German this month. “Each of his novels is so vastly different from the one before, and this is no exception, save for the beauty and sound of his writing.”
In addition, two other English translations of Bowles—author of the 2015 book The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing—are scheduled for publication later this year: a new novel by German author Jan Philipp Sendker, and Uwe Wittstock’s nonfiction book Marseille 1940, which recounts how German Jewish and leftist refugees in France escaped fascism with the help of Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee.