Indecision in the Land of Overabundance

By Heidi Noroozy

Tram drivers in Gotha, GDR
Photo by Felix O (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s 1981 and I’m on my way to Marxism class in the tooth-shaped University Tower on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square. The tram is an old rattletrap from a bygone era, with its hard wooden seats and worn-out shock absorbers, and it’s packed with students and early bird shoppers. Outside the window, Soviet-style slab buildings rub shoulders with once elegant stone mansions, filling gaps left by long-ago bombs. The war has been over for 36 years, but wounds heal slowly in the East German heartland.

In this drab landscape, a spot of color bobs along the sidewalk, a bright yellow object poking out of a woman’s bulging shopping bag. Bananas. My mouth waters, and I don’t even like bananas. But it’s been months since my neighborhood supermarket has offered any produce more exotic than onions, potatoes, cabbages, and those dessicated oranges from Cuba that the locals call “Castro’s Revenge.”

The tram shudders to a stop and in seconds I’m the only person left on board. The crowd surges toward the banana lady. Someone must have asked where she bought the coveted fruit because she points down a side street and soon even the sidewalk is bare. I’m still such a novice at this socialist shopping gig, I don’t bother to follow the crowd. By the time I reach the shop, there won’t be as much as a yellow peel left.

In the decade before the Berlin Wall came down and the two German nations reunified, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) suffered a serious shortage of exchangeable currency. The burden this placed on international trade meant that many items began disappearing from the stores.

Bananas: once a coveted luxury
item in the GDR

A supermarket run could turn into guessing game. Would the shelves be well stocked or half empty? Would they have real coffee that day or only the cheap stuff, mixed with chicory to make it go further? Maybe there’d be a note taped to the dairy case warning customers that they were allowed only one package of butter per shopper. Hoarding was verboten.

“Mangelware,” the shopkeeper would say with a disinterested shrug when I asked after a newly missing item I’d seen only the previous week. The word means “scarce commodity” and explained everything from an empty meat counter at the butcher’s shop to the absence of ethnic specialties on the menu of my favorite Hungarian restaurant.

Sometimes the problem wasn’t Mangelware but a scarcity of labels. At my neighborhood grocery store, certain non-branded food staples came in plain white paper sacks with their contents printed on the front in purple ink: rice, flour, and sugar. Occasionally, the factory would run out of ink, and you had to feel the package to figure out what it contained. A lumpy bag was rice, a grainy one held sugar, and the soft, squishy one was most likely flour. More than once, I bought a grainy-feeling bag only to discover it held cornmeal and not the sugar I’d expected.

Early on, I realized I had to develop some new shopping strategies. Back home in the States, if I ran out of milk or bread, a quick drive to the supermarket quickly remedied the situation. It would never have occurred to me that, on arriving at the store, I’d discover the items I needed had vanished from the shelves.

In the GDR, I learned to shop like the locals. Whenever I saw an item that was in potentially short supply—toilet paper, packing tape, or those elusive bananas—I’d buy it on the spot. Who knew when I’d see it again? Over time, such “opportunity shopping” became so ingrained in me, I forgot how to do it any other way.

When I left the GDR at the end of my two year stay, I spent the flight home dreaming about all the long missed food I’d get to enjoy. I planned to make thick peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and suck the sweet juice out of California oranges. And I’d buy ten packages of butter if I felt like it. It would be a year before I could face cabbage and potatoes.

Too many brands!
Photo by Tara Whitsitt (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But the first time I entered an American supermarket, my enthusiasm evaporated into a cloud of anxiety. I wandered about the air-conditioned space, feeling a bit shell-shocked—such abundance, so many choices, way too many brands. How to decide? I knew there had to be some strategy to help me find my way through this confusing maze of brands, but I couldn’t bring it to mind. The cereal aisle was the worst, with its bright colors and loud labels. What I would have given for a plain white sack that I could poke with my fingers and decide whether it held cornflakes or Rice Crispies. I fled the supermarket without making a purchase, too overwhelmed to figure out this simple dilemma.

My shopping amnesia turned out to be short-lived and days later I was picking items off the shelves and tossing them into my basket without a second thought. And yet, I don’t really want to forget those moments of utter helplessness when I entered the supermarket and didn’t know what to do. The echo of that reverse culture shock reminds me that not every place is blessed with such riches, and many people around the world have to make do with far less.

Riding the Rails

Vintage train in Bad Doberan, Germany
Photo by Felix O.

 

By Heidi Noroozy

As a child, I had fantasies about living the life of a hobo, hopping on and off trains, traveling to wherever the rails led. As an adult, I realize I hadn’t considered the practicalities well enough to appreciate the downside of such a life: the lack of creature comforts and regular meals—the danger. But back then, it wasn’t the lifestyle that beckoned to me or even the sense of freedom and boundless horizons. I just loved trains.

One memorable rail-riding experience came when I was 11. That summer, my family and I spent some weeks in a small town called Tabarz in Thuringia, a forested region of gently rolling hills in East Germany. A network of hiking trails crisscrossed the landscape and led through the woods from one red-roofed village to the next. We’d spend long afternoons wandering those loamy trails, and when dusk fell, we’d return home by way of the Bimmelbahn, a narrow-gauge train that stopped at every tiny hamlet along its route. The train got its name from the little bell the engineer would ring on approaching a station. (Bimmeln means to ring a bell.) I could have ridden that little train all day long and never tired of listening to its cheerful chimes as it pulled into the next town. To this day, decades later, I can still conjure up the rich, piney scent of those woodsy trails and the ting-a-ling of the Bimmelbahn’s bell.

When I embark on a trip and need to choose a mode of transport, plane travel usually wins out for the sake of expediency. But if I had my druthers, I’d pick the rails every time. Most modern trains give a smooth and silent ride, but sometimes on a regional route, you can still find the old rattle-traps that are more like a historic steam engine than the high-tech, computerized machines of today. I love the way they go clickety clack down the line, slowly at first then faster and faster as they gather speed, until the world whizzes by to a staccato rhythm.

Hiking in the Thuringian Forest

Once, years ago, I had a bit of extra time and rode the rails straight across the United States, a journey that took three days. By the end of that trip, my mind was filled with images of wind rippling through golden wheat fields, green-flanked mountains reaching up to stroke the clouds, and the dramatic landscapes of the California’s Pacific coast, where waterfalls tumble down rocky cliffs and the sea carves blue coves out of the rugged shoreline. I gained a new appreciation for the varied landscapes of the country where I live.

I’ve had some fun times on trains. Once, on an overnight trip from Madrid to Algeciras at the southern tip of Spain, my two friends and I shared a compartment with three Spanish teenagers. The six of us played hand after hand of Crazy Eights throughout the long night. I understood no more than five or six words of Spanish at the beginning of the card game, which we took to calling “Ochos Locos,” but by dawn I could count to ten and rattle off the names of suits as though I’d been playing cards in Spanish for years.

Not every rail-riding experience has been quite so much fun. On a 1980 trip from Oslo to East Berlin, the train was late and I missed an evening connection somewhere in the middle of Denmark. The next train heading my way didn’t leave until six the next morning, so I settled in for a long night of strong coffee and a good book in the station’s tiny café. By the time we made it to the East German border, I discovered that, somewhere along the way, I’d lost the visa, stamped on a separate piece of paper, that I needed to enter the GDR. Possibly it had fallen out of my bag at that little café in Denmark.

GDR border crossing
Photo by Felix O.

Certain that I’d be unceremoniously tossed off the train and left behind in the no man’s land that existed between the two German states, I explained my situation to the East German border guard—hoping I didn’t look as nervous as I felt. But he just shrugged, told me to get a new visa as soon as I could, and moved on to the next passenger.

The shops, and therefore the travel agencies, were closed for the day when we reached Berlin, and the next day was Sunday. So I spent two nights as an illegal alien in the German Democratic Republic before getting my visa sorted out. No one seemed to care except me.

These days, I may have abandoned my over-romanticized image of the hobo’s life, but I still feel a thrill of excitement when I climb aboard a train. Sometimes it’s not the destination that matters but the thrill of the journey that gets you there.

Drinking With the Devil

By Heidi Noroozy

Credit: Morn the Gorn

Gastronomical delight is not something I associate with Leipzig, Germany. At least not when I lived there 30 years ago. Much has changed since then, but in the 1980s, the German Democratic Republic suffered a chronic shortage of exchangeable currency, which meant chronic shortages of nearly everything else. A restaurant meal often began by checking off menu items in conference with the waiter until we hit upon one whose ingredients were available.

But Leipzig also had the Auerbachs Keller, which made up for any hardship. Like Leipzig itself, this underground wine bar is not only steeped in history but positively drenched with it. And much of that history is literary.

The historic tavern opened in 1525 on Grimmaische Straße, just off Leipzig’s marketplace. Its first proprietor was a professor of medicine named Dr. Heinrich Stromer, also known as Dr. Auerbach, a reference to his birthplace in Germany’s Upper Palatinate region. In addition to his academic duties (he was also the rector of Leipzig University), Dr. Auerbach was the personal physician of the Elector of Saxony, a title granted to the German princes who elected the emperor. In gratitude for the doctor’s excellent work, the Elector granted him a license to operate the wine bar.

Almost immediately, a legend became associated with the Auerbachs Keller. A scholar named Dr. Johannes Faust, who had grown bored with life, made a pact with the Devil through the Horned One’s representative, Mephistopheles (aka Mephisto). The Devil agreed to give Dr. Faust access to unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures—but only for the next 24 years (one year for every hour in the day). At the end of the contract term, the scholar would be required to hand over his soul to the Devil.

Faust riding out of the Auerbachs Keller
Credit: Deutsche Fotothek

To convince Dr. Faust of the plan’s merit, Mephisto invited him to an evening of revelry in the underground wine bar of the Auerbachs Keller. At the end of the night, the scholar rode up the stairs on the back of a barrel in a gravity-defying feat of devilish fun.

On the tavern’s 100^th anniversary in 1625, two paintings were mounted on the wall, one depicting Faust and Mephisto drinking with students and the other showing Faust riding the barrel.

By the 18^th century, the Auerbachs Keller had become a well established hangout for Leipzig University students, and one regular patron went on to become one of Germany’s leading literary figures: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Inspired by the legend during his student days—and perhaps after staring at the paintings of Faust and Mephisto through a wine-induced haze—Goethe later wrote a tragic play titled Faust. He set one scene in his old hangout, where Mephisto and Faust join a group of students in a night of drinking until the revelry turns violent. The Devil’s agent casts a spell on the students, who watch Faust riding out of the tavern on his legendary barrel.

Fasskeller of the Auerbachs Keller
Credit: Bundesarchiv,
Bild 183-1988-0908-307 / CC-BY-SA

Germany is a land of long traditions, so when I arrived in Leipzig over 200 years later, the Auerbachs Keller was still a popular student hangout. It had expanded to include five rooms, each with a distinctive name: Fasskeller (Barrel Cellar), Lutherzimmer (Luther Room), Goethezimmer (Goethe Room), Alt-Leipzig (Old Leipzig), and Großer Keller (Big Cellar). A sixth room, the Mephisto Bar, was added in 1989. There was even a tribute to Goethe’s version of the legend in the form of two bronze sculptures at the entrance, one of Mephisto and Faust and the other of the bewitched students.

My friends and I usually sipped our drinks in the Fasskeller, with its plain wooden tables and paintings of the Faust legend along the walls and ceilings. To my great disappointment, and likely good fortune, I never spotted Mephisto in the flesh. On occasion, however, I did order a glass of Tokaji, the topaz-colored wine from Hungary, which is mentioned in Goethe’s play. After all, when you live in a city so steeped in literary history, it doesn’t hurt to raise a glass to tradition.

Adventures In An Ancient Land

By Heidi Noroozy
 
I’ve made it a lifelong practice to seek out unusual vacation spots. In fact, it’s a bit of a family tradition. When I was two, my parents took my sister and me on our first trip to East Germany to visit my mother’s family. It was 1960, and the Berlin Wall hadn’t even been built yet, but my mother’s friends were scandalized at the thought of taking two toddlers into that mysterious and frightening world behind the Iron Curtain. “The Communists will never let you bring your children out again,” they warned. Their fears were unfounded, and I returned to the GDR many times over the next two decades.

For the past ten years, my travels have taken me to another country that is well off the beaten track for most Westerners: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many of my adventures in this ancient land have already appeared on this blog. But in all that time, I can count the number of Americans I met there on two fingers. European travelers are slightly more common, and I’ve encountered tour groups from Austria, Italy, Sweden, and England as well as a handful of individual travelers from France and Germany. But most of the time, I’m the only Westerner anywhere in sight.

So what keeps drawing me back to this most unlikely of holiday destinations? Here is a list of my top three reasons:

History: Iran has a tradition of empire that stretches back 2,500 years—and a civilization that is even older than that. You can’t walk two steps in the Islamic Republic without bumping into the nation’s past. The ancients have left their mark in the ruins of the Persepolis, the Achaemenid palace complex near Shiraz, and the rock carvings of Bisotun, both of which I’ve blogged about before. Isfahan is a monument to the Savafid dynasty, with its palaces, mosques, gardens, and historic bridges dating back to the 15^th century. Shiraz pays tribute to the Zand dynasty, which followed the Safavid era, as well as to some of Iran’s most beloved poets, notably Hafez and Sa’adi, both of whom are buried there.

Food: Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Isn’t one reason we travel to expand our culinary horizons? The best meals I’ve eaten in Iran have been in private homes. (My mother-in-law’s koofteh Tabrizi are to die for, and I’m not just saying that to keep the peace in the family.) But I’ve had some restaurant fare that comes in a close second. In Tehran, the Lux-e Talaee serves a lamb kebab that is so tender it melts like butter in your mouth. And one of the best dinners I’ve eaten anywhere was at a little truck stop on the Tehran-Rasht Road. The place hadn’t an ounce of charm—it was just a big square room with Formica-topped tables and hard wooden chairs. The menu offered only one item: braised chicken in tomato sauce with white rice and a dish of yogurt on the side. But it was so delicious, I still remember that meal eight years later.

People: I’ve saved this one for last because the most compelling reason to visit Iran is to meet the Iranians themselves. After all, Persians have honed hospitality to a fine art, and a guest—especially a foreign one—is warmly welcomed. It’s the people who give me the most precious memories of every trip to Iran. I’m lucky to have family in Tehran who not only take me around town and the country but also give me a window into the inner workings of the society.

View from the back patio of the Ramsar Hotel

Along with the chance to catch up with friends and family, I treasure the encounters with perfect strangers whose names I will never know. Like the three women at the Shah Abdol Azim Shrine in Reyy, who took pity on me and my struggles with the chador and gave me a crash course in the proper way to wear that unwieldy garment. Or the manager of the Ramsar Hotel on the Caspian Sea, who offered me a private tour even though the place was closed for the season. He’d worked there for 50 years and told stories of his early days as a porter during the monarchy, when the establishment was a British-run casino and the shah entertained foreign dignitaries at the gaming tables.

Last month, on my most recent adventure in this ancient land, I met an old rose famer in Ghamsar who, at the age of 81, still rises at dawn every day to work in his rose fields, distills attar from the fragrant blossoms, and still finds time to tend a large garden of fruits and vegetables for his extended family. You can be sure that his story will be part of a future post.

Travel to Iran isn’t for everyone. It’s not an easy culture to navigate, especially if you don’t speak the language. Tourism infrastructure is patchy at times, and visas are not always easy to get (virtually impossible for Americans except as part of a tour). But for those with a spark of adventure in their souls, all I can say is khosh begzareh: have a great time!

Lost In Leipzig

By Heidi Noroozy

City Tower, Leipzig
Photo by Dundak

Everyone should get lost in a foreign country at least once in life. It’s the best way to discover the heart of a place, the cultural gems that don’t make it into the guide books: a tiny restaurant without a menu in English translation, a roadside shrine to a local saint, a pretty park where you can watch the life of the city ebb and flow around you. I’ve gotten lost like this more times than I can count, but one experience stands out from all the rest – the cold day in February when I discovered a rare private bakery in the heart of Communist Leipzig.

I wasn’t a tourist but a student living in a city steeped in history. Leipzig once was home to the likes of Bach and Mendelsohn, and it inspired Goethe to write his masterpiece, Faust. By the time I lived there, though, Leipzig had lost its mojo. The Auerbachskeller, which Goethe used as a setting in Faust, still existed and so did the St. Thomas Church where Bach worked as musical director. But for the most part, Leipzig had become a city of soot-stained buildings and filthy air, polluted by the coal refineries just outside town.

Every chance I got, I’d go exploring and try to find a hint of the grand old days. Usually, I managed to find my way around with a good map and directions from the locals. But one day, I got completely lost. It was the dead of winter, the sideways slick with gray slush, the chill air freezing my breath into clouds of steam. I wandered through streets that all seemed to have the same small grocery stores with half empty shelves, the same stout matrons sweeping debris off their stoops, the same ethnic restaurants where all you could get was German food, due to the scarcity of imported ingredients.

Factory Bakery in Leipzig, GDR
Photo by Deutsche Fotothek

Then I rounded a corner and smelled a rare scent: freshly baked bread. In a country whose bakers are famous for their bread, the smell of baking shouldn’t be unusual in the least. But in East Germany, bread, like most products, was usually manufactured in state-run factories. The shop on the street where I lived carried two kinds – oval rye loaves the locals called Graubrot (gray bread, on account of the color) and occasional rectangular bricks of a heavy, multigrain variety. In both cases, the loaves arrived from the state-run bakery wrapped in brown paper and were usually well past their peak freshness. A private bakeshop, with its wares baked right on the premises, was a discovery worth getting excited about.

On that wintry day, I followed my nose until I saw a line of people snaking down the sidewalk. It was eleven in the morning, only an hour until every shop closed their doors for the obligatory midday break. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I took my place at the end of the line.

Forty minutes later, I made it through the door into the warm, delicious-smelling bakery. The shelves were alarmingly bare. But my hopes sprung eternal as I inched ever closer to the counter. Only to be dashed when the baker sold her last loaf to a customer just ahead of me in line. The rest of us were told to come back the next day.

The bakery opened at six in the morning. I arrived shortly after five (yes, I was desperate). A line had already started to form, but this time I was in luck and left the shop with a rye loaf under my arm, still warm from the oven.

Photo by Rainer Zenz

Later, I learned an interesting fact about the GDR’s private economy. Although the state owned most businesses, anyone could open a private company as long as it employed fewer than fifteen people. With fresh bread such an important element of German culture, it still amazes me that there weren’t private bakeries on every street corner. Leipzig, a city of around 50,000 inhabitants, had only three.

It’s been thirty years since I found my private bakery, but I still remember the taste of that fresh, loaf with its firm texture and chewy crust, just like a good German rye bread should be. So I’m not at all sorry I got lost on that cold day in Leipzig.

A Tale of Three Misfits

Several decades ago, I enrolled in a university in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to study German language and literature with a focus on East German authors. When the time came for me to pick a topic for my Diplomarbeit, roughly the equivalent of an American thesis for a master’s degree, I had a ready topic. I wanted to explore the theme of social alienation in The New Sufferings of Young W., a 1973 novel by Ulrich Plenzdorf, an East German poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist.

You could have knocked my academic advisor over with a feather. Naively, I’d assumed I had freedom of choice in the matter but quickly realized my error when the professor offered a long list of more suitable candidates for me to study. Although Plenzdorf was not strictly a dissident author (his work was published, produced, and staged in the GDR), he nevertheless didn’t earn a lot of popularity points with the East German authorities, largely (although not exclusively) because of the novel I’d proposed for my Diplomarbeit.

First produced as a play in 1972 and turned into a novel the following year, The New Sufferings tells the story of Edgar Wibeau, a hydraulics apprentice who drops out of vocational school and lives for some months in a condemned cottage in Berlin, where he creates abstract paintings, listens to music, and sends taped accounts of his life and musings to his best friend, Willi. Edgar falls desperately in love with a young woman he nicknames Charlie, a kindergarten teacher who is engaged to be married to the much older Dieter.

The short novel (it’s only 84 pages long) is a modern retelling of The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), a classic 18^th-century novel by the German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749—1832). Not only do the two novels follow the same plot, but they are populated by characters who play equivalent roles and have similar names. In Goethe’s version, young Werther (Wibeau) is a sensitive artist who falls in love with Charlotte (Charlie), a woman betrothed to an older man named Albert (Dieter), and Werther pours out the sorrows of his unrequited love in letters to a confidante named Wilhelm (Willi).

In The New Sufferings, Edgar finds a copy of Goethe’s novel in the outhouse of the cottage where he’s staying. Although he reads the book and quotes extensively from it to anyone who’ll listen, he doesn’t identify with Werther. “I can’t imagine that anyone ever talked like that, even three centuries ago,” he says. Instead, he relates to another literary figure – Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Both young men rebel against the “phoniness” of social conventions and both feel youthful angst and alienation. In another parallel with Edgar’s story, Holden is expelled from prep school and hides out in New York while he tries to figure out how to break the bad news to his parents.

Like Holden Caulfield, Edgar has plenty of attitude to offer, much of it directed against the authoritarian society in which he lives. In a conversation with a movie producer, he criticizes “socialist realism,” the state-approved art form where entertainment plays second fiddle to the primary purpose of educating citizens to become better socialists. “I told him that a movie in which people are supposed to do nonstop learning can only be boring.”*

Edgar has plenty to say on the value of jeans as a fashion statement. Jeans, those symbols of the decadent West, are not just pants, they’re “an attitude.” In Edgar’s view they’re not to be worn by anyone over 25, an age group incapable of grasping the finer points of proper jeans wearing: low on the hips. “People over 25 are too dense to grasp that. Especially if they are card-carrying Communists who beat their wives.”

In publishing The New Sufferings, Plenzdorf’s timing was impeccable. Only one year before the premier of the stage version, the GDR relaxed its strict censorship rules, which had limited acceptable literature to the socialist realism category. Plenzdorf’s story was the first to openly criticize social conditions in the GDR, an idea so remarkable that the novel became the most widely discussed book among East German readers.

That social criticism is precisely what made Ulrich Plenzdorf’s novel an unacceptable focus for my thesis at the university. My studies there began ten years after the censorship rules changed, and most of my professors had been educated in a world where literature was meant to be edifying and not necessarily entertaining. My academic adviser likely couldn’t see a novel expressing the social dissatisfaction of Plenzdorf’s story as being worthy of academic analysis.

Although Edgar Wibeau has plenty of reason to rebel against the constraints of his world, The New Sufferings is not a wholesale condemnation of communism. Edgar merely objects to the heavy-handed way in which socialist ideals are applied. “No halfway intelligent person can have anything against communism these days,” he says. Like all the best literature, his story holds up a mirror to the society in which it was written and reflects a true-to-life image of that experience.

All citations of The New Sufferings of Young W. come from the 1979 translation by Kenneth P. Wilcox.

Lost in Translation

St. Jerome, patron saint of translators

Years ago, in graduate school, a professor offered a piece of advice that has remained with me throughout my translation career: “We don’t translate words,” she said. “We translate the ideas behind the words.”

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easier said than done because it implies that the translator can always identify those sometimes elusive ideas. Any writer who’s ever been in a critique group has probably heard herself say: “But what I meant was…” Right. What we want to express isn’t always what ends up on the page. It’s all too easy to get lost in the words.

People often say that language reflects culture, and the way we express ourselves in our native tongues shows how we think and relate to the world around us. Extrapolated onto the translator’s work, this means that it’s not enough to know grammar and vocabulary. We need to have a thorough understanding of both the source and target cultures to do justice to our text.

As a translator, I like to think that there is no such thing as an untranslatable word, phrase, or concept. Sometimes the ideas behind the words are not immediately apparent and you have to dig deep to understand these notions and find a way to convey them in another language. Often this involves a lot of reflection, discussion with other translators, or asking native speakers, “what does this mean to you?” But in the end, we are all human and can connect on some level, right? Put two people without a common language in a room and they will eventually find some way to communicate, even on a very basic, non-verbal level.

Yet I have to acknowledge that some things do get lost in translation. Not so much the ideas themselves but rather their emotional impact.

Case in point: A few months ago, I translated a short story by the German crime novelist, Nina George. “The Light in the West” (published this month in World Literature Today) tells the tale of an East German man who attempts to flee to the west with his girlfriend, but something goes wrong and he is forced to leave her behind.

The German word that gave me the greatest trouble in the story was a seemingly simple and innocuous one: drüben. On the surface of things, this word means “over there” as in across the room, across the street, or on the other side of a vaguely defined space.

But to any German who lived through the Cold War, drüben also has a very specific and highly emotional connotation. It means “on the other side of the Wall,” that ideological and political barrier that divided a nation, a culture, and entire families.

So how do I convey that emotion to an English-speaking readership, especially those who haven’t a clue what it feels like to grow up in a physically divided country?

The short answer is that I didn’t even try. Drüben occurs three times in the story, and each time I translated it a little differently. Or, more accurately, I didn’t translate the word at all but the meaning behind it, using selected phrasings like “east-west” and “divide.” Not once did I translate it as “over there.”

In the end, the emotional impact of drüben wasn’t entirely lost in translation, thanks to Nina George’s powerful storytelling. You can’t come away from this story without feeling the trauma that crossing this divide exacted on the people who attempted it—and especially on those they left behind.

Do you sometimes translate from another language? What words or emotional connotations get lost in translation?