Susanne Beechey has translated a piece of prose by Meret Oppenheim which can be seen below. Please direct any correspondence to her at sbeechey@macalester.edu

Translator’s Preface

I decided to translate these pieces based on qualities that are somewhat outside of the dominant ideology of translation and literature. Thankfully this is an academic exercise, giving me the luxury to ignore the consequences of this decision. I have no publishing company to answer to.

Both of these pieces could be viewed as on the margins of the dominant system for various reasons. Meret Oppenheim is not even a "real" poet, known instead primarily as a sculptor and painter. Karin Struck writes about addiction and abortion in the rather unliterary form of a letter in a journal. And both are women. Though perhaps not valued by dominant ideology, the act of translating women’s words is very much a part of my feminist ideology. I view it as a political act to translate the works of a historically marginalized group of people. Furthermore I ascribe to some belief in a feminine voice, in Kristeva’s use of the term, which makes me feel more able and compelled to translate the words of another feminine voice.

WITHOUT ME

WITHOUT ME has no set rhyme, rhythm or meaning. Not narrative but images are the focal point. This poem does not make sense and it is not supposed to. For that reason, my first decision was not to footnote my translation. It would go against Meret Oppenheim’s project of forcing the reader to create a solution to the riddle on their own by explaining everything in footnotes. Besides I can hardly take on that kind of authority when I don’t have the solution to the riddle.

My goal was to recreate the aspects of the poem that drew me to it in the first place: the obstinate undertone, the tension between "with" and "without", the alliteration and plays with language. Some examples follow.

When reading the German original the alliteration in key lines makes me consciously aware of the words rolling around in my mouth. I tried to preserve this quality through heavy use of alliteration, for example "seemed slightly square", "grassy growth" and "oh dive you down in your dungeon oh bury you yourself".

I chose to leave "Kaspar" in the German spelling with no clarification of the literary allusion. Following the author’s lead I leave it up to the most curious reader to search out this reference, which was too obscure for two randomly chosen native German speakers, but recognizable to a scholar of German literature. Additionally I avoid the trap of inadvertently alluding to the friendly ghost of my culture. This is my "German marker", hopefully in some way signaling to the reader, without being too obvious, that this is a translation of a German work.

In my mind the most intriguing aspect of this poem is the double meanings and the way that language is played with. Unfortunately these are extremely difficult aspects to bring through in translation. Though I was unable to bring across all of the double meanings, I tried to at least hint at them. The word pair "mitnichten mitneffen" posed a most interesting problem for me. The former is an adverb meaning "not at all" but by separating the prefix and capitalizing the resulting noun it becomes "with nieces". The latter is not a word as it stands but becomes "with nephews". I tried to do something similar, "with reason with daughter", but could not quite achieve Meret Oppenheim’s genius in this area.

Certainly some aspects of this complicated poem are lost in my translation, but I hope that some sense of the materiality of language remains.

"You are my life / you are my wife" is in the form of a letter addressed to an ex-husband, M, written by a woman in her journal. I have tried to preserve the sense that this woman is pouring her heart onto the page. The flow, the casual language, the repetition of certain words and themes are all important aspects to this piece, which I have tired to preserve.

Sentences in this piece are even longer than standard German sentences and often strung together with colons and semi-colons. Though German clauses necessitate the use of many commas that become meaningless in English, the use of other punctuation in this piece is a matter of style that I have tried to preserve whenever possible. This gives a flowing, rambling feeling to the writing.

Karin Struck writes in a rather informal German, always using the familiar "you" and at times writing phrases rather than grammatically correct sentences. In this vein I often use contractions as a way to make the prose read informally. The German does not use contractions, as they are generally used to signify dialect, which does not play a role in this story.

Two main themes, drug addiction and abortion, posed some lexicon issues. The German word "Spritze" encompasses the ideas of: the syringe, the drug inside and the act of injecting. This allows for greater repetition of this single word in German, reinforcing the importance of the theme. English has a wider variety of terms available, so I have tried to pick the most accurate one for each situation, while being aware of the importance of repetition.

Though discussions of abortion carry about the same cultural baggage today in the United States as they did in the early 1980s in Germany and the verbs "(sich) abtreiben" and "to abort, to have an abortion" match in meaning they have different grammatical constructions. In English there is a passive construction, while German can use a reflexive construction. The use of the reflexive offers an additional meaning of doing damage to or killing oneself. I have generally used a reflexive construction in English to mirror these connotations.

The allusions all translated easily into American culture, so I have not used any footnotes. Though the author quoted may not be familiar to American readers, she is not necessarily familiar to German readers either and it is made clear through the text that she is an author. The Velvet Underground reference is certainly familiar to at least a certain segment of the American public - I’m not sure my father knows them, but he probably wouldn’t read the book. The Velvet Underground reference is in English in the original. This affect is of course lost in translation. As a way to add a bit of that spice back I do not translate the title of Kafka’s Brief an den Vater. This reference also serves the purpose of marking the text German.

Finally, the typography of this piece is varied and I have faithfully retained all italicized words and uses of quotation marks. These are most often used to signify stress, like underlining in a journal, and are another way of retaining the emotional charge of the original.

by

Meret Oppenheim

as translated by

Susanne Beechey

WITHOUT ME anyway without way I came there without bread

without breath but with reason with daughter with Kaspar

with cake so round it seemed slightly square

though without grassy growth with scars with warts with

fingers

with sticks with swarms of W’s and sparse A’s

thus with an enormously little bit of a lot.

Oh dive you down in your dungeon oh bury you your-

self

and your longwinded hope

give your ego the boot, your id its reward

and what of you remains fry like little fishes in oil

you can shed your shoes.

Dear M…

In my dreams I’ve always know the truth about you; I didn’t believe the dreams. I believed you and the lies you’ve repeated for two years, that you only smoke hashish.

As I lay there sleepless the next night I reread the book "Addiction" by Tove Ditlevsen. I wished I could read it aloud for you alone and send you my voice on the waves of a pirate radio station; but I knew you wouldn’t listen to me anymore. Tove sits in her room in her husband’s flat; she had married Viggo F. in order to be taken care of so that she could write. She sits on the edge of the bed at five in the morning, teeth chattering from the cold. She sleeps alone; Viggo F. "has lived alone for so many years that he can’t just suddenly get used to sleeping together with another person." She can never say what she wants; she does what others want; the drugs are the only way for her to say no, just like for you.

"Maybe it wasn’t necessary to marry Viggo F. in order to get along in the world. Maybe I only did it because my mother wanted it so badly." She makes up for it all by using the relationships that she’s forced to put up with; she uses people, leaving them as soon as a better offer comes along. M, you said: I only married you for your money; heroin addicts enter into marriage in order to finance their addiction. You said: Now you have nothing left, you’re just a woman with debts, what good are you to me? He said it in the heat of the moment, I thought; how often you’d say devilish, hateful things in the heat of the moment only to take them back a day later. The taking back happens less often these days, you’ve grown ever more hateful. Then sometimes your hateful outbursts look to me like eruptions of honesty. You could build up so many facades, "put on" so many faces; only when hating me were you "real". When I read Addiction it’s as if I’m looking at the mechanism of your behavior. The addictive personality is there before the addictive medium that makes people addicted. Tove finds no sustenance in herself or anyone else. She seeks out people based only on how useful their are to her acute needs. As soon as something doesn’t go according to her plan it’s as though her feelings for the person were extinguished, for example there’s her second husband Ebbe, who she appeared she to still love dearly.

She consumes herself just as she consumes people. She has an abortion and laments that she had to abort. A little later the sorrow that she felt before is past: "I don’t regret what I’ve done, but in the dark corners of my soul a faint trail reveals itself, as if from children’s feet in the sand." She plans for the possibility of an abortion; as she is together with Carl, the doctor, she thinks: "If something should happen, he is a doctor, so it would have to be easier than the last time." She treats herself like her mother treated her long before she was born; she and her brother came to the world "in a cloud of lather", her mother tried to abort her by eating green soap, and the mother "never liked" children.

Oh M, did your parents ever like children, isn’t your father the arch-enemy of children, incapable of any kind of understanding of a child-like soul, of the simplest daily needs of a child?

In indifferent association with herself and the way she throws herself to other destructive people - like the doctor, Carl, who gets her hooked on Pethidin - Tove aborts herself again and again.

I’m reminded, M, of the saying that you so often brought to your lips: They should be put back in the womb and aborted; your speech M, for as long as I’ve known you, a singular arsenal of self destructive sayings.

Tove wears out herself and one man after the other; her ability to be indifferent to herself and others is inexhaustible.

During the second abortion Carl, who is mentally ill, gives her a shot of Pethidin, it produces an incomprehensible feeling of happiness, whose repeat Tove would crave for the following year.

M, why did they rob you of your ability to be happy? Who are "they"? It couldn’t have been just one person, it couldn’t have been just your mother, not just your father. Your "hotheaded" father beat to death your possibilities for happiness, M, your ability to be happy. Not just the threat of instant death, also death by installments: Addiction is given to children by those who beat them.

A big piece of brokeness is left inside of a woman who again and again has to abort; the excised child is a shadow; she is shadow-like.

You knew back then that you’d "won" me, M, when you showed such deep understanding for my sorrow over the abortion, although I probably wanted to and did overestimate your somewhat sympathetic remarks; your understanding of my sorrow was like a promise that you would understand me.

At the time you shot Heroin between your teeth so that if the police caught you at a deal they couldn’t see anything; you told me that much later; I wasn’t an insider after all, and I didn’t recognize the signs. You said, you’d done it ten times, then it became fifteen times that you’d shot Heroine - and quit. Why did I ever believe that you could quit? Did I just want to believe it?

Tove marries Carl, who injects her with Pethidin, leaving her husband Ebbe, although she finds Carl repulsive and ugly; M, have you used me so that you’d have money for the next hit?

As I read Tove Ditlevsen’s book, I can look the painful truth in the eye, you have used me to finance your addiction. I don’t want to insinuate that you methodically engineered it this way; certainly at the beginning there was also the hope of joining me again to the sunny side of life, to be clean, but the desire to quit the drugs was never very strong. No, M, I won’t give you any moralistic lectures like your parents, who through my parents warned me about you, saying you were "a pattern".

Tove writes "If I’d just told him (Ebbe) the truth, if I’d explained to him that it was a clear liquid in a syringe that I’d fallen in love with, and not the man who had the syringe at his disposal?" When the doctor gave Tove the injection, suddenly she found him attractive, after that she moved out on her husband, at first moving with their child into a boarding house, then later to Carl’s flat. She nestled herself in with the doctor, like you’ve nestled yourself in with me, M. Sure, I couldn’t give you any injections, but you could sponge off of me, finding the perfect conditions from which to journey out into the scene, as if setting sailing out of a harbor. You always came back to me, your harbor, at the beginning perhaps still with desperate hope of finding a new path out of the drug scene through my influence. But from the beginning the Heroin was stronger than me, it was a uneven, predestined fight. It was completely useless that I ever took him in, that I later full of zeal competed with the drugs, as if they were my rival.

I knew the line out of the song Heroin by Velvet Underground: You are my life / you are my wife, but I didn’t want to feel that truth.

Tove: "If I come back, I say slowly, do I get another shot of this stuff (Pethidin)?" You too only knew people who could be useful to your addiction, M, people with whom you could smoke up, get wasted, pop pills, shoot up. People who had stuff or needed stuff from you; that way you had the feeling that you were important. You could give to them and they could give to you something that was forbidden. The forbidden is especially exciting, drugs out of the neighbor’s garden. To eat out of the forbidden garden of poison is the most powerful rebellion against your hotheaded father, who is only addicted to the ordinary, unforbidden drug alcohol. Ahh yes, your father M, an entire evening’s topic; your father, M, the "child killer" who would love to lynch, gas and hang Jewish children, degenerate youths, if you can put any stock in his verbal threats. Toward his only grandchild, your son, he’s indifferent and cold, he must have been that way toward you too, worse than Kafka’s father, you devoured his Brief an den Vater.

I’d like to spend days crying over you, M, climb up onto a rock in the far-off secluded countryside, sit there and cry over you; I wish I could give you a new father; give you your childhood back, make it all better; I know it’s a claim of omnipotence, I can’t do it; I can’t make it all better; I can’t save anything. I could lament for days that you aren’t capable of defending yourself against your father. Only in the protective, safe atmosphere of solitary evenings with me, during the time when you would still empty a couple of bottles of wine at home before my eyes and with a relaxed tongue pour out your hate for your father in front of me as if in front of a therapist, only then was it possible for you to open up for hours on end. As soon as you were sober again you’d say positive things about your father, defending him to me, as I gradually developed my own hate for your father, after everything that you’d told me about him; you were like an abused child that suddenly grows silent before the judge and professes love for his tormenting father. During those songs of praise for your father you exposed your incredible longing for a loving father. How well I understood that! How well I understood that you would have preferred to make yourself a new father in a test tube and longed to live a new childhood, a new life. But since our parents are there before we exist, there’ll never be the freedom to choose your own parents. As compensation you swore by your freedom to take whatever drugs you wanted. This freedom was the most important thing in the world to you, the absolute epitome of freedom. How often we fought over that in the beginning, until I gave up trying to convince you that it’s not freedom to be dependent. Do you know that I could strangle your father with my own hands, that I would love to torture him, to shut him up for days and scream into his face everything that he’s done to you, to us? We could have done it together, then you wouldn’t have had to hit me, M. During one of those nervous walks two years ago during our ten day vacation in Southwest Germany didn’t you once scream at me that I was just like your father? Naturally you fought with your father, too, especially when drunk; do you remember the wedding, where he attacked you about taking karate lessons and you two almost hit each other and then around sunrise you drove yourself home, completely drunk and then steadfastly claimed that your father had brought you home. Sure, I understood this deep longing: to just once be lovingly brought home by your father, to just once be loved by your father. An unfulfillable dream, that you wanted to kill by becoming cold and unfeeling; your favorite saying: If I just couldn’t feel anything anymore! You’ve achieved that in the meantime: H makes you cold, down to your heart cold.

Why though did I try to "compete" with the drugs, why did I want to be stronger than them, why did I have the responsibility of showing you "alternative" methods of happiness? I should have sensed from the beginning that the drugs are stronger, that they are "brutally good", "corrosive", "lustful" - just like the slogans say. You are my life / you are my wife.