Translation - Übersetzung

My somewhat career goal is to be a German-to-English translator.

Realistically speaking, I am probably going to end up working with the EU translating documents and contracts and boring stuff like that.  But while I am still young and free, I can dream about introducing Amercans to German children's fantasy.  You've probably heard of Cornelia Funke and Inkheart, but do you know Kai Meyer?  He is (nearly) as brilliant as she.

I may be violating copyright laws by doing this, but here is the Prologue from Meyer's book Frostfeuer ("Frostfire"), translated by my very own self:

                Where night and north end, over the mist lies the fastness of the Snow Queen

                Nobody had ever charted the range of her icy kingdom.  None went there without a good reason.  And hardly anyone thinks that her palace still stands today, on top of the last and tallest of all cliffs, where snow and ice melt into eternity.

                The Snow Queen is old, but no one knows when she first strode through this ice-cold waste.  From wind and frost and magic she built her palace, and even today the stroms whine for mercy, when they lose their way in the endless halls and corridors.  Snow blows through the winding chambers, without ever seeing the sun.  And even the starlight of the Beginning is enclosed here, in towers of ice crystals and in the deadly eyes of the Queen.

*

                Years ago, which today in fact appears to many to mean only the blink of an eye in the lifespan of the palace, a snow-eagle hunted through the labyrinth of halls and chasms.  It was no ordinary eagle, but that was known only to itself and the one whose hate-filled gaze followed it.  It had stolen what was most dear to her.

                In its talons, covered with glittering hoarfrost, it carried an icicle – a icicle that held the heart of the Snow Queen.

                One so old and cold and clever as the Lady of the Northland does not bear her heart in her chest.  A heart can warm even the blackest soul – sometimes even when the worst would not hav counted on it – and even one such as the Queen would well have felt joy now and then as well, or have it beat more quickly in a rare moment of joy.

                But the Queen had guarded against all that.  In her was only ever cold.  Many ages ago she had plucked the heart from her breast and since then saved it in a chamber in her palace, unmolested by human or magical influences. 

                No one had ever succeeded in casting a glance upon it – until that day, when the snow-eagle flew through a crack in the ice of the fastness, lighted down on the heart of the Snow Queen, and broke an icicle from it.  The pain that this theft brought forth quickly dissipated.  But in that same moment that the icicle split from her heart, she lost the better part of her power.  Even a being such as she had a weak point, and this was, as she now knew, her own icy heart.

                At once she called her cruel servants to her, to capture the eagle and being the icicle back to its place.  And yet she was not to catch the bird.

                With widening wingbeats, it swept through the halls and the labyrinthine ways.  Once it was frightened when its reflection on the bare ice flitted past it, and when an avalanche of snow rampaged through the corridor, and struck at him with crystal talons.

                But at last the eagle found its way back to the crevasse through which it had penetrated into the inner sanctum of the Queen, and with him came the trapped storms out into the freedom of the northland waste.

                Fog billowed around the icy steep face, which melted into edge of the cliff underneath it.  Not even the eagle’s eyes could peer deeper in:  Whatever surged against the crags from beyond the see, it was not an ocean.  Perhaps the end of the world; or a remainder of that which came before it; or ever that which was yet to come, at the parting of all days.

                The snow-eagle hit a snag and glided inland, carried by the unleashed winds which, out of joy for their freedom, carried it over the white waste faster than any other bird before.

                On the ground, the snow-covered roofs of a city that stayed behind clawed at the cliffs of the fortress, crooked, humped, in humility and fear for the the Lady.  The eagle knew that eyes were watching it from under there, hidden in the shadow of thick fur hoods, people who knew what it had done and were thankful for it.

                Quick as an arrow it shot over the frozen polar waste.  Once it thought it heard a terrible cry behind it, half crazed with rage and the thirst for revenge.  But it did not look back at the castle because it feared to see the face of the Queen, high above over the battlements and towers, formed of driving snow and the night-black of the edge of the world.

                It held the icicle of her heart fast in its talons, flew as fast as it could, far, far, far into the land beyond, thither to the south to the Czardom, there, where it could catch its breath and hide both itself and the icicle.

                On the way, the eagle turned back into a woman with blue hair who resumed her journey by sledge.  Next to her stood a suitcase and an umbrella.  She still did not look over her shoulder.  She suspected that she was being followed.

                A long way.

                A peculiar woman.

                And the beginning of a wondrous story.

Books, books, books

I like books.  I should get that out of the way before I say anything else, because that is the sum of where I am from.  I hesitate to say that as a child, I had books instead of friends - rather, I had books for friends.

My first true love is and always will be fantasy - I loved it before it Harry Potter made it popular.  Normal books for children never interested me.  They were all about kids with best friends and bullies and ambitions, things that were completely foreign to my life that made it impossible for me to connect with them.

Now that makes it sound like fantasy would be even less interesting to me, because I did not have magic powers and had never ridden a unicorn (neither of those things have changed, sadly).  Yet fantasy was in fact more relevant to my life because sometimes they were about people like me - the kids who had no friends and no life outside of reading books, until they were whisked away on a magical adventure.  Certainly my life did not fit the pattern of a typical kid's book; it was far too bland.  That only made it all the more likely that something extraordinary was about to happen.

Well, in a way it did.  If you count finding out that my life is in fact a YA novel of overdramatic college students.  I imagine that in the text, eighteen years of my life is summed up as "She had an unremarkable childhood."

But back to the topic at hand.

Though I have branched into other genres, a normal book for me to read is still something fantastic, and after a seven-or-eight-year hiatus, I have gone back to the children's books as well.  There's some good stuff there - while many writers of adult fantasy are locked into the Tolkien Paradigm, children's fantasy tends to be a bit more creative.

Still to come:  Tolkienism, Coming of Age, The Author of my Life, Books I Used to Like Before I Had Taste, Translation, Non-Fantasy Books I Like, Writing

PS. If you're curious, here are some of my favorite children's books, some of which I read as a child

The Seventh Tower - series, by Garth Nix.  Most people rave about his Sabriel, but I found Tower to have a far more engaging premise.

The Unicorn Chronicles - series by Bruce Coville.  I waited nine years for him to finish the third book, and it was worth it.  The fourth one, not quite as much, but still epic and mostly satisfying.  To me it is still the definitive unicorn text.

Diana Wynne Jones - author.  She has such a diverse range of series and stand-alones that I could not possibly pick the one I like best.  Dark Lord of Derkholm would be a good place to start.

Gregor the Overlander - by Suzanne Collins.  I started reading this series right before the Hunger Games made her popular.  It's good.  Dark.  The sort of thing that would have kept me in the kid's section if I had read it at a younger age.

Inkheart -by Cornelia Funke.  Second book okay.  Third book epic awesomeness.  First book, the book for people who like books.

I'd better stop before I feel compelled to add Artemis Fowl, Charlie Bone, Prydain, Warriors, Narnia...

Books, books, books.  So many books!

The Language Barrier

I am an American, but I am currently doing a semester abroad in Germany.  I have been here about four weeks, and still do not feel like I have settled in.  I have the essentials down by now - food, laundry, bus routes, school supplies - but I am still lacking something that actually ties me here.  All my friends are foreign.  I also have a borderline social phobia when it comes to talking to strangers.

You see, here is the greatest irony of my life:

I am good at languages.  Not super-genius-can-pick-up-a-new-language-in-five-minutes, but I am pretty damn good.  Even with English - I learned how to read Scout Finch style, without being taught.  I don't remember a time before I could read.  I already knew all the words on the vocabulary lists and aced every spelling test without even studying. 

When I got to middle and high school and started learning Spanish, and then German, it was the same way.  I understood language better than the others.  New vocab?  Don't even bother to study.  By the end of class, I'll have it down.  While others struggled with adjective agreement and case endings, I saw the logic in it. An insane, often contradictory logic, but there was a definite pattern that I saw and understood.

Now here's the ironic part.

Language is all about communication.  I am awesome at languages.  I suck at communication. 

I had no friends as a child.  I exaggerate only slightly.  I did not socialize.  I sat quietly in a corner by myself and read.  Which, if the adults are to be believed, is apparently a sign of maturity, rather than social retardation.  My theory is that it took me about eight years to get over the culture shock of being thrown into kindergarten.

In any case, though I am able to function at a mostly normal level by now, I am still very quiet and slow to trust others with my words.  Words are personal.  Words are my soul.  It's also why I don't let people read my stories, not even my most trusted friends, especially my most trusted friends.  When you read something, you make it your own.  I am not yet ready to give away myself like that.

This was really just a roundabout way of complaining that I have no friends in Germany, and it's my own stupid fault for not talking to people.  The fact that it's German is not even a problem.  The language barrier is that I just don't know what to say, in any language.  Something interesting.  Something the other person will like.  Something that will let me know if I like the other person.  Something not too personal and dangerous for them to know if it turns out I don't.

Still to come:  Thoughts on reading, and on writing.  Having friends.  And what my dangerous secrets that I don't want strangers to know are.

I started a blog

It seems to be the thing to do these days, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon. 

Blogs have always struck me as a rather pretentious means of expression used only by those who have no friends to talk to.  However, this view has been refuted by my many friends and acquaintances who have blogs. 

It's like letting someone read your diary, and why would you do that?

Or perhaps it's more like writing a letter to the world.

If I had to offer a reason for why I am starting a blog, I think it would be because my life it finally getting interesting, and people might even care enough to read about it.

So.  Here it goes.