Negotiating Culture, Humour and Readability in Contemporary German Journalism

A Study of Sixteen Articles by Michael Schophaus and Marc Bielefeld

 

Emma Heygate

A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements of the degree of MA in Translation in the Faculty of Arts, Department of German, September 2011.

Translation 15 I’m a Celebrity... Get Me a Drink! Academic Grunting, or: Why Bosseln Is Only Fun with Hermann

By Michael Schophaus OFF-SIDE 24.01.2011 

Today, I’d like to tell you about a certain sport, although I don’t even know whether it actually is a sport. All I know is that to this day, I don’t really know the rules, so I suppose I don’t know very much at all! I probably didn’t understand the rules because I’ve always practised this sport pretty aimlessly, displaying a distinct alcohol dependence, as I chant loudly and devote myself to the intake of psychotropic substances for three days on end. In this place that I visit every January, these substances have names like Bullenschluck, Saurer and Genever. Come rain or shine, grown men and women pack these potent supplies into children’s wooden play carts and drag them along the road, concentrating so hard on knocking back slug after slug from a glass tied to their belts that they sometimes forget what it is they do for a living.114

I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ve seen reputable doctors, having downed one too many, strip to their underwear and toss a red ball in the air in great elation, and then make strange contortions of their upper extremities, before calling out ‘shoooooooooot!’ and hurling the ball along a bumpy course across the Frisian fields. Or just recently, there was a man who I believe is a manager in real life and who, when sober, is fully capable of formulating a complex sentence. However, a few days ago he was squatting on a tall fence wearing his cap askew, with a ‘To Let’ sign clamped in his crotch, bellowing

114 Addition of ‘potent’ to ‘supplies’ to make the meaning more explicit – see 1.3.5 Sentence Structure. The phonetic contrast of ‘Bande’ and ‘Binde’ is lost; some compensation is provided by the repetition of ‘slug’ – see 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

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something to the stalwart crew of legless onlookers.115 You could hardly make out what he said, but it didn’t matter – even grunts can sound academic at times.

And  now I’m sure you want to know the name of this bewildering escapade, which can be enjoyed with traditional North German beverages to leave you at least four or five sheets to the wind.116 It’s called: b-o-s-s-e-l-n! As I said, less a sport than a contest in linguistic sensibilities, or a big-shot jungle camp (see above) – but not a complete sausage fest, although there’s plenty of smoked sausage and curly kale, the regional speciality.117 I’m always astounded at how much the human body can take, but I must admit that after my first experience with bosseln, I crossed my liver off my organ donor card as it’d no longer be medically acceptable. Not even for Johannes Heesters.

In bosseln, everyone’s equal and everyone’s nice, and everyone’s equally nicely pissed. This doesn’t make the bit where you throw the ball any easier, but it does make everyone’s comments as unrestrainedly filthy as the streets of Varel. Varel is a place in the district of Friesland where they really like driving tractors, hanging out at the dykes in stubborn silence, and where Uwe fell into the Jever beer glass when he was a small boy.118 You remember my old pal Uwe, who I’ve mentioned on several occasions here,

115 Eggs does not have the same double meaning as Eier (‘eggs/testicles’), but a similarly crude double- entendre implying a ‘boastful invitation’ has been used instead. This is a feasible substitution for the context, as ‘To Let’ signs are not culture-specific. However, the countrified image evoked by ‘das Schild „Frische Eier!“’, i.e. that of a handwritten cardboard sign placed by the roadside, is lost. See 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay. 

116 The idiom in the ST sich die Kante geben (‘to get drunk’ – colloquial) is translated with a substitute play on the idiom to be three sheets to the wind – see 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay. 

117 The ST contains two plays on idiom: firstly, ‘mit dicker Hose’, which modifies the slang expression einen auf dicke Hose machen (‘to show off’, especially in the sense of flashing one’s cash around). This seems to be the author’s view of the participants mentioned in the previous paragraph (‘Arzt’ and ‘Abteilungsleiter’). This is rendered in the TT as ‘big-shot’, which loses the wordplay but retains the meaning and register. See 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay and 1.3.4.3 Register.

The second play on idiom concerns the phrase ‘die feinen Pinkel’, which means both the region’s traditional smoked sausage and a colloquial, pejorative term for rich men who like to show off their wealth. In order to preserve the humour, a substitute pun is created using the American slang expression ‘sausage fest’ (usually used to describe a party with too many male guests). See 1.2.2 Audience, 1.3.2.4 Food & Drink and 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

118 Friesland in German can mean the coastal region in the German Bight known as ‘Frisia’ in English, or the Landkreis (‘administrative district’) of Friesland in Lower Saxony, where the town of Varel is 

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for example because of the time he sent his regards to the better half of a colleague paralysed on one side of his body, or when he began an article about an interment of ashes by describing the deceased as very scatter-brained. Uwe’s a great bossler and always in a good mood throughout this long, long weekend in Varel, his home town. It’s not quite out in the boonies, but I’m sorry, Uwe, you can see them pretty well from there.

One of the best-known characters is Hermann, landlord and owner of the Linde pub in Rallenbüschen, a part of Varel. The gods placed Hermann there before bosseln even existed, or rather they put him there for the post-bosseln festivities. This Frisian festival has been organised by Uwe and his handball club for more than 25 years now, and those years have taken their toll on Hermann, who walks a little stiffly and wears his grey hair loose.119 He looks as though he’s emerged from a book by Wilhelm Busch, or like Rainer Langhans without the curls, following an Australian rain shower on the German I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!120 Yes, I think that if pride could walk, it’d be a minor celebrity called Hermann.121 Without doubt, bosseln without him would be absolutely unthinkable for me. He tells you what to do with the ball, how full the ditches along the route are, brags about throwing techniques such as överd Finge and liek ut Hand, and if you’re new, brand new, back at the bar there’ll be a sly grin as he lets you have a nip from the bottle with the skull on it.122 After that, some newbies end up looking very old indeed.

located (although the adjective used for both places is ‘Frisian’). The latter is clearly the place referred to in the ST, and brief explicitation (‘the district of Friesland’) has been added to the TT to ensure clarity. See 1.3.2.2 Places.

119 ‘Jedenfalls’ in the ST is expanded into ‘those years have taken their toll’ in order to provide more explicit cohesion between the sentences. See 1.3.5 Sentence Structure.

120 The same strategy is employed here as in Article 6, to more obviously site the game show in the SC – see annotation 47 and 1.3.2.5 Media. The play on the words Star (‘star’, as in celebrity) and starr (‘stiff’) is lost, which obviously also has implications for the title – see 1.3.1.1 Titles and 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

121 Addition of ‘minor celebrity’ to compensate for the loss in the previous sentence – see 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

122 ‘Överd Finge’ and ‘liek ut Hand’ have been retained as loan words. It would be possible to translate via High German into English (über den Finger = over the finger; gerade aus der Hand = straight from the hand), but this article is clearly intended to offer a foreign flavour even to the German reader, so full ST authenticity is retained. See 1.3.4.2 Dialect and 1.3.4.4 Loan Words and Neologisms.

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Hermann is over eighty and has everything under control. His wife Christel cooks up a traditional dish of curly kale, which leaves more than 140 bosslers smacking their lips for a long time afterwards, and the twelve taxis of Varel do the trade of their lives on this long, long weekend. Everything’s always the same as ever with bosseln. That’s what makes it so exciting, so unique for those of us who only ever practise boring old sport. Bosseln, on the other hand, is a state of being, a duel with the devil – some people (the hardened alkies) get scared every year when the invitation arrives because they know that if they take it up, they won’t be able to string whole sentences together for a week afterwards. One of them, an important bod at stern magazine, even managed to get himself crowned Kale King two years running. He went down in history, not least because of his incredible motor skills. In the restaurant at Hermann’s Linde, he actually managed to match his left shoe back up to the missing right one without making a mistake. In all modesty, I was also reeling from my own achievements, having run up the most expensive tab the night before.123

Nothing ever changes at Hermann’s. You fight the battle outside, and then battle the bottle at Hermann’s bar.124 Sure, I’ve seen him unplug the stereo at two in the morning because he’s been afraid of cracks in the load-bearing walls. But with Hermann, you’d better just try to keep up, even if you become king and go dancing with your queen to the sound of Hans Albers’s ‘On the Reeperbahn at half past midnight’, with two beer cans stuck to a construction helmet crowning your noble head.125

123 Schophaus makes an allusive play on the idiom einen in der Krone haben (‘to have one over the eight’). This is substituted in the TT for a marked collocation ‘reeling from my own achievements’. See Baker (1992: 51) and 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

124 The ST reference is to Germanic hero Hermann, also known as Arminius, who defeated the Romans in AD 9 at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, a battle that seemed impossible, yet in which Hermann’s army ultimately gained a resounding victory. Even if the TR knows of this battle, s/he would probably only know the name ‘Arminius’, and would not have been brought up to see him as a national hero. This reference has therefore been replaced by a more basic description of the alcohol consumption that takes place at Hermann’s pub. See 1.3.4.1 Idioms and Wordplay.

 

125 This is a reference to a song that the TR is unlikely to know, Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins, by Hans Albers, an iconic German singer and actor, especially in the interwar years. The TR would also have to know that the Reeperbahn is a nightlife and red light district in Hamburg. Schophaus’s purpose here is to describe the night-time celebrations that take place, emphasising that no-one can outdo 

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But Hermann doesn’t respect any of that, and why should he? He knows all his patrons by name, whether they’re called Ratter, Rubber, Great Barrel, Magic Tooth, Octopus, Mini or Asamoah. Incidentally, Asamoah is actually paler than a salt desert at high noon, but Mini really is mini, and likes to park his blue behind on a cushion while he eats.126 Ah, Hermann, I know what you’d be saying to them now: ‘That Schophaus fellow’s got no idea about bosseln and can’t beat me, let’s not invite him any more; give him a good swig from the skull bottle.’127 And Hermann, I bet you’d be grinning all the while, as though maggots had tickled your tonsils or worms were wriggling around in your belly. But I’ll ride out the storm, Hermann, and I’ll quote you this:128 ‘None of the people spoke much; only when a capital shot occurred was a cry heard from the young men or women. Your father threw the same way, God rest his soul for eternity!’129

That’s old Theodor Storm, Hermann, in the Schimmelreiter, his 19th century novella about bosseln.130 But I’m afraid eternity’s too long for me to wait.

Hermann. In translation, the TR’s lack of background knowledge means that the song title cannot be integrated into the sentence in the same way. See 1.3.2 Presuppositions.

126 Without knowing more about the context, it is not possible to determine whether Mini’s behind is described as ‘blau’ because he has fallen over, is drunk, or simply likes to wear blue clothing. This should ideally be clarified with the author in advance, but a literal translation of ‘blue’ covers all possibilities in the meantime. See 1.3.7 Queries for the Client.

 

127 Insertion of ‘Schophaus’ into the quotation to make it clearer who Hermann is referring to. See 1.3.2 Presuppositions regarding explicitation.

 

128 The TT departs significantly from the ST here to include an extra play on idiom (ride out the storm/Theodor Storm) by way of compensation for puns lost elsewhere, and to introduce the upcoming quotation (‘I’ll quote you this’). See 1.3.2 Presuppositions.

 

129 There does not seem to be a published English translation of Storm’s book, so this excerpt is my own translation. Unfortunately, this may lead the TR to assume that an English version does exist, but there is no other way to fulfil the skopos and provide the reader with the information content of the ST. See 1.3.2.5 Media.

130 Explicitation regarding Theodor Storm – see 1.3.2 Presuppositions.