How do you translate Virginia Woolf into English?

You might laugh at the question, but Tess Lewis can't afford that.

Because that's exactly the question she'll have to ask herself soon.

She is still busy with the translation work on Lutz Seiler's latest novel, "Stern 111", but after that a French book is on the American translator's agenda: Cécile Wajsbrot's "Nevermore", the German version of which, provided by Anne Weber, has just won the Leipzig Translator's Prize book fair won.

Andrew Plathaus

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The decisive factor for this award was that Wajsbrot's novel itself is essentially about translation: a French writer (the author herself only slightly conceals it) comes to Dresden thanks to a scholarship to translate Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" into French.

Many passages from "Nevermore" therefore consist of examples of her work on it, and so Anne Weber, as a translator, not only had to find German words for Wajsbrot's French, but also for Woolf's English novel text, because of course the German had to be handled just as scrupulously with the starting book take place as Wajsbrot's protagonist cares for him.

Tess Lewis is now faced with the same task, but she will have to choose English words that differ from Woolf's,

This problem might make one despair, but Tess Lewis is up for the challenge, even if she doesn't yet know how she will rise to it.

An intensive exchange should help: in Leipzig she recently met both Cécile Wajsbrot and Anne Weber;

they have known each other for a long time, as Lewis also translated Weber's award-winning verse novel Annette, and Wajsbrot's French publisher is Le Bruit de Temps, which is managed by Antoine Jaccottet, son of the Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, whose French poetry Lewis brought into English - a brilliant constellation of literary artistry comes to light.

By the way, Lewis has never translated as many books by anyone else as by Philippe Jaccottet.

He died of old age last year

and if there's one thing Tess Lewis regrets, it's never having met the legendary poet in person.

But in the last few decades she has also traveled more to German-speaking countries than to French.

Fascination of the accuracy of observation and analysis

At the moment it's the same again: Tess Lewis is still in Berlin as a Fellow of the American Academy until mid-May;

we talk in the library of the academy property on Wannsee.

On the way here from reception we passed through the conference room which has a picture of Anselm Kiefer, but Tess Lewis has to be specifically told that she also translated it: the 'Notebooks 1998-1999'.

Kiefer's art is not so much her thing, but she appreciates his notes despite their vanities.

Since Lewis is also an essayist herself, she is fascinated by the accuracy of observation and analysis in other authors.