Perlefter: The Story of A Bourgeois

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

While I was hard at work translating Joseph Roth’s The Hundred Days I vowed it would be my last Roth translation. But all the while the question lurked in the back of my mind — dare I attempt one final challenge? Should I take on Perlefter? Was it a worthwhile endeavour? Indeed, it existed in German, but the effort required by Kiepenheuer & Witsch to publish it was limited to deciphering and transcribing Roth’s longhand. Translation is another story entirely.

Was this partial manuscript, one that Roth had abandoned ten years before he died, one that was probably between halfway and two-thirds completed, worthy of publication in English? It helped somewhat knowing that Roberto Bravo de la Varga had deemed it a worthy project to translate Perlefter into Spanish (published in 2006 together with Strawberries, which, incidentally, also features a character named Napthali Kroj). Was there anything inherently wrong with translating an unfinished work?

The first thing that came to mind as I considered the latter question was Franz Kafka, who had instructed that all his manuscripts be burned after his death. Max Brod ignored his instructions, and only because of that do we have Kafka’s rich literary legacy available to us today. But Roth, unlike Kafka, was a successful writer during his lifetime, with many books to his credit and an established literary reputation. Would Perlefter contribute anything positive to the existing Roth oeuvre in English? I began to read the book, and I soon discovered that the answer was a resounding yes.

It is impossible to know how much refinement and revision the existing chapters of Perlefter would have gone through had the book been finished. The mere fact that it remained unfinished means that the previous question may be moot. A sort of ‘what-if’ line of questioning that can only lead to frustration. In effect, every translator is an editor, negotiating the nuances between two languages and making the transition as smooth as possible. But a translator’s challenge is even greater than usual with such a manuscript. A translator must strive to bring a work into its new language with elegance and style to make it readable and digestible without completely rewriting or changing the meaning. So any curt or cryptic moments had to remain so. The published German book as it stands is certainly surprisingly cohesive, but there are clearly moments when the narrative feels rushed and dismissive or lacking in detail, as if parts of Perlefter were more or less an outline. I have not crossed any lines here, in the translation of this unfinished book. I have approached the project the same way that I approached my other two Roth translations — to create the English version of Roth’s distinct voice.

I would like to thank Peter Owen and Antonia Owen for their belief in this important project, as well as Simon Smith, my excellent editor, and Michael O’Connell.