The Lamentations of Zeno

Translator’s Note

With The Lamentations of Zeno, Ilija Trojanow charts new territory in prose as well as geography. Not a native speaker of German, he has adopted that language and adapted it to his own purposes, taking full advantage of its lexical fecundity, creating words at will, and of its suspended syntax, with which he unleashes whole currents of consciousness. Alternating painterly descriptions of the natural world with cacophonic passages composed of song snippets, adspeak and “breaking news,” he contrasts the majestic stillness of the Antarctic with the clamor of human “civilization.” And all of this is framed within a confessional log that allows the reader to reconstruct the emotional course of the troubled protagonist.

The sheer range of registers is impressive — and quite a challenge for the translator. The title itself is a case in point: A literal “IceThaw” not only lacks the “aura” of the original EisTau, it also fails to convey the layers of meaning lurking in the German. “Melting Ice” seemed a bit lackluster, while “Meltdown” was more appropriate for any number of TV movies. Instead we decided to focus on the narrator who is the soul of the novel.

My primary task in translating the book has been to recreate the voice of Zeno Hintermeier — his gruff demeanor, deprecating self-irony, bone-dry wit, and great erudition. To this end I have broken up single-sentence paragraphs and recast them with somewhat shorter sentences easier on Anglophone ears. Otherwise punctuation remains light, echoing the German, although quotation marks have been added to set off some speech. Songs cited in the shorter bricolage passages have been substituted with popular English lyrics from the same period, and elsewhere I have similarly opted for equivalence over literal rendering.

Most of all I hope to have captured the deeper musicality of the prose, by paying as much attention to the rests as to the notes. Because for all his linguistic virtuosity Trojanow is equally a master of the unsaid, so that the words on the page are like the icebergs themselves — a sparkling intimation of what lies below.