Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 21

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Translating Paul Biegel
Patricia Crampton

Vertaalster Patricia Crampton heeft zestien titels van Paul Biegel uit het Nederlands in het Engels vertaald. Zij vertelt over haar kennismaking met zijn werk en over hun persoonlijke contacten.^1.

It was a sunny morning in 1971. I was sitting in the garden room at my large desk (a disembowelled spinet) translating into my tape recorder, when the telephone rang and Gwen Marsh, my editor at J.M. Dent, was asking me, with some embarrassment, if she could send someone over with a Paul Biegel translation that had been found wanting. It was really urgent: could I possibly ‘do something’?

‘How soon?’ I asked.

‘Oh, right away! We'd like Bob (or Bill, or Tony) to wait and bring it back with him...’

Not knowing Paul's work at the time (Dent presumably asked me because I had translated Godfried Bomans' wonderful fairy tales for them the year before) I was really apprehensive, but fell in love with the dramatic immediacy of Paul's scene-setting from the first few lines of The Little Captain (De kleine kapitein).

‘Oh, I see,’ said Bob (or Bill), ‘you tweak the verbs!’

Maybe, maybe not, but by whatever means The Little Captain, published in 1972, was the first of sixteen books I was to translate for Paul, from 1972 to 1984.

The three Little Captain-books made an exciting start: a wonderful medley of modern clutter - a boat made from a piece of stove pipe, a bicycle chain, a whistling kettle, an old bath-tub - and the legendary voyages of ancient myth: justling rocks, a maelstrom, seven labours...their ancient power made accessible to young minds, while simultaneously demanding the utmost that the ‘Neversink's’^2. little crew have to offer. It reads aloud wonderfully: ‘...with a hey-diddle-diddle and a hop-sa-sa, over the snow-white sea foam floor...’ And Paul's thoughtful, profounder notes; when, for instance, Podgy Plum wonders why the tough sailors are bewitched by the Crab King's daughters, while his friends are not, the Little Captain replies:

1. Een overzicht van de vertalingen van Patricia Crampton is te vinden in de Appendix, blz. 127-134 van dit nummer.

2. ‘Neversink' is de Engelse vertaling van de naam van de boot: Nooitlek’.

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‘I think it is because we are children’.

With the first translation came the first greeting from Paul to my children on the flyleaf: ‘To Harriet and Dan, who have such a wonderful mother!’ So he liked the translation!

When we all met, not long afterwards, at 39 Keizersgracht, the tall house overlooking the canal, Paul's children, Leonie and Arthur, played Scrabble with our two - who were mortified to lose - in English! And yet Paul never suggested a single correction in the fifteen books to come, with their dazzling range of styles. His courtesy was boundless.

The tumult of The Twelve Robbers (De twaalf rovers) was a very different challenge: none of the Little Captain's steady purpose here: a tearing, roistering bunch of fellows, heedless of all tiresome restraints. I had a lot of fun with their colourful names: Trillingburr, the careless reed-pipe player; Laggard and Sluggard, the inseparable louts, who ‘when they wanted to piss, had to do it together’. (I'd venture a bet that this wouldn't have passed the censorship of the American publishers of the day...)

In 1974, with Far Beyond and Back Again (Het Stenen Beeld) we are presented with a seriously moving story of two brothers, quite different in character, setting off in opposite directions, from a worn stone statue. The linguistic contrast is striking - when the younger brother boards a ship the author's voice hardens, with the steely sense of purpose, driving the story forward with brusque strokes. Not that the special Biegel glimpses are missing: the other brother digs ‘a hole deep enough for the moon to look in’. The book, with all its complexities, seems to convey a simple longing from the heart: as each brother finds himself, both find their father, when the stone figure from which they parted comes to life and steps down from his pedestal on their return.

In the same year, 1974, Paul presents us, in The Clock Struck Twelve (Twaalf sloeg de klok), with a poignant and dramatic style which nevertheless portrays the inner life (or, more picturesquely, the midnight dreams) of a little boy. He sleeps at the top of the house, whose garden and pond are the stage of the drama he dreams. In tortured juxtaposition to one another are Siliacus the caterpillar, striving to achieve his transformation into a butterfly, and Ninochka the fairy dancer, with the broken wings. By day the little boy searches the garden and the pond for signs of the nightly dramas and finds tattered blossoms and broken stems. In Part II an elf prince journeys away from his father's ‘hall of the mountain king’ in search of a remedy, and the boy wakes, disembodied, drifting in the white nothingness. ‘This was no dream - the boy had been with him’: the whole book bears the true hallmark of the fairy tale, the quest, the suffering, the redemption.

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Patricia Crampton en Paul Biegel. Bron: archief Patricia Crampton.

And again, in that same year, a change of genre: The Curse of the Werewolf (De vloek van Woestewolf) is a folk tale, with two knockabout robbers, a rowdy crowd of revellers who appear and disappear, as do the great golden castle, and the sad, central figure of the werewolf/duke, who appeals to a little local physician for help. This is not, for once, a book that calls for sensitive translation choices - nor is it coarse, as one (Dutch) critic claimed - it is a simple popular legend to entice the greedy and benefit no one with its faery gold.

The varied illustrations of Paul's books are themselves translations: examples of the possible choices, to underline one genre or another. Carl Hollander's dramatic pictures of the Little Captain's heroic adventures can powerfully nudge the translator, or the illustrations may, as in Werewolf, offer the artist's original cartoons of the author's theme, in this case emphasizing the ‘grotesque’ aspects of the popular folk tale.

Letters from the General (De brieven van de generaal), first published in 1977, is one of the most vigorously cheerful and child-centred of Paul's shorter books. It has a favourite children's book theme: the holiday the children have to spend with an unknown and quite astonishingly eccentric aunt. But in Paul Biegel's hands eccentricity is swiftly transformed into magic: the tiny table that has to be laid each night for 18 mice, the adventures of the Siskinniest Siskin and the regular arrival of startling letters from the General whose portrait hangs on the staircase - all keep the children permanently involved in the best holiday of their lives. For once, an English critic commented on the translation: ‘very

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witty,’ he wrote - but of course, the wit was all Paul's. My son reminded me that Paul, instead of laughing at him in his most extreme punk stage, had a serious conversation with him about its meaning. This response to the child's own outlook contributed, I am sure, to the strength of his own children's love for him. We, his friends, could not begin to imagine the depth of Paul's grief when his son, Arthur, died. Despite his unending sorrow, his courtesy and attention to others never faltered, and of course his devotion to Leonie, and later to her own family grew daily more profoundly joyful.

The last of Paul's books that I translated were the five chronicles of the Dwarfs of Nosegay. It is one of Paul's best jokes that here his response to the long shadow cast by his classical education finds expression in the name of his hero - Virgi - the Fattest Dwarf (Virgilius van Tuil)!

But this was not quite the end, for me, of translating for Paul. In 2003 Man en muis came to me for a sample translation, and the same thing happened with the enchanting Swing - a book in which the ‘magic’ resides in the two central characters. And, of course, the personal connection continued. An outstanding occasion was the literary festival held in Rotterdam in January 1994, at which I read some of Paul's work in English, and Paul and several others of us were made to do inexplicable experiments on stage. (There is a dreamy photograph of Paul sitting on a sofa - I am on a chair beside it - with our eyes shut, being ordered to think of - no, I can't remember what, but we both look quite contented.) The Festival also featured a stirring talk by Jung Chang, the author of The Wild Swans, an outstanding best-seller at the time. My husband's work as a sculptor, unsurprisingly, interested Paul very much. In a letter following a visit to us, he discusses a figure called ‘Stagdancer’, which first puzzled and then revealed its meaning to him. His characteristic comment: ‘I envy you, Sean, for being able to “say” things outside the bloody words I am put up with!’ But we are all thankful for ‘the bloody words’.