Inside the Process: Lucia Writes About Translating “Schutzraum”

״During the translation of “Schutzraum”, I felt above all the grueling tension between the words to be translated and their manifest content: on the one hand, the literary beauty of the text in front of me, and on the other, the horror it deals with. This tension was sometimes difficult to bear, but perhaps this is the power of art and literature.

Certainly, the translation was a kind of “work of grief” for me: it demanded a pausing that was impossible for me in the months after the seventh of October; a sensing of unbearable feelings, an immersion in the moment. We translators tend to spend a lot of time on single words or sentences, polishing and honing them. Our eyes cannot quickly escape to the next line when faced with sentences and evoked imagery that are difficult to bear – our eyes must stay fixed on the line.

I undertook a lot of research for the translation process: Among other things, I turned to a former German marine to find the right terminology for the naval parable in Aryeh Attias’s “The Collision”. A recurring field of terminology that required trans-cultural adaptation was the different types of Israeli bunkers or shelters, which are completely normal in Israeli society but not in the German speaking ones. Similar attention was required for images and stories of October 7 that have become “iconic” in Israeli society, but which can be assumed to be unfamiliar to non-Israeli/non-Jewish readers.

The translation process of the short story by Oded Carmeli, in which the inner monologue of a woman hiding from armed men is told, was particularly interesting. I realized that I was missing something fundamental in the story; something was puzzling me. So, I contacted the author. What I came to realize was that the story can be read from the perspective of a Jewish-Israeli woman hiding from Hamas fighters or from the perspective of a Palestinian woman hiding from Israeli soldiers. Regardless of the perspective, the woman is scared to death – that’s the main message. While Oded Carmeli deliberately created this (unconscious) confusion in readers, I needed the greatest possible clarity about the text to create the same confusion in German.

Finally, texts written by different authors also require a thoughtful and attentive approach to their respective styles. Thus, each of the short stories I translated is characterized by its own linguistic style, which I aimed to capture in German.״