Exciting news
here – Margaret Hiley Translations has moved! Not very far, however: my husband
and I have bought a cottage about five minutes’ walk from Pudding Bag Lane, so
are still happily based in Exton and enjoying the beautiful spring flowers here
in the village.
A rare skill: Sütterlin
script
Over the past
months, I’ve been making use of a skill I acquired as an undergraduate for one
very specific university module, thinking afterwards that I would probably
never need it again. This is the ability to read (and write, if necessary) a
special kind of German handwriting called Sütterlinschrift
that was widely used in the late 19th and early 20th
century, eventually falling out of use following the Second World War.
I first re-used
my Sütterlin skills shortly after I
set up my translation business, when I was asked to translate some letters
written to and by a German prisoner of war who was interned in a camp in
Lincolnshire after the War. These letters provided a fascinating insight both
into the POW’s life – his experiences, hopes and dreams for the future after
his release – and into life in post-war Germany. The POW’s family had been
forced to move from formerly German territory in what then became
Czechoslovakia, and the letters included some very telling comments to the
effect that the Czechs were now treating the Germans “like Jews”! (Germans were
subject to a curfew and had to wear symbols on their clothing.) One wonders to
what extent this treatment opened some people’s eyes to the dreadful injustices
of Nazi Germany.
Last year, I
started to work on a longer ongoing project that involves transcribing and
translating the correspondence between the Austrian modernist composers Arnold
Schoenberg and Anton Webern. These letters are publically available in PDF
format in the database of the Vienna Schoenberg Center.
Once again, they provide fascinating insights, this time into a slightly
earlier period. Some of the statements I found most intriguing (besides the
information on musical compositions and performances) concerned the outbreak of
the First World War – for example, on 11 August 1914 Webern writes: “What
terrible events. There is no way of understanding it all. [..] Where has all of
this terrible hatred been up till now? And what will happen? […] I pray to
heaven for the victory of the Austrian and the German army. It cannot be that
the German Reich will perish, and we with it. A steadfast belief in the German
spirit, which created the culture of mankind nearly on its own, has awakened
within me.” Little did he know what was to come!
Last month I got
to use Sütterlin again for some more
personal correspondence, this time written by a family who found themselves on
opposite sides of the Iron Curtain following the Second World War: the son,
taken prisoner during the War, in England, and the rest of his family in the
GDR. The letters revealed the difficulties faced by these individuals in simply
trying to stay in touch under these adverse circumstances; this made
particularly poignant by the information supplied by my client that they in
fact never saw each another again.
Working on
personal historical documents such as these always gives me a particular
thrill; it is almost like being there at a given moment in time, seeing it
through the eyes of those who experienced it. At the same time, it always also
feels a little bit like eavesdropping; after all, these are intimate letters
written for the eyes of one or two people, certainly not for mine. This makes
the whole translating experience a particularly intense – and often moving – one.
Wishing you all
a wonderful blossom-y May!
