Blumfeld April Translation

Translation

In February 2023, the German department at Scripps College invited translator Ross Benjamin to speak about his work in translating Franz Kafka’s diaries from German to English. I hadn’t really thought about translation as any more difficult than just speaking a language up until that point–I’ve spoken both English and German since I was a little kid, and at age 8 I was translating bakery orders into German for my dad–so translating something like a short song should be ridiculously easy.

On a raw, practical level that assumption turned out to be wildly untrue. The song I chose to translate was April, a 2006 song by German indie band Blumfeld that I’ve been obsessed with since 2020. My friend Grace asked me for a translation when I shared it with them, since nothing was available online, so I typed out a word-by-word English translation of the song right there in our text chat.

That first translation was awful. Although technically 90% accurate, it lost all the poetry and light playfulness of the original, and none of my word choices were as delicate or specific.

So I decided to make a project out of it. I would re-translate the whole song, properly this time, over the course of March-April 2021, and create a series of illustrations to go with it, featuring two of my original characters experiencing a day out in April.

My second translation was in some ways less accurate to the original–I didn’t translate word-by-word, instead getting the feeling of a whole line across–but I’m much more proud of it. I learned some new words along the way: “das Wechselspiel" (interplay) and “tollen" (to frolic), and found previously-unknown synonyms for others.

Some words had to be left untranslated (there just aren’t common flower names for Goldwolfsmilch or Alpenveilchen in English, but I did my best to explain them by drawing them into the video).

I gave up on perfect accuracy in a few places: the line “Wind spielt mit den Weiden wie er will" directly translates to “Wind plays with the willows as it pleases," but I chose “Wind plays with the willows now and then" to match the rhythm of now-and-then to wie-er-will. And I took my time in shaping and shifting the words around to try to catch the original spirit. I never got it to rhyme, but it still flows in a mostly-pleasing way.

In his talk at Scripps College, Ross Benjamin dug into some of these practical issues of translation, but he also talked about the deeper implications of trying to accurately convey meaning across language. It’s impossible to create a “perfect" translation, so every translation will have its own unique flavor and bias. His specific project, Franz Kafka’s diaries, also brought up ethical questions because Kafka never meant for them to be published; upon his death, he handed off all of his diaries to a friend with a request to burn them all. Instead, his friend published them. Earlier translations to English had carved up the diaries into palatable pieces, but Benjamin wanted to fully and accurately translate the whole thing.

I didn’t spend too much time grappling with those questions in my short song translation (I never even asked for permission to translate it–my bad, Blumfeld). But they’ve stayed underneath my skin, and I haven’t looked at translation the same way since.

Artwork

On the illustration side of the project, I also wildly underestimated the work required there. I finished the project by April 2023 instead of April 2021, although I was mostly slowed down by the intervening semesters of college. It’s one of my oddest pieces of work because the art style changes so dramatically throughout the project.

The artwork of my 19-year-old mid-pandemic self sometimes bears little resemblance to the artwork I made at age 22.

I kept the project mostly on track by deciding on character designs early on, as well as picking out a color palette for the whole thing. Although the backgrounds are varied, and some contain unique colors, 90% of the project fits into the color palette that I picked out back in March 2021.

I also learned the importance of just letting go of ideas that aren’t working. Eventually I had to abandon this treetop thumbnail because I just couldn’t get the colors to work, no matter how visually appealing the base design was.

But the biggest game-changer for me was access to Photoshop, which I finally got through my college in August 2021. Up until that point I’d been making everything in FireAlpaca, a small but powerful art program that allowed me to design my own brushes to paint with. But Photoshop had built-in brushes with textures I could never hope to make on my own, and radically changed what I was able to do.

Overall, I’m ridiculously proud of this project and everything I learned and accomplished in both translation and artwork. My next German song translation is already in the works: Schlagschatten, by AnnenMayKantereit. But it’ll probably be a while until that one’s done.