This is an edited extract of the ‘Translator’s notes’ to Conversation Time, as published by Holocaust Centre North. Order your copy here: https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop/conversation-time/
When I began the residency – in May 2024 – I had thought I was interested in what I called ‘special’ uses of language: poetry, song, quotations; family codes and in-jokes, dialect, multilingualism, self-translation; and non-language, like drawings, doodles or different kinds of handwriting. I wanted to know what happened when ordinary language ran out: the ways that people find to communicate in writing with those from whom they have been separated by war and persecution, not knowing when they will receive a reply. What they put in a letter of strictly twenty-four lines or twenty-five words, a letter that is ‘confined to private affairs and to business matters in which the writer has a personal interest’, written ‘in plain language of which the meaning is clear’, a letter that has to smooth its own passage through the censor.
In the archive I found the things I had thought I was looking for. I found drawings, rhymes, wordplay, dialect; I found people switching between languages for different purposes or different members of the family. But mostly I found the same words repeat themselves, the same ordinary words and phrases and formulations. I was very pleased to receive a letter from you today. We were very pleased to receive your lovely letter. I’ve not heard from you for a long time. We’ve not heard from you in a long time now. News from you at last. 2 letters from you arrived today at last. A long letter came from you today at last.
And so I turned to this, this ordinary language: the repetitions and variations, the formulae, common to letters in German from very different writers across the archive. I was very glad to get news from you at last. At long last proper news from you! To my great joy I received your airmail letter dated 26th Nov. You can hardly imagine how glad we were to receive your telegram of the 2nd of this month. We were very glad to receive your lovely card. Glad you keep well. I hope nonetheless that you are both well, as I am, at least in terms of health. I hope you are well, as we are. Doing very well, hope the same of you. Especially in the Red Cross letters of twenty-five words: Still no word from Philipp, which we are very worried about. Why does Philipp not write to us. Have you heard from Philipp yet. Go out a lot. Go out quite a bit. Lots of friends. Dressmaking super. Dressmaking super. Dressmaking super.
In the archive I read the letters of Henry Mendel, a refugee from Germany who was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940: ‘We have far too much time for thinking here, more’s the pity’. And only two letters a week, maximum twenty-four lines on regulation paper, twenty-four lines sideways, not lengthways, in pen, not pencil, on thick coated paper that folds to become its own envelope.
‘Conversation time’ (‘Unterhaltungsstunde’) is what Mendel calls it when he writes a letter without having received one to reply to, to his wife Alice and young daughter Rachel. There’s a fortnightly Viennese café that will soon be weekly. He has been giving lectures on differential calculus. The vegetation is interesting. He has Rachel’s hand-drawn cards up in his room, next to reproductions of Rembrandts: his ‘gallery’. It is writing to pass the time, writing that ‘does him good’, writing for the sake of writing. And, at the same time, communication for the sake of communication – writing to someone for the sake of reaching outwards.
I went to the Isle of Man to see the ‘blossoming palms, large fuchsia trees & other marvellous colours on flowers etc.’ that Mendel described. It was summer but past the height, no longer light until 11pm, unlike when he first arrived and was still able to read in his room at around midnight without switching the light on. Shabby Victorian boarding houses, unpaved alleys; souvenir shops, chip shops, cabbage palms.
One of the internment camps Mendel had been in, the famous one where the artists were, had been done up. The houses and the garden in the square were well-kept, with plaques at intervals around the wall, a project with local art students to commemorate the famous internees: Kurt Schwitters, Erich Kahn. But in Onchan, Mooragh in Ramsey in the north of the island, central Douglas on the promenade – perhaps there were memorials there, too, but I didn’t find them. Across the island, the boarding houses and hotels were once again for tourists, mostly, although many fewer of these now. Looking up at the houses: here was a Viennese café organised by the internees, here was a concert, here were lectures on differential calculus. Chips cheese and gravy under the monkey puzzle trees and cabbage palms. A friend once went to Devon and was disappointed to find that they were not real palms. But Mendel was impressed.
I went to the Isle of Man to see what Henry Mendel had seen. As if something of the latitude, the climate – the shape of the island, the look of the buildings – would be enough for me to feel I had come closer to him. But of course there was too much else, and too much that had happened in between as well. The finance guys in the fish restaurant by the harbour. The old street where all the advocates had their offices, now Coutts, KPMG. Then, there had been none of that. The museum in Peel has reconstructions of fishwives covered in blood, but no mention of internment, or nearly none. Everything on the island is motorcycle-themed, which Mendel would not have seen because the TT was suspended between 1940 and 1945, although perhaps, like now, there would have been reminders of it here and there, crash mats on the curves. On the other hand, the island air, the island light, the way the winds pass over: all of that has not changed (although of course it has).
In Mendel’s letters are all those special uses of language I had been looking for: rhyming poems, made-up words, drawings and diagrams, dialect. It’s a kind of made-up dialect, or so it seems, a playful version of south-west German, a playful version of Swiss. I can’t tell exactly when the dialect shades into idiolect – family words, or his own words, that he has invented and his family has learned to use.
I was drawn to Mendel’s letters, because of their playfulness with language, and because of their pedantry. But I was also drawn to his letters because the letters, as all letters from the Isle of Man internment camps, had to pass through the censor in Liverpool; and to smooth their passage through the censor, Mendel had written in a clear, printed hand, not cursive. The presence of the censor had smoothed their passage to me.
The Red Cross letters printed in capitals, the letters written in French or English or in a clear hand to smooth their way through the censor: this is language designed to be overheard. And for that reason it is also more closed to me. People ask if the letters are in code. No, no, it’s not that, it’s not that there are secrets within them. Of course, in some cases, perhaps. But the war censors – they were like editors on behalf of the nation, making sure nothing was said that was compromising, either of the writer or the war effort. They were not there only to intercept disloyalty. No, the censor was a second pair of eyes in anticipation of a third, the enemy. All of the constraints on civilian international mail: don’t give times or locations of air raids, don’t say ‘letter’, say ‘news’ or ‘message’, don’t mention the means or routes of writing from country to country. The censor a reminder that language makes things available to others; that letters are always a gamble.
I have censored – edited – in choosing how and what to translate. I can’t do justice to every word. And within each word I can’t do justice to every millimetre, every moment of pressure transmitted from hand to crumbling paper. In a letter, Gershom Scholem asks Walter Benjamin to facilitate the passage of his reply by writing clearly. I want these letters to have a smooth passage.
Ordinary formulae, precisely in their ordinariness full of feeling – the way you write to someone you love but are afraid to tell them so, and so you use the formulae hoping that they will see that, this time, for once, they are not empty. The addition of ‘very’, or ‘very, very’. In the very ordinary language, the sense that language – as I initially put it – has run out.
I had thought that these were opposites: on the one hand, things that were challenging or even in some way pointless to translate – wordplay, drawings, ditties; and then, on the other, the salutations and sign-offs and housekeeping, straightforward and unproblematic. Of course there are decisions to be made, as a translator. But these are not ‘contentful’ decisions – the only question is how to convey the ordinariness. And so both are, in a way, the same. What both the language and the non-language are for is to mark and maintain relation.