Talking in Tongues Essays on Language and Literature

Peter Wortsman (born 1952 in New York City) is the American-born son of Austrian‑Jewish émigrés and was raised bilingually in German and English.  He is the author of a novel (Cold Earth Wanderers), two collections of short fiction (A Modern Way to Die and Footprints in Wet Cement), the travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin, and the nonfiction book The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard.  His plays include Burning Words and The Tattooed Man Tells All, and his stage work has been performed in the United States and Germany.  Wortsman is also a prolific literary translator from German into English, with translations of works by Chamisso, the Brothers Grimm, Heine, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Musil, and others.  A former Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Fellow and Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, he has received numerous awards, including the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award, the Gertje Potash‑Suhr Prose Prize, the Solas Awards Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, and an Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY). He lives in New York.

• ContentsSmuggling Secrets Across Time and Space, A ForewordI. Talking in TonguesI Harbor a Stillborn Scribe of the German Tongue in MeOf Sublime Ecstasy and Guttural Disgust: My German LanguageI am a French Irregular VerbMeditation in Translation: Transcending Ego and Transmitting VoiceTalking in Tongues: Translating Others and MyselfThe Converted TongueII Making Bones SingDon’t Burn What You Don’t Understand! (German Humanist Johannes Reuchlin’s Defense of the Talmud)Making Bones Sing: Tales of the German ImaginationFacing Fears and Furies: The Unexpurgated Brothers GrimmThe Displaced Person’s Guide to Nowhere: The Forked Tongue and Divided Loyalties of Adelbert von ChamissoAll Fall Down: The Collapsing House of Cards of Heinrich von KleistFacing the Music: The Melodious Imaginings of E.T.A. HoffmannReturn to Sender: The Letters of Rahel Levin VarnhagenHiking Through Heaven and Hell: Reflections on Heinrich Heine’s Travel PicturesTo Make a Long Story Short: The Prose of Peter AltenbergIn the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka Inverted Anonymity: The Mindful Farce of MynonaRobert Musil’s Posthumous Papers RevisitedPreserving the Imprint of the Ineffable in Musil’s ProseOrpheus Raising Hell: Memories of the late Aleksander KulisiewiczTranslating the Surreal (Or Doing the DADA dance): On Coming up with an English Take on Kurt Schwitters’ Verbal Collage “The Onion”Qui es-tu, Federman: An Intimate Reading of La fourure de ma tante RachelSix Fragments in Pursuit of Fiction’s Roots and Fruits  Small Wonder (a Reflection on the Short Form) Language Belongs to All its Practitioners (An Afterword)

The German language has a great proverb for "dilemma": "Sitting between chairs." Peter Wortsman’s beautifully crafted essays on translation, as well as his introductions to his translations of German literature, demonstrate his mastery in dealing with this dilemma. He straddles his two native languages, German, and English, which he once described as a "Hybrid Anglo-Saxon-Norman language." To translate German the way he does, to write English the way he does, he needs a third chair: French, the "Norman" component of English. His works demonstrate that it is only through writing and translating between these three languages that his essays and translation are so rich and deep.– Barbara Hahn, Max Cade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University