Intersect Conversations: Daniel Bowles

So, my first question pertains to Christian Kracht’s –– I don't know if it's his latest novel now, because Air just came out –– but one of his latest novels, which is Eurotrash. So Marcel Thoroux praised you in The Guardian for the phrases “gimmicky roundelay” and “bevy of liveried waiters” from the passage where Christian describes his father's funeral dinner. Where do those phrases come from, or is that just a literal translation from the text? Is that from imagination? Is it from other literature that you're drawing those phrases? How do you, more broadly, go about the process of translating?

That's not a literal translation, although I guess that raises a question of what constitutes a literal translation, too. Let me perhaps back up and give you a more general answer about translation first, and then dig into that section. And while I'm doing that, I might be able to find it in the original, and might be able to reconstruct my thought process around that.

When I translate, from German into English, any text, but especially literary fiction, which is where my heart lies, my primary motivation is to give an English-language reader the same, or an equivalent, or an analogous reading experience to the one I had. How do I feel when I read the German original? What does the text evoke for me? I'm a lover of words, I guess that's why I'm in the field I'm in. When I come across a certain turn of phrase that feels playful or strange, I want to give an anglophone reader a similar sense of playfulness or strangeness.

With “bevy of liveried waiters,” I was looking for something that had some kind of alliteration there, and also felt a little silly, because the whole situation of his father's funeral in Eurotrash is pretty ridiculous. You've got the [protagonist’s stepmother] with, essentially, the Ziploc bag of ashes on the back of a barge in the Elbe. Interesting side note: the fact that I lived in Hamburg for the first 6 months of the year which was my first time spending any great deal of time in Hamburg. It allowed me to go out into the harbor on one of the same kinds of barges. And my partner played an extra in that scene in the film that his wife, [Frauke Finsterwalder], is making. He remarked that the scene was just as unromantic and unsentimental as one might expect from the book description. 

“I’m a lover of words, I guess that’s why I’m in the field I’m in.”

The “roundelay” is a fairly literal translation. I remember the German word is Reigen which is an old-fashioned kind of circle dance. In fact, there's a play by Arthur Schnitzler called Reigen that is a salacious, early modernist play. And I remember having translated “Reigen” as “roundelay” in Imperium, if I'm remembering correctly. That seems to capture this succession of passing one thing after the other. In Schnitzer's play called Reigen, each act is set up as a kind of love affair between a man and a woman, who differ then in the next one. So, for example, the maid will sleep with the soldier and the soldier in the next act will sleep with his wife and his wife will then sleep with someone else. And so there's this passing of the baton, pun intended, that just continues along in that play. And that's, thinking about the term “Reigen,” that's what I envision.

And in the funeral scene, you have all of the pomposity of food. And contrast that with how banal everything is, and so I remember thinking that this has to just seem silly and ridiculous. I'm glad the writer liked that as I like finding these solutions to problems of language. And this brings me back to the question of literal translation. Of course, there is no one-to-one direct correspondence from one language to the next. And, in German, you might have a word that captures nearly all the senses of the English word that is, essentially, a perfect stand-in but, when you put that in context, then you're dealing with something that is a fool's errand. 

You're not ever going to be able to literally translate and have the reading experience be the same and so I go for tone and reading experience more than I go for the exactitude of words. And this is somewhere that I also differ, to some extent, with Christian Kracht who is even more invested in tone than I am. So it’s a spectrum. I'm rejecting a literal translation and, when I work with Christian Kracht, he thinks that I'm doing literal translation sometimes. So he's even more into the interpretive kind of translation realm than I am.

I read that interview that you did with the International Booker Prize and it was interesting to hear that you go through and read it with him to get the tenor of the words, to reflect on how the piece is being translated. So, that's interesting.

He also has a different perspective because of his fluency in English. He went to a boarding school, later in his schooling, in Ontario, Canada and went to college at Sarah Lawrence. So his English is essentially uninflected, perfect English. He always very modestly says, oh no, no, it's not. But his English is essentially perfect and, because of the [strong liberal arts] program that Sarah Lawrence has and Christian's familiarity with literature he has a really strong sense of how it should sound in English which is very different from how it should sound in German.

Navigating that on my end can be difficult, trying to thread the needle so to speak. But he definitely has a vision of his own, also, about how things should sound in English. And what works in German and what may not work in English and vice versa. So there are a lot of different variables there.

I'm curious. Would he ever pull a Samuel Beckett and start writing in English and translate it back into German? Does he have any interest in that? 

I don't think so. I know he has tinkered with translation into German. I haven't asked him recently how that goes and what that process is like. But if ever I get frustrated, I've sort of lashed out and said, “Christian, you should just translate the books yourself.” And he always says, “No, I couldn't possibly, I couldn't ever. I don't have that feeling for the language that I need to have. He has a feeling but sometimes I think, and I'm reading into his words, he thinks he needs some kind of direction. 

Of course, I think it's a fallacy these days that you have to translate into your native language and out of your foreign language. I know that, in Germany for instance, Isabel Fargo Cole is a novelist who publishes in German but who's a native English speaker and learned German as a second language. And there are a couple of translators who also work back and forth between English and German, some of whom might claim bilingualism from birth and others may not. They may have learned German, but have lived in Germany long enough to be able to translate back into German. That requires a level of precision that I don't have. 

But to get back to your question, I don't know if Christian Kracht would ever want to write in English alone and not in German. He has said before, I think in interviews, and it comes up in Eurotrash actually, there's a chapter that begins, essentially, “It had always been the German language.” It had always been this language that is so encumbered by its history of usage, but that [Kracht] finds so beautiful, so wonderful, and finds so much possibility in. And so, I'd have to speculate, but I think his love of German is enough to keep him occupied for the rest of his life.

This involves more speculation, so no pressure to answer for Mr. Kracht, but who do you think his influences are? Does he have concrete influences? 

I can't answer that specifically. What I can tell you is, like any great writer, he reads so much. So, so, so much. I recall when working with him on Air, his most recent translation, that he had been rereading works by Ursula K. Le Guin. So, I know that he really takes inspiration from the writing of writers he loves. Or, let's just say, writing he loves. I can't speak to any specific influences, but I can say that he's always reading and reading widely.

I want to turn to a book you recently translated, which I haven't had time to read yet. How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold about how, at least from a cursory understanding of it, two Italian anti-fascist scholars rehabilitated Nietzsche for a new generation. What's Nietzsche's importance for our moment?

I'm going to use a sports metaphor and punt on the question a little bit. The caveat here is that I'm not a Nietzsche scholar and haven't read as much of my Nietzsche as I should have as a Germanist. So, let's just put that out there. But the story of Colli and Montinari, the two Italian editors, and their engagement with Nietzsche is the story, essentially, of literary interpretation over the course of a century and how it changes. How reading changes. And the question that really haunts those two throughout the whole project, and haunts the 20th century, is “What is the text?” Questions that really come up a lot in literary theory that we study, especially post-structuralism and structuralist theory. But questions that arise, especially in the 20th century, that beforehand seemed very easy to answer. 

And what we find in Felsch's book is that books contain multitudes and multitudes of meanings and senses, and that the context of reading also matters. In reading, to find a unitary meaning is also a fool's errand. There will be a different historical moment and a different historical, social, cultural, political context in which you can read the same words and find an entirely different meaning. And so, over the course of the editorial project, they find Nietzsche was co-opted, essentially, by the Nazis in the early part of the 20th century to racist ends. You have Colli and  Montinari discovering and trying to figure out what the text is. They find that Nietzsche had been co-opted by his sister, largely, and her political allegiances but that the text. as intended by the author –– and there's the whole issue, of course, of authorial intention –– wasn't what it was made out to be.

The texts that we read are so intensely contingent and variable despite the fact that we think when we see a single printed page, that's how it is. But there's always a history there. There's always variability, there's always change, there's always contingency and contextuality. That's sort of the story that I take away from this as a non-Nietzsche scholar. But I do have my Nietzsche on my shelf. I should go and read him.

Yes, as should I. This leads me into something that we briefly talked about in the past, but the overall crisis of the humanities. So I know Boston College just opened –– not to trash on my alma mater –– but they opened the Schiller Center for human-centered engineering. So, it's almost like instrumentalizing the humanities for STEM. I don't know what your thoughts are on  the crisis of the humanities because I feel like there's an op-ed in the New Yorker every couple of months about the end of the English major and stuff like that. I don't know what your thoughts on that are as an instructor, as a professor?

They're manifold, depending on the state of my mental health from day-to-day. It's terrifying to me. It's baked into, at least in English, baked into the word humanities. We're studying what it means to be human and humanness, unlike the sciences that study natural laws and natural phenomena. In humanities, you study what humanity has created, the history that we've produced –– the documents, the culture, the art, the traces that we've left. Philosophically speaking, what could be more important than trying to study that sort of thing, to understand ourselves better not just for self-satisfaction or complacency, but to improve the human race and the human condition?

What I think becomes problematic is that, in late-stage capitalism and the neoliberal, global world order that we're in, there's often a devaluing of the intangible and a valuing of the tangible. For instance, if I teach the German language, certainly I want my students to learn German for their German language proficiency to improve, for them to acquire the language. It's baked into the language we use, right? You acquire [a language], you get it, it's a thing that you have.

However, I also know from my own educational experience learning the German language over many, many years and in many different contexts that the process of learning and engaging with that language acquisition is deeply formative. It changes the way I think, it has changed the way I write, it changes the way I approach the world, how I think about the world. For instance, at least studying German culture and literature has allowed me moments where I can step outside of my own perspective and look back at myself critically and at the context in which I arose.

Whether that's institutionally at Boston College or growing up in Kentucky and seeing these unquestioned ways of being that I can now view through a different lens and understand in a deeper way.  All of that is intangible. I'm not going to be able to teach that, necessarily, in a class when I'm trying for the thousandth time to review adjective endings with students who just don't want to learn them or think that it's impossible. And I get reactions from students, and you hear also, of course, from parents of college students paying outrageous tuition payments that they want their kids to have certain skills, right? Career skills. So it's all about the tangible.

And I don't think, in the humanities, we have been good about playing the game of late-stage capitalism: marketing ourselves. Read any press release from a science lab at MIT and they're like “This new discovery could change the way we do everything. It will change the way we live in 5 to 10 years. Maybe we'll have fusion reactors.” We don't do that in the humanities. It's really hard for us to articulate. Or, for me particularly, I studied contemporary German literature. How do I articulate to students, parents, the layperson what the benefit of my research is if I'm studying “the fantastic” in contemporary German novels? That's really hard. It's not going to change anyone's life, necessarily.

“It’s the intangibles that they’ll never be able to learn again once they are out of that really special context of an undergraduate education. ”

And, to some extent, I think a lot of the discourse in the sciences is really overblown and designed to trump up the importance of that research, but, in the humanities, we've got to learn how to talk about what we do in a way that also feels important, too. I'm lucky to be at a place like Boston College that still has formative education as its primary mission because that's the mission that I can certainly buy into, that education will change you as a person and shape you. But again, that's, for many people, too abstract. They want a lot of concrete things they can walk away with.

It's troubling to me when I'm advising incoming first-year students and they say, “I think I want to minor in financial accounting.” It’s like: “Have you taken a financial accounting class?” Okay, what you want is a credential, and knowledge from that credential, but are you interested in this? Is this something that will scratch and itch for you intellectually or let you discover something new about yourself? And, inevitably, the answer is probably not. At least they haven't done that kind of discernment yet. 

And I get sad when I am advising seniors. in, for instance, computer science which happened at one point –– a senior in computer science who said, “I wish I had studied literature because that's what I love.” So many missed opportunities, so many transformative experiences that people could have had. But when you turn college and university into a business and need to make money from it… And when it costs $100,000 a year to go to college, and people need a job to pay down that debt… Of course everything gets commodified. So I, in one sense, understand why there is a crisis in the humanities these days. 

I'm deeply frustrated by it, because much of it I can't control. I'm not going to be able to fix it single-handedly. But I know that there's also a major communication problem out there that is not being addressed that is a fallacy. For instance, to say that you have to have majored in a certain field, and those 10 or 12 classes will provide the basis for a career in that field. That's not true. Everyone who graduates with a degree in German studies from Boston College has gone on to do very great things.

They go to law school, they go to medical school, they go to graduate school, they get jobs in finance, they get jobs in education, they go on Fulbrights. They do all sorts of really interesting things, and a lot of the tangible skills that parents and some students really want to acquire in college are things that you could learn in the first two weeks on the job. It's the intangibles that they'll never be able to learn again once they are out of that really special context of an undergraduate education. I'll get off my perch now, my soapbox.

It's something that I talk with my grandfather a lot about, because he was a classics major in a different era and he went into business and always valued his classics education. But I guess the million dollar question is: What's all this artificial intelligence gonna do to the essay, to the essay assignment, to critical thinking. All those skills that you just mentioned that are intangible.

The AI systems are evolving at such a rapid clip. Four years ago, nobody was using artificial intelligence to do anything, and what they were doing, whatever answers they were getting from it, were very ham-fisted. I think of the Apple AirPod simultaneous translation thing that they have now. That's incredible! And also a little scary. What is [AI] going to do? It's going to make people dumber in certain ways, if you’d like to put a fine point on it I suppose.

People will also develop other alternative skills we can't possibly imagine right now. At least institutionally, Boston College has a kind of agnostic approach to artificial intelligence right now. The administration rightly says that AI is here to stay and students are going to use it, and you need to figure out how you're going to address that use and encourage it. And, also, it's going to be part of the world that students graduate into, so they need to know how to use it.

I'm sure there's a place for it. If I'm teaching German, is it okay for me to ask AI to find all B2 level vocabulary words in a reading and list them by page number in a document or something like that. That would save me time. That would be great, actually. I don't have an ethical or moral problem with time-saving something that's kind of rote like that. But when it comes to asking AI to write an essay, or even help with a draft. I think you're sparing yourself the labor and mental exercise that you need to really develop a certain skill. And to recognize, and to discern what is good writing. 

I mentioned exercise because I think about it in that context. You can run a marathon, but you need to train for it. And if you decide to have someone else run a marathon for you, you won't have developed the skills that you need to do it on your own if ever that comes up, right? Bringing this back to the question of the tangible versus the intangible, some might argue, “I could have AI do all of my calculus homework for me, because when in my life am I ever going to use calculus? When am I ever going to need this skill?” Well, it's not about the skill. It's about the intangible, formative process that changes your brain and how you think and how you see the world.

The same could be said about essay writing. You may never need to write an essay in your life, but learning how to write well is also learning how to think well, and think critically, and think logically. If there's one thing that we all need to be able to do well in this world we live in, it's to communicate well with one another. AI can do that on some level, but not with subtlety. AI is certainly not going to go well for the humanities, but things aren't going well for the humanities, period. This is sort of adding insult to injury. 

“It feels like a step back.”

It's quite interesting to see people in computer science or in the sciences or in any field that feel threatened by AI. It's interesting to be like: “Oh, look, you guys are suddenly feeling precarious. Welcome to the club! It sucks! Let’s talk about this.” It's a little odd to have company right now amid the crisis, but trying to address it is sometimes like trying to shout into the void. Everybody wants to diagnose a problem, but no one person has the capacity to change it.

One thing that I found helpful this past semester, though, that I was shocked about came up on a course evaluation at the end of the term. I was thinking: what is my AI policy in class? I don't want students to use it. I want them to think through their own questions and do their own writing. And I want to help them improve that writing if they struggle. But I needed something more, and as I was thinking about it over the summer, I stumbled upon a UN report from 2024 that noted that there is, baked into the LLMs, behind all of these AI bots and companies, a great deal of Holocaust denial and simplification and relativization. And, in German studies, that’s ethically, morally, absolutely inappropriate. And so I tell the students, you're not allowed to use it, and the reason is because in my field, those things cannot be questioned… this is a historical fact. We believe in fact, and in truth, and in justice, and these are the sorts of core values that we have.

AI using a tool that has a tendency, particularly for writing, to simplify and relativize and deny something like the Holocaust is just completely unethical. And a student remarked and said that they found that really refreshing which shocked me, because I thought I was going to get a slap on the wrist, like: “This is this old professor who doesn't see the writing on the wall and is forbidding us from using something that everybody's using.” 

I think a lot of us in the humanities, just one last little word about this, are feeling really resentful. Because the technology has come up so quickly, that it has essentially forced us to retool the way we teach overnight. And that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to have to think: “Well, I can't give a final essay to my classes, because there's no way I can police that they haven't used AI.” I can accuse someone of it. Unlike back in the old plagiarism days, when you could Google around and see: Did they steal this from another source? And you would have hard evidence. There's no hard evidence now.

The only way around that is to do things old-fashioned in person by hand: write essays, take exams in person. That just means more class time that you could be learning something important taken away by a really old-school assignment. That sucks too. I wish we didn't have to do it. None of us like this because it's not good for anybody. It feels like a step back.

Daniel Bowles is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Boston College and a translator of contemporary German fiction including some of the novels of Christian Kracht. His first book examined the legacies of satire in postwar German writing and his next book project analyzes “the fantastic” in contemporary German literature.