On Uwe Johnson: Poet of Both Germanys
This week marks the publication in English of one of the great novels of New York City, and of the twentieth century: Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, by the German writer Uwe Johnson. This is the first of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily, on the book, its author, and what it means to translate a foreign book about your hometown.
In 1961, the heads of six leading publishers—French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and American—created the International Publishers’ Prize, “meant to single out writers who were actively transforming the world literary landscape, and to rival the Nobel Prize in prestige,” in the words of J. M. Coetzee. That inaugural year, the prize was shared by two writers everyone has heard of: Jorge Luis Borges, whose international career it launched, and Samuel Beckett. In its second year it went to a twenty-seven-year-old German named Uwe Johnson.
