Let’s start with a short introduction:
“Glaub mir” is actually the result of “Vertrau mir…ich vergebe dir”, a fan fiction written in twenty chapters about the story of Gabrielle, a fan of the metal band Rammstein and a fervent admirer of the poet and singer Till Lindemann. After a concert in Nantes, she is raped by a security guard. Paul Landers witnesses the assault but finds himself unable to help the young woman because of an excess of alcohol during the after party. Gabrielle disappears and Paul feels so guilty that he chooses to cancel the tour. He even asks the police to find the young woman, without success.
Several years pass, during which Paul treats his depression with alcohol, while Gabrielle ends up renaming herself Amaryllis to become a stripper in a cabaret in Berlin. One evening, Paul, torn apart by a divorce and family conflicts, recognizes Amaryllis on stage thanks to her very particular tattoo on her chest. The man and the young stripper meet again and start a friendship which soon turns into love. But Amy is unable to reconcile the feelings of gratitude she owes to Paul with the admiration she still feels for Till. The love triangle gets complicated when Till seduces her while she now expects Paul’s child. The former, torn by remorse, confesses the betrayal to his friend, who cancels the marriage and leaves his fiancée and their daughter Myalis.
Amy comes back to the cabaret where she tries to raise her daughter while ‘burning angels.’ One winter night, she receives a note from Till, who expresses his regrets, along with a poem which compares Paul and Till with bees who voraciously gathered pollen from a helpless flower (an amaryllis). The next day, Amy, miserable and disoriented, is fatally hit by a bus. The day of the funeral, Paul comes to the cabaret and is told about the tragic accident – he drives back home in despair and sinks in alcohol. Deliriously pacing up and down his balcony, he finally stumbles and falls from the fifth floor, and dies.
NB: Gabrielle/Amaryllis comes from Toulouse (Fr.). When she died, her daughter Myalis was sent to France – her aunt took care of her.
I chose to call Paul’s third wife Sina – their daughter Hannah. I also assume that he has two other sons, Emil and Thomas/Tanja (transgenre). Besides, in “Vertrau mir”, Sina is supposed to be Schneider’s best friend while Maria is Till’s third girlfriend, with whom he had two sons, Esteban and Fabiano, stepbrothers for Nele and Marie-Louise.
Glaub mir
„Die Haut...so jung
Das Fleisch...so fest“
Amaryllis’s petal. This is what she is when she stands up. She puts on her panties, with a dark look certainly meaning “I knew you were a dirty pervert!” or something else, and then she gathers her things and goes to my bathroom to get dressed.
***
Fourteen years after Paul’s and Amaryllis’s death, I saw this little girl coming home, accompanied by her aunt, who wasn’t visibly so delighted to discover who I was. Since she doesn’t speak a word in German, and because I don’t understand French, she had called me from France to explain her choice with a rather vague English: she had waited until the little girl was fourteen to give her all my letters – that is, two every year, twenty-eight in all – and she had taken care of her education by sending her to a school where she could study German as a first foreign language (which is not easy to find in Southern France) so that she could read my letters, one day.
“Myalis is a good pupil,” the aunt said in an English more and more approximate towards my silent resignation. “She could translate all the letters and asked me who you are…”
The aunt, she’s a good little woman. A little plump, visibly resourceful and full of life, it’s obvious that she gave birth to four kids and has educated them properly. On the phone, she had explained that she had simply told Myalis what was “only necessary” about her parents: her mother went to live in Berlin, where she met an older man, that is her father, and with whom her mother lived a few months together before she died in an accident. Her father, who could not cope with this tragic loss, chose to commit suicide. In the story, I remain dad’s ‘best friend.’ In other words, what is “only necessary” turns out to be everything except one small detail – the breaking up and the reasons why they broke up, which therefore includes me in the story and modifies it slightly – but I think that the aunt may not have known this little detail and still may not know, since Myalis’s malice was such that she had chosen not to translate everything in my letters to see how much her aunt knew about the story.
“Actually, if I call you today, it’s because she wants to meet you, to know more about her father, how he was…”
Actually, Paul left little family behind, except three other kids who never knew what happened to Myalis: Emil chose to forget her, Tanja simply forgot, and Hannah was forced to forget because her mother Sina has broken off all contacts, even with Schneider. In her aunt’s view, who did her best to tell Myalis all that she knew about her sister, I am the best candidate to satisfy the father’s desire that grows inside the little girl. So I agreed on their coming to see me in Wendisch, in my lonely countryside, also on paying the flight tickets and even offering accommodation.
***
No, the aunt was not openly cheerful when she saw me. I suppose she did not expect that I looked so much like an old man (at sixty-six now I’m more like a grandfather), living alone in my huge house since Maria broke up – Maria, my ex girlfriend, who had seen fit to spread my problems with alcohol into the open in order to get the custody of our children. I no longer dye my hair black, no longer give myself a daily shave, often prefer to lay in bed all day long burning angels rather than exercising and swimming – an obvious sign of depression since swimming has always been my favourite hobby. Clearly, this is a very bad sign, along with alcohol – a family trait that I would have preferred not to inherit from my father. Even Nele dares not visit me (she pretends she is too busy with Fritzi)! I know, I know – I’m pathetic. For the perceptive aunt, it was perhaps no longer a good idea to leave just two days after her arrival, Myalis in my responsibility for the rest of the week – but since I booked the flights…
It seemed to me that Myalis was an introverted girl still with a frail body but a clever look in her eyes. When I opened the door the day of their arrival, she looked pensive, as if she was already calculating my surprise when I noticed how much she resembled her mother – with smaller breasts and without tattoos. She had the same wavy hair, although brown, not black, and without the red streaks Amaryllis used to have, and the same nutty brown eyes, with an incongruous sparkle in them, and the same neatly-shaped mouth, without its glossy red cleverly applied to its lips however as fleshy as her mother’s, and the same delicate hands, with long nails perfectly varnished. Myalis also inherited her mother’s taste for a modern and sophisticated clothes style, in spite of her young age, and chose to present herself to my eyes on this particularly hot summer day in a fuchsia blouse, a pastel pink skirt, and small white sandals. I confess: I was delighted to see that she was given her mother’s slender feet by providential genetics. I considered her as the perfect little clone, and she knew it surely.
The aunt didn’t notice the way I looked at Myalis during the two days under supervision – a dreamy, almost nostalgic look, which lingered on the girl’s beautiful buttocks before fleeing away immediately, ashamed – or resigned. And because the aunt seemed to be pleased with my cooking and my humorous anecdotes about Paul as the Joker, who had become a man full of life and flawless on every point through my tales, she flew back home without having scruples, only making sure that Myalis didn’t forget to call her during the week.
Myalis called her only once in order to make the right impression, mentioning that she was having a lot of fun with me, that I was organizing excursions for her to discover the region, that I was a funny guy, that I was telling her lots of interesting stuff about her father. Actually, Myalis asked mostly questions about her mother – she knew that I had had a very short relationship with her: she guessed so by reading her poems and my letters. Now she wanted all the details. It was like a self-inflicted injury for me, but I complied with her wishes like an old man who is eagerly asked to tell war tales. Myalis looked mature enough to understand all these burning feelings that overturn lives, so I did not hesitate telling her everything: from my passion for Amaryllis to my regrets at her death through my jealous remorse towards the tender and servile love that Paul felt for the same woman, and finally, my decision to step aside. Myalis didn’t understand my choice – from her retrospective and incomplete point of view, it was obvious that her mother felt only compassion for Paul, a depressive man, consumed by guilt and a certain lack of self-confidence. I told her it was unfair to her father, but she remained obstinate – Amaryllis didn’t love Paul, she said.
“She loved you. Couldn’t you see that?”
“She…she didn’t act so…”
“What? You’re talking about the time when she cried after sleeping with you?”
I nodded: Myalis is so frank that she can steal your words from your own mouth.
“Well! But you should have gone to see her after Paul had cleared her out! Instead of dropping a miserable poem and this small note…”
“You know…”
“What?”
“…It doesn’t help…to stir the past that way.”
Myalis remained stoic. I had just dissolved into tears as it happens to me sometimes on rainy evenings or sleepless nights, when solitude weighs on me like a vise squeezing, crushing, grinding up my shoulders. Myalis came and sat beside me, put her hand on my thigh and asked if I needed a drink. Strangely enough, her question made me laugh and I was still chuckling a little when I dried my tears with my sleeve and answered:
“No, no, it’s okay.”
When I looked at her, I saw that she wouldn’t stop looking at me – she was scanning the whites of my eyes as she was searching a flaw – and on the moment I felt like I dived back on the day when I saw her mother for the first time during a signing: Amaryllis had come in retro clothes in the femme fatale style perfect to the nails. That day, I had felt the same discomfort, the same doubts towards the glance that was inspecting the slightest details in me, as if it was trying to take a picture of my every expression. That day, I discovered how far the admiration of a fan could go in the desire to dissect me by analyzing all the poems of my first book, one by one, without exception, with the meticulousness of a pain-in-the-assing psychiatrist.
“My mother was right.”
“Why?”
“In one of her poems, she talks about time that makes men more attractive. She says that there are men who are unattractive until they’re twenty, but who are charming at forty. Not beautiful-charming, but attractive-charming. As if a sign with the inscription ‘No entry’ or ‘Do not touch’ was stuck on them: you want to see what lays behind, just out of curiosity.”
She said these words with a nonchalance that had me caught in a trap, and on her lips, I recognized the outline of Paul’s naughty smile, so I looked away and chose not to answer. Myalis wouldn’t let things get her down though. She sat up straight, grabbed my head in her small hands and gave me the most passionate kiss of my whole life.
[to be continued... here: http://doomkrusmannders.blogspot.com/2009/12/glaub-mir-translation-part-2.html ]
“Glaub mir” is actually the result of “Vertrau mir…ich vergebe dir”, a fan fiction written in twenty chapters about the story of Gabrielle, a fan of the metal band Rammstein and a fervent admirer of the poet and singer Till Lindemann. After a concert in Nantes, she is raped by a security guard. Paul Landers witnesses the assault but finds himself unable to help the young woman because of an excess of alcohol during the after party. Gabrielle disappears and Paul feels so guilty that he chooses to cancel the tour. He even asks the police to find the young woman, without success.
Several years pass, during which Paul treats his depression with alcohol, while Gabrielle ends up renaming herself Amaryllis to become a stripper in a cabaret in Berlin. One evening, Paul, torn apart by a divorce and family conflicts, recognizes Amaryllis on stage thanks to her very particular tattoo on her chest. The man and the young stripper meet again and start a friendship which soon turns into love. But Amy is unable to reconcile the feelings of gratitude she owes to Paul with the admiration she still feels for Till. The love triangle gets complicated when Till seduces her while she now expects Paul’s child. The former, torn by remorse, confesses the betrayal to his friend, who cancels the marriage and leaves his fiancée and their daughter Myalis.
Amy comes back to the cabaret where she tries to raise her daughter while ‘burning angels.’ One winter night, she receives a note from Till, who expresses his regrets, along with a poem which compares Paul and Till with bees who voraciously gathered pollen from a helpless flower (an amaryllis). The next day, Amy, miserable and disoriented, is fatally hit by a bus. The day of the funeral, Paul comes to the cabaret and is told about the tragic accident – he drives back home in despair and sinks in alcohol. Deliriously pacing up and down his balcony, he finally stumbles and falls from the fifth floor, and dies.
NB: Gabrielle/Amaryllis comes from Toulouse (Fr.). When she died, her daughter Myalis was sent to France – her aunt took care of her.
I chose to call Paul’s third wife Sina – their daughter Hannah. I also assume that he has two other sons, Emil and Thomas/Tanja (transgenre). Besides, in “Vertrau mir”, Sina is supposed to be Schneider’s best friend while Maria is Till’s third girlfriend, with whom he had two sons, Esteban and Fabiano, stepbrothers for Nele and Marie-Louise.
Glaub mir
„Die Haut...so jung
Das Fleisch...so fest“
Amaryllis’s petal. This is what she is when she stands up. She puts on her panties, with a dark look certainly meaning “I knew you were a dirty pervert!” or something else, and then she gathers her things and goes to my bathroom to get dressed.
***
Fourteen years after Paul’s and Amaryllis’s death, I saw this little girl coming home, accompanied by her aunt, who wasn’t visibly so delighted to discover who I was. Since she doesn’t speak a word in German, and because I don’t understand French, she had called me from France to explain her choice with a rather vague English: she had waited until the little girl was fourteen to give her all my letters – that is, two every year, twenty-eight in all – and she had taken care of her education by sending her to a school where she could study German as a first foreign language (which is not easy to find in Southern France) so that she could read my letters, one day.
“Myalis is a good pupil,” the aunt said in an English more and more approximate towards my silent resignation. “She could translate all the letters and asked me who you are…”
The aunt, she’s a good little woman. A little plump, visibly resourceful and full of life, it’s obvious that she gave birth to four kids and has educated them properly. On the phone, she had explained that she had simply told Myalis what was “only necessary” about her parents: her mother went to live in Berlin, where she met an older man, that is her father, and with whom her mother lived a few months together before she died in an accident. Her father, who could not cope with this tragic loss, chose to commit suicide. In the story, I remain dad’s ‘best friend.’ In other words, what is “only necessary” turns out to be everything except one small detail – the breaking up and the reasons why they broke up, which therefore includes me in the story and modifies it slightly – but I think that the aunt may not have known this little detail and still may not know, since Myalis’s malice was such that she had chosen not to translate everything in my letters to see how much her aunt knew about the story.
“Actually, if I call you today, it’s because she wants to meet you, to know more about her father, how he was…”
Actually, Paul left little family behind, except three other kids who never knew what happened to Myalis: Emil chose to forget her, Tanja simply forgot, and Hannah was forced to forget because her mother Sina has broken off all contacts, even with Schneider. In her aunt’s view, who did her best to tell Myalis all that she knew about her sister, I am the best candidate to satisfy the father’s desire that grows inside the little girl. So I agreed on their coming to see me in Wendisch, in my lonely countryside, also on paying the flight tickets and even offering accommodation.
***
No, the aunt was not openly cheerful when she saw me. I suppose she did not expect that I looked so much like an old man (at sixty-six now I’m more like a grandfather), living alone in my huge house since Maria broke up – Maria, my ex girlfriend, who had seen fit to spread my problems with alcohol into the open in order to get the custody of our children. I no longer dye my hair black, no longer give myself a daily shave, often prefer to lay in bed all day long burning angels rather than exercising and swimming – an obvious sign of depression since swimming has always been my favourite hobby. Clearly, this is a very bad sign, along with alcohol – a family trait that I would have preferred not to inherit from my father. Even Nele dares not visit me (she pretends she is too busy with Fritzi)! I know, I know – I’m pathetic. For the perceptive aunt, it was perhaps no longer a good idea to leave just two days after her arrival, Myalis in my responsibility for the rest of the week – but since I booked the flights…
It seemed to me that Myalis was an introverted girl still with a frail body but a clever look in her eyes. When I opened the door the day of their arrival, she looked pensive, as if she was already calculating my surprise when I noticed how much she resembled her mother – with smaller breasts and without tattoos. She had the same wavy hair, although brown, not black, and without the red streaks Amaryllis used to have, and the same nutty brown eyes, with an incongruous sparkle in them, and the same neatly-shaped mouth, without its glossy red cleverly applied to its lips however as fleshy as her mother’s, and the same delicate hands, with long nails perfectly varnished. Myalis also inherited her mother’s taste for a modern and sophisticated clothes style, in spite of her young age, and chose to present herself to my eyes on this particularly hot summer day in a fuchsia blouse, a pastel pink skirt, and small white sandals. I confess: I was delighted to see that she was given her mother’s slender feet by providential genetics. I considered her as the perfect little clone, and she knew it surely.
The aunt didn’t notice the way I looked at Myalis during the two days under supervision – a dreamy, almost nostalgic look, which lingered on the girl’s beautiful buttocks before fleeing away immediately, ashamed – or resigned. And because the aunt seemed to be pleased with my cooking and my humorous anecdotes about Paul as the Joker, who had become a man full of life and flawless on every point through my tales, she flew back home without having scruples, only making sure that Myalis didn’t forget to call her during the week.
Myalis called her only once in order to make the right impression, mentioning that she was having a lot of fun with me, that I was organizing excursions for her to discover the region, that I was a funny guy, that I was telling her lots of interesting stuff about her father. Actually, Myalis asked mostly questions about her mother – she knew that I had had a very short relationship with her: she guessed so by reading her poems and my letters. Now she wanted all the details. It was like a self-inflicted injury for me, but I complied with her wishes like an old man who is eagerly asked to tell war tales. Myalis looked mature enough to understand all these burning feelings that overturn lives, so I did not hesitate telling her everything: from my passion for Amaryllis to my regrets at her death through my jealous remorse towards the tender and servile love that Paul felt for the same woman, and finally, my decision to step aside. Myalis didn’t understand my choice – from her retrospective and incomplete point of view, it was obvious that her mother felt only compassion for Paul, a depressive man, consumed by guilt and a certain lack of self-confidence. I told her it was unfair to her father, but she remained obstinate – Amaryllis didn’t love Paul, she said.
“She loved you. Couldn’t you see that?”
“She…she didn’t act so…”
“What? You’re talking about the time when she cried after sleeping with you?”
I nodded: Myalis is so frank that she can steal your words from your own mouth.
“Well! But you should have gone to see her after Paul had cleared her out! Instead of dropping a miserable poem and this small note…”
“You know…”
“What?”
“…It doesn’t help…to stir the past that way.”
Myalis remained stoic. I had just dissolved into tears as it happens to me sometimes on rainy evenings or sleepless nights, when solitude weighs on me like a vise squeezing, crushing, grinding up my shoulders. Myalis came and sat beside me, put her hand on my thigh and asked if I needed a drink. Strangely enough, her question made me laugh and I was still chuckling a little when I dried my tears with my sleeve and answered:
“No, no, it’s okay.”
When I looked at her, I saw that she wouldn’t stop looking at me – she was scanning the whites of my eyes as she was searching a flaw – and on the moment I felt like I dived back on the day when I saw her mother for the first time during a signing: Amaryllis had come in retro clothes in the femme fatale style perfect to the nails. That day, I had felt the same discomfort, the same doubts towards the glance that was inspecting the slightest details in me, as if it was trying to take a picture of my every expression. That day, I discovered how far the admiration of a fan could go in the desire to dissect me by analyzing all the poems of my first book, one by one, without exception, with the meticulousness of a pain-in-the-assing psychiatrist.
“My mother was right.”
“Why?”
“In one of her poems, she talks about time that makes men more attractive. She says that there are men who are unattractive until they’re twenty, but who are charming at forty. Not beautiful-charming, but attractive-charming. As if a sign with the inscription ‘No entry’ or ‘Do not touch’ was stuck on them: you want to see what lays behind, just out of curiosity.”
She said these words with a nonchalance that had me caught in a trap, and on her lips, I recognized the outline of Paul’s naughty smile, so I looked away and chose not to answer. Myalis wouldn’t let things get her down though. She sat up straight, grabbed my head in her small hands and gave me the most passionate kiss of my whole life.
[to be continued... here: http://doomkrusmannders.blogspot.com/2009/12/glaub-mir-translation-part-2.html ]
Tu m'as pas prévenu!!!
RépondreSupprimerElle est tres bien faite, ca garde le sens. J'aimerais bien me lancer à la traduction de ma propre fiction, une fois qu'elle sera terminée... Comme je parle anglais depuis ma naissance (autant que le francais) ca sera probablement plaisant à faire... Parfois je cherche l'équivalent d'une expression anglo et je trouve pas...
Enfin, j'ai hate d'avoir la suite ;)xD comptant le fait que je l'ai deja lu!!
Sinon, est-ce que tu vas traduire vertrau mir au complet?