Gabriel Josipovici is an English writer of fascinating, oblique fiction (The Inventory, Mobius the Stripper) and memoir (A Life). I find him interesting not only because of his outstanding work and varied background (France, Egypt, England), but more precisely because of his experiences with English-language publishers as opposed to German ones. I, too, have seen my work better produced, better publicized, and better marketed in German translation than in its mother tongue. Here he describes working with the excellent Gerd Haffmans, who has also published some of my work (Happy Birds-Day), and who commissioned from me the short story "Liam's Inheritance" (available on the Free Samples page of this site) for his literary review Der Rabe ("The Raven").
"My agent then tried placing Only Joking with other English
publishers, but they weren’t interested. It was pretty depressing. Luckily Gerd
Haffmans, who had published two of my earlier novels, Contre-Jour and Now, in German, liked it very much and decided to publish it and even translate it
himself. He’s now an editor at Zweitausendeins, who have published Perec’s La Vie, Mode d'Emploi and have also just
published the first German translation of Finnegans Wake, so I’m in good company. All my German friends tell me he’s done a
wonderful job, that by and large it reads as if it was written in German. The
reviews so far have not just been good, they’ve been enthusiastic. But then my
previous novels have also had very good – and often very intelligent - reviews in
Gemany. Why? Who knows? Is it a coincidence that the first book on my work
should be by a German writer, Monika Fludernik (Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici's Creative Oeuvre)? I have found,
doing readings of my novels and stories, both in Berlin and elsewhere, that the
audience starts from the premise that the books are interesting and worth
exploring, not (as in England) that I am a ‘difficult’ or ‘avant-garde’ writer
(whatever that means) and therefore in some obscure sense their enemy. Simply,
the level of sophistication of German readers is far greater than I have ever
found in England. I feel understood, not in the sense that every detail of what
I am doing is grasped, but in the sense that we share assumptions and horizons
of expectation. When a witty reviewer writes that 'Nur Ein Scherz should be awarded the Cosi Fan Tutte Prize for depth of exploration of the relations
between lovers' I feel he or she has understood profoundly what I was
after. I’ve never felt this in England, in close on forty years of publishing
fiction. I’ve got the occasional good or even understanding review, but it’s
always felt like an uphill battle, as if I have to justify what I do every inch
of the way. That is not a very healthy state of affairs or one that encourages
writers who perhaps do not conform to certain expected ways of proceeding."
