"The problem is that it is difficult to translate"
About this Quote
A complaint that doubles as a dare: Jelinek’s line is less an apology than a trap set for anyone who wants tidy access to her work. “The problem” sounds administrative, like a memo about logistics. Then she turns translation into the whole battlefield. Not “it can’t be translated,” not “it gets lost,” but “it is difficult” - a cool, bureaucratic phrase that masks a more aggressive point: the friction is the meaning.
Jelinek writes in a German that’s booby-trapped with puns, bureaucratese, advertising jingles, pornographic rhythms, and political euphemism. Her sentences often behave like crowds rather than lanes: voices overlap, register collides with register, sense is made and unmade at speed. Translation isn’t merely swapping vocabulary; it’s reconstructing a system of cultural reflexes. When she says it’s “difficult,” she’s pointing at the fact that her targets - Austrian respectability, fascism’s afterlives, patriarchy’s scripts, consumer language - are encoded in the linguistic tics of a specific place. Move the words, and you risk moving the crime scene.
The subtext is also protective. Jelinek, famously wary of authorial celebrity and interpretive domestication, implies that outsiders will inevitably miss some of the joke, some of the venom, some of the complicity. The line quietly indicts the reader’s desire for seamlessness: if you want a version that goes down easy, you’re already reading her wrong. Difficulty here isn’t a defect; it’s an ethics, forcing every translator and audience to show their work - and their limits.
Jelinek writes in a German that’s booby-trapped with puns, bureaucratese, advertising jingles, pornographic rhythms, and political euphemism. Her sentences often behave like crowds rather than lanes: voices overlap, register collides with register, sense is made and unmade at speed. Translation isn’t merely swapping vocabulary; it’s reconstructing a system of cultural reflexes. When she says it’s “difficult,” she’s pointing at the fact that her targets - Austrian respectability, fascism’s afterlives, patriarchy’s scripts, consumer language - are encoded in the linguistic tics of a specific place. Move the words, and you risk moving the crime scene.
The subtext is also protective. Jelinek, famously wary of authorial celebrity and interpretive domestication, implies that outsiders will inevitably miss some of the joke, some of the venom, some of the complicity. The line quietly indicts the reader’s desire for seamlessness: if you want a version that goes down easy, you’re already reading her wrong. Difficulty here isn’t a defect; it’s an ethics, forcing every translator and audience to show their work - and their limits.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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