Interviewing the Editors #2: Karen Nölle, Editor, Translator, and Co-publisher of edition fünf
At a recent gathering at New York’s Goethe-Institut WiT caught up again with publisher, editor, and translator Karen Nölle on one of her occasional trips from Germany to the US, this time to co-lead a ViceVersa translation workshop with Shelley Frisch at Ledig House in Ghent, New York. Karen told us more about the press she co-founded, edition fünf, which devotes itself to literature by women, both in German and in translation, and whose mission, as she explains below, is to create “a chest full of women’s narrative traditions that we would all get excited about, and argue about and discuss and pass on to others.” Karen’s commitment to women’s writing has also led her to translate into German such essential women’s voices as Doris Lessing, Janet Frame, Eudora Welty, Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, and Ursula K. LeGuin, among others. With so much to talk about but with a train for Karen to catch, we agreed to keep talking via email about edition fünf and about its against-the-grain mission to focus on women writers. Our conversation follows below.
—Margaret Carson
Edition fünf's first twenty-five: bound in red linen, with bound ribbon bookmark and illustrated belly band. All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.
Could you talk about how edition fünf got its start?
Edition fünf was founded in 2009 by Silke Weniger, a literary agent in Gräfelfing, near Munich. She and I had known each other for some time, and as we are both interested in women’s narrative traditions, that is what we talked about when I came to Munich in the spring of that year. Somehow our conversation moved to all the books we missed on the market. Silke was out for an adventure; I was looking for possibilities to use the time I spent working in ways that made sense to me. A few days after my visit, Silke called, and there we were, thinking about founding a small press and how to go about it. Eight years later I can say, she has found adventure on many levels, and I get to focus on books that I love and to produce them as well as I am—we are—able.
What inspired you?
There were at least two things: The idea to publish books our way, without concern for the conventions of mainstream publishing. We wanted to do “slow books,” produced at our speed, with a shelf life of more than the usual number of days—in Germany many new publications disappear from the shops after just 90 days (or even less)—and with time to find their readers. That was a dream, of course; we make all sorts of compromises. We would have to sell many more books to get them really well known, but the original idea still keeps us going and enthusiastic.
And, probably even more animating, the project itself—to publish the books we missed on the market and to go look for more books and authors and create a chest full of women’s narrative traditions that we would all get excited about, and argue about and discuss and pass on to others, because it is so vital to learn more about how women think, live, suffer, overcome, create art—and what they/we might want beyond the strange society we happen to be born into. Another dream, much too large for what we can do. But parts of it still keep us going.
Cover of the German edition of Anne Garréta's Sphinx. All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.
What is your background in publishing?
I left academia when I was 35, to become a freelance translator. My first translation was Telling Tales by Sarah Maitland. Editors interested in what women writers were up to in the eighties noticed that I had a feel for (and knowledge of) the new contents, so for a while I was asked to translate mainly women: Audre Lorde, Eva Figes, Alice Walker. When I realized that I liked working with “serious” literature, I took up editing translations, too. And I was on the editorial board of the feminist press Frauenoffensive for some years. With them I traveled to the international feminist book fairs. Meanwhile I translated books by Alice Munro, Barbara Trapido, Annie Dillard, and many less well known authors. In the ’90s I started leading workshops for translators, editors, writers. But edition fünf is my first “job” as a publisher per se.
Why did you decide to focus on women writers?
Silke and I have been feminists forever. Our main interest was never in politics, though, but more in culture at large. We long to hear women’s voices, to feel their influence throughout society; we get inspired by the way women tell stories, it informs our perspective on the world and what happens in it. The stories, the ways of seeing, the experiments with language and literary forms speak to our experience, influence our thinking. Help us find foundations to build on.
It has always surprised me when writers, translators, editors claim to be indifferent to the gender of those that influence them artistically. In teaching, I had noticed that many of the books by women writers which I thought should be available as nourishment for those interested in developing their ideas on the basis of what their forebears had been up to, were not on the German market, having either been there and disappeared or never having been published at all.
Our idea was to create a space—a kind of library, perhaps—that would make these books available and spread interest in their contribution to the world of art. There were so many of them, we wanted to make them visible . . .
Cover of Ein Haus mit vielen Zimmern, an anthology of women writers on wiriting, made up of stories, essays, and poems, edited by Sophia Jungmann and Karen Nölle. All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.
What is the gender gap in publishing in Germany like?
We have a lot of women in publishing, many many in the types of jobs that were outsourced from the 1990s on: freelance editors, proofreaders etc., a lot working as illustrators and translators (women make up around 80% of the translators here—with more than half the prizes going to men . . . ). As you go up the career ladder, the percentage of women gets smaller, although, in recent years, more women have risen to top positions.
What kinds of books by women are you attracted to as a publisher?
We look for books we find inspiring, for special narrative techniques, ideas . . . ways of telling stories, perspectives on life and art. We admire inventiveness that relates to experience, not so much l’art pour l’art.
Karen’s favorite page in Ein Haus mit vielen Zimmern, the first page of Sylvia Plath’s “A Comparison,” on the difference between writing poetry and novels. All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.
How do translations fit into your editorial vision?
We publish in Germany, and German publishers tend to publish a lot of translations. Several thousand from English alone. So we, too, are open to translating books we miss on the market. There are plenty of those to discover. When we started out, we were interested in re-publishing books by women we thought should be part of the culture, but were forgotten. Authors who wrote in German tend to be available (you can be all but forgotten when a publisher still has the rights, but does nothing to promote your work), so we focused less on those. That might be changing. We’re working on it. But we do translate a lot and attach a lot of importance to the quality of the translation and the editing. So far, there are books from English, Finnish, Dutch, French, Italian, and Portuguese in our catalog.
You've published German translations of Joyce Johnson's memoir of her Beat years, Minor Characters, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Johnson's memoir is all but unknown in the US, and Hurston's essential work was out of print and forgotten until Alice Walker discovered her in the 1970s. What led you to these books?
Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters is simply a great book, about young women in the 1950s trying to become beat poets of a sort. Johnson has such a loving view of the way she was, when she was young . . . I suppose what I like in literature is a love of life and human beings (and nature and . . . and . . . ). The writers on our list tend to be able to hold on to it under the most taxing circumstances, and to be fully human and smart and analytic and artistic in the way they express that. All this, of course, is true of Zora Neale Hurston in her masterpiece. I’ve loved Their Eyes Were Watching God since I was in my twenties. What pleasure to be able to bring it out in a new translation!
Cover of German edition of Zora Neale Hurston's Vor ihren Augen sahen sie Gott (Their Eyes Were Watching God). All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.
Who reads edition fünf books?
Not enough people to make us rich. We publish hard covers, the books can’t compete on a mass-market level, but we have a small and growing group of followers. Mainly women, well educated, not afraid of reading things that need a bit of concentration, interested in women’s writing. Many of our books sell slowly, but continuously over the years. People learn about them by word of mouth.
edition fünf books are extremely beautiful objects. The book jackets and their spectrum of bright colors are especially striking. Can you talk about what goes into their design and into the cover art?
The designer who does all the art work for our books on the outside and the inside is Kathleen Bernsdorf. Kathleen lives in Berlin, we discuss the contents of each book with her in detail, and she comes up with the ideas both for the cover and the typesetting. Of course, we provide only a small portion of the work she does, but she enjoys the freedom in working with us. The first 25 books were all bound in red linen, to underline our idea that we were creating a sort of library. Since book 26, we have become much more colorful and inventive. For me, it is one of the treats in my job, to have a hand in creating the whole product, not just the words.
What else can you tell us about yourself? What are you working on now?
Right now, I’ve begun a new translation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, and will be doing the first three volumes.
At edition fünf we’re publishing Laurence Tardieu’s A la fin le silence this fall, a novel about the acts of terrorism in France in 2015 and how acts like these affect the emotional lives of the people in the country. A very personal perspective in attempting to find words for what is going on.
Shelley (Frisch)’s and my ViceVersa workshop for translators of English to German and German to English is part of a larger project for many language pairs, organized by Deutscher Übersetzerfonds and funded by the Robert Bosch Foundation. We do practical work on the texts the participants are translating, and through the direct exchange not only learn about how differently the two languages work and what characterizes their literatures, but also about translation and translationese in general, while of course striving to avoid the latter . . .
In Germany I also do other workshops on translation and editing—my most regular one being one I found my own format for: working on texts with translators, editors and authors on the island of Sylt in the very north of Germany and combining the work on the texts with exercise—this year with Tai Chi.
Cover of German edition of Joyce Johnson's Zaunköniginnen (Minor Characters). All design elements by Kathleen Bernsdorf.