How cool is this!

Check out the ladies at Romancing the Yarn.

Ten knitting and crocheting romance writers, it does not get better than this.
No, really, apparently there is something about knitting and romance novels - uh, and I guess the conventional association wouldn't be a flattering one. Never mind, count me in anyway.

Now here I was quietly celebrating the fact that I'm no longer in the romance biz - nothing personal, I just need the break from the vampires - and suddenly I'm discovering a great new blog with at least two authors I know, so to speak. Barbara, Elizabeth, if you ever wanted to know what one of your German voices sounds like - that would be me. Not that I could think of a reason why you would, but there you are.

I was reading through the posts and visiting the ladies' websites, getting all verklempt about the good old days - you know, before the vampires.
Ten years ago, I cut my translating teeth on Barbara Bretton, Operation: Husband. Jeez, was that manuscript red when I got it back. My editor had, well, edited it by hand and made me enter every single change and correction. I hated her, but I learned. I learned enough to be able to appreciate the art of the romance novel and to do my best not to hack them up too badly. I learned about cultural transfer, about different audiences and standards when it came to sex. (German readers have a much more .. uh ... delicate taste, which means I also know all the sexual euphemisms of the German language never dreamed by Goethe and Schiller. Really, try me.)

I may sound full of myself here, but I owe it to those first romance novels that I am, in fact, a pretty darn good translator today. Translating novels is a balancing act. You need to find the creativity that is necessary to turn an "alien" story into something that reads as if it was meant to be written in your language, but you must never forget your responsibility to the author. You are trying to make her work accessible to a new audience, to people who wouldn't have the chance to appreciate it otherwise. And if you screw up, they won't like the book, no matter how lovely it is in the original version.
I never took that lightly.
Yeah, you know what? I can virtually see the curled lips. (Come off it, this isn't Finnegan's Wake, it's romance novels.) Many of my colleagues see it that way. They take romances as a quick and dirty way to make money while waiting for an "important" book to come along. Me? I've never been one for intellectual auto-eroticism. I love stories. All kinds. And retelling them was a joy.

My first ever contract for a "big" book was Once Tempted, by Elizabeth Boyle.
Historical romance. Over 300 pages. And enough wordplays, non-translatable clues and details of dress to drive me mad at times. But I still love that story. And I still remember it in great detail. That's no big deal, really. As a translator, you ponder every single line of a text. Nobody, with the exception of a good editor, will ever read a book as closely and think about it as much as a translator. Full of myself again? Nope. Think about it. You have to understand every shade of meaning of every sentence, every image, every line of dialogue, because you have to rewrite it in a completely different language, yet as close to the original as you possibly can. There is no skipping over things, there is no inventing something else, because you don't get it. Not if you are translating sans curled lip, that is.

The point of this lengthy stroll down literary memory lane? Well, duh, that should have been obvious from the beginning. The ladies are KNITTERS.