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Science fiction
The first volume of the Amel Confederation saga now has a complete German edition. The diary of a translation made of upside-down quotation marks, words as long as starships, and registers that shift in tone.
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There is a moment, for anyone who writes, when a story stops belonging to you alone and starts walking on its own. It has happened to me again: Il Naufragio di Shan now exists in German too. It is called Das Wrack der Shan, and from today Shan d'Or lifts her eyes to the burning sky of Asper in the language of Goethe and of European science fiction.
Not a summary and not an adaptation: all twenty chapters, the author's note and the appendix with the glossary — the Anhang — some 107,000 words of literary German. The narration runs in a level, sober register; the dialogue, on the other hand, breathes with every shade it has. And in German, dialogue begins with a small typographic gesture that Italian does not have at all.
In German, direct speech does not open the way it does for us. It opens low and closes high: „like this". These are the Gänsefüßchen, the "little goose feet", and nested inside them are the single ones for a quotation within a quotation: ‚like this'. I rewrote every line of dialogue respecting that dance of marks, checking one by one that each low mark had its high twin, that thoughts stayed in italics, and that no mark was left an orphan. Watchmaker's work — but it is out of details like these that a translated text stops sounding translated.
Like Korean with its levels of courtesy — I wrote about that here — German forces a choice at every line: du or Sie? The familiar "you" or the formal one? Shift it even slightly and you have said something about the characters. Yann and Shan speak as equals, with the ease of two people who have shared a whole life; certain officers keep their distance; and when Aansh becomes Kaiser, the language around him stiffens and takes on the weight of a man who now reigns. Ranks and institutions speak German — Oberst, Leutnant, Konföderation — while the proper names stay untouched: Shan d'Or, the Zeyadas, Amel.
German builds words by slotting them together, without end. When I uploaded the manuscript, the spell checker raised its flag: "481 spelling errors". I went through them one at a time — and nearly all were false alarms. Abertrillionen (billions upon billions), achthunderttausend (eight hundred thousand, all in one piece), genitives like Abfangens: perfectly correct words, only too long or too rare for a basic dictionary. German simply invents more of them than any checker can hold. In a science fiction novel, where half the vocabulary is invented to begin with, that struck me as almost fitting.
The book: Das Wrack der Shan · Il Naufragio di Shan — Volume I of the Amel Confederation Saga. Twenty chapters plus glossary, about 107,700 words, 21 illustrations, 14×21 cm, a complete German translation. From today you will also find it on sale directly from this site, delivered signed by the author.
„Wir werden uns wiedersehen — in einem unserer künftigen Leben."
"We will meet again — in one of our future lives."
I wanted the German edition to be a true twin of the Italian one, not a distant cousin. So it shares the format, the same twenty-one illustrations in the same places, the running heads with the chapter titles, the navigable contents and, of course, its cover: Shan looking up, hair in the wind, the planet at her back. The language changes, not the ship.
The Shipwreck of Shan ends on a promise and a rebirth — and I will say no more, for anyone who has not read it yet. But translating it into a language at once so precise and so pliable made me feel exactly this: a story passing into another tongue does not die. It is reborn. As somebody in these pages knows rather well how to do.