Two of this year’s White Rose Project translators, James Cutting and Amira Ramdani, talk about the experience of translating excerpts from the letters of White Rose members Sophie Scholl and Alexander Schmorell.
Why did you want to get involved in the project?
James: Inge Scholl’s Die weiße Rose was one of the first German books I ever properly read and thoroughly moved me — I thought it would be a very worthwhile experience translating some of their letters into English to help spread awareness of their struggle.
Amira: Having grown up in Germany, I had learnt about the White Rose in school, but I never really looked at any of their own writings. Since this year the project’s aim was to translate excerpts from the members’ diaries and letters, I thought this was a great opportunity to have a glimpse into their personal lives, something you don’t typically read about in school books.
What translation challenges did you encounter working on the texts?
James: It was difficult to try to understand the tone at some points in the letters, whether they were being falsely optimistic, sarcastic or just fearful. Conveying these sorts of emotions was one of the more difficult aspects of translating the letters.
Amira: I think the most challenging part was rendering the tone, the “voice” of the person who had written these deeply personal texts — Sophie Scholl, in my case. In her later letters, she writes with a more mature style. This stylistic complexity is definitely something we wanted to express with our translations, but without making her writing sound antiquated or stilted.
What impression did the letters, and the language used in the letters, make on you?
Amira: I was most impressed by how, looking at Sophie’s letters in chronological order, one can get a real feeling for how she matures intellectually throughout the years — how her convictions become more defined, more concrete, and how her need to play an active role in society grows stronger as she becomes older.
James: The letters themselves were very much a rollercoaster of emotions, from the first few reciting amusing or touching anecdotes to the last ones being written in the face of their untimely deaths. It was very saddening to feel like you were getting to know them and to have them ripped away from you so suddenly and really brought home just how difficult it must have been to live in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, even if we only got a minute glimpse of it.
Are there any solutions you are particularly proud of?
Amira: I can’t pinpoint an exact bit of the translation, but what I am most proud of are the little changes in syntax or lexis that we came up with when we re-read our translation as a team — once you’ve got different ideas going, it is a pretty amazing feeling to find a small word or a slight alteration in the phrase structure that just makes the text flow more naturally.
James: Several more unfamiliar concepts were particularly troublesome, especially in letters sent from the Russian border where they mentioned particular traditions and items that required a little research.
Are there any words/phrases which proved ‘untranslatable’?
Amira: It’s not quite untranslatable, but I wasn’t aware of how difficult it would be to translate the tone of the syntagma man… eben (“Man hat uns eben politisch erzogen”) — it sounds very matter-of-fact, a bit dry, but also quite defiant — it sounds a lot like Sophie.
Who do you hope reads your translations?
Amira: I hope that our translations will enable anglophone readers to not only get to know about the White Rose, but also to peak into the more “hidden” parts of its members’ lives: what kind of people they were, what motivated them, what spurned them on in life, what they valued, what distraught them…
James: I hope that our translations will be useful to anyone who is interested in studying German history of the mid-twentieth century, and that they will be able to help bring the thoughts and feelings of such an inspiring group to a new audience.
Has anything changed in your understanding of or approach to the White Rose as a result of translating, or as a result of the project more broadly?
Amira: I think the close readings we did on the texts made me realise just how ordinary and also how very not ordinary the members of the White Rose were: Sophie likes to make little snide remarks, crack a joke here and there, talk about a powerful dream that she had, tell her boyfriend how much she misses him — but a lot of her insights prove that she was also extremely sensible and thoughtful; she analyses the world around her in a very perceptive manner.
James: It has definitely deepened my understanding of the group to hear their thoughts in their own words, in particular their ties to each other and to their family and friends external to the group. It also has made me appreciate their dedication to their ideals, having been through so much and refused to submit to a ruthless government even in the face of death.
What should the White Rose Project do in its future work?
Amira: I think that exploring the personal writings of the White Rose members is really worthwhile — I ended up reading more of Sophie Scholl’s diary and her letters, and I believe there’s a lot there that could make people reflect not only on life under the National Socialist regime, but also on more timeless questions: what it means to be political, to want to change the status quo, and to search for one’s path in life.
James: The White Rose Project is doing amazing work and should definitely keep up its translation of letters, diary entries and other documents of the White Rose, and maybe hold more concerts and public events to further make known the story behind the group.
