(MENAFN – The Conversation) Every publication can be considered a kind of translation. Sometimes from one language to another, but also from one place to another, from one time to another, from one reader to another.
The writer and publisher Helen Wolff knew this. It shaped her life as one of the most important publishers of the 20th century, and it also shaped the life of her novella Background For Love, which has just been translated from German into English for the first time by her grandson Tristram Wolff.
It is a sensational work about a young woman who flees the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin with her older lover to the south of France. It shimmers with summer sun, with a young woman’s longing for her lover, but also with her stronger desire to shape her own life. And amidst all this shimmer, the novella also emphasizes those human values that are evident in the best translations and are our defense against narrowness and limitations.
Wolff was born Helen Mosel in 1906 to a German father and an Austro-Hungarian mother and spent her early childhood in the Balkans. She had a gift for languages and put this to good use in the late 1920s when she began working as an editor and translator for the important Munich publisher Kurt Wolff, who had published Franz Kafka and other important German-language writers in the 1910s and 1920s.
She wrote “Background For Love” in 1932. The story it contains is a summary and re-writing of the period between 1929 and 1932, when she lived in the South of France with Kurt, her then much older and married lover.
The novella is unique for its time in that it is written in the first person and in the present tense, which was unusual for pre-World War II novels. Also unusual is that the young narrator addresses her older lover as “you” throughout. All of these techniques give the novel a contemporary feel and a powerful immediacy that connects it to the landscape that surrounds it – the light, colors, textures and smells of the Mediterranean.
In and through the landscape of southern France, the narrator finds freedom and new knowledge, but not in the way she initially expected. She is young, inexperienced and penniless. What she finds is the chance to create herself, to create a world that suits her.
Although seemingly apolitical, Background For Love is a hymn to values that were hostile to the forces that were gaining strength in Germany in the early 1930s. As she and her lover arrive in Provence, the narrator thinks:
When Wolff wrote the novella, it was already clear that the Nazis were on the rise. Background For Love was scheduled to be published in Germany in 1933, but the contract was canceled after the Nazis came to power. The novella remained unpublished until 2020 and was only translated from German into English this year.
Pushkin Press
As recounted in the essay by her great-niece Marion Detjen, which accompanies the story in this new edition, Helen and Kurt left Germany forever shortly after Hitler became Chancellor. They settled first in Paris, then in London, where they married, then in Switzerland, and again in the South of France, where their son was born in 1934.
They were living in Paris at the beginning of the war and both worked for the French Ministry of Information, where they wrote anti-Nazi propaganda. They fled occupied France in 1940, returned to Nice with their son and were finally able to leave Europe in March 1941 on a ship to New York via Spain and Portugal.
The following year, the Wolffs founded Pantheon, which grew to become one of the most respected literary publishers in the United States. It was responsible for bringing to light through translation a number of the most important European writers of the 20th century – Boris Pasternak, Giuseppe de Lampedusa and Günter Grass.
Panetheon was purchased by Random House in 1961, and the Wolffs subsequently founded Helen and Kurt Wolff Books as an imprint of Harcourt Brace, running it together until Kurt’s death in 1963. Helen then ran it alone until her retirement in 1986, continuing to bring translations of important European writers such as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco to U.S. audiences.
Helen Wolff’s work as a publisher making European literature available in English in the United States contributed to the friendlier climate envisioned by the narrator of Background For Love – boundaries dissolving, understanding strengthening, new perspectives being shared. Her work as a writer in Background For Love can now contribute to this too, through the work of various kinds of translation.
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