""Dear friend, do you not see, that everything we see is but reflections" "of that which is invisible to our sight?" "Dear friend, do you not hear, that life's reverberating noise" "is but the echo - an altered echo of transcendent harmonies?" "Dear friend, do you not feel - do you not sense that nothing in the world apart from this exists:" "that one heart speaks to another, wordlessly."" "I find that so beautiful, when one can say something wordlessly." "Then one doesn't need to translate it." "THE WOMAN WITH THE 5 ELEPHANTS" ""I believe, that each spiritual experience leads us to treat each other better and not strike others dead."" "That is what Svetlana Geier told me at the beginning of our acquaintance." "Svetlana Geier left the Ukraine for Germany during the war and has never returned there since." "She has continued to work till this day." "She says: "For breaks" " I'm too old."" "Could you bring me my saucer?" "Yes." "When I ask her what she means by being too old for breaks, she answers, that she owes life something." "I believe, that this is the most interesting thing about the house, at least for children, because there is nothing like it anymore in modern houses." "It is absolutely not, my darling, completely unnecessary." "Yes, I take incessant good care of myself." "You do not need to worry in the slightest." "No charming robber has ever yet dropped in." "Thank-you." "That is fabulous." "I have read it twice in a row." "What is that?" "It is a piece from the Russian cemetery." "Mrs Hagen is one of the greatest godsends of my life." "An incredibly sincere, decent and well-educated person." "She has an incredible memory, musically, is very widely read and when a speck of dust whirls through some part of Freiburg," "then it voluntarily steers clear of Mrs Hagen's apartment." "And she is a person who really knows German." "That is a rare virtue." "She comes every morning at nine, brings four bread rolls, only likes jam, and as soon as I have poured myself a second cup of tea she says:" "We'll take that cup upstairs." "Which means:" "End of the performance, time for work." "New line, quotation marks..." ""Why is it..."" ""...that you all want after me, like a tail..."" "It is the same person saying that." "Yes, it is the old one." ""Why is it that you want..." "Why do you all want..."" ""..." "like a tail..."" ""Why do you all want to follow me at every turn, like a tail."" "Question mark." ""I can look at everything with Alexei Ivanovich."" "Dot, dot, dot, quotation marks." "Sorry, I was clattering so loudly, I didn't quite understand." ""like a tail... ", question mark." ""I can look alone at everything..." "with Alexei Ivanovich."" ""I can look at everything alone, with Alexei Ivanovich."" "I have always prepared a section the evening before." "The book is already learned, meaning the sweeping construction lines are already revealed." "I know what is written on each page and how it will work." "But on the evening before, I really look at the building blocks." "Svetlana Geier has been translating Russian literature into German for fifty years." "Since the 1990's she has concentrated on the works of Dostoyevsky." "Her translations give his novels a new voice." "At the same time she raised two children and has been teaching at universities for forty years." "She divorced her husband in the 1960's." "Now, Svetlana Geier is the head of a large family, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren come and go in her house." "I should like to drink a tea now!" "You have a very beautiful jacket, I like it very much, is it new?" "This is silk." "Approved?" "It has to be several pieces on one fork." "That's the principle." "Like that?" "Yes, exactly." "What one discovers again and again, and that is a sign of an excellent text, is that the text moves." "And suddenly, one has prepared it and sees everything, knows everything, but suddenly something is there, that one has never noticed before." "A text like this is inexhaustible." "Even if one has translated it - I have translated it twice now, one cannot exhaust it and that is probably a sign of the most superb quality." "Naturally, one has to learn to read." "When one washes a fabric, its threads lose their orientation." "One has to help the thread really, to retrieve its exact orientation." "I mean, this is a woven fabric." "That is the text and textile;" "they have the same root, too." "There is always one thread within several threads." "And when one has this lying in front of one like this, then it is like fresh snow." "In Moby Dick, by Melville, there is a wonderful chapter about shades of white and it describes, very carefully, what it is like when one walks through freshly fallen snow." "One has the feeling as though one were the first human being and one is walking through snow for the first time." "And when one has fresh linen on a bed, it is the same feeling of virgin territory, a very pleasant feeling." "My mother made this." "It is also wonderful, white in white." "Those were the first dragons I ever had." "Men cannot understand how beautiful this is." "One calculates the pattern in one's head." "One cannot imagine how much work it is." "This is incredible." "When you think that it has all been counted out!" "When you draw out the threads here it has to be exact, not one thread more, not one less, otherwise the pattern doesn't work afterwards." "One first breaks the textile then one fills it out - such things are very human." "Mr. Klodt is a musician and reads my translations aloud to me." "Mr. Klodt is extremely well read and has an extraordinarily receptive and critical mind." "He is very reliable and that is very reassuring." "'From the Notes of a Young Man' certainly comes in the middle." "Yes, precisely." "In brackets and in the middle." "Just under novel." "Chapter 1." "Shall we?" ""At last I am back, after fourteen days of absence."" ""Our party had already been in Ruletenburg for three days"" " Ruleten oder Rouletten?" "Probably with two T's, or?" "I don't know." "In these meetings the book itself is in the background." "Now we are really concentrating on words, spaces and consistencies." ""Every now and then the General felt obliged to offer an objection."" "What should that mean?" ""He dared"!" ""He dared to contradict every now and then" " But very modestly."" ""But in Moscow, I remember... he described..."" " what did he describe?" ""But in Moscow..."" ""But in Moscow, I remember,"" ""he let one soap bubble after another rise in the air."" "That's good!" ""He let one soap bubble after another rise in the air."" ""It was the little Frenchman who dominated the conversation," right?" "Shouldn't it say "he must have owned seven or eight thousand francs"?" ""He owned."" "No, he cannot..." "Of course he can." "It could also be seven and a half thousand." "No." "Of course." "Seven or eight thousand, he doesn't know." "It is exactly the same as in the text." "He estimated it." "If somebody estimates something he doesn't know exactly." "Correct, he doesn't know." "Certainly, but if it says "own" it is exact and that is wrong." "Well here it says unequivocally:" "Well then at least use the conjunctive form." "I capitulate." "Then write it as you see fit." "I'll mark it and look at it afterwards." "A couple of months after I started visiting Svetlana Geier, she tells me that her son Johannes had an accident." "He is a handicrafts teacher." "While teaching he suffered a serious head injury." "Now he is lying in hospital, paralysed on one side and no longer talks." "This is my son." "Svetlana Geier stops working." "She doesn't go to the university to teach anymore, she stops translating." "Every day she cooks for her son and brings the food to him in the clinic." "These are two meals, two deserts and that is for this evening." "My granddaughter will give him that, and..." "And that is potato soup." "I'll give him that." "Bread and butter are already there." "I wear my father's watch now." "He had it in prison." "When they let him out we went on foot with him to the prison on the first day and collected this watch and his wallet with the paper money." "Do you have a photo of your father?" "I do..." "One moment..." "On the day we collected this watch this photo was made." "He is 58 there." "You can see how his clothes are far too big for him." "He weighed 54 kilos." "My mother brought me to a nurse, a diet specialist, and for two days she explained to me how I should nurse my father." "I was fifteen." "And then we went to our dacha and my mother came every evening and left again at six the next morning." "I learned what one gives a person with a perforated stomach." "And now, with my son, I remembered all that again, but in fact it is all thanks to my father." "It is quite uncanny... dress rehearsal and main performance." "Svetlana Geier grew up in Kiev as her parent's only child." "Her father:" "Fyodor Michailovich Ivanov." "He cultivated sugar beet and tobacco plants." "For his services the ministry rewarded him with a car." "He swapped it for a dacha." "The family spent the summers there." "That was in the 1930's." "In 1938, like thousands of others, her father became a victim of Stalin's political cleansing programs." "On the night of 2nd/3rd January our doorbell rang." "And three people came in, two in uniform, one in plain clothes, with an order for his arrest." "They put him in a cell for four, but there were forty people in there, lying so close together that they could only turn over all at once, on the floor." "He was tortured." "They smashed out several of his teeth, his lower back was brownish-violet and one of his eardrums was broken." "Most prisoners were killed." "Others committed suicide in the overfilled cells." "After 18 months, one night Fyodor Michailovich was released." "They set him down in front of the prison gates and he could hardly walk." "This is my father's certificate of release." "Releases were so seldom, there was really no return once one had been arrested and they didn't even have a proper form for it." "It is a tiny note, as though one had parked wrongly." "While her mother, Sophia Nikolayevna, worked as a cleaning lady in the city, the 15 year old Svetlana was left alone with her mortally ill father in the dacha." "She nursed him a whole summer long." "My father was released on Thursday" "and on Saturday we travelled to our dacha and then my father said:" ""I shall tell you everything, but you are not allowed to ever ask me anything."" "This is something quite terrible in my fate." "I see the room, I see myself," "I see my father, there was a big room in that house, and my mother is sitting on his bed." "I hear him speaking - and I have retained nothing." "I know nothing." "You see, I could, for example, describe several of his shirts," "I remember them exactly." "I know what his boots looked like, he always wore tall boots." "I know what those Tolstoy jackets that he wore looked like." "I can still feel the corduroy velvet between my fingers, but I know nothing of what he told us." "It has anyway become very clear to me now that I carry that somewhere within me" "and that then, when I was fourteen or fifteen," "I locked it away, so to speak... in order to survive." "Just like Bluebeard." "Her son's accident seems to open a door to a different era:" "For the first time since 1943" "Svetlana Geier sets off on a journey back to the Ukraine." "A school has invited her to give talks and readings." "Her granddaughter Anna accompanies her." "This is father's cemetery." "Here." "This is the cemetery." "There weren't these wide strips in my day." "I am looking to see if there isn't a name" "I still recognise, but I have found nothing." "The Nazis executed more than 100,000 people from Kiev in Babi Yar, most of them were Jewish." "During the occupation more than 200,000 were murdered in Kiev alone." "And why were you supposed to learn German of all things?" "Because Mamuchka said, that was my dowry." "And she thought that if I could master different languages," "then I was taken care of." ""Ladies and Gentlemen, an announcement."" ""B345 from Berlin to Kiev." "Departure 21:36..."" "Take my bag..." "For goodness sake, I haven't flown to the moon yet." "Thank you!" "I haven't found the light yet, but apart from that..." "This is quite simply ugly." "This wall doesn't have to be like that." "It is ridiculously ugly and nothing works." "Svetlana's father lived another half a year after his release." "Then he died in the winter of 1939 as a consequence of the torture." "Svetlana didn't go to school for weeks." "Instead, she secretly read her way through the neighbour's bookshelves." "As the daughter of a poltical prisioner she didn't really have a future in the Soviet Union." "But her school director vouched for her and arranged for her to join the Communist Youth Brigade." "So she could stay in school." "Our train is approaching the Ukraine." "65 years have passed since Svetlana Geier last crossed this border." "Did you have a reason for not returning to the Ukraine all these years?" "It's the other way round." "I had no reason to go." "I don't know." "I don't know." "It is so very complicated." "It was so very long ago." "We have to show our passports." "May I tell you something?" "Do you understand German?" "Do you understand Russian?" "May I say it in Russian?" "You know, I wanted to pay you a compliment:" "We were just having an important professional discussion." "And you waited till we were silent." "I find that incredible." "One has to search out such politeness on this earth." "Thank you." "The languages are not compatible." "I have experienced that repeatedly during forty years of teaching." "A Russian cannot say:" ""I have a bank account."" "Grammatically it is impossible." "Russian has no supporting verbs in the present tense:" "neither "to have" nor "to be"." "In order to express that in Russian, you turn the object, which in German is dependent on you, into the subject." "Thus, you yourself become dependent, an object." ""The cup is with me."" "When I own the cup, I lose my nominative," "I lose my autonomy," "I lose my freedom to act, everything!" "Because I have the cup, or whatever." "Isn't that fascinating?" "That is what my students learn." "The effect of the words is different." "In Pushkin, it is a summer evening he writes: "the beetle hummed"" "In German it sounds very platitudinous - a car hums and a washing machine hums and the grandfather hums" " everything hums!" "In Russian one says "shuck shushal"." "Four times in a row the vocalised sh, it can't be anything other than a fat, flying maybug on a summer evening, can it?" "And that is lost." "Because the words don't reflect it." "Or "Mielas"" ""Mielas"" "with this bright M, the clear I, and then the soft L, "Mielas."" "It is a very beneficent word, isn't it?" ""Gnade" (German for mercy) sounds like a stuffed mattress in comparison." ""Peace lies over all the peaks."" "That cannot be translated, it is like Pushkin:" "One understands every word, but doesn't know what it is about." ""Peace lies over all the peaks," what is happening there?" ""You feel almost no trace of a breeze in the treetops."" "Well, do you feel something or do you feel nothing?" "Is there a trace of a breeze or none?" "The same with "the birds are silent in the woods."" "How does one know that?" "Has one been there before?" "The circumstances are completely unclear." "That would not have been accepted in the baccalaureate because the statement is... infinite." ""Just wait,"" "so the author is talking to himself " ""soon you will be resting too"." "Incredible, this exhaling, as wide as the whole world." "And when we translate, we have a book lying in front of us and we think the story starts in the top left hand corner and finishes in the bottom right hand corner." "I had a wonderful teacher." "And when I was translating something, she would say to me in German:" "Stick your nose up in the air when you're translating." "That means:" "Lift your head while translating." "She demanded that that little girl didn't read from left to right," "but that she should take in the sentence, lift her head and then translate it." "That is all." "I cannot say more." "In fact," "I could leave again, now, this evening." "You see, that is the quintessence." "A translation... is not a caterpillar crawling from left to right," "a translation always emerges from the whole." "Do you understand?" "One has to make the text entirely one's own." "The Germans say "internalised"." "You have to take the text into yourself, into your heart." "Make it your own." "Stick your nose up in the air when you're translating!" "And when the first article was written about the translator Svetlana Geier 100 years ago, the journalist gave the article the title:" ""Nose in the air while translating"" "And with that he ruined my reputation completely." "Because since then everyone is convinced that I am stuck up!" "I never went to the upper floor." "My teacher did not allow me to." "Over the apse?" "No, in the apse." "I have never been up here." "My teacher did not want me to." "But do you understand, one has to see it as a whole, and one has to love it as a whole." "One cannot even take in all these individual figures." "Of course I did not realise that in those days." "What?" "That it is about the 'sum'," "about the whole thing." "On 22nd June 1941 Svetlana passed her baccalaureate with distinction." "On the same day the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union." "German troops advanced on Kiev." "Before the Germans came and before Kiev was completely encircled, one could still leave, my mother told me very clearly:" ""You are young, you have your life ahead of you, you can go," "I am not going with your father's murderers." "Full stop."" "Mother and daughter stayed." "Three months later Kiev was taken over by German soldiers." "Most people welcomed them as liberators from Stalin's dictatorship." "Baba, that must be the house." "We lived on the lower floor and the windowsills of the house were so deep that I set up a whole doll's house on the windowsill of my bedroom." "I could really sit on it with a chair and a little table." ""I do not mourn, I do not call, I do not weep-"" ""everything disperses"" ""like the white mist over apple orchards."" "I like that." "That must be it." "Does it look like that?" "It is slippery..." "It was a cool, grey September morning." "She came on the day before the Jews were supposed to gather in one place." "My friend came and we wanted to organise carefully and terribly cleverly, that we would not lose sight of each other à la longe'." "They were a Jewish family." "I accompanied her out of the house and went down to the pavement with her." "Then a German car came driving very slowly from the left." "The car was obviously lost." "Sitting inside it was Count Kerssenbrock, who was the armaments commander of the southern sector." "And he was looking for somewhere to stay." "Then my friend left and I went back into the house." "When she said goodbye to me we had not the slightest idea of what was about to follow." "Ten days after the Wehrmacht marched in, the Jewish inhabitants of Kiev were ordered to gather for deportation." "Svetlana's friend Neta and her mother proceeded in an endless column to a freight yard on the outskirts of the city." "One knew that Hitler was not favourably disposed to the Jews but that was taken as anti-German propaganda." "It was not taken seriously." "Their path lead through the ravine Babi Yar." "An SS special unit and security task forces were waiting there." "For two days one heard the machine gun fire all the way to the city." "The ravine became a mass grave for more than 30,000 people." "It never ceases." "Never ceases." "And it has never become the past." "It causes me such pain, now while talking, as much as it did sixty years ago." "It is impossible to forget." "And on the next day someone knocked on the window." "It was Kerssenbrock." "He asked me whether there wasn't someone living here who spoke German." "And then he asked whether I would come over." "And there were some people in uniform, a Russian architect and others." "And then I translated." "And then someone asked whether I didn't know of someone who would keep house and I said, no, I didn't know of anyone." "Then I went home and I told my mother and she said:" ""We have no electricity, no water, no bread, how are we supposed to stay alive?"" "And then my mother went over and said she would be happy to keep house." "While her mother kept house for Count Kerssenbrock" "Svetlana interpreted in his office." "The well-educated German impressed her." "He recommended her to the Geological Institute in Kiev, where she translated for German and Ukrainian scientists." "I never, not for one second, associated Kerssenbrock with what happened there." "Never." "I mean," "Hitler has nothing in common with Goethe or Schiller or Thomas Mann and I cannot," "regard a person and the nation into which he is born as matching." "But didn't the idea force itself on you?" "He was in uniform." "I cannot change how it was." "I didn't consider it." "Did you ever talk to him about Babi Yar?" "Yes." "What did he say about it?" "What can a person say about it?" "It was, I think..." "He had something of the loyalty of a knight." "And in such a case one could only go to the headquarters with a weapon in your hand." "Or precisely not do that." "He did not go to the headquarters with a weapon." "Tell me, what road is this?" "Terishinskovskaya?" "That means the museum is here?" "What road is it?" "With the two museums." "The museum is here, directly opposite." "Just imagine..." "It was here I saw a painting for the first time, a picture of snow by Igor Krabach." "And there was not one millimetre of white in the whole painting;" "it was all the colours... of the palette." "And it was a painting of snow." "It was the beginning of the modern movement." "Right from the start, it is clear to Dostoyevsky that the most important characteristic of a human being is his need for freedom." "And this freedom expresses itself in self-determination." "One does what one wants to do." "And our intelligence plays a fatal role here, because our reason constantly offers us reasons, when we want to justify something." "We can offer a reason for anything, in fact." "The justification of an often punishable action due to the prospect of a humane and charitable outcome." "One does not even bother with a fig leaf." "Mr. Bush for example." "Or Mr. Putin." "The great warriors against terrorism." "It seems to me that is the most important mode of argument today, in grand politics as well as in modest thinking, in private, everywhere." "Here, Dostoyevsky is in sharp contrast to all the potentates of this world." "And for him there is no doubt:" "there is no end that could ever justify a wrong means." "The Student Raskolnikov is the main figure in Dostoyevsky's novel 'Crime and Punishment', which until Svetlana Geier's new translation was known in German as 'Guilt and Atonement'." "Raskolnikov believes he will achieve inner freedom by overcoming his own scruples:" "He believes he can save two people by slaying an old, sick usurer." "He forces himself to perform this deed against his own conscience." "The inner obstacles he has to this act are not of a logical nature." "After long consideration this very clever man decides that the end justifies the means." "We tremble with the murderer right from the beginning, hoping he will manage the murder, out of liking for the murderer, it is incredible." "Even such a pious soul as my Mrs. Hagen, loves Raskolnikov, who would certainly have murdered her without a thought, with pleasure." "And when he sets off to the murder, he cannot fetch his axe and then we as readers begin to pant, because now he won't be able to murder." "For goodness sake!" "Rather than saying:" ""Thank God, his guardian angel."" "We pant, "where can we get an axe from", and it is already there waiting." "So they are such small stitches, such tiny, microscopic stitches, it is so delicate." "Incredible, the text is so finely embroidered, crocheted, whatever, woven." "What is the forest?" "The forest is a sea" "Where, which, to which...." "What is the forest?" "The forest is a city" "From which, which, in which..." "What is the forest?" "The forest is a sky" "Thanks to which, because of which, in the absence of which, as if..." "What is the forest?" "The forest is the forest." "Has anything better been said for our times?" "My son, who is already over fifty years old, works with the tenth class, your class." "He was standing at the circular saw and a piece broke, flew out of the saw and hit him in the head." "And he is still lying in hospital." "Please take a piece of paper and each of you write your name on it." "I'll bring it to him." "That will give him great pleasure." "Mrs Geier recounts her favourite fairy tale "Emelya and the Pike" for the pupils." "Emelya catches a pike and this pike begins to talk to him." "Emelya understands what the fish is saying." "He listens to his advice." "Thereupon he survives many adventures." "Finally, he wins the heart of the Tsar's daughter and becomes Tsar himself." "I wish each of you that, from time to time in your lives, you will meet such a pike, a fish, that tells you something, that only you understand, contrary to all the laws of nature and science." "And that you will have the courage to follow your inner voice, even then when it means acting against general, prevailing opinions." "So." "That was what I wanted to say to you." "Perhaps that was the last fairy tale you heard." "But because I have travelled here, I could allow myself that." "If you have any questions you would like to ask me, I shall answer with pleasure." "If I can." "One day Prof. Leo von zur Mühlen turned up." "He belonged to the scientific advisory committee to the Army's High Command." "He had been invited by Count Kerssenbrock and he said he would arrange a grant" "from the Humboldt Foundation for me, subject to an aptitude test, once I had worked for the Germans for a year." "Leo von zur Mühlen recommended the eighteen year old Svetlana to the Bridge-Building Union of Dortmund, who were building a bridge over the Dnieper, in Kiev, for the German State Railways." "She worked in an office, and helped with the distribution of foodstuffs." "There she saw under what terrible conditions prisoners of war were living in their own country." "After the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad the course of the war changed, in the winter of 1943." "After two years of occupation, it became obvious that the Germans would soon be abandoning Kiev." "Svetlana and her mother knew that they would have no future under Stalin." "In the summer they went out to the dacha, one last time." "Here was the well and the storks flew to it." "There was a sort of little gate here, and there was a wood here too, and here was an oak wood." "We had a 'Kopenka', that was a scooped-out hole." "It was overgrown with blackberries and orchids." "In the morning and the evening the storks came and drank from it." "And they got used to me, they thought I was a particularly poorly-formed stork," "because I was so thin." "They were not startled away when I came." "That was all quite wonderful, of course." "Quite paradisiacal!" "No one demanded anything of me." "I had my storks and my books and my semolina, it was wonderful." "When I was alone there with my father, well that, of course, was a very hard time." "I was actually too young for it." "But it worked." "You were never here in winter?" "No." "So this is the first time that you see snow here?" "Yes." "Hallo you, what are you doing here?" "Good day." "I am looking for traces of the Voronins." "They lived next-door to the Nebogatis." "The Nebogatis live on the corner back there." "You have to go along there..." "Ask mother!" "He was a tailor in the cadets' brigade until the revolution." "New people live there now." "And you lived here in Kladyevo?" "Yes, in Kladyevo." "My parents bought the house from the Voronins." "And you can't remember where you lived?" "I cannot even find the house!" "When did you go away from here?" "We never came back after the war." "Ah, only till the war, well then..." "And now I have come from Germany and I was hoping to drink once more from the well before I die." "Well, thank you very much." "Ask other people about the Voronins, I don't know either." "Thank you very much." "Goodbye." "Nothing!" "I was hoping to drink water from my stork well, but that doesn't matter now..." "Wait darling, I'll hold on here, that's ok." "Here is the headstone." "Shall I clear it a bit for you?" "No, that's not necessary." "You know, this grave should be preserved, for cases such as my father are very rare." "You see: 27 million people died, but less than a thousand were released." "That is why one simply has to preserve this grave..." "Father forgive me for I am a sinner." "You are Redemption, You are Strength, You are Eternity." "Forgive us." "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen." "Let us go." "Take one of those twigs." "A stick like this?" "Then you take it with you to your great-grandmother's grave." "Let us go." "Svetlana and her mother left Kiev in autumn 1943 shortly before the Red Army retook the city." "We were in the German-occupied zone and were therefore completely déclassé." "It was simply unavoidable that we left as well." "Svetlana wanted to study." "Like a guiding star, she kept the promised grant before her and was convinced that this dream would become reality in Germany." "The two women were interned in Dortmund in a camp for Eastern European workers." "Svetlana attracted attention due to her knowledge of German." "She was interrogated by the Gestapo several times." "A secretary in the Bridge-Building Union of Dortmund alerted Kerssenbrock and von zur Mühlen." "The two women were then summoned to Berlin, to the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories." "The ministerial official Constantine, Count Stamati awaited them in Berlin." "He accompanied Svetlana to an aptitude test and to the Gestapo's headquarters." "She was measured there and her ancestry was investigated for Aryan roots:" "without success." "I didn't know what that building was." "Our table was positioned next to a white tiled wall and I found it somewhat strange, that wall." "I found that wall sinister, it was in the cellar." "Probably there was a reason why all the walls were tiled." "Then the two men began to question me about my parents." "I found that very friendly." "I told them about my mother and my father." "They wanted to impute that I had German blood." "They wanted to help me, but I didn't understand." "Stamati organised alien passports for Svetlana and her mother, a rarity in the Third Reich." "She was also awarded the promised Humboldt grant and advised to move to Freiburg for her studies." "The fact that we were awarded those passports was the cause of a huge procedure." "Her special treatment set off a chain reaction:" "The Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was subjected to a political cleansing and placed under the direct control of the Nazi Party." "Stamati, who had associations with Admiral Canaris' resistance group, was taken away at night and sent off to the Eastern front." "He put himself out for me, for the sake of the matter." "He didn't know me before;" "there was absolutely no reason for him to expose himself for my sake." "I belong to the nation they were at war with and Germany was in the process of losing that war, finally and for a long time." "And then something like that." "It obliged me to feel an enormous respect for this country." "And I am very happy, that I have the opportunity to repay my enormous debt to Germany, to some extent." "In the spring of 1944 Svetlana and her mother arrived in Freiburg." "She studied, married and became a mother." "She worked as a lecturer at the university and began her career as a translator of Russian literature." "At the beginning of the 1990's the publisher Egon Ammann visited her, to discuss a new translation of Dostoyevsky's most important novels." "A bunch of parsley." "And I'd like two pounds of spinach too, please." "I believe that each spiritual experience leads us to treat each other better and" "not strike others dead, quite elementary." "And I believe that language is a very effective remedy." "The first elephant." "The second, the third," "the fourth," "the fifth and the supplement." "It is so monstrously heavy, isn't it?" "Reading it is already a physical effort." "In fact, it should be in three volumes, to be comfortable." "'Crime and Punishment'," "'The Idiot'," "'The Devils'," "'A Raw Youth', and 'The Brothers Karamasov'." "One doesn't translate this with impunity." "I have learned an incredible amount and I have learned such a lot, not just for my profession" "but also for my life." "It is immense." "Why do people translate?" "It is the yearning for something... that keeps escaping for the unrivalled original, for the final, the essential..." "These words, I find it incredible..." "Yearning." "A fabulous word." "One week after our visit to her native country" "Svetlana Geier tells me about the death of her son Johannes." "After one and a half years, he died of the consequences of his accident." "It's still not reality for me." "I can talk about it, but I... somehow I don't know it." "He looked very beautiful" "and completely alive and... calm." "And then two nurses came, they had arranged things with the undertaker" "and they came to lay him in the coffin." "And it was like a child in his cradle, it was quite wonderful." "They certainly spared us a great deal of bother." "Then he lay there, and they had to put the lid on." "His face was so beautiful." "And then he stayed there and the next morning the lid had to be screwed down." "I had to do that." "I found that very good." "That one will never see someone again;" "I shall never see him again..." "It would be good if these were used up, for they are really not so..." "Yes, one cannot expect more from them." "Yes, at this time of year..." "An onion has no centre." "When one cuts through an onion one does not find a central point." "The onion has an objective." "The objective of an onion is the new onion." "This is basically where the idea begins." "In Dostoyevsky's novels there is always a cadence, the story within the story that is not directly associated with the plot, but which, like an onion within an onion, is in fact the core of the whole thing." "And there is the comparison to people, because existence itself cannot be the objective people strive for." "It is only justified by the fact that it is the way to something that transcends it." ""In a railway compartment,"" "Comma." ""where we were sitting opposite each other,"" "not ourselves, "were sitting opposite each other."" ""The General had an air of extraordinary..."" "is that the right word: "independent"?" "I would say: "sovereign."" "Pardon?" "Sovereign." ""When I came back with the children around midday..."" " "came - came" of course does not sound so beautiful..." ""When I returned with the children around midday"" ""We were met," in fact." "In fact, yes." "Correct." ""We were met by an entire cavalcade,"" "full stop." "And who is sitting in the carriages?" "The ladies." "One would really expect either a semi-colon or a dash here." "I can only do what is written." "It would make it more comprehensible if one put a comma after the carriages." "For the horses do not belong to the carriages." "They are being ridden." "Well alright." "I can do it, but what is the point?" "To separate the coach from the horses." "Of course the coaches are pulled by horses, but at the beginning it says that they went out riding." "That does not refer to the coach horses." "But the horses harnessed to the coach are counted too and the magnificent horses are the mounts." "So, they are not the coach horses." ""Mademoiselle Blanche in a coach with Nadia Filipovna and Paulina..."" ""The Frenchman..."" "Is it not the "little Frenchman"?" "No, I have decided to simply call him "the Frenchman."" "Good, "the Frenchman, the Englishman and our General on horseback."" "So there are three horses." "Yes, in total there are probably five." "Correct." ""The magnificent horses."" "And I would put a comma after the coaches."