| Interview 2: Translating Karl May's Winnetou | |||||||||||||
|
On the Trail of the Original Winnetou An Interview with Translator David Koblick |
|||||||||||||
Welcome to the second of two interviews with translators of Karl May into English. Following our first interview with the translator of Durch die Wüste, this week we turn to another translator and another one of Karl May's books. Because it was written by a German author over a century ago and is set in the American West, Karl May's three-volume Winnetou series should be of particular interest to American readers. But despite being translated into some 30 other languages, very few of Karl May's German books have ever been translated into English. Early English translations of Winnetou were poorly executed and failed to attract American readers, who had plenty of other, far more authentic Western material at their disposal. One early (1898) unauthorized English version of Winnetou was entitled “Winnetou, the Apache Knight: Jack Hildreth among the Indians.” For some reason, the translator, Marion Ames Taggart, changed the name of the story's main paleface character from Charley (“Karl”) to Jack Hildreth, and made other more serious alterations and deletions that deviated from the German original. But as translator David Koblick points out in the following interview, deciding which Winnetou “original” is the original is not as simple as you might think. In the case of just the Winnetou I book, Karl May and his publisher made numerous revisions of their own. One of the few original Winnetou story elements was the introductory “Greenhorn” description, which May took from one of his earlier stories entitled “Der Scout” — first published in the Deutscher Hausschatz edition of 1889. For the new book version of Winnetou (1892-93), May wrote an entirely new version of Volume I and new chapters for Volumes 2 and 3, tying together elements from earlier serialized versions of his stories to create the “Winnetou Trilogy” (Winnetou IV is considered a later, separate work.) For later editions in 1904 and 1909, May made even more revisions. Even after his death in 1912, the Karl-May-Verlag continued to further alter May's texts. Most Karl May experts consider the texts printed after World War II to be the least authentic, yet those are the very versions that many Germans remember and grew up reading.
But regardless of the sources, if a well-translated version were available, English-language readers could better appreciate the German fascination with the Wild West written from a European point of view. How there came to be just such a translation is an interesting story involving an American living in Austria and an Italian publishing agent who was a big Karl May fan. This week we publish our interview with Winnetou I translator David Koblick. Born in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents on what he calls “the inauspicious date of September 11, 1916,” Koblick grew up and was educated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Following high school, he began an electrical apprenticeship, but interrupted it to work his way to Hawaii as a “scullion”—a pot-washer in the ship's galley. He was still living and working on the island of Oahu when he became an eyewitness to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the US Navy and served several years in the South Pacific during and after WWII. Later he studied electrical engineering and German in college back in California. During a trip to Europe in 1961, Koblick met Berta, the Austrian lady who was to become his fifth (and last) wife. When they weren't traveling or visiting Austria, they lived in San Francisco until Koblick's retirement in 1981, when the couple moved to Austria and settled in Berta's hometown of Steyr, where they still reside. So how did Koblick, an electrical engineer by trade, get into German-English translation? It all started with a bottle of Austrian wine in San Francisco (details in the interview). A longtime science fiction fan, Koblick's first book translation turned out to be, appropriately, the English version of Peter Krassa's German biography of Chariots of the Gods author, Erich von Däniken. Koblick's translation of Däniken intim (Herman Bauer, 1976) appeared in the U.K. in hardcover (W.H. Allen, 1978) and paperback (Star Book) editions under the title Erich von Daniken: Disciple of the Gods. Since then he has translated several other German books into English. How the American David Koblick came to translate a German classic about the Old West is revealed in our interview with him about finding the original Winnetou. N E X T > Koblick Interview: Part 1 | Part 2
Michalak Interview- Introduction
German Newsletters
OUR GERMAN FORUMS Explore German LanguageMust ReadsAbout.com Special FeaturesA Smarter FutureTips that will help finance your education, excel in the classroom, and advance your career. More > How to Ace the GREBeing well prepared is the first step; here are more essential suggestions. More > ©2009 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. | |||||||||||||
