As language that speaks from and to a specific community, defined in opposition to the "standard", common language, dialect almost willfully resists translation. Standard-language speakers – frustrated by the difficulty of understanding – may even suspect dialect writers of intentional insularity. Yet, as became amply clear, dialect writers are anything but insular; in fact, they are explorers of linguistic borders, themselves translators between different strains of language. The fact remains, however: as language that embeds meaning, music and emotion in extreme cultural specificity, dialect is notoriously "untranslatable".

But time and again it is the "untranslatable" that yields the most inspired translations, by challenging the translator to penetrate the work's deeper structures. This is amply confirmed by the translations presented here. We offer them in the original Franconian and in Scots and standard English translation so that readers can compare the sound and sense of the different versions. The works stand on their own; still, I hope the reflections below will give readers a better sense of the fascinating issues involved.

I myself embarked on this project with only a passing understanding of dialect issues. Through the Goethe Institute Glasgow no man's land had made new contacts in Scotland, culminating in plans to develop a "translation master class" at the Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews preceded by a workshop at the University of Edinburgh.

Given the strong interest in "dialect" in Scotland, it seemed natural to depart from the narrow "German-English" paradigm, exploring the diversity within each language and its implications for translation. The project was a learning process for me, and it is this process, rather than a scholarly analysis, which I wish to convey here. All inaccuracies and generalizations are mine alone!

How to Talk about "Dialect"?

The word "dialect" itself posed the first problem. In Scotland the term is controversial; some regard Scots as a distinct language related to English, rather than a dialect of English. This made the stakes clear from the outset: does a linguistic hierarchy exist? What are its broader cultural or political implications? How is it constructed, and how can it be challenged?

Ultimately, it proved difficult to find an alternative, especially one that could apply to both Scots and Franconian. The word "dialect" was used throughout the planning process and in audience discussions at Stanza. I use it here in the spirit of the Webster's definition: "a regional variety of language distinguished… from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language". It can be inspiring to view a language as the sum of all its variants, rather than as a hierarchy, to recall that the "standard" (newscaster) variant, however necessary for communication, is ultimately just one dialect among many.

German has its own native word for dialect: "Mundart", from the word for mouth, evokes the vitality of the spoken word. There seems to be little controversy surrounding the use of the word "Mundart" or "Dialekt", or indeed the explicitly privileging term "High German" for standard German. Dialect writing remains more marginalized in Germany than in Scotland and dialect writers have yet to assert themselves to a similar extent. Which brings me to the second problem I encountered…

Who Writes in Dialect?

The Stanza Festival regularly features poets such as Alexander Hutchison and Robert Alan Jamison who use Scots dialects. Finding German dialect poets proved more difficult; virtually none of the German poets or literary organizers I spoke to could suggest "serious" dialect poets or "mainstream" poets who draw on dialect.

Coming from the linguistically homogenized United States, I was always struck by the wealth of dialects in Germany, often cultivated in everyday conversation and in popular culture. Yet while English-language writers, from the U.S., Britain or elsewhere, draw freely on dialect and slang, it plays a very marginal role in contemporary German literature. Dialect seems stigmatized. Perhaps it is a matter of literary trends, with "authentic" spoken language and dialect associated with an outmoded form of (social) realism. Also, Germany's intellectuals trend strongly toward cosmopolitanism; emphasis on regional roots can seem parochial, even politically incorrect, given Germans' fraught relationship with their own ethnicity.

Switzerland and Austria are a different matter, with dialect writing proudly fostered – in opposition, perhaps, to Germany's cultural/linguistic dominance. In this sense, Scots may be more comparable to Swiss or Austrian German: a cherished aspect of national identity.

Resorting to Google, I did discover a diverse dialect scene in Germany – much of it unsophisticated, however, nostalgia-oriented or shading into cabaret and entertainment. Interestingly, certain regions seem to have fostered more sophisticated dialect literature scenes. I was fortunate enough to find two Franconian poets, Fitzgerald Kusz and Helmut Haberkamm, whose sophisticated work is bound both to their region and to the national and international literary scenes.

Cracking the Dialect Code

The third and most stimulating "problem" I encountered lay in the poems themselves, the effort to relate to language utterly unlike the English I grew up with or the German I learned at school. Charged as it is with group identity, dialect can give a standard-language speaker an unaccustomed feeling of insecurity, exclusion – and trigger defensive arrogance. Or it can open our eyes to the possibilities and meanings hidden in the language we thought we knew.

Dialect is a difficult code to crack – but why should this be an obstacle to readers when idiosyncratic, experimental, indeed "encoded" language has become the norm, especially in poetry? And as I came to appreciate, far from being tradition-bound, dialect poetry can be as consciously experimental as any. But rather than drawing primarily on written literary tradition or broad popular discourse, dialect poets construct their poetic code out of the (spoken) language immediately surrounding them. The result is an individual idiom – an idiolect.

Identity Politics

As noted, Scottish and German attitudes toward dialect are quite different. Yet when our poets met, they sought and found parallels in personal experience and aesthetic approach. All the poets shared two fundamental experiences: growing up in the tension between their native dialect and the language of the dominant culture; and consciously choosing their dialect over the "standard" as their form of literary expression. In short – one could say – they share a lifelong preoccupation with the question of the "proper" language (whether in social or literary terms) for expressing themselves. An excellent precondition for writing!

"It turned out that Robert Alan Jamieson and Helmut Haberkamm both felt that their ‘real home' as country boys had been their local dialect and that the standard language imposed on them by school remained something foreign. Fitzgerald Kusz basically spent his life within the city of Nuremberg. He was never cut off his roots like Jamieson and Haberkamm. Kusz came to dialect-writing around 1968 when it seemed to be a way of rebelling against language barriers, as described by sociologists. Meanwhile, Sandy Hutchison was the most ‘uprooted' of the poets, having spent 18 years in Canada."*1

Written vs. spoken language

The nature of the material itself led to common preoccupations. As reflected by the German term "Mundart", dialect is associated with spoken language. This puts it at a distance from the standard literary language with its wealth of written tradition, at the same time opening up new opportunities. It can often more effectively evoke the rhythms, melodies and emotional emphases of spoken language. For another thing, the lack of a standard orthography frees the poet to invent his own. Robert Alan Jamieson devised his own system of transcription for the Shetlandic dialect, while Fitzgerald Kusz and Helmut Haberkamm developed ways of rendering their respective versions of Franconian. On a fundamental level, the lack of language norms virtually dictates non-conformism.

Sound

All the poets produce much work that is heavily phonetic, to the point of resembling sound poetry, as in Kusz's syllabic "liebe xii" or Haberkamm's "ach goddla gell…". Again, the orthography offers much scope to stress the dialect's unique melody and color, or indeed to consciously distill out phonetic and rhythmic elements. This enables the poems to resonate powerfully with the reader even when they are difficult to understand. Of course, this also poses a serious translation problem. Scots happens to share some phonetic qualities with Franconian that standard English does not, for instance the guttural "ch" and, especially in the case of Norse-influenced Shetlandic, certain Germanicisms. But in most cases, rather than attempting to reproduce the "Franconian sound", the Scottish poets sought the equivalent point on their own Scots spectrum. A striking example is Jamieson's translation of "ach goddla gell…". When rendering baby-talk, Franconian becomes still more embellished, polysyllabic, while Shetlandic becomes still terser.

Landscape

In this vein, Renate Fitzroy, who prepared the gloss translations of Hutchison's work, wrote me early on: "The question is whether it will really work in Franconian, and the same applies to the other way round. The dialect conjures up the region – soft hills, vineyards, mediaeval towns – against rough sea, bleak rocks and hills, seagulls..." Indeed, landscape explicit or implicit emerged as one of the most vivid elements of the poets' work, and one of the most concrete translation problems. After all, Haberkamm debuted with a collection called "Frankn lichd nedd am Meer" (Franconia Does Not Lie on the Sea). Franconian lacks terms for the experience of maritime life, as Shetlandic lacks terms for the Catholic-influenced culture of Franconia. How could he and a Shetlander find common ground? In their workshop sessions, Haberkamm and Jamieson sought deeper parallels: the shared loss of a rural way of life, the experience of belonging to a region within a region (Franconia/Bavaria/Germany vs. Shetland/Scotland/U.K.), the awareness of historic tensions, be they Scottish-English or Catholic-Protestant*2. On this basis, they recreated foreign experience in their own terms. As does every translator.

In this sense, dialect merely makes explicit the eternal question of the reader, the translator: Where is the poet coming from?

*1 Interpreter Renate Fitzroy describing the workshop in the ITI Newsletter, October 2008.

*2 Thanks to Sarah Tolley for her notes from the workshop.