August has been a gauntlet. I knew when the blows were going to land but that didn’t mean that they stung any less. Early this month, I had kidney stone surgery and then a follow-up procedure to remove a plastic stent that was left in to help the organs drain. When you have kidney surgery, you’re given a list of symptoms that accompany recuperating from the procedure: difficult and painful urination, fever, nausea, vomiting, and so on. The funny thing is that these are almost the exact same symptoms of kidney stones themselves. In my case, the recuperation from surgery was more painful and difficult than the worst symptoms of kidney stones. I lay on the floor of my home office—the bedroom, facing an arterial street, was too noisy during the day to sleep—and in the moments that I was awake and lucid enough to do work, I translated a poem by Goethe, whose birthday is today: August 28th, 1749.
The Goethe translation was for a panel discussion at NecronomiCon, a horror literature convention held every two years in Providence, Rhode Island. Begun as a rather narrow gathering of H.P. Lovecraft scholars, NecronomiCon has evolved into a massive multi-day event featuring author readings, concerts, costume balls, tours of local mycology, and more. I went to the last convention, in 2024, but did not participate in any events as an author or translator. 2026 was another matter entirely, as there were numerous panels that related directly to my translation work. It would have been worth it alone to participate in this one particular panel:
The Birth of the Fantastique in German Literature: Influenced by Romanticism, a generation of German writers including Adelbert von Chamisso, Achim von Arnim, and E.T.A. Hoffmann pioneered a literary form prefiguring slipstream and magical realism by integrating supernatural elements into ostensibly real-world stories. Reaction to the First World War’s horrors breathed new life into German Fantastique and, through German Expressionism, also put an enduring stamp on cinema. Panelists discuss the movement and its legacy. Panelists: Jon Black (Moderator), Michael Cisco, Matthew Spencer, Eric Williams.
In total, I took part in six panel discussions and one group reading, where I read from my translations of Heinrich von Kleist. I will go in depth about the rest of the events later, but suffice to say that every single one was uncannily well-aligned with my interests. The only problem—only!—was that the convention was going to take place a little over a week after my surgery. That was the amount of time that I had to recover. Then my wife and I had to pack up the car and drive to Providence, picking up a friend who was also taking part in the convention, in Brooklyn along the way.
For the balance of that week, it looked as if I wasn’t going to make it to NecronomiCon, but a few days before the actual event, my symptoms subsided. I was still in a great deal of pain, had to fight off fatigue at doing basic tasks, but I was no longer completely debilitated. This might sound cocky or worse—(self-dramatizing is worse)—but I was sure that I was going to make it to the convention. I didn’t have any other plans—not that convalescing at home takes a lot of planning—and my worry was restricted to practical matters like temporarily registering for Rhode Island state sales tax. My friends Eric Williams, Rick Claypool, and I planned to share a merch table at NecronomiCon, my wife Amber assisting with sales, and I had a few dozen copies of Night Fears printed for the occasion, along with other select books of horror and science fiction in translation from other publishers. We spent almost a thousand dollars on books alone for the convention. This was a planned expense, not a hardship, but I was worried that I wasn’t going to get a chance to sell off all that stuff. In hindsight, I’m grateful that I had other problems, good problems, to focus my mind on while I was lying there sick. I think it would have taken me considerably longer to recover otherwise.
Translating poetry is a problem,—certainly the poetry of Goethe, with his breadth of learning and distinctive personal philosophy. Even a brief, superficially simple poem like “To the United States” presents immediate difficulties:
Den Vereinigten Staaten
Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, der alte,
Hast keine verfallenen Schlösser
Und keine Basalte.
Dich stört nicht im Innern,
Zu lebendiger Zeit,
Unnützes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.
Benutzt die Gegenwart mit Glück!
Und wenn nun Eure Kinder dichten,
Bewahre sie ein gut Geschick
Vor Ritter-, Räuber- und Gespenstergeschichten.
Here is my rendition:
To the United States
America, you have it better
Than our continent, the elder,
Neither tumbledown castle barricade
Nor volcanistic basalt palisade.
But rather a mind untroubled,
In your lively pursuits,
By vain old remembrance
And unavailing disputes.
Make use of this, this present day
And later, when your children compose,
Guard them well, so that they may,
Be toward ghastly tales quite indisposed.
As with every aspect of Goethe, there is a plethora of secondary literature explaining every aspect of his career, and in that sense, it made certain baffling lines explicable. For instance, one of Goethe’s abiding scientific interests was geology, which during his lifetime was undergoing a rapid evolution into the modern science we know today. Goethe examined the then current geological literature on the United States and saw a country blessed with a remarkably fortunate location, without the numerous earthquakes, volcanoes, and other dangerous natural phenomena that periodically wreak havoc in Italy and other Mediterranean countries. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American geology can tell you that this picture is hopelessly out of date, but at the time of the poem’s composition, 1827, the United States had not yet acquired the territories that would one day become Alaska, California, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest, some of the most geologically active areas on the planet.
This would all just be some nice material in a history of science paper but for the fact that Goethe’s line about basalt is not really intelligible without that background. In the two centuries since the poem’s composition the scientific context has faded into obscurity. Earlier translations either had the basalt stand on its own or substituted another stone with more legible connotations, marble for instance, as a stand-in for Europe’s monumental architecture, which America also lacked at the time. The capital of the United States had only recently moved to Washington D.C. from Philadelphia. I chose to insert the martial “palisade” because of imagery of castle ruins in the previous line, but also because in Western U.S., where basalt is often mind-bogglingly plentiful, walls of rock are sometimes called palisades, such as the town of Palisade, Colorado, though in that particular instance the walls are composed of sandstone and shale, sedimentary rocks that lacked the violent origins that troubled Goethe.
As I said, these were the problems that were preoccupying me while I recovered from surgery. I knew that I could speak extemporaneously on every panel topic. Having translated a few books worth of German fantastic tales, I could at least speak extemporaneously on that, but Goethe’s poem illustrated a fascinating dimension of fantastic literature from Germany: many of the best writers, Goethe no less, had a distaste as well as a fascination for “tales of knights, robbers, and ghosts”, which is a more literal rendition of “ghastly tales” in that final line. When I first began reading Goethe seriously, I found that skepticism baffling. Here was the writer who composed the Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust, Part I, one of the most vivid and disturbing depictions of a witches’ sabbath in literature. And yet here he was, a fusty old man saying that American kids shouldn’t get into this stuff. That’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted! Later, I came to understand how Goethe was dogged by the fame he had acquired from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust. His own personal philosophy was centered on continuous growth and development, qualities he saw in nature, particularly the botanical world, and which represented the best qualities of humanity as well. It would be immensely frustrating to talk with all these eminent figures—Napoleon’s favorite book was Werther, for instance—and have them all say: “play the hits”. You can understand why he wanted to get away from all that.
For my own part as a translator, I’m not averse to playing the hits, so to speak, but I was surprised how many people I met at NecronomiCon were not only interested in favorites like E.T.A Hoffmann, to say nothing of Lovecraft himself, but were also game to discuss and even buy books from the obscure figures I’ve translated, like Jean Paul and Wolfgang Hilbig. I sold out of my supply of those authors. We ended up, on the net, making up for our lodging and transportation expenses to the convention with book sales. These might seem like picayune concerns, one more episode in the shopworn life of a petit-bourgeois writer, but I was glad to have those concerns, I could make a life out of those concerns, they’re so much better, so much easier to endure the endless procession of doctor and hospital visits that came before. Contemporary writers, contemporary translators too, are by and large a self-pitying lot. Seeing their comparatively lowly station on the rungs of global popular culture, they internalize that position. Writing is for nobodies, for losers. If it were simply a matter of raw numbers, then yes, my life too would not be much to talk about. I sell a few hundred copies of my work, at best. If I’m lucky I’ll have a few thousand people read my book reviews or newsletter entries. But I like my life. I’m not sure how much happier I’d be if I was more successful in a more general sense. I’ll try my best to figure that out, but for the moment, I’ll take doing panel discussions and hand-selling obscure German books. I’m glad that I was able to get out of bed—well, the bedroll on the office room floor—and do just that.
