David Herman

The Task of a Translator:

Engaging with Klaus Modick’s Anticipatory Ecofiction

David Herman’s English translation of Klaus Modick’s first novel, Moss, was published by Bellevue Literary Press in 2020. It is available for purchase here.

In translating Klaus Modick’s first novel Moos into English as Moss, I sought to widen the readership for this brilliant work, which unfolds as a series of memories and meditations recorded by a disaffected botanist, and which contributes to the genre of ecofiction avant la lettre. The present essay aims to complement my translation by offering further context for Modick’s ingenious and arresting text, whose focus on human-plant relationships and their place within broader social and natural ecosystems remains vitally relevant. At a time when anthropogenic climate change fostered by the techno-scientific complex threatens biodiversity and indeed all life on earth, Moss, with its rethinking of the role of science in mediating humans’ engagement with larger biotic communities, highlights the crucial importance of formulating a “poetics of the vegetal,” to use Joela Jacobs and Isabel Kranz’s phrase [1]. As the account offered by Modick’s narrator-protagonist suggests, a poetics of plants can both reflect and help promote a different way of being in the world. In this reconfigured Weltanschauung, other-than-human beings become not just objects but interlocutors, subjects-of-a-life who take their place in an altered, more expansive ontology in which kinds of agency and varieties of experience—and potentially types of personhood—extend beyond the human [2].           

First published in 1984, Moss inaugurated Modick's career as a literary author. Modick—born in Oldenburg, Germany in 1951— completed a doctoral degree in German literature at the University of Hamburg in 1984. His dissertation focused on the work of novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger, whose friendship with Bertolt Brecht Modick would later explore in his 2011 genre-blending novel Sunset, a documentary fiction about art—and artists—under conditions of exile. This same impulse toward generic experimentation and the hybridization of discourses is already evident in Moss, in which a former professor of botany named Lukas Ohlburg, having lost faith in the descriptive and explanatory power of scientific discourse, undertakes a self-reflexive Critique of Botanical Nomenclature and Terminology. Ohlburg's Critique unfolds as a diary-cum-memoir. He combines reflections on the scientific method with an account of his present-day experiences in—and his childhood memories from—his family's summer house in the Ammerland district, in Lower Saxony. His narrative also encompasses his school days and then his university studies during the rise of German fascism, his family's perilous emigration to England to escape the Nazis, and his career in academia, at the end of which he comes to question the value and even the legitimacy of the scientific work for which he has received considerable professional acclaim.

Modick provides further insights into the origins and personal significance of Moss in an autobiographical essay titled "I Didn't Want to Be a Writer" [3]. Here the author recounts how, in 1982, while writing copy for an advertising agency and oscillating between his scholarly work and his first unsuccessful attempts at fiction-writing, he finds himself sitting by a quarry pond on a late-summer afternoon and looking at the moss growing near the water's edge. Suddenly, the moss appears to him as a symbol or image of his own difficulty in reconciling, as he puts it, "abstraction and literary language," and he simultaneously realizes that the only way to address a personal problem of this sort is indirectly, by telling a story about something else. As it turned out, telling that story—in other words, drafting Moss—took Modick a full year, and not only because he had to research the relevant botanical literature. What is more, the project was the first in which he made a real effort to achieve "literary discipline," which the author defines as an outgrowth of "the ambition to write in such a way that, to the greatest degree possible, no superfluous matter is included, and every word remains equally close to the conceptual center of the whole" [4]. Just as striking are Modick's remarks about resonances between the text's concluding events and his circumstances at the time: "And so, without really wanting to or even knowing that he has, the old man arrives at a new, strange and yet familiar language—the language of literature. The end of this fictional old man was thus my literary beginning" [5].

And what a beginning! Moss is a sophisticated, adventurous text, linguistically, narratively, and philosophically, and engaging with the book launches the translator on a corresponding intellectual adventure. This work features frequent, often kaleidoscopic shifts of style and voice. It also contains multiple flashbacks, passages in which the protagonist's romantic encounters are refracted through botanical terminology, dream scenarios and other episodes that create what narratologists call metalepsis, in which different narrative levels become entangled, and probing comments on the relations between scientific knowledge and everyday experience, between the increasing specialization of science and an older Goethean ideal of science as comprehensive and unifying, and between scientific institutions and their broader sociopolitical contexts. 

In the process, Moss interweaves modernist and postmodernist themes and techniques—to extend the argument outlined by Dirk Frank in Narrative Gedankenspiele (Narrative Thought Experiments), a 2001 critical study that discusses other novels by Modick [6]. On the one hand, Moss's modeling of how present-day perceptions can involuntarily trigger memories of the past evokes the modernist methods of Marcel Proust, even as Ohlburg's detailed reflections on the nature of perception itself, the sense of smell in particular, call to mind the early-twentieth-century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On the other hand, Ohlburg's critical engagement with the discourse and methods of science suggests the incredulity toward metanarratives—the distrust of grand explanatory schemes—that Jean-François Lyotard describes as the hallmark of postmodernism. This adventurous intermixture of modernist and postmodernist emphases is especially fitting in a text that pushes back against fragmentation or splitting in various domains and instead imagines how science might be reconnected with lived experience, names with places, adulthood with childhood, human communities with the larger communities of organisms among which Homo sapiens figures as just one form of life among many others. 

As these last remarks suggest, Moss takes the translator—and readers—on another kind of adventure as well. This other adventure has become ever more challenging, and urgent, since Modick's book first appeared: namely, the adventure of reconsidering humans' place in the wider world of living beings. Published in the years between the partial meltdown of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the US in March, 1979, and the more catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in April, 1986, Moss, like Christa Wolf's 1987 novel Störfall (Accident), can be read as a pioneering work of ecofiction. This is a text that insistently explores, through its forms as well as its themes, humans' impacts on and interrelations with other living beings—and the larger ecosystems on which all life depends. Ohlburg's reassessment of his own earlier attempts to distance himself from the world via dispassionate observation, or the scientific gaze; his rethinking of classificatory schemes as instruments of control, means of domination; his rejection of his earlier skepticism about plants' responsiveness to humans and his growing interest in both plant individuals and plant cultures; his reflections about how he has lost the child's ability to see mountain ranges, the subtle qualities of chimney smoke and sunlight, and the dormant vitality that animates forests even when they are stiffened by frost—all of this is part of the exciting ecofictional adventure on which Moss invites its readers to embark, from the very first pages of the book.

[1] Joela Jacobs and Isabel Kranz, “Einleitung: Das literarische Leben der Pflanzen: Poetiken des Botanischen,” Literatur für Leser 17, no. 2 (2017): 85-89. (Introduction to a special journal issue on “The Literary Life of Plants: Agency, Languages and the Poetics of the Vegetal.”)

[2] For an experimental writer’s take on the cultural variability of the concept of person, see Thalia Field’s Personhood (New York: New Directions, 2021). I discuss Field’s engagement with questions of more-than-human personhood in David Herman, “Experimental Writing as Autoethnography: Thalia Field’s Decentered Stories of Personhood,” Transpositiones, forthcoming. For an early and highly generative ethnographic account of personhood beyond the human, see A. I. Hallowell’s “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Culture in History, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Octagon Books, 1981 [1960]). Hallowell writes: “While in all cultures ‘persons’ comprise one of the major classes of objects to which the self must become oriented, this category of being is by no means limited to human beings . . . Since in the Ojibwa universe there are many kinds of person-objects which are other than human but have the same ontological status, these, of course, fall into the same ethnoseme as human beings and into the ‘animate’ linguistic class” (21; 24).

[3] Klaus Modick. “Dichter wollte ich nicht werden,” in Ein Bild und tausend Worte (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2016), 14-36.

[4] Modick, “Dichter wollte ich nicht werden,” 24. My translation.

[5] Modick, “Dichter wollte ich nicht werden,” 23. My translation.

[6] Dirk Frank, Narrative Gedankenspiele: Der metafiktionale Roman zwischen Modernismus und Postmodernismus (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2001).

Now a prolific, best-selling novelist, as well as an accomplished critic, essayist, poet, and translator in his own right, Klaus Modick has been awarded numerous literary prizes, writing residencies, and guest lectureships. It is thus all the more surprising that, although Modick's writing has been translated into multiple languages, Moss is the first English translation of one of his works.

David Herman’s translation of “Ein russischer Sommer” (“A Russian Summer”), a short story by Gabriele Wohmann about literal and figurative fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, appeared in the Columbia Journal in 2021. The author of a chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (2020) on “Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities,” he is currently working on a collection of posthumanist fables, one of which, “The Fence,” was recently published in Landlocked Magazine.