2023-06-05 10:01:39
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As a singer, Liat Himmelheber is well known to music lovers. Now she has excelled in another area.
The mezzo-soprano Liat Himmelheber has been well known to music lovers for a long time – as Dorabella on the Augsburg theatre, in various roles at the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, as an oratorio singer and as an interpreter of modern music, such as works by Aribert Reimann. As a singing teacher, she is at the Musikhochschule Nürnberg and privately in Augsburg employed.
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Now Himmelheber appears more and more on another, namely literary stage. After she and her husband, the translator and author Andreas Nohl, translated Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller “Gone with the Wind” into a new German language version, she presented her own work as a translator – first Katherine Mansfield’s short novel “Die Aloe” and now stories from Virginia Woolf. They were published in the small, fine Nocturnes series that Nohl publishes with Steidl-Verlag.
They are whimsical stories by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf said she wrote these little-known lyrics just for her amusement, as a distraction (from what?), sometimes in one go. There are bizarre stories like the one regarding the old woman who wants to take over her brother’s inheritance and only finds it with the help of a clever parrot, or regarding a man who says goodbye to the world with his mania for collecting. Or little things like that of the moth that dances and settles in the head of the writer. The famous Mrs. Dalloway is also there, although not as the protagonist of an entire novel, but rather as a background character who invites you to an evening party. There, their guests deal extensively with their doubts and fears and they are quite funny regarding it.
One reads these texts with pleasure, even with a little trepidation, as always with Virginia Woolf, because a lot of subtle things lurk behind all the bourgeois goodness and banality. As a translator, Liat Himmelheber takes on Woolf’s laconic style of language, sometimes lets her caricature her characters ironically, but then quickly chats carefree once more, so that the small stories retain their lightness. It is said that music and language are closely connected, and that is evident in Himmelheber’s translations. As a singer, she obviously suits the rhythmic, musical flow of Virginia Woolf’s language, and lets it flow in the German translation as well. For her, translating is nice, quiet, concentrated work, says Liat Himmelheber regarding her new field of activity. So you can probably expect more texts from her.
Virginia Woolf: The widow and the parrot, Steidl-Verlag, 128 pages, 18 euros.
1685980556
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