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But Lhotzky has chosen not to load up his translations with 
notes, which was probably wise. This is not a scholarly edition 
but is clearly intended to be a singable collection. Whether that 
objective succeeds depends entirely on the reader’s familiarity 
with the music; Lhotzky does point out that many of the songs 
are available on YouTube through Degenhardt’s comprehensive 
website.

This book includes not only a thoughtful and insightful foreword 
by Lhotzky but also an extremely useful appendix listing the 
song contents (titles, not entire lyrics) from all of Degenhardt’s 
recorded albums over his fifty-year career. Degenhardt was a 
politically engaged observer of Germany through its postwar ups 
and downs, not only the years of the Great Coalition of CDU and 
SPD, but up to and including reunification in 1990, after which he 
recorded nine CDs. Lhotzky includes only five song translations 
from this late period.

Traduttore traditore (the translator is a traitor) is no less true 
now than when it was first expressed in the context of translating 
Dante into French, and yet one would not therefore ask that 
translators stop trying. Lhotzky’s attempts are a valuable service 
in sharing a good cross-section of one of Germany’s most 
important Liedermacher with an Anglo-American audience.

     Richard Rundell

David Trueba. Blitz. Translated from Spanish by John Cullen. 
New York: Other, 2016. 176 pages.

“Eventually I went back to sleep, and memory of the years 
we’d shared rolled through my mind, images evoked by nostalgia 
or spite,” reflects Beto, the narrator and protagonist of David 
Trueba’s 2015 novel Blitz, as he shares a Munich hotel room with 
the woman whose infidelity he has just discovered. Nostalgia or 
spite remain, generally, the underlying political message of this 
text, as some combination of these emotions leaves our narrator 
in a self-pitying quagmire. Explaining his decision to skip his 
flight back to Spain and stay in Germany after the landscape 
architecture conference that has brought them there, Beto tells 
us, “My inertia could be understood as petty revenge.” Against 
his girlfriend, certainly. But, on a wider level, his inertia is a 
protest against the modern economy. The Eurozone crisis is the 
inevitable backdrop, the necessary explanation for this novel of 
crash, failure, and drift.



172    Reviews

In the first half of what the Spanish publisher Anagrama 
Editorial marketed in 2015 as a “tragicomedia romántica,” a label 
Other Press has stuck with, our narrator travels to Munich with his 
gorgeous, failing-actress girlfriend. He is a more-or-less flailing 
landscape architect, living on the verge of poverty following the 
collapse of Spanish spending. She is his sidekick in his Madrid 
“firm,” a spare room in their apartment, where he designs 
projects that will never be built. For the Munich competition, he 
has designed a park for adults full of hourglasses, with the idea 
that they would transform the inevitable passage of time into 
something visual: “It would teach you to appreciate what three 
minutes were.” He discovers that his girlfriend has been cheating 
on him with her Uruguayan musician ex; he stays on in Germany 
for a few days, breaking his cellphone, checking his empty bank 
account, pushing a more successful Catalan colleague off-stage 
during a roundtable, and sleeping with a German woman twice 
his age, Helga. She arranges for his return flight, during which 
the Catalan architect offers him a job at his firm in Barcelona. 
He moves there, lives with a sexy, self-described “vampire” 
of a lesbian, sleeps with girls while keeping his distance, and 
eventually, impulsively, flies to Mallorca on New Year’s Eve to 
reunite with Helga.

Trueba (born in Madrid in 1969) has moved with success 
between cinema, literature, and journalism. Indeed, he has 
recently announced that Blitz will be adapted as a film. In all three 
areas, his work has been heavy on humor and heavy on leftism. 
Even while announcing the adaptation of Blitz, he explained that 
he bases his fiction on real life and uses it to solve real problems. 
However, a few years earlier, discussing his 2008 Saber Perder, 
the author said that he doesn’t try to do sociology in his books. All 
the same, the reader can decide whether it is politically engaged 
or merely heavy-handed to announce eighteen paragraphs into 
the novel: “The financial crisis had accustomed us all to a pretty 
ridiculous level of insecurity, in that we accepted degrading jobs 
and subhuman salaries in order to feel we were still stakeholders 
in the system and not yet reduced to beggary.” And the reader 
might judge, too, that this description of Beto is sociological: 
“One more Spanish immigrant in search of a promising future 
far from the tragedies of his country.” While we’re at it, it might 
be called “heavy-handed” foreshadowing to christen Helga (the 
Munich woman who will soon sleep with the young foreigner)’s 
cat Fassbinder. 

Debate has buzzed within the Spanish literary community 
around the so-called novela de la crisis. Critics fume over the 
role of literature today, and the need for objectivity, anonymity, 
and collectivity; authors like Marta Sanz, Pablo Guitiérrez, and 



Delos    173

Rafael Chirbes may be hailed as the great novelists of the crisis. 
Spanish disenchantment with the European and liberal dreams 
has sometimes translated into narratives that situate personal 
failure within larger political failure, so that sexuality, work, and 
nation are simply the devastated casualties of the recession. 
Critics like David Becerra have dismissed the so-called novela 
de la crisis as a nostalgic, hence conservative, ode to the way 
things were.

And in a way, Blitz is indeed nostalgic. Though Beto dismisses 
sentimentality as an “egocentric […] nationalism of the self,” 
let us consider his theory of landscaping: “We need a mirror, a 
healing mirror, we need to fall in love with ourselves again, with 
the concrete, human fact of us, however imperfect they might 
be.” Or how he remembers his girlfriend: “On stormy-weather 
days, when the economy was staining everything with winning 
and losing, Marta was my refuge and my shelter.” Or his opinion 
on emoticons: “She knew I hated messages with emoticons and 
text symbols, irritating substitutes for real emotion.” Beto is a 
difficult narrator to like; he is self-pitying and self-indulgent, and 
a self-important and unappreciated genius  buoyed by having a 
girlfriend who, he reminds us constantly, has a perfect body. Not 
only is she lovely, but she is self-abnegating: “I’ve already given 
up my dreams, and it’s enough for one of us to do that, she’d 
say on the days when I let my discouragement show.” Though 
Marta found Kiarostami films boring, for instance, he “assured 
her more than once that agitation was only an attempt to fill the 
essential void.” Well, then. On the other hand, Helga is a far more 
interesting and insightful character, weighing down Beto’s jejune 
recriminations with wise and wizened sobriety, and even Marta-of-
the-apple-ass is, finally, out of his orbit. The Catalan landscaper 
turns out to be his real refuge and shelter. Ultimately, Beto’s 
sophomoric anger against the Catalan, the Uruguayan, and the 
beauty is misplaced, leaving us with a more ambiguous moral 
accounting. The only sure enemies, it seems, are capitalism and 
time itself. 

Having dragged his suitcase to a park, Beto takes a picture 
of the suitcase on the grass and another of the building façades 
around him. “Saving the photos was like making a map in which I 
wouldn’t feel so lost,” he reflects. Indeed, pictures play a large role 
in this short book. Beto masturbates to old phone pictures of Marta; 
Helga points to old photographs of herself; Beto avoids photos of 
her family. He takes a photo of her postcard from Mallorca, and 
uses it to find her; he remembers taking photographs, with Marta, 
of el Palacio Real in the snow. His mother receives a digital 
photo frame for Christmas; Beto’s rival Alex receives occasional 
photographs from Helga. Photographs give the past weight, in 



174    Reviews

contrast to the shapelessness and drift of the present. In this 
way, Beto’s compulsion to depict is a kind of sentimentality. This 
sentimental compulsion to record and hence preserve spills over 
into the physical book itself.  On the cover of the Spanish edition 
is a drawing, purportedly a self-portrait, of Beto moving out of 
his and Marta’s apartment, scratching his head, lanky, sloppy, 
in a sweatshirt, facing empty boxes and boxes and boxes. Berta 
Risueño’s drawings and photographs add to the spontaneous, 
flighty feeling of the text. She gives us blueprint and 3D-rendering 
style illustrations of the hourglass park and, later, an hourglass 
phone application, as well as reproductions of Otto Dix paintings 
and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government fresco. 
The reader can thereby allow Beto (and Trueba) to skip the 
heavy lifting of ekphrasis, much as he skips the heavy lifting of 
describing or reproducing conversation.

We can thank John Cullen for bringing into English a 
contemporary Spanish author of such fame and this exemplary 
artifact of the Eurozone crisis. The English occasionally reads a 
bit awkwardly; Beto refers to the “friendliness and naturalness of 
her [Helga’s] manner.” However, this is no failing of Cullen; Beto 
narrates in a mixture of pretension and youthfulness, using the 
hoity noun “trato” in the original. Similarly, another sentence reads 
“Although I ventured a courteous nod in their direction, I preferred 
to descend the stairs with a certain haste” (in the original: “Yo 
les dirigí un gesto educado, pero preferí bajar por la escalera 
con cierta prisa.”) In this case, the English comes off as equally 
formal, contributing to his aloofness and superiority. Also, Cullen 
might have kept the name of Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia and 
the internationally beloved food tortilla in Spanish, rather than 
rendering a “Queen Sofia” and an “omelet.” Aside from these 
small faults, there is the larger question of translating Trueba’s 
humor. A running joke of the novel’s first half—the narrator calls 
his rival Alex Ripollés Alex Gilipollez (“gilipollez,” which John 
Cullen glosses, means “bullshit”) —may or may not be funny at 
all for an Anglophone audience.

It is no surprise that Blitz is being optioned for the big screen. 
It is visual, sexual, and comic. It functions on the surface, largely, 
with nearly all its profundity offered up in conversation and very, 
very little in private meditation. It is full of jokes, slapstick and 
otherwise, and full of easily digested anti-capitalism. “Blitz” 
means lightning bolt; the text revolves around hourglasses; 
and its theme, eventually, is time, and the loss of time. For a 
novel about such young people—or perhaps because it is about 
such young people—it seems constantly afraid of age, while 
simultaneously yearning for depth and permanence. Anagrama 



Delos    175

Editorial published Blitz with Beto confused among his boxes 
on the cover; the lovely Other Press jacket shows an hourglass 
against a black background, flecks of gold floating away. At the 
cinema, we will see which Blitz takes the starring role: la novela 
de la crisis, la tragicomedia romántica, or the one of lightning 
bolts and hourglasses, of loss and dislocation.

     Ann Manov

Dror Abend-David, ed. Media and Translation: An 
Interdisciplinary Approach. New York/London/New Delhi/
Sidney: Bloomsbury, 2014. 365 pp.

Dror Abend-David, the editor of this fine collection of research 
papers, has been able to bring together in a collaborative effort 
23 translation studies scholars from eight countries. He has also 
provided clearly-worded one-page introductory notes for each of 
the seven parts of this translation studies anthology. The book 
is about audiovisual translation in its multiple and all-pervasive 
manifestations. 

The three chapters in Part I (Film Translation and Adaptation) 
elaborate on the classical Jakobsonian L1-to-L2 translation 
paradigm by suggesting a more nuanced methodology to analyze 
film as a text in the wide sociocultural sense. The methodology 
takes account of elements in another language or languages (that 
is, L2 in Jakobson’s schema) such as idiolect, dialect (regional 
and social), peculiarities of style and diction, slang/jargon, and 
foreign accents incorporated in a film. These “extra” features 
are described as L3 (language 3) components of the film’s text. 
This novel, more nuanced approach to film translation analysis 
is introduced briefly in the opening Chapter 1 and illustrated in 
detail in Chapter 2, which compares Quentin Tarantino’s multi-
lingual film Inglourious Basterds (2009) with its representations 
in the form of dubbed versions in German, Spanish and Italian. 
The three translations illustrate a complex simultaneous interplay 
of interlingual, intralingual, and semiotic factors and confirm the 
researchers’ initial hypothesis that there is no one universal 
solution: the final unique mix of languages in the dubbed version 
of an L3-saturated film is determined by the specific source text 
of the film in its varying sociocultural settings and the professional 
competence of the translator/s. Chapter 3 further develops the 
general theme of Part I by examining the way in which Tsotsitaal 
(a South African township variety of slang) is represented in 
the English and French subtitled and dubbed versions of Oliver 
Schmitz’s South African film Hijack Stories (2000). 


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