Franz Josef Degenhardt. Deutsche Lieder—German Songs. 
Translated from German into English by Stephan Lhotzky. 
Bremen: edition lumière, 2016. 260 pp. 

Every facing-page bilingual translation makes its readers 
into far more attentive translation critics than they might have 
otherwise been. In the case of poetry, we are even more critical, 
since it is so difficult to walk the tightrope between accuracy and 
beauty. In the case of songs, as in this collection, there is the 
added challenge of singability with the melody, metric structure, 
and rhymes of the original. This collection is a worthy attempt at 
achieving this balance. However, in many instances, the English 
renditions sound awkward and don’t adequately reflect the 
idiomatic German originals.

Franz Josef Degenhardt was one of the fathers of the German 
Liedermacher movement, active on tour and in recordings (28 
albums as LPs, cassettes, and CDs) from 1962 until his death 
in 2011. He wrote some 270 songs, from which collected work 
the translator Stephan Lhotzky has selected 53, or about 20% 
of the total. They are arranged in random order, with neither a 
chronological or thematic sequence apparent. They include 
many of Degenhardt’s best-known songs, particularly from the 
five albums recorded between 1965 and 1969, a flourishing of 
productivity for the singer-songwriter.

It seems logical to ask why Degenhardt’s songs hadn’t been 
translated earlier, apart from a few isolated instances. Some of 
them, such as “Tonio Schiavo,” the ballad of the life and death of 
an Italian Gastarbeiter, recorded in 1966, not only have become 
widely appreciated classics which show up in schoolbooks now, 
but have lost almost none of their power in half a century. 

I asked Degenhardt in 1974 after a concert in Regensburg 
about touring in the USA, and he was clearly interested, but 
there was the challenge of non-German-speaking audiences. We 
discussed the idea of touring mainly to the German departments 
of several big American universities with students interested in 
the Liedermacher movement, then in full swing. I wondered about 
the sponsorship by some organization such as Munich’s Goethe-
Institut, but the idea never came to any fruition.

Degenhardt’s gift as a songwriter in German is extremely 
hard to render in English, not least because of the cultural and 
political context of his songs, which are often about current 
events and attitudes. If the Anglo-American reader is unaware 
of these contexts, the songs inevitably lose some of their impact. 

Reviews



Delos    171

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.


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