As I was thinking about Shakespeare and German translations the other day, I remembered a book that I found while I was on my mission Romeo und Julia: Ruhrpott, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet taking place not only in Germany, but in this particular area of Germany known as the Ruhrgebiet or Ruhrpott. I spent 18 months of my mission living in the Ruhrgebiet, so I really enjoy this book.
The Ruhrgebiet is the industrial heart of Germany, with coal mines, steel mills, foundries, etc. There are a lot of large cities pretty close together, and as such industrial areas do, it attracts a lot of immigrants and foreigners. Particularly in Germany, after WWII there was a large Guest-worker program bringing in workers from other countries since most of Germany's men did not return from the war.
Because of the coal mines and steel mills as well as the many immigrants, the German spoken in the Ruhrgebiet is a little different from standard German. Immigrants could not pronounce or conjugate German properly, and a lot of words get 'slanged' or shortened to facilitate work in the mines when you don't always have the luxury of time to be able to enunciate clearly.
Not only is this book written in this dialect of German, which is mostly incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the Ruhrgebiet, it is set in Wanne-Eickel, a town in the Ruhrgebiet and stars Rom-Jo Czervinski, whose father is Polish and runs the local Bratwurst stand, and Yülle Özmir,whose father is Turkish and runs the local Döner stand. As members of different minority groups vying for the same market stall the two families have become rivals until .... well, you know the story.
This book is fun. It's short, only 95 pages of simple poetry written in this dialect, telling the story from a third person narrator's perspective rather than an actual rewriting of the text. What I find most interesting is that, while it takes place in Germany, it is not about Germans. That just speaks volumes about the racial and political makeup of Germany as a whole, but more especially this region. But the story survives, because the basic story is so beautiful: two young people who shouldn't love each other but do, doing anything they can, despite their parents feud to be together.
That is what makes Shakespeare so great -everyone everywhere can find at least something they can relate to. And the plots and characters are so simple and complex, so universal that they can be transposed just about anywhere or anywhen and he play can stand on it's own. There will always be people who dislike other people and there will always be people falling in love despite what others think is 'proper'.
