Nobel literature prize winner Herta Mueller grew up in Romania. She spoke German at home, and Romanian at school. As a result her writing is infused with mixed metaphors. Not as in “he careened between lovers till his private life went completely off the rails.” No, Mueller’s metaphors are linguistically mixed. She connects Romanian images and metaphors with German ones. That’s what she did with the title of one of her novels: Hertztier (which literally means “heart animal”). That’s an invented German word with roots in a piece of Romanian wordplay. The Romanian for heart is inimă and for animal is animală — the words sound quite similar. In German, hertz and tier don’t sound at all similar. That suggests that in every language, thoughts and ideas cluster uniquely and somewhat randomly. Yet if, like Mueller, you’re bilingual, you’re more likely to transpose word clusters, punning and otherwise, from one language to the next . Of course, by the time an expression like inimă-animală is translated into English (via German) it loses resonance and meaning. Which is why translator Michael Hoffman avoided it completely. He called the novel The Land of Green Plums.

Also, a conversation with Harry Campbell, the author of Whatever Happened to Tanganika? The Place Names that History Left Behind. This interview is long and full of infamous, and some less well-known, episodes from colonial history. Typically, colonists like to leave their mark in the form of a place or two, whether they were British imperial officers, unscrupulous Belgians or Soviet true believers. The names, of course, rarely stick. Local populations have a healthy disrespect for the monikers of their former masters. But this leaves some people nostalgic for the old names, and others wondering what those names, and their replacements, reveal. I’m struck by how important place names are to people, even in cases where people have never visited the name in question. Much of comes down to power and influence. And occasionally, money. A shorter version of the interview ran on The World’s regular broadcast; it generated a ton of posts and comments. Post your own at this site or here.

Finally in this week’s podcast, a profile the Japanese interpreter for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Kenji Nimura is actually trilingual — he speaks Spanish, as well as Japanese and English — which comes in handy in Major League Baseball, where those three languages are most used.

• BBC profile
• Nobelprize.org

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.

JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.

BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.

SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.

HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.

SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.

HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.

SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.

HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.

SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.

LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.

SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.

MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.

SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.

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