The Hustler Read Online
ISBN #: | Softcover | 1-4010-4491-3 |
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Contents
The first edition of my translation of John Henry Mackay’s The Hustler appeared in 1985 (Alyson Publications, Boston; Sasha Alyson was still the owner-publisher). It has been out-of-print for several years, so that a new edition now seems called for—along with a revision of the translation, for in an attempt to make the novel “flow more smoothly” the editor had trimmed my rather literal translation. I had forgotten how much until once more, after many years, I compared that version with the original German. And—I should add—my acquaintance in the meantime with Mackay’s writings showed me a number of errors in translation. For example, in my attempt to make the story clear I often put the names of the characters in place of the pronouns “he” and “him.” I discovered that I sometimes got them wrong, so I have now left Mackay’s pronouns in and trust the reader to straighten them out. Nor did I earlier trust the reader to know the distinction between the German personal pronouns: the familiar “Du” (used between close friends) and the more formal “Sie.” Each must be translated as “you,” but when the characters in the novel refer to the distinction, I have now given the German words.
The result is a return to a more literal translation—not a word-for-word translation, but a closer adherence to the original text as well as to Mackay’s own writing style: short paragraphs, repetitions designed to pace the reader through the story and heighten the suspense—so that the present edition is nearly four percent longer than the first. In short, having immersed myself in Mackay’s writings over the years—and having followed The Hustler with five other volumes of Mackay translations—I have come to appreciate the force of his personal style, which is superficially simple, but carefully constructed—and very effective.
Beginning in 1905, the Scotch-German writer John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), using the pseudonym Sagitta, began a literary campaign for the recognition of man-boy love with several works in various genres; the first were suppressed by the government, but all were published underground in 1913. The relative freedom of the Weimar Republic allowed him to reprint those works in a one-volume edition in 1924. Two years later he followed this with his last work as Sagitta, the long novel Der Puppenjunge (which I have translated as The Hustler; the title will be explained in my afterword). All the Sagitta writings were reprinted in a two-volume edition in 1979 (simultaneously published by the Verlag rosa Winkel, Berlin, and the Verlag der Mackay-Gesellschaft, Freiburg/Breisgau). I first became acquainted with the novel in this edition and, encouraged by Kurt Zube, secretary of the Mackay-Gesellschaft, spent several months translating it while on a sabbatical leave in Munich in 1982-1983. I followed that translation with a number of articles on Mackay’s writings as well as other translations, and Mackay has continued to be a special interest.
When a new edition of Der Puppenjunge was planned for 1999, I was asked to write an afterword for it. It was this that prompted me to return to the novel, and I was once again reminded of its timely theme—and Mackay’s passionate, yet objective treatment of it. I wanted to make it available again in an English edition worthy of the original.
Thus I hope that the numerous readers who enjoyed the first edition of The Hustler will also want to revisit the story in its new appearance. I believe they will discover further depths to the story and appreciate more its historical context. And of course I hope that this edition will introduce Mackay’s unique novel to a new generation of readers. In our time, which has demonized intergenerational love, Mackay’s novel of “a nameless love from Friedrichstrasse” is the classic document of the agonies, triumphs, and defeats of this love “like any other love.”
Hubert Kennedy
“If one of them would once fall in love with me, then I would really take
advantage of him!” (Saying of the hustler and pimp Arthur Klemke, called “the
refined Atze,” from Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.)
*
“Trotter, trotter . . . toujours trotter!” (Saying of the Petit Jesus Andre Devie from
the great boulevards in Paris.) [“Petit Jesus” was a term for a young hustler in
Paris in the 1920s. HK]
1
Punctually on schedule the four o’clock afternoon train from the northern part of Germany rolled into the Stettin Train Station.
The travelers streamed out, crowding and jamming the gates, then dispersed—to be met or not—into the large room, finally to be drawn out in thin streams from the various exits, and to submerge and disappear in the life outside.
The hall was again empty, as it had been a half hour earlier.
Only in its middle did there still stand, as if lost, a boy about fifteen or sixteen years old, looking around indecisively. He wore a gray, wrinkled, ill-fitting suit, heavy boots, and a yellow sports cap, and in his hand he carried a simple cardboard box wrapped around many times with string.
Eventually he seemed to have found what he was looking for. He resolutely walked up to the hand luggage checkroom, handed over the check piece, and, when he wanted to pay right away, was promptly—for he was now in Berlin—growled at: “When you pick it up!” A minute later he was standing at the entrance to the train station, the great city and its boisterous life before him.
He was again hesitant and still expectant. For what he saw here—the flood of human activity, the confusion of vehicles of all kinds, the noise and bluster, all immersed in a haze of smoke and the humidity of the spring afternoon—was completely new to him and stunned him.
But not for too long.
Once more, he pulled himself together, turned instinctively to the right, and resolutely set foot on the pavement of Berlin, which from that moment, for the duration of the coming year, was to be his true home.
*
Letting himself be pressed and shoved, he reached a street so long that it seemed never to end and turned into it, stopping in front of every fourth shop. Driven and pushed along again, he eventually halted spellbound before the show window of a men’s clothing store. There, among an enormous quantity of splendid things, were straw hats. He must have something like that, he felt. But which?—the one with the thick ribbing or the one with the colorful band? The price written by each was the same—three marks.
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