Feuchtgebiete (English title: Wetlands), by Charlotte Roche, was first published in Germany in 2008 and immediately sparked a national outcry and media frenzy. It was the most talked about novel at the time and before long, Wetlands was awarded the title ‘Book of the Year 2008’ and translated into 27 languages.
The author Charlotte Roche, a woman of British descent who grew up in Germany, succeeded in breaking and polemicising feminist and sexual taboos. The Guardian newspaper stated, in a book review: “If you ever wondered what you’d be like if you weren’t shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you” (Ellmann, 2009). Its explicit content sparked a lot of controversy and heated debate about whether or not the novel should be considered a literary or pornographic work of art.
Wetlands seeks to challenge mainstream ideas about the female body and women’s obsession with body hygiene. Female protagonist Helen Memel ends up in a hospital
proctological ward after an intimate shaving accident, which resulted in her having an anal fissure. Confined to her hospital bed, she is immersed in her own thoughts and ponders over her dysfunctional upbringing, sexuality, body parts, and divorced parents. She takes the reader on a fascinating, and at times stomach-churning, journey. Helen is fascinated by bodily fluids such as period blood, and it angers her that society depicts women’s private body parts as disgusting and ‘unclean’. She is a teenager who openly admits to masturbating with food items, and is not too shy to share her sexual desires, her experiences of sleeping with female sex workers, as well as using her own bodily secretions as body perfume because, contrary to the status quo, she believes female sexual organs to be beautiful and not disgusting. She voices her anger over not being taken seriously by doctors when she decides to undergo permanent sterilisation on her eighteenth birthday and describes how she felt belittled by the doctors, who kept on insisting that she was too young to be making such a life-changing decision of that scale.
In short, the book does not shy away from addressing topics that would make most people blush. Helen, who is still suffering from her parents’ divorce, sees her hospital stay as a potential opportunity to bring her parents back together, and intentionally prolongs her stay by thrusting the lower pedal of her hospital bed into her anus. She is immediately sent into emergency surgery and asks the male nurse Robin to inform her parents. Unable to get hold of her parents, Helen’s quest to further gain her parents’ attention and prospect of a possible romantic reunion fails as her parents have stopped visiting altogether.
As the plot unfolds, it transpires that Helen is traumatised from her dysfunctional childhood, following an attempted suicide by her mother. However, it remains unclear to the
imagination. She calls her parents, only to be redirected to their answering machines.
Disillusioned, she fantasises about the male nurse, Robin, and falls in love with him. Robin is fascinated by Helen, who continuously tries to draw him into her world. The story concludes with an open ending: after Helen is released from hospital, she asks Robin if she can live with him. At the end of the novel, Helen leaves the hospital together with Robin; however, the reader is left in the dark as to whether their relationship is successful and if Helen has managed to finally find the love she so desperately longs for (Roche, 2008).
The author Charlotte Roche is a British-German TV presenter, actress and author. She was born to British parents (her father was an engineer and her mother a political activist) on 18th March 1978 in High-Wycombe, England. Her family later moved to Germany, where she received her secondary education. She discontinued her studies at the age of 17 before completing the German equivalent of the high school diploma. Whilst at school, she gained her first acting experiences in the school’s drama society and founded a girl’s garage rock band together with three other girls. Charlotte was known to be quite the rebel and even shaved her hair off at some point! She was reported to have engaged in self-harming behaviour including excessive experimentation with drugs. After leaving school prematurely to pursue her acting and musical ambitions, Charlotte would regularly publish her own performances on YouTube, where she would engage in activities considered ‘provocative’ by the status quo, such as stripping, exposing her armpit hair, or painting with blood (Schulz, 2017).
Charlotte had her big breakthrough when she was cast as the TV presenter for the German music channel VIVA, winning various television awards. She further rose to fame after discussing sexual fantasies with celebrities including Uma Thurman and Kylie Minogue, during one of her talk shows. At the time of the publication of Wetlands in 2008, Charlotte
Roche was already a well-known TV celebrity in Germany, which definitely facilitated the promotion of the book. The main events of the novel, such as the protagonist’s desire to reunite her divorced parents, are inspired by Charlotte Roche’s own life. Roche’s own parents are known to have divorced when Roche was five years old. The book comprises autobiographical elements; however, Charlotte Roche has posited that she is not as bold or daring as Helen, thus making it a fictive novel. Her second book Schossgebete (English title: Wrecked) followed in 2011, which draws on a traumatic event in her life: the death of her three brothers, who succumbed to a car accident on their way to her wedding in 2001. Recently, Roche and her husband have been hosting their own Podcast, where they talk openly about the ups and downs of their marriage, not shying away from discussing their extra-marital affairs and decision to have an open marriage (Schulz, 2017).
Despite its controversy and numerous negative critiques, the fact that Feuchtgebiete was such a success in Germany bears testament to the fact that it managed to hit a nerve in German society. The English translation went by the name of Wetlands and was translated by the translator Tim Mohr in 2009. Even though the novel was somewhat successful in the English-speaking world and adapted as a film in 2013, it did not spark as much of a frenzy as it did in Germany. Reviews in the Anglo-American context were a lot more critical. The Chinese translation of the Taiwanese book version was translated in 2009 by translator Tang Wei (唐薇) and titled Chaoshi-Didai （潮濕地帶）.
This research will analyse, contextualise and compare paratextual elements of the German original publication with their Anglo-American and Taiwanese counterparts in their English and Chinese translations. The promotional value and ideological functionality of
strategically used to promote ideological norms in translation with the aim of political intervention in different cultural contexts. Furthermore, the thesis seeks to answer what insights we can gain from paratextual analysis about cultural norms, political power relations and ideologies in the different target cultures, and how can these findings help explain why the book was not as successful in Taiwan and the Anglo-American world as in Germany.
Since Charlotte Roche was already a well-known celebrity in Germany at the time of publication, emphasis will also be placed on the authorial image created in the various paratexts presented and how this could have influenced the reception of the book in the German, Anglo-American and Chinese speaking worlds. The first part of the research section is concerned with the study of peritextual and the second with epitextual material.