The project didn’t unfold as translations usually do, with a publisher first obtaining rights and then finding a translator, so it was more complicated.” “I then peddled it around to publishers, but there were issues about how to go about getting translation rights. “I first met Marcel as a child at gallery openings and events and we became friends, and I showed him the book and we began talking about illustrations for it,” Zwirner said. I still feel terrible about that!”īy summer’s end, Zwirner had completed a draft, and he contacted Dzama, an artist associated with David Zwirner Gallery in New York, which is owned by the translator’s father. One thing I feel bad about is that I had difficulty propping open the German copy of the novel I was working with, and I tore it apart so that I could isolate the pages.

I translated eight or 10 pages a day, and spent six or seven hours each day hunched over my computer. “I had limited time, since I knew I’d have little time or energy for it when school started again. “It was a somewhat daunting challenge, but I wrote it quite quickly,” he said. Realizing that Momo had long been out of print in the U.S., and eager to sharpen his German skills, the 18-year-old decided to embark on a new translation of the novel. That auspiciously placed copy inspired Zwirner’s summer plan. “I was trying to figure out how I should spend my summer, and I noticed a random copy of a German edition of Momo that happened to be lying around.” “Then when I was a bit older, I read it and reread it on my own.” He said he didn’t think about the novel for years, until his freshman year in college. “My father was born in Cologne, and he read it to me in part to help my German but also because he had loved the novel as a child,” Zwirner explained.

The new edition of Momo is the brainchild of Zwirner, now 22 and a recent graduate of Yale, who first encountered the novel as a child, when his father read it to him in German. This week, McSweeney’s McMullens brings the novel back into print in this country for the first time in 25 years with a 40th-anniversary edition featuring a new translation by Lucas Zwirner and illustrations by Marcel Dzama. for a brief time in the mid-1980s, when Puffin released a translation by J. First published in 1973 in Germany (predating The Neverending Story by six years), Momo was available in the U.S. An orphaned girl blessed with an extraordinary gift for listening stands up to ominous time thieves in Momo, a fantasy novel by the late German writer Michael Ende, best known as the author of The Neverending Story.

Momo by Michael Ende