When Kim de l’Horizon won the German Book Prize for Blood Book in 2022, it sparked a nationwide debate about the limitations of the German language. The autofictional novel, which explores de l’Horizon’s childhood and their relationship with their grandmother as she descended into dementia, is deliberately untethered from conventional form and language.
In following a non-binary character, de l’Horizon sought ways to “de-gender” German, a language so rigid in gendering its nouns that you have to remember that carrots are female but all dogs are male. English, by contrast, has never faced this problem: the singular “they” has been in use since the 14th century and nouns are not assigned gender.
The young protagonist of Blood Book often reflects on their gender: “The child wonders. When is it time to decide? Whether to become a man or a woman? […] The child knows: it can’t become a man. […] But the child can’t become a woman either.” Reading the novel, with its extended meditations on nonbinary identity, one can’t help but wonder how all of this works in German.
Part of the book’s acclaim in its home country stems from de l’Horizon’s refiguring of the German language, a quality inevitably diminished in the English translation, simply because our grammar doesn’t face the same constraints. The result feels, in part, lost in translation.
Blood Book by Kim de l’Horizon, translated by Jamie Lee Searle is out now (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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