In Times of Fading Light (38 page)

Then the palm fronds will have stopped rustling. The shouting and laughter from the village and the clattering in the guesthouse kitchen will have died down. Car engines will be silent, and so will the voices coming from the radio that otherwise waft up here at all times of day from the loudspeakers in the branch of a bank that has just been opened here.

Only the creaking of the hemp ropes will still be audible. And the indifferent, distant roar of the sea.

Eugen Ruge was born in the Urals, studied mathematics in Berlin, and became a member of the research staff at the Central Institute for Geophysics in Potsdam. Before leaving the GDR for the West in 1988 he was a writer, contributing to documentaries made at the state-owned DEFA Studios. Since 1989 he has been writing and translating for theaters and broadcasters, and he teaches periodically at the Berlin University of the Arts. He was honored with the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2009 for his then still unpublished first work of prose,
In Times of Fading Light,
which won the German Book Prize and the Aspekte Literature Prize, has sold more than 450,000 copies in Germany, and has been translated into twenty languages.

Anthea Bell is a freelance translator from German and French. Her translations include works of fiction and general nonfiction, books for young people, and classics by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won a number of translation awards in the United Kingdom and the United States.

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