Die Kunst einzuschlafen: Satire (German Edition)
Contents:
Book titles OR Journal titles. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Poetic Theory in the Depression Years: In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Rent from DeepDyve Recommend. Yet understanding exactly what otherness means is highly com- plex and fraught with difficulties. The present book seeks to explore the roots of diverse understandings of otherness in Western translation theory, investigating the extent to which ideas of otherness might affect translation today.
Wiebke Sievers also asks the crucially important question as to whether or not by understanding more about theories of otherness we might arrive at a better understanding of translation and maybe even alter translation practice. She argues that there is an uneasiness about ideas of otherness, which can be seen as threatening, as alien and even as undesirable. This assumption can lead to a view of translation that seeks to elide difference and incorporate or absorb the foreign. The belief that translation might represent an act of understanding can also lead to a reduc- tion of the foreign, in the hope that this will lead to a deeper understanding of the self.
The corpus of texts selected for close study to illustrate her argument are German prose works translated into English between and , the period immediately before and after the unification of Germany.
Sein Verstummen kann als Reaktion auf die kommunistische Propagandasprache interpretiert werden. Rosalind interrupted herself, first because a drowsy fly was buzzing around her room in aimless dives, distracting her with its insistent, monotonous humming, and second, because her thoughts — though she had put as much distance be- tween them and her point of departure as possible — kept narrowing on fewer and fewer people, and if she were to continue pursuing them as before, she would soon find herself faced with the question of why she was alive in the first place. Describing a historical event in narrative form, this text thus implies that fact and fiction are closely related. Rent from DeepDyve Recommend. The effect of transparency, which is created by an adherence to current usage, the maintenance of continuous syntax and the fixation of a precise meaning, leads readers to believe that transla- tions represent originals written in English.
She explores how the works were selected, marketed and received, and concludes that what happened in the British book market was no more than a confirmation of the already known, that is a deliberate demonstration of the dismal living conditions that had prevailed for so many years behind the Iron Curtain. Her conclusion is to note that the construc- tion of the foreign other in the case of the authors she has examined fitted into pre- existing discourses and did not extend any boundaries for British readers. This, she argues, confirms the perception of its literary and social superiority by the receiving culture.
Rather, by drawing attention to long-standing attitudes to translation and to otherness, in the receiving culture, she lays down the challenge for a change of perspective in both theories and practice. Her book is thought-provoking, clearly argued and an important contribu- tion to translation studies.
It is, above all, a wake-up call to publishers and readers to move beyond the narrow confines of an out-dated cultural positioning. Special thanks go to Piotr Kuhiwczak and Georgina Paul for their criticism and support. Thanks are also due to Anne Duden and Monika Maron for their willingness to supply information on the evolution of the translations of their works. My proofreaders, Julie Gregson and Rachel Palfreyman, turned the original manuscript into a readable text; Keri Jones gave this text its final touches. Margarita Valdivia copy-edited the book and provided the cover illustration.
Of course, none of them is responsible for the final product. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Susan Bassnett who, despite her busy schedule, kindly agreed to write the foreword for this publication. Acknowledgements are due to the publishers Rodopi and Peter Lang and the journal Seminar for allowing me to use material from the following essays first published by them: Lang, , pp. Rodopi, , pp.
Imagining Local Self and Global Other, ed. Finally, I should like to thank a number of publishers for granting me permission to publish reprints of the following cover illustrations: Hence, otherness can be regarded as a central component of the translation process. Moreover, via disciplines, such as philoso- phy and anthropology, otherness in the last two decades has entered Western theo- ries and studies of translation and become an important analytical and normative category in the field of translation studies. He insists that the translator should not assimilate otherness but make it visible: Since English serves as a lingua franca in the scientific community, the term has come to express a myriad of concepts that have different etymological roots, which can influence the slant on the discussion of otherness within the languages.
Notwithstanding the complexity of the term otherness and its significance in the field of translation studies, there is an apparent lack of research considering the concept itself as well as its history and current use in the field and its relevance for the practice of translation. The present study is a first and by no means complete at- tempt to fill this gap. It intends to answer the following questions: What are the roots of the diverse understandings of otherness in Western translation theory? What are the concepts of otherness underlying them and how far do these still inform current studies of translation?
How could the study of otherness contribute to a new under- standing of the study of translation? And, what is the significance of otherness in the practice of translation? Hence, this study will use otherness as a frame in order to come to a new understanding of the field, which, as Maria Tymoczko has pointed out in a recent article, is not only a traditional method but also one of the future tra- jectories of research within the multidisciplinary field of translation studies.
My analysis of these texts will question this categorization. It will prove that these theoreti- cal approaches differ markedly since they depart from different understandings of otherness. As a consequence, translation in this context usually serves to confirm national cultures. Yet, this dominant position has always been accompanied by alternative voices which perceive the self to be per se under- mined by otherness. Consistently, translation in these theories is regarded as a means of questioning national languages, cultures and identities. Departing from these alternative voices, I examine the significance of other- ness in the current practice of translation.
This case study focuses on the multi- dimensional reduction of otherness, as it becomes apparent in the translation of contemporary German prose in Britain, in particular, and to some extent also in France in the two decades preceding and following German unification — I chose to concentrate on this triangle at this particular time because I as- sumed that this time of radical change that initiated renegotiations of identities within Germany and with its neighbours would also influence the selection of texts translated.
However, as the second chapter will show, global developments on the book market proved to be more decisive than the changes within Germany and Europe. Due to Anglo-American hegemony on the book market, the numbers of translations of contemporary German prose are extremely low in Britain and not very much higher in France. Moreover, a more detailed analysis of the selection of texts chosen for translation, the strategies used for their publication, and the recep- tion of these texts in the press confirms that the factors that are important for the rejection of contemporary German prose in Britain and France cannot be traced back to the changes in Germany at the time nor to any kind of a particular German otherness but are of a more general nature.
They concern ideological, generic here derived from the literary genre and linguistic otherness. I further explore these three factors in my detailed studies on Monika Maron, Edgar Hilsenrath and Anne Duden in chapters three, four and five of this study. At first glance the writer from the former GDR, whose texts are usually set within this framework, the Jewish-German writer, who concentrates on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and the West German writer, whose prose reveals the cruelty of lan- guage, do not seem to have anything in common.
However, all three of them deal with topics which have come to play an important role in the post-war construc- tions of German identities, such as the GDR and the Holocaust. Moreover, as the detailed readings will show, they in diverse ways undermine the fixity of identities in their writing. The final aim of this book is thus to reveal the limitations of the prevalent concept of other- ness underlying the theory and practice of translation not only in Britain and France but probably also in other Western cultures. This growing interest in otherness corresponds to a boom in the study of translation as the other of the original.
Whether in functional linguistic models, such as skopos theory, or in descriptive translation studies, the translation as the ignored and subjected shadow of the original in the s suddenly stands in the centre of attention. However, only in the s and s does otherness emerge as an analytical and normative category in theories and studies of translation, which brings about the decisive change from theories of equivalence to theories of dif- ference.
He describes Berman as well as Benjamin as sourciers, who, according to him, stress the signifiers in the source language, and differentiates them from the ciblistes, who concentrate on the transfer of the sense into the target language. The first section deals with the ethnocentric ideas underly- ing the theory elaborated by Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose essay on translation was published when proto-national ideas were in the process of being established, and links these to contemporary theories by Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti.
Their concepts of otherness will pro- vide the basis for the elaboration of my own methodological framework. First, otherness cannot be clearly conceptualized. On the con- trary, it vanishes in the process of understanding because the understood extra-ordi- nary is no longer strange or foreign but ordinary. Grasping otherness then is as much a paradox as reaching the beyond. It does not constitute a lack of knowledge which at some stage will be identified and then can be overcome. Second, since life is organized in a variety of interlinked systems, including theoretical and grammatical systems but also more functional systems, such as health or tax systems, otherness has to be thought of as a multidimensional plurality: As a daily and thus normal experi- ence we meet strangers in our usual environment; on a second level otherness might become conceivable in a foreign system, such as a foreign language or culture, and thus question our interpretation of life; and finally the experience of radical other- ness confronts us with events which, unlike structural otherness, not only question a certain interpretation of life but subvert the possibility of interpretation.
These might be liminal phenomena, such as eros and death, as well as times of crises such as revolutions and wars.
- How to jailbreak your iphone with redsn0w!!!.
- Country Girl!
- Free Pdf Ebook Downloads Sites..
- La casa dei destini intrecciati (Italian Edition).
According to Waldenfels, the constructed other and radical otherness are thus graded realizations of the same phenomenon, the confrontation with the inaccessible. Waldenfels cites an example from literature to illustrate this point: Is it the windmill-fighting Don Quixote or Sancho Panza, settled in an imperturbable normality, who is estranged from reality? Both approaches are selective and thus exclude elements that do not fit into their systems of understanding.
It is this exclusion, this otherness underlying their systems that questions and haunts them. These three tenets explain why the confrontation with the other is enticing as well as threatening. Depending on whether the person confronted with the other is interested in challenging or maintaining the respective system, one or the other will prevail. If otherness is primarily felt to be a threat, it may result in exclusion and ex- termination or in appropriation of the other. In the long run appropriation proves to be an even more effective defence against the alien than the first two strategies, since appropriation promises to maintain otherness by understanding and absorbing it.
This circular structure results from the Western thinking of self and other in binary oppositions in combination with a growing concentration on the self, as it is expressed in egocentrism and ethnocentrism: In the rest of this chapter I will reconsider a number of translation theories ac- cording to their stance towards otherness.
I regard them as belonging to two basic traditions. The following section deals with the ethnocentric orientation towards an expansion of the national culture. However, this occidental concentration on the self has always been accompanied by voices which include the challenge of otherness in their theories without appropriating it.
These will be in the centre of attention in section 1. The Nation in Translation The link between translation and nation found prolific expression in the first theo- retical approaches and the prefaces to, and fragmentary remarks on, translations written in Romantic Germany. As Antoine Berman rightly pointed out, while the Romantics rarely theoretically discussed translation, all of their ideas were imbued with diverse notions of translation. Huyssen sees Romantic thought as opening up the possibilities of intercultural communication within developing Europe and thus as anticipating ideas about a common European identity which were lost in the nationalist nineteenth century.
At the time when Huyssen wrote his study, German Romanticism was a research field still tainted by the work performed in this area during the Third Reich. Huyssen is clearly at pains to distinguish his work from this earlier research with its national- ist focus. Most of these texts were published in the Athenaeum, a magazine edited by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, who themselves contributed to the debate with several publications.
Moreover, he feels the need to appropriate these texts in translation. This conquest of foreign texts is described as a sexual act — a typical metaphor for translation — which, in an allusion to the ninth commandment, is cat- egorized as adultery: Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, gave a very concise description of the ethnocentric aims of translation in Romantic Germany in the preface to his translation of the Agamemnon, first published in In this text Humboldt states that translation primarily serves as a tool to in- troduce new, hitherto unknown genres into the receiving culture and thus to expand the expressive possibilities in the respective language which will lead to the growth of the nation: There would not be what we call our language, literature or culture without the denomination of, and delimitation from, a foreign counterpart.
At the time of the Athenaeum and when Humboldt published his translation, the area that was to become Germany was governed by various principals. In this vein August Wilhelm Schlegel claims: That is why, he claims, their attempts to be innovative usually come out as travesties of the original text. However, he also explicitly contrasts his own ideas on translation with French practice. Attacking their lack of appropriative capabilities, he posits that the beauty of these translations prevents the absorption of the spirit of antiquity into the French culture and therefore does not benefit the French nation.
In his historical over- view George Steiner names him among the few theoreticians who introduced new ideas to the study of translation. In national languages these disturbances become apparent in dialects and sociolects of a constructed standard language which are often mutually incomprehensible. Furthermore, even our own texts might after a certain time seem foreign to us.
Furthermore, as Waldenfels observed, the art of understanding, which emanates from the self towards a defined and controllable other, in a circular move- ment confirms this self. The hermeneutic circle thus ignores radical otherness: Within this appropriative framework, Schleiermacher differentiates between two methods of translation that have been in the centre of the debate about his essay in the field of translation studies. According to him, translators have two incompat- ible options: These translators create a text the author would have written himself if German had been as much a foreign language to him as his own language was to his translator.
For Schleiermacher this second approach represents translation prop- er, even though he knows that most of the ancient and modern nations, preferring reconstruction and paraphrase, have shrunk from this difficult practice. Being handcuffed by the tight ropes of their fully developed expressive capabilities, the French nation is damned to resort- ing to the first and inferior method of translation.
The second condition finds expression in an inner demand for translation which is specific to the German nation: Hence, even this second approach, which has come to be regarded as the first model of foreignizing transla- tion, does not answer to the multidimensional challenge of otherness but reduces it to the linguistic and cultural other which can be understood and then appropri- ated for the self in translation.
Furthermore, this foreignizing translation, in good Romantic vein, ultimately serves the full development of the self: While he admits that the command of several foreign languages contributes to the general education of mankind, Schleiermacher insists that in crucial moments everybody has to decide on one country and language: The full establishment of this nation will render translation superfluous, for in the national context linguistic developments will be inspired by a public life which will guarantee freedom of speech and permit the full development of the self through the confrontation with, and the understanding of, the personal and national other: Criticizing the partialized and limited daily reality, Schleiermacher envisions in this text a concept of communal behaviour and con- versation, which, having no specific purpose and taking place in a liberated society, will permit the people to escape from daily life and pressures in order to increase their social capabilities.
The confrontation with others in this liberated space will allow any individual to appropriate foreign worlds and ideas so that at some stage everything will be known to them. The ethnocentric ideas developed in Romantic Germany were translated and appropriated by national movements in developing European nations, such as Bohemia, as well as in the United States, and had a significant impact on the devel- opment of European as well as American national identities.
Published in France in , this text uses the theoretical, critical and practical importance of translation in Romantic Germany in order to criticize the oppressed, despised and subservient condition of translation in contemporary France: It nourished the renewal of scholarly interest in translation. But it also fed into an intense concern for the relationship between Self and Other, Native and Stranger, which agitated French culture during the s.
In order to do justice to one of these demands, translators will have to betray the other. Hence, any translation inescapably fulfils the old Italian adage: The status of translators and the resist- ances they are confronted with in the process of translation not only reveal the eth- nocentricity of French culture. According to Berman, the French longing for purity, i. After his elaborate discussion of the Romantic period, Berman comes back to the tasks of translation in his time and culture.
Analogous to the fine line Schleiermacher draws between enrich- ing foreignizing and unacceptable translation, Berman makes a distinction between an acceptable and a self-destructive translatory drive. Nevertheless, his French colleagues reproached Berman for the same hatred of the self to which he objected. Venuti himself chose to translate an author of minority status, the nineteenth century Italian writer I.
The effect of transparency, which is created by an adherence to current usage, the maintenance of continuous syntax and the fixation of a precise meaning, leads readers to believe that transla- tions represent originals written in English. Instead of fixing the other in its similarity to the self, his resistant translation strategy pins down the other in its difference from the self. In his translations the foreign is not replaced by the same, but by a fixed other opposed to the same which in the one language comes to be expressed in ar- chaisms and Britishisms.
His translation strategy can therefore be described as exoticist because it turns the uncontrollable other into a shadow of the self, which is as much an appropriation of otherness as the continuous production of sameness he aims to undermine. Beyond the Nation in Translation The Western tradition of translation theories which aimed to understand and ap- propriate or exoticize the foreign has always been accompanied by voices which rejected the dominance of reason and responded to the multidimensional claim of otherness.
Walter Benjamin has certainly come to be regarded as the most im- portant advocate of these ideas. In this essay Schlegel polemicizes against several complaints about the incomprehensibility of the journal, which was designed to be a medium of communication. As mentioned above, Schlegel described translation as a means of universal progressive education in his notes for a philosophy of philology, which he made in and intended to develop into a theory of hermeneutics.
Commenting on the reproaches of incomprehensibility made against the Athenaeum, he ironically proves that these complaints were justified.
The magazine represented an attempt to realize the paradox of the need for, and the impossibility of, communication. While the establishment of the magazine fulfilled the former, the means of Romantic irony, such as the conscious use of fragmentary texts, emphasize the latter. Discussing the diverse forms of irony, Schlegel notes that even if all of these ironies could be subsumed under a generic irony, the incomprehensible would always come back to haunt this alleged universality: Furthermore, irony has a long-term effect: However, Schlegel does not only state the inaccessibility of texts, he also extends his praise of the inaccessible to human systems in general: Nations are built on the feeling of an imagined community, which dissolves when people try to explain it.
Even human satisfaction includes its own borderlines, which, left in darkness, constitute its foundation. Schlegel therefore praises the inaccessible which represents the basis of our understanding of the world and fortunately can- not be reasoned away: However, his concept of translation can be intimated from his concept of art criticism, which Benjamin discussed in his dissertation and which also markedly influenced his es- say on translation.
As Bernd Witte argued, this widespread interest in Romantic ideas in the wake of World War I can be explained by the similarities between the historical situations. Based on the general incompleteness of real art, Schlegel developed a concept of criticism which aimed to complement the respective work: So, like Berman and Venuti, Benjamin draws on Romantic thought to criticize the contemporary understanding of translation.
Developed in the mystic tradition, this concept of history be- lieves the end of time to be the completion of the ideal plan inherent in the creation. However, Jewish messianism does not imply a simple return to the origin but aims for the realization of all the utopian possibilities, encoded in the original plan on the fate of humanity, in the changing phases of human times.
Refuting the understanding of translation as an act of intercultural communica- tion, as it is commonly described, Benjamin states that translation does not serve to mediate an inessential content of a text to an audience that otherwise would not un- derstand it. The Benjaminian concepts of form, original and translatability do not correspond with the traditional understanding of these terms.
Regarding the original, this mainly concerns its relation to the translation. Like other theoreticians, Benjamin believes that translations spring from the original work. The ongoing and eternal process of translation incorporates the changes these texts undergo in time: Conceived in this way, translation is comparable to other secondary forms dependent on a work of art such as art criti- cism.
However, each of these forms has a specific purpose. As described above, the pur- pose of translation is inherent in the prior value which determines an original work of art to be translatable: Irving Wohlfarth points out that the daily use of language as a means of com- munication and the prevailing practice of translation made people forget Babel and the ensuing alienation of languages. On the contrary, it reveals their foreignness, their state of alienation from the pure language and thus the otherness underlying their alleged selves.
Like him, Derrida believes that translation should reveal, transgress and undermine the borderlines of languages and thereby question identities. Moreover, like Benjamin, he ingrains this idea in his writing by dislocating definitions instead of establishing them. While Benjamin focuses on the other- ness that undermines the ethnocentric idea of translation from within the German nation, Derrida adds a post-colonial stance to this thinking that also questions na- tionality and identity from an external position. Unlike him, he does not clearly differentiate between literary criticism and translation but subsumes both of these under the heading of translation.
In fact, several of his texts that deal with translation are also important pieces of literary criticism on authors ranging from William Shakespeare to Maurice Blanchot. Yet, his understanding of translation goes even further. He believes any act of thinking and writing to be a translation of unknown possibilities: Yet, for him translation is not only a means of discovering new worlds.
Translation also serves to question a language and culture imposed on him when he was born. Derrida was born in Algeria in and grew up in a Jewish community that regarded itself as French. However, following French collaboration with Germany, France officially withdrew citizenship from the Algerian Jews in which for many of them meant the loss of any identity. They had no Jewish language and culture to go back to, nor had they ever integrated into Algerian society which was also not an easy option considering the colonial situation. The official language was French, whereas Arabic featured after Latin among many others as a possible choice for a third language.
So the members of the Jewish community continued speaking a language that they could no longer consider their language. As Derrida puts it: Without wanting to eliminate differences, he claims that language is always already imposed. This means that, unlike Schleiermacher and Berman, Derrida posits that no person, culture or nation is in possession of the language they have appropriated and claim to be their own.
At the same time, the above quotation implies that lan- guage depends on, and as a consequence is always undermined by, an otherness that allows one to question hegemonic impositions. Unlike Benjamin, Derrida believes that the destruction of the Tower of Babel does not represent the end of a unitary language, but the punishment of a people who were trying to establish an empire and thus to impose their language as a universal idiom: So God calls the city Babel which, as explicitly mentioned in this translation, means confusion in Hebrew.
Hence God, in this performative speech act, spreads confusion which is inherent in him. In his approach, it does not represent the messianic end of all languages constantly and preliminarily tested in translation. Not only can a word have more than one meaning, as illustrated by the proper name Babel, it can also refer to more than one language. If every word is undermined by otherness, then the same holds true for every text. Consequently, the texts were first published in the English translation by James Hulbert in Deconstruction and Criticism, which brought together five interpretations of Percey B.
These methodological differences are also mirrored in the language used in the two essays. The title of the volume Parages describes a shore or a coastline and thus refers to a liminal zone between land and sea. While Benjamin believes a text to be translatable if it reflects on language, Derrida posits that any text reflects on language because texts are per se undermined by otherness. This also means that texts do not contain a priori mes- sages that translation has to reveal.
📙 Online Book Downloads Die Kunst Einzuschlafen Satire German Edition Pdf Rtf Djvu
Texts change and it is translation that promotes this change by constantly rereading and reinterpreting texts: Or, in other words, the origi- nal as much evolves from the translation as the translation does from the original. This understanding implies that the task of the translator is to complete the original. However, no translation will ever be able to uncover all the meanings implied in a text. Translation therefore is a task Aufgabe that always already implies failure Aufgabe since texts are not only per se translatable but also per se untranslatable: Consequently, Derrida departs from the English understanding of his essay title, which he trans- lates to mean what is a good translation in the framework that currently dominates the practice of translation.
It is a practice that has ethnocentric roots, which implies that translation serves to confirm the national languages. Moreover, translation in this framework also has a neutralizing effect in the sense that it creates the impression that the respective language is apt to express every idea in the world without having to change, i.
This procedure un- dermines the alleged identity of languages, cultures and nations by revealing the otherness underlying these. From the perspective of his procedure, this reading subverts the current practice of translation in two ways. Derrida always uses several words to interpret each single word in the chosen passage. But even when he translates a word by a word, this word is by no means a univocal concept. Derrida interprets this sentence to describe not only the modification but the elevation and the replacement of a Jewish concept by a Christian concept.
A relevant translation then is a translation that seasons, elevates and replaces the original. It maintains the Christian terminology, thus guarding the memory of the Christian concept, but reveals the otherness underlying this termi- nology. On the one hand, we can observe an ethno- centric striving towards an alleged universal understanding, which tends to appro- priate otherness. On the other hand, this idea, which is deeply ingrained in Western thought, has always been opposed by an understanding of translation that discloses the delimitations of the self by responding to the claim of otherness.
Toury describes norms as the translation of values which are shared by a com- munity and become apparent in regularities of behaviour. Consequently he tries to deduce translational norms from cultural-internal regularities in translation samples in order to move towards the formulation of general laws of translational behav- iour. It is therefore of utmost importance to raise the awareness for the significance of otherness for the theory, practice and study of translation. But how can the analysis of translations respond to the claim of otherness?
If with Waldenfels we posit that otherness is the extra-ordinary which at once evades and underlies any sort of order, we cannot define otherness. However, we can ana- lyse the traces left by the confrontation with the other. Translation contains these traces. This is true for several levels of the translation process. First, we can com- pare the selection of texts available in different cultural contexts. These compari- sons display the excluded alternatives, which in turn highlight the significance of particular choices. Second, we can identify the traces left by the confrontation with otherness in the marketing and press reception of each individual text in several cultures, including the source cultural context.
This kind of analysis will provide an insight into the various di- mensions of a text that are perceived as other in the process of its reception. The comparison of one source and several target texts reveals the various dimensions of the text that the respective translator perceived as foreign or strange.
It also provides an insight into the strategies chosen to deal with this other- ness. As will become apparent from my case study, the translators usually opt for appropriation and normalization, regardless of the cultural context. Nevertheless, these comparative readings also represent an ideal tool to question the unconscious presuppositions of our readings of the source texts.
Hence, translations disclose the otherness underlying the original text. Of course, one could counter that this thesis also holds for any kind of review or literary criticism. However, while these inter- pretations will only ever comment on a selection of passages, translations usually present readings of whole texts and thus a higher potential for confrontation.
Account Options
By directing our gazes towards paragraphs and ideas which have evaded our interpre- tations, they make us see the glasses which, as Wittgenstein has observed, permit us to see but also limit our gazes without us realizing these limitations: The following interpretations of contemporary German prose through the lens of their English and French translations are therefore marked by an inalienable tension.
They depend on the translations which they criticize for not responding to the challenge of otherness. However, the revelation of the otherness undermining these texts is only a side effect of the primary aim of this whole study. Ultimately, the analyses aim to reveal the limits of the traditional concept of translation as a tool for intercultural communication which, as pointed out by Benjamin and Derrida, does not serve to criticize and question the imposed cultural, literary and linguistic normality but aids and abets in the maintenance of the imagined cultures.
On the one hand these constant breaks in the constructions of German identities have left their mark on contemporary German prose. Contributing to the de- and reconstruc- tions of German identities and histories, German authors after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing unification not only focused on the GDR but also returned to the discussion of the Nazi legacy.
See details and download book: Rapidshare Ebooks Download Deutsch Die Kunst Einzuschlafen Satire German Edition B00cdjfub0 Pdf. See details and download book: Online Book Downloads Die Kunst Einzuschlafen Satire German Edition Pdf Rtf Djvu.
The reactions to German unification were particularly strong in Britain and France, where the governments were afraid of the new Germany dominating Europe; such fears found expression in images showing the return of Hitler and National Socialism. Based on the hypoth- esis that the changes within Germany in the wake of unification, which exposed the ruptures within the alleged German cultural nation, would also leave their mark on the British and French constructions of German identities, the initial focus of my case study was on the renegotiations of the internal and external borderlines before and after German unification, as they become apparent in the selection and transla- tion of contemporary German prose in Britain and France.
As a consequence, I decided to change the focus of my study and analyse the reactions to the confrontation with otherness in Britain. In this analysis the French corpus of translations will mainly serve as a contrastive foil. This chapter will test different hypotheses that have been brought forward to explain the British lack of interest in German texts in particular and in foreign texts in general by contrasting it with the developments in France. Is German literature too different to be of interest for the British book market, as sometimes argued by publishers? Or are the reasons for the rejection of otherness in Britain of a structural nature?
I will argue for the latter. It is primarily the Anglo-Americanization of the book market that explains the lack of interest in translations in Britain, as has been suggested by Lawrence Venuti. The growing concentration in the publishing indus- try has further decreased the interest in translations, as has been argued by Terry Hale, but, as the following will show, this development cannot be regarded as the root cause of British self-sufficiency in publishing. Roughly books were translated into English in the time under consideration.
The remainder of my case study will look at the traces left by this confrontation with otherness. These traces are identifiable on several levels in the reception process, from the selection of texts to be translated, via their trans- lation and the strategies used for their publication, to their press reception. In the second half of this chapter, I will first look at the inclusions and exclusions as they become apparent in the selection of texts translated in Britain compared to those translated in France.
Eines macht mich aber wirklich traurig: Gerade in der Literatur, wo es auf die Sprache ankommt, ist diese Haltung absurd. Das Entscheidende ist die Sprache, in der ein Autor oder eine Autorin schreibt. Und auch als Schriftsteller hat mir der Wechsel in eine andere Sprache viel gebracht. Das Schreiben in einer anderen Sprache ist schwieriger. Du suchst oft sehr lange nach dem richtigen Wort. Denn wer, wenn nicht die Migranten, sind auf jedes Wort angewiesen. Und die Literatur lebt von guten Geschichten! Darauf weist auch Salman Rushdie hin, wenn er schreibt:.
Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. Dinevs Texte lassen sich, wie gezeigt, nicht einfach in der Schublade der MigrantInnenliteratur ablegen.
Der Begriff nivelliert die einzelnen Texte und vermischt sie zu einem Einheitsbrei. Entscheidende Impulse sind dabei vor allem von der Auslandsgermanistik ausgegangen: Nasrin Amirsedghi und Thomas Bleicher Hg. Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland. Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil. Claudia Benthien und Rudolf Velten Hg. Verlag Die Blaue Eule, Literaturwissenschaft in der Blauen Eule 28 - Azade Seyhan: Writing Outside the Nation.
Princeton University Press, Reihe A, Kongressberichte 59 - Sigrid Weigel: Klaus Briegleb und Sigrid Weigel Hg. Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Zum anderen wird der Literaturpreis ,schreiben zwischen den kulturen' im Feld der MigrantInnenliteratur verortet und eingehend untersucht. Der Literaturpreis ,schreiben zwischen den kulturen'. Migrantenliteratur als Bestandteil deutscher Gegenwartsliteratur. The Location of Culture. Volltext 6 , S. Essays and Criticism Falter 41 , S.