Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2000) 424-8
Kurt Mueller-Vollmer & Michael Irmscher, eds., Translating
Literatures – Translating Cultures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary
Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998; xviii+214 pp; ISBN: 8084730830 (hbk.);
0804735441 (pbk.); LC call no.: P306.2. T7358; ix+214 pp.; US$ 49.50
This volume derives from the “Translating Cultures –
Translating Literatures” conference held at Stanford University in 1995. Although
its subject is translation theory in general, there is a strong German-American
slant; the contributors are German academics and those engaged in the study
and teaching of German at American universities. There is particular representation
from the Center for [end of page 424] Advanced Studies in Literary
Translation, a Sonderforschungsbereich active at the University of
Göttingen from 1985 to 1997, which has itself produced numerous volumes investigating
historical topics in literary translation among European as well as non-European
languages, interdisciplinary issues such as drama and theatre in translation,
and problems of otherness and comprehension. In fact, all of the contributors
have published extensively on translation theory or been very active in applied
translation projects, so the essays in Translating Literatures Translating
Cultures often read like precis of much larger bodies of work, their dimensions
indicated by ample allusions and references.
The first, most expansive of the three sections in
the volume presents the case for a context- and culture-oriented view of
translation. It is not a matter of translating words from one language into
those of another, but of translating one culture into another. This approach
comes into contact with polisystem theory at numerous points, although the
editors and contributors take pains to distinguish their approach by arguing
that they pay attention to the place of the non-translated work in the source
culture as well as the place of the translated work in the target culture,
while polisystem theory would restrict itself to the latter. Throughout the
book, there is a fairly persuasive attempt to break down the concept of
“original” or “original-language” or “non-translated” literature by arguing
that source-language and target-language works are more alike than they might
seem; originality is called into question since processes of translation,
whether or not these are between two specific languages, are constantly at
work.
Thus the two opening essays, both by collaborators in
the Göttingen Center, begin by broadening the concept of translation. In brief
essays that retain the flavour of oral delivery, Harald Kittel outlines the
“Göttingen approach” to translation studies, and his colleague Armin Paul
Frank applies the terms Nachdichtung (imitation, or “the production
of versions rather than translations” [20]), Schattenkultur
(shadow culture, or the “‘hum and buzz’... of a culture talking back and forth
with both one or several other cultures and with its own former selves” [22]),
and “non-translated literature” (a deconstructive move that locates translation
as primary, and what used to be called “originality” as secondary). To support
his expanded definition of translation, Frank draws examples from a case study
that foregrounds cultural rather than linguistic translation: the transplantation
of British Romantic literature into the nineteenth-century American context.
Rainer Schulte follows up with a programmatic essay about “translation thinking”–its
significance for literary interpretation as well as its potential to revitalize
graduate literary studies and interdisciplinary programs in American universities.
Among other things, Schulte cites a revealing contrast between the number
of literary translations published each year in Germany and France (7000-8000
each per year) and in the United States (1800 per year at most).
By far the longest and most philosophical essay in
this first section is by Liselotte Gumpel, whose wide-ranging and learned
contribution develops the ontological context for a new approach to translation
studies. Gumpel seeks to develop a non-Aristotelian theory of metaphor, drawing
for help on Kant, Nietzsche, Nelson Goodman, and especially on Roman Ingarden’s
concepts of Wortlaut (wordsound, or “a semantic threshold... that allows
matter to turn into meaning” [68]), Richtungsfaktor (the
“direction-factor” that “directs consciousness to assume a content
corresponding to the word in question” [68]), and meaning as a
“pure-intentional object,” or the target of a verbally induced intending act.
Despite a too-liberal sprinkling of italics, quotation marks, and capitals
throughout – and a quirky last paragraph in which Gumpel confidently identifies
the language of her own essay as purely literal in the context of a
“new, non-Aristotelian era” that regards metaphor as fundamentally functional
– the essay makes a very important argument that “all of the human universe
amounts to a ‘language’ of sorts, remade as it is by human faculties when
brought into finite immanence” (49).
This opening section characterizes the new approach
to translation studies explored in the book as a post-Kantian project, heavily
dependent on German Romantic theories of language and epistemology, and centered
in various ways on the transference between Germany and America. The second section focuses more specifically
on historical case studies of the way German philosophy has been translated
into American culture. Two substantial, nicely complementary essays by Kurt
Mueller-Vollmer and Cyrus Hamlin, both dealing with the translation of German
Romanticism into the nineteenth-century American context, form the heart of
the volume. Mueller-Vollmer’s interesting and detailed contribution focuses
on theological and poetic discourse as it gets translated into New England
Transcendentalism. His nuanced approach adopts aspects of polisystem theory,
but addresses extensively both source culture (Herder, Schleiermacher, the
languages of cultural nationalism and early German Romanticism) and target
culture (James Marsh, James Freeman Clarke, Emerson, the ideological position
of early American literature and public sermons). Mueller-Vollmer puts the
emphasis on the translation of discourses, not just individual works
– and presents this as evidence that literary history is still a viable project. Hamlin’s essay, less attached to a formal translation-studies
approach, nonetheless illustrates superbly how the translation of cultures,
discourses, and specific texts depends on complex, unpredictable factors such
as interactions among religious and educational institutions, literary journals,
personal contacts and travels. Briefly outlining the careers of three largely
forgotten nineteenth-century translators and educators (Frederic Henry Hedge,
William Torrey Harris, and Charles Timothy Brooks), he makes a persuasive
case for their influence on the transformation of the American cultural [end
of page 426] tradition and educational system.
According to the ideology of translation advocated throughout this
volume, the historical charting of translations and their influences may depend
on exactly the kind of detailed, biographical, and archival approach that
Hamlin exemplifies here.
The section ends with a report on scholarship by the
late Ernst Behler, general editor of the massive translation effort underway in
America under the title The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Along
with an analysis of ways in which the Complete Works will differ from
the standard German edition of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari in its
incorporation of unpublished versions and fragments, Behler’s report shows in
practice some of the systemic constraints affecting a translation effort,
including issues of copyright and the special challenges facing large-scale
collaborative projects. Behler’s death
while the Nietzsche translation was barely underway, and while Translating
Literatures Translating Cultures was in preparation, adds a sad irony to
this insight into how translation is subject to human contingencies.
The third and final section comprises four diverse case
studies in twentieth-century German-American translation. Helga Eßmann’s survey
of anthologies published in Germany between 1840 and 1914 demonstrates how
the publication of collections of translated literature, overwhelmingly a
German phenomenon, was implicated with the ideology of Weltliteratur,
and how Weltliteratur evolved away from its original, Goethean meaning.
Neither translation nor Weltliteratur, Eßmann’s study ironically shows,
necessarily reflects an openness to the Other; on the contrary, these can
be imperialistic enterprises that almost inevitably involve assignments of
value. John Felstiner focuses on the poet Paul Celan as a translator, showing
how traumatic personal experience affected his “strong” translations of Shakespeare,
Dickinson, Frost, Apollinaire, Osip Mandelshtam, and others, and how these
translations in turn influence readings of the originals. Relying on close reading, Felstiner’s essay
comes nearer than any other in the volume to what one expects from “traditional”
translation studies; yet here, too, it is evident that translation has been
elevated well beyond its traditional secondary role. The last two essays, by Brigitte Schultze and
Thomas Freeland, both address the peculiar and largely unexamined problems
of translating drama. Informed by
performance theory (in Schultze’s case), and by the practical experience of
staging Heiner Müller’s Mommsens Block in American translation (in
Freeland’s case), these essays argue that staging itself should be regarded
as a form of translation. The staging of a foreign-language, foreign-culture
drama thereby becomes a challenging and revealing instance of the doubly translated
text.
The essays in Translating Literatures Translating
Cultures are uneven in length, ranging from brief, programmatic outlines
to detailed scholarly studies, but together they present the reader with an
approach to translation that is more [end of page 427] culturally aware,
an approach to cultural studies that is more sensitive to language and otherness,
and an approach to comparative literary history that gives due place to the
manifold issues raised by translation. The best of the essays demonstrate
ways of narrativizing cultural history by examining–in painstaking detail–the
activities, journeys, contacts, and networks of important translators (though
these are not always translators in the traditional, linguistic sense). Inevitably,
several of the projects outlined in this volume raise questions about the
reliability and limitations of sociological surveys and studies as a basis
for literary and cultural history. At the same time, however, they make a
strong case for the benefits, even the necessity, of incorporating sociocultural
data into expanded concepts of interpretation and translation.
Angela
Esterhammer
University
of Western Ontario