2012 Binghamton University German Studies Colloquium Participants
Lisa Marie Anderson is Associate Professor of German at Hunter College, City University of New York. She published the first English translation of GWF Hegel’s 1828 essay on JG Hamann in the volume Hegel on Hamann (Northwestern University Press, 2008), and recently edited Hamann and the Tradition (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2012). Her translations appear in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies and Translation, and in the anthology Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2012). She has presented papers on pedagogy to the American Association of Teachers of German, the Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Midwest Modern Language Association, and Women in German – one of which was published in Arts & Humanities in Higher Education in 2011. She teaches German language, literature and culture at all levels, in German and in translation. Email: lan@hunter.cuny.edu
“What We Teach When We Teach Translation: How to Teach German Majors to Translate, and Why”
This presentation offers some best practices for teaching the art and science of translation to undergraduate German majors. It is based on the presenter’s experience teaching an advanced course called "Advanced German through Translation." As the title suggests, the course is not designed to train students to become translators into or out of German. Instead, it aims, through the practice of translation, to: strengthen students’ command of German and English vocabulary and grammar; deepen students’ sensitivity to how language functions and is received; improve students’ reading comprehension in German; build students’ familiarity and comfort with search and research tools; and develop in students a working understanding of the nature of translation. To demonstrate how engaging in German-English translation helps students to achieve these learning goals, the presentation will include samples of student work, with a focus on students’ compilation of a translation portfolio. I will offer suggestions as to how assignments can be contextualized to give students the sense of translating for ‘real-world’ purposes, and will discuss the ways in which translation theory can be productively integrated in such a course.
Mary Boldt received her B.A. from Wilson College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. For twelve years she taught in the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Hartwick College, where she co-authored the book Learning Interdependence: A Case Study of the International/Intercultural Education of First-Year College Students. She currently is Associate Professor of German at York College of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in German language, literature, and culture. Her most recent publication was the jointly authored “Text Translation: Approaching Otherness” in Language in the Real World. She has delivered talks in the United States and Austria on special-needs learners in the second-language classroom and is also engaged in research on translation of Brecht as well as of screen translation. Additionally, she maintains an ongoing interest in Foreign Language across the Curriculum. Email: mboldt@ycp.edu
“Translating Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder: An Ironic Act"
What makes a good translation? Adopting a single stylistic element of a major work as a microcosm for literature as a whole, can we explore how the varied treatment by different translators of that single element can affect the value of the audience’s experience? An examination of Bertolt Brecht’s twentieth-century masterpiece Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, and especially of the irony so central to that work, provides useful insight into how translation can enhance the communication process. In sorting through the challenges posed at multiple levels by Mutter Courage, translators have omitted, changed, or reduced in scope elements of Brecht’s thought, wording, and style, while amplifying and enhancing others. In other words, what appears to be Brecht’s voice is not entirely what it seems – a fact all the more ironic when we consider the centrality of irony to Mutter Courage. Yet for all the exaggeration and diminution, despite all the changes in emphasis produced by the translation process, much of Brecht’s communication undeniably survives to reach a wider audience intact. A close reading of an excerpt from five translations of Mutter Courage spanning nearly five decades reveals the scope to which certain aspects of that text are indeed untranslatable, and what choices translators have made when faced with the option of whether to bring out Brecht’s irony or some other facet of the text at hand.
Andrea Dortmann is Senior Language Lecturer at New York University’s German Department, where she teaches all levels of German from Elementary to Advanced Writing, Translation, and Culture courses. She received her Ph.D. in German from NYU in 2003 and holds a Master’s degree in Comparative and French Literature from the Freie Universität. She has been Director of the German Language Program for the past eight years and as such she trains, mentors and supervises Graduate Student Instructors. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she continues to translate mostly scholarly work from English to German. Her translation of John Hamilton’s book Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (Musik, Wahnsinn und das Außerkaftsetzen der Sprache) has just been published with Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. Email: ad132@nyu.edu
Benjamin Gutschmidt teaches Elementary and Intermediate German at Binghamton University. He holds a B.A. degree in English Philology and a M.Ed. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language and German from the Free University in Berlin. He is currently working as a Language Assistant for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Email: bgutschm@binghamton.edu
Bradley Holtman is Professor of German and French at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania. Dutch has remained a primary focus of his scholarly activity since graduate school. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the Early New High German of Cologne. His research concentrates similarly on Dutch-related topics, such as Dutch/French language contact phenomena, the influence of southern Netherlandic forms on the development of standard Dutch, genitive and prepositional constructs in Dutch headlines, and the reception of Dutch writers in Germany. He is the reviewer of Dutch textbooks and dictionaries for the AATG journal Die Unterrichtspraxis. His current research project is a translation into English of A.F.Th. van der Heijden’s Het leven uit een dag, which has also been the topic of conference papers and an essay on the use of natural phenomena in the novel. He is a long-standing member of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) and serves as its Treasurer. Email: bholtman@mansfield.edu
“Translating Dutch: A. F. Th. van der Heijden’s Het leven uit een dag”
One of the premier writers of the postwar Netherlands, A. F. Th. van der Heijden is well known for his portrayals of Amsterdam life in the 1970s and 1980s, and especially for his cycle of seven novels, The Toothless Time (De tandeloze tijd). In his 1988 Het leven uit een dag, van der Heijden presents a fantastic world in which a person’s entire life takes place within the span of a twenty-four-hour period. Every important event occurs only once and is unrepeatable. Seminal events are thus experienced with such vividness and attention to detail that they remain indelibly imprinted, almost tangible in their clarity, throughout one’s remaining existence. In this world, hell is routine, the repetition of events to the point of barely experiencing them anymore (i.e., a world much like our real existence). In this presentation I will read sections of my English translation of his Dutch-language novel Het leven uit een dag (working title One Day’s Life) and discuss some of the difficulties in rendering Dutch idioms and syntax, as well as in making the tone and style of the language sound natural in English, where a closer translation would seem stilted or mannered. I will compare these versions with the German translation of the book, which is able to use a more literal translation because of the close proximity of the two languages in lexicon, syntax and stylistic considerations, and discuss this text as a case study on translation.
Geoffrey C. Howes is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1985. He has published widely on various aspects of Austrian literature and culture, including Robert Musil, Peter Rosei, Michael Scharang, Joseph Roth, Ingeborg Bachmann, the essay, and madness in Austrian literature. From 2000 to 2005 he was co-editor (with Jacqueline Vansant) of Modern Austrian Literature. He coordinates the Max Kade Writer in Residence program at Bowling Green and has translated texts by Peter Rosei, Doron Rabinovici, Lilian Faschinger, Susanne Ayoub, Dieter Sperl, Margret Kreidl, and Gerhard Kofler. In 2009 his translation of Peter Rosei’s novel Wien Metropolis appeared with Green Integer in Los Angeles as Metropolis Vienna. Email: ghowes@bgsu.edu
“Translating Rhythm in Prose, German to English”
In an article from October 2011 I analyzed the relationship between my translations of Peter Rosei’s fiction and the original texts in terms of rhythmic figures. While acknowledging that a major purpose of translation is to transmit information from one cultural sphere to another, I assert that interest in the source culture should be awakened by the reader’s aesthetic engagement with the translation as a literary text, and not vice versa: “Durch das Lesen wird das Interesse am breiteren historischen und kulturellen Hintergrund erweckt und nicht umgekehrt.” Engaging the reader at the level of aesthetic appreciation requires, among other things, rendering the text’s rhythm. Tracing a rhythmic figure analogous to the riff in blues, jazz, and rock music in Peter Rosei’s novels Wien Metropolis (2005)and Das große Töten (2009), I analyze the translations (Metropolis Vienna,2009; A Big Killing, manuscript) to discover whether and how they solve the problem of reproducing rhythmic effects in English. (I say “discover” because translating itself is synthetic, not analytical, and my rendering of rhythm is intuitive, not calculated.) This paper will apply a similar analysis of analogous rhythmic figures to other prose translations of texts by Lilian Faschinger and Dieter Sperl, and then extend the investigation to published translations of Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. The presentation will consist of a close comparative analysis of short segments of text in order to expand on the “riff” concept and start developing a typology based on the tension between sentence intonation in German and that in English.
Kristine Jennings received her M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, where she also teaches undergraduate literature courses. Her research interests include the European novel, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, and literature in translation. Her dissertation examines constructions of narcissism in the eighteenth-century novel in both Britain and Germany. Email: Kjennin1@binghamton.edu
“Translating Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Mein Dank an Freud”
This presentation will discuss the unique challenges of translating the work of Lou Andreas-Salomé, focusing on her psychoanalytic text, Mein Dank an Freud. In 1912, at the age of 50, Lou Andreas-Salomé began her study of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, becoming one of the first women to practice in that field. Already a well-known and widely-published author of novels, essays, and a book on Nietzsche, this period represents not only a turning point in Andreas-Salomé’s life, it illuminates and perhaps defines her entire life’s work as well. Mein Dank an Freud, a lengthy “open” letter to the professor for his seventy-fifth birthday, pays public homage to Freud’s teachings and to the art of his psychoanalytic method, “dem schönsten Beruf.” It is one of her very last works, written in 1931, and not only expresses her immense gratitude to Freud and her deep and comprehensive understanding of his work but also offers an engaging summary of her own theories and beliefs, in many points reconsidering or supplementing those of her mentor. Her theories, though adhering closely to Freud’s, also incorporate much of her philosophical background; and her views on religion, sex (in both senses of the word), and art in their relation to the human psyche reflect her distinctive ability to synthesize apparently contradictory positions in order to generate new meanings. By offering a translation of Mein Dank an Freud, I hope to follow the trend of those academics and researchers who have tried to relocate Andreas-Salomé as a significant contributor and formative influence within the beginning discussions of psychoanalytic theory.
Vincent Kling teaches German and comparative literature at La Salle University in Philadelphia. His Ph.D. thesis examined Hugo von Hofmannsthal as an Austrian. He has written critical and scholarly essays on Hofmannsthal, Gert Jonke, Ödön von Horváth, Heimito von Doderer, W. G. Sebald, Isabel Allende, the “Austrian Robin Hood” Johann Breitwieser, and on the topic of literary translation. He has translated Jonke, Doderer, Gerhard Fritsch, Heimrad Bäcker, and Aglaja Veteranyi for Southern Humanities Review, Chicago Review, Literary Imagination, Calque, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. His translations have been published by Ariadne Press, Counterpath Press and Dalkey Archive Press. He has also translated essays for the program booklets of the Salzburg Festival, notably for the production of Die Frau ohne Schatten in the summer of 2011. Email: kling@lasalle.edu
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Title”
Titles of literary works and films are often translated with close lexical correspondence, as one would expect—Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg is rendered as The Magic Mountain by both Helen T. Lowe-Porter and John E. Woods, Kafka’s Das Schloß is The Castle, and both older and newer versions of Grass’s Die Blechtrommel are titled The Tin Drum in English. Almost as often as the expected versions, though, titles are transmuted away from the original for a variety of reasons all worth investigating—cultural, commercial, contextual. Studying the phenomenon of altered titles promises insight into every aspect of translation, from the most purely hermetic and esthetic considerations to the most bottom-line sales decisions made by marketing departments. In every case – and I will categorize my examples – the change of a title can suggest whole areas of cultural study
Eckhard Kuhn-Osius is Associate Professor of German at Hunter College, CUNY. He is widely recognized for his scholarship on theory and practice of foreign language teaching. He has taught at the University of Colorado, Vassar, Princeton, and Columbia University. His research focuses on developing the proficiency of students in foreign languages. As Chair of the Testing Commission of the American Association of Teachers of German he has been active in assessment and standardized testing. His literary interests span the theoretical (theory of understanding, diaries) and practical (research on the impact of World War I on German literature, Heinrich Böll). Email: ekuhnos@hunter.cuny.edu
“Literature into Film: Homo Faber oder über die Grenzen der Filmerei und der Poesie”
This paper is deliberately titled to evoke memories of Lessing’s Laokoon. The translation of material from one medium into another calls attention to the borders/limits of each medium. Most readers’ disappointment with the film version of a beloved story is generally explained with the insufficient congruence of how textual “Leerstellen” (Iser) have been filled by reader and film director. Reflection on the limits of language and image point in a slightly different direction. Images ‘win’ when it comes to physical description, but the common evaluative elements of language cannot be replicated in a visual medium. While one can easily speak of the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’, it is impossible to show her. Frisch’s Homo Faber is heavily dependent on its evaluative language. Trying to transform Walter Faber’s fate into objective images converts a complex, emotionally and intellectually challenging narrative into a very sad but shallow story because of inherent differences in the chosen media.
Julia Ludewig works as a teaching assistant for the Department of German and Russian Studies at Binghamton University where she teaches German to beginners. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. She holds a B.A. degree in Cultural Studies (University of Frankfurt/Oder, Germany) and an M.A. degree in European Linguistics (University of Freiburg, Germany). Her research interests include literature and linguistics. She is currently working on her dissertation which deals with aspects of genre in literary criticism. Email: jludewi1@binghamton.edu
Darrah Lustig received a B.A. in German and European Studies from the University of Vermont in 2008. Following graduation, she accepted a Fulbright award to Wolfsberg, Austria, where she worked as an English Language Teaching Assistant for two years. She recently completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she concentrated her thesis work on contemporary Holocaust studies and Austrian literature. A dual national of Austria and the United States, she has developed a particular interest in Austrian literature and dialects that she hopes to explore further while pursuing a PhD in German Studies in the United States in fall 2012. Email: darrahjoy@gmail.com
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey teaches German Studies at Binghamton University. Areas of scholarship are German film (from Weimar through the New German Cinema) and contemporary feminist film theory. Her publications include the edited volumes Triangulated Visions (with Ingeborg von Zadow); Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar (with Judith Holland Sarnecki); Riefenstahl Screened. An Anthology of New Criticism (with Neil Christian Pages and Mary Rhiel); and European Cinema: Experiment, Mainstream and Praxis as well as numerous articles on German film and filmmakers (Percy Adlon, R.W. Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Tom Tykwer). Email: imos@binghamton.edu
Elena Mancini is the author of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the World’s First International Sexual Freedom Movement, published by Palgrave in 2010. She earned her Ph.D. in German Studies from Rutgers University. She has published several of her translations of excerpts from Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s memoirs from German into English. She is currently working on the first English language translation of Magnus Hirschfeld’s, ethnographic work: Berlin’s Third Sex. Elena serves on the advisory group of the gender non-profit: Have Art: Will Travel! and works as an Information Officer at the DAAD in New York. Email: elemancini@aol.com
“The Role of the Imagined Translator in the Post-Communist Memoir Writing of Carmen-Francesca Banciu”
The post-Communist memoirs of Romanian novelist Carmen-Francesca Banciu have been noted for their intimate and poignant portrayal of a woman’s struggle to claim her individuality and legitimate her voice against the backdrop of Romanian Communist dictatorship and the less formal forms of authoritarian dogma and ideology. Banciu’s confrontation with her Communist past, growing up as the defiant daughter of a zealous Communist party functionary, raises questions about the struggle to assert oneself as a woman, an individual and an artist amid rigid moral and political imperatives to conform to a superimposed Communist ideal. This paper will investigate the ways in which the translator and the imagined foreign audience that he or she represents influence and inform Communist memoir writing in a Post-Communist world. It will address critical questions concerning the dialogical interaction, whether real or imagined, between writer and translator and approach these questions theoretically and empirically through personal interviews with Carmen-Francesca Banciu and other post-Communist memoir writers.
Dennis McCort is Professor of German emeritus at Syracuse University. His areas of specialization are German Romanticism, nineteenth century fiction, literature and religion, and Franz Kafka. Much of his research focuses on common ground among these: e.g., his book, Going beyond the Pairs, is not only a study of East-West comparative literature and religion, but also considers the work of Kafka. His articles have included such topics as the influence of Rilke and Zen on J. D. Salinger, the Zen style and spirit of Kafka’s short fiction and the representation of madness in the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In 2011 he published a memoir, Confessions from the Analytic Couch, which traces the shaping influence of the mind and personality of Kafka on a recently completed nine-year-long Jungian analysis. The Man Who Loved Doughnuts (2012), a pastiche of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is his first attempt at a novel. Email: ddmccort@yahoo.com
Kathleen McKenna earned a JD/MSFS degree from Georgetown University. She is currently the chair of the Criminal Justice department at Broome Community College in Binghamton. She has also worked as the College's Affirmative Action Officer. Her passion for German was sparked while living in the Erlangen area from 1989-1992, and has been reignited over the past couple of years while attending German classes at Binghamton University. Email: mckenna_k@sunybroome.edu
Rosmarie T. Morewedge teaches German language, literature and cultural studies at Binghamton University. Deeply interested in problems of narration, she works with both medieval historical “minstrel” epics, but also the modern short story and Märchen. Other scholarly interests are poetry and pedagogy. She has published on Wolfram von Eschenbach, medieval poetry, medieval folktales, Märchen and on a number of modern authors, most recently on Ruth Klüger. Her publications in pedagogy include a textbook for students of German on intermediate and advanced levels that develops integrated language/culture skills as well as close reading and literary interpretation. Email: rmorewed@binghamton.edu
Neil Christian Pages teaches at Binghamton University. His research interests include Austrian, German and Scandinavian cultural productions, commemorative practices, translation and the history of criticism. Publications include essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, W.G. Sebald, Adalbert Stifter, on Rachel Whiteread’s Shoah memorial in Vienna and Michael Haneke’s film Caché. He is co-editor (with Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey) of Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism. Email: npages@binghamton.edu
“‘Il avait du mal avec la littérature’: Teaching Kafka as Translation”
This presentation will sketch in broad strokes the problems of integrating the teaching of translation into a course that focuses on the life, work and reception of Franz Kafka (in English translation). Beginning with the problematic nature of the interplay between authoritative original andmetatextual translation, I hope to trouble the assumptions about what an undergraduate humanities course can do in terms of teaching the art and science of translation.
Kerstin Petersen teaches Elementary German at Binghamton University. She earned an M.A. in English Literature, History, and Philosophy from the Philipps-Universität in Marburg and an M.A. in German as a Foreign Language. She is currently working on her PhD in Comparative Literature. Email: kpeters7@binghamton.edu
Karl Ivan Solibakke is Associate Professor in Modern German Literature and Culture at Syracuse University, where he is completing two volumes on cultural memory in visual and textual media. In addition to his monograph on Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, he has also edited volumes and published articles on Benjamin, Jelinek, Heine, Uwe Johnson, Goethe, Schiller, Kafka, and Gustav Mahler. General Manager of the International Walter Benjamin Society from 2002 to 2009, he is co-editor of the society's publication series, Benjamin Blätter. Recently, Solibakke was appointed Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in Syracuse. Email: ksolibak@syr.edu
“Mimesis und Poesis: Zu Benjamin und Flussers Übersetzungstheorien”
Wie eng verwandt Walter Benjamins und Vilem Flussers Übersetzungsansätze sind, läßt sich an der Kreuzung der Übersetzungspraxis Flussers, nach welcher der übersetzte Text immer neue Bedeutungsperspektiven im ‚logischen Raum’ hervorbringt, mit Benjamins Lehre vom Ähnlichen ablesen. In beiden Modellen werden ‚Kontinua der Verwandlung’, die prinzipiell die Durchlässigkeit aller Zeichensysteme gewährleisten, zum Leitbild des Sprachwandels und zum Erkennungszeichen der Menschheits- und Kulturgeschichte, schließlich zur Allegorie gesellschaftlichen Gewordenseins. Erweist sich die Sprache des Menschen bei Benjamin zunächst als pantheistisch fundiertes, medial durchlässiges Benennungsvermögen, das sowohl lautlose als auch artikulierte Zeichensysteme aktiviert, um den Weltgeist zu ‚offenbaren’, so wird sie schließlich in den frühen 1930er Jahren zum Kanon geschichtlich kodierter Naturmimesis. Der Vortrag setzt sich das Ziel, die kommunikationstheoretischen, epistemologischen und mimetisch-poetischen Spielräume der kongenialen Übersetzungstheorien Benjamins und Flussers zu untersuchen.
Oliver C. Speck teaches Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of World Studies. His 2010 book Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke explores how a political thinking manifests itself in the oeuvre of the Austrian director, suggesting that the constant shifting of frames of reference in his films is needed to open up ethical perspectives. In addition to numerous essays on German and European cinema, Speck is co-editor (with Robert von Dassanowsky) of the 2011 anthology, New Austrian Film. Email: ocspeck@vcu.edu
“The Multiplicity of Translation: Werner Herzog Guides Dieter Dengler”
My paper explores the multiple translations that Werner Herzog undertook bringing to the screen the life of Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was captured, held by the Vietcong and who later escaped through the jungle. Rereading Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the “Task of the Translator,” I argue that Herzog undertakes multiple translations and does not follow the path of a classic adaptation. Three basic texts build a fascinating intertextual play that interrogates, or better allegorizes, questions of truth and truthfulness surrounding the event of the Vietnam War: Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) is a documentary by Herzog, inspired, in turn, by Dengler’s memoirs, Escape from Laos(1979). The documentary portrays Dengler’s visit (with Herzog and his team) to the sites of his capture and escape. Putting in place a mise-en-abime, this reenactment then serves as inspiration for a Hollywood movie, Rescue Dawn (2006), with Christian Bale in the role of Dieter Dengler. The “kinship” (Verwandtschaft) that Benjamin mentions in his essay barely needs to be pointed out: Werner Herzog is, of course, a famously obsessive German expatriate filmmaker, auteur of many documentary and fiction films about obsessive men. Using the concept of kinship allows us to examine with Benjamin the “essential translatability” of the actual event, which is always already multilayered: a young German is so obsessed with flying that he joins the American air force and voluntarily flies clandestine bombing missions in Laos before the official beginning of the Vietnam War.
Karina von Tippelskirch teaches German language, literature and culture at Syracuse University. She studied German, Yiddish, and Cultural Anthropology in Marburg and Frankfurt am Main. Her fields of specialization include exile literature, German-Jewish and Yiddish literature and transnational literary encounters. She translated and edited among others the poetry of Rajzel Zychlinski (Gottes blinde Augen. Ausgewählte Gedichte. Jiddisch und Deutsch. Berlin: Oberbaum, 1997). She is a member of the American PEN Club and served on its translation committee. Email: kvontipp@syr.edu
Lioba Ungurianu studied at the Universities of Mainz and Bonn as well as the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She recently received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures and earned a Certificate in Film Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her dissertation,“Georg Büchner in the German Cinematic Tradition: Film, Theater, and the Art of Adaptation,” addresses the period from the early 1920s to the late 1970s. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College where she teaches various levels of German language, literature, and film. Email: liungurianu@vassar.edu
“Talkies and Tongues: The English-Language Version of Der blaue Engel and Challenges of Translation in Early Sound Cinema”
During the first decades of cinema’s existence, translation was a minor issue. Silent film transcended language barriers and, whenever the need for words arose, laconic title cards could be easily translated. With the advent of sound, cinema lost its international language, much to the dismay of both film theorists and producers. While the former lamented the demise of a universally understood artistic idiom, the latter dreaded the complications in the international distribution of “talkies.” The eventual resolutions to the problem have their obvious drawbacks: subtitles are not attractive to mass audiences, whereas dubbing eliminates the voices of the original actors. This is partially redressed in voice-over translation, although it introduces a decidedly non-diegetic presence that compromises the illusion of cinematic reality. In the early sound era, a peculiar solution was found in the simultaneous production of multiple language versions (something that is not to be confused with remakes of foreign films). Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (1929) is a famous example of such productions. Its English version employs the entire cast of the original, using Emil Jannings’s success as a silent actor in Hollywood to provide international appeal. Instead of transferring the entire dialogue into the foreign language, this film attempts to create a diegesis that makes the use of English “natural” in a German environment. Marlene Dietrich’s character Lola-Lola is presented as a performer from England, unable to speak German and thus conversing in her ative tongue. This arrangement inevitably results in improbabilities that undermine the integrity of the film’s German background. Thus the production of Der blaue Engel in English not only presents an interesting episode in the development of foreign-language versions in cinema but also raises important questions pertaining to the issue of translation and the inherent dilemma of cultural discrepancy.
Astrid Weigert has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German at Georgetown University since 1999. Her research interests include issues of gender and genre, particularly in German Romanticism. She is currently preparing a monograph on Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s contributions to German Romantic theory and practice. She is the Book Review Editor for The German Quarterly and the German Area Director for NeMLA. She teaches courses on all undergraduate levels at Georgetown, from Basic German to German Business Culture and courses on German literature and culture. Email: weigerta@georgetown.edu
“Übersetzung und Geschlecht in der deutschen Romantik am Beispiel von Dorothea Schlegel”
Dorothea Schlegel (1764-1839) gehörte zum Kreis der Jenaer Frühromantik, dessen männliche Mitglieder ihr künstlerisches Selbstverständnis in der Triade “Dichter-Literaturkritiker-Übersetzer” begründet sahen. Auch Schlegels Oeuvre, so die übergreifende These, sollte im Licht dieser Triade besprochen werden. Gerade die Übersetzertätigkeit Schlegels ist jedoch bisher in der Forschung nur wenig beachtet worden. Die Analyse der Arbeitsbedingungen und Veröffentlichungsmechanismen, unter denen Schlegel ihre Übersetzungen vornahm, läβt deutlich erkennen, wie groβ die Diskrepanz zwischen der theoretischen Überhöhung des Übersetzens, die von den männlichen Frühromantikern propagiert wurde, und der Abwertung der von Frauen vorgenommenen Übersetzungen in der Praxis war. Zur Veranschaulichung dieser Aspekte dient Schlegels Übersetzung von Mme de Staëls Roman Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807).
Harald Zils earned a Dr. phil. from the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg and teaches in the German Studies program at Binghamton University. His research interests include anthropological perspectives on literature, the German essay and aesthetic theories of production and reception. His book Tradition und Autonomie. Innovativer Konservatismus bei Rudolf Borchardt, Harold Bloom und Botho Strauß appeared in 2009. He is currently working on a study of Ernst Jünger.
Markus Zisselsberger is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami, Florida. He has published articles on Musil, Heidegger, W.G. Sebald, Kafka, and Jean Améry. He is the editor of The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel (Camden House, 2010) and the co-editor (with Gisela Brinker-Gabler) of “If we had the word.” Ingeborg Bachmann. Views and Reviews (Ariadne Press, 2004). He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the relationship between reading, literary criticism, and literature in the work of W.G. Sebald. Email: mzisselsberger@miami.edu
“Kunst als Lebensbewältigung: Translating Childhood in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Drei Briefe an einen Knaben”
Lou Andreas-Salomé’s writings testify to their author’s life-long interest in childhood development, in the ways children relate to the outside world through the imagination and through play, and in the various – highly gendered – ways in which the child crosses the “Zwischenland” between adolescence and adulthood. This paper examines the representation of childhood both as a developmental stage and as an aesthetic trope in Drei Briefe an einen Knaben, in which Andreas-Salomé, through partly fictionalized letters to a fifteen year old boy, explores how sexuality could be explained and communicated to a growing adolescent. It examines the letters in conjunction with an essay titled “Kind und Kunst,” published in 1914, in which Andreas-Salomé reflects on the relationship between children and art and eventually develops the idea of “eine eigene Kunstgattung” – a singular genre of art located on the threshold between child- and adulthood and grounded in the affinity between child’s play and artistic creation. The paper argues that the form through which Salomé aims to relate content to the child in the letters can be conceptualized with the features of this envisioned Kunstgattung, namely the adult’s identification with the child, the translation of content into the child’s cognitive and imaginative world, and the transmission of knowledge as a mutual process that requires the child’s imaginative involvement. Taking on the role of an interlocutor who stages herself as a childlike questioner, Andreas-Salomé explores the aesthetic forms through which “adult” content and reality can be mediated and translated for a growing child in such a way that the recipient becomes and recognizes himself as what Andreas-Salomé identified as the central charactersistic of her envisioned Kunstgattung: “ein Mitvollziehender dieser Realität,” “ein Mitschaffender im Erlebenssinn.” As “art,” then, the letters are intended as a form of Begleitung and Vermittlung directed at assisting a child in his efforts at Lebensbewältigung.