Forum: The Role of Translation in German Studies, Responses

ROLF J. GOEBEL University of Alabama in Huntsville In her thoughtful extension of theories by Benjamin and Levi-Strauss, Nora Alter rightly calls for a theoretical and practical broadening of concept of (literary) translation, which negotiates meaning not only among different languages, but also across various media (literature, arts, music, etc.). This move is important especially in context of interdisciplinary and intermedial structure of today's cultural studies. However, I'd like to question Alter 's assumption that for translation, the problem is to find what is common to all of codes of such media. Certainly, various media do not coexist in isolation but interact and intersect with one another and hence do allow translation to preserve common themes, tropes, ideologies, etc. But equally-or even more-important, it seems to me, is unique ability of translation to produce intermedial difference. By this I mean genuinely new facets of meaning that are potentially encrypted in original but require target medium's specific technologies, formal structures, and social contexts to surface as material signifiers referring to hitherto unexplored territories of knowledge and human imagination for new audiences. Thus, whereas translational commonality is related to ideal of media synthesis, this emergence of intermedial difference frequently occurs through media competition, when various media (e.g., writing, film, internet) arising from different historical contexts co-exist together in present, vying for cultural hegemony. By virtue of this simultaneity of non-simultaneous media, process of translation lets one medium coopt-colonize, adapt, and unleash-inherent properties of competing media for its own purposes. All media tend to re-legitimize or newly define possibilities, limitations, and boundaries of their own specific techniques of signification through such competitive strategies. Therefore, to paraphrase Benjamin, it is task of translator in (German) cultural studies to release in his own medium that hybrid difference that is under spell of another, to liberate code imprisoned in another medium. JANE V. CURRAN Dalhousie University Mark Harman feels that younger scholars may need encouragement if they are to emulate scholar-translators of recent memory. What about following those earlier poet-translators who contributed so much to development of modern German idiom: Voss, Wieland, Goethe, Garve, Ramler, von Knebel, Stolberg, Schlegels . . . who realized that translating a venerable ancient text resulted in confrontations, resolution of which was inevitably beneficial to modernisation of vernacular. Gottsched, too, firmly believed that translating an ancient or modern masterpiece would both enrich what we might now call target language and exert a positive influence on speakers of that language. Modern German theater owes a tremendous debt to Wieland's translations from Shakespeare, which inspired Sturm und Drang dramatists. Voss 's Homer and Schleiermacher 's Plato live on. Nevertheless, we do need to keep in mind statement made by master translator, Wieland, that a translation needs to be re-done every thirty years. Anyone who has looked at a flowery but bowdlerized nineteenth-century English translation of, say, Schiller's beautifully crafted prose cannot help but see wisdom of such a view. It implies Gadamer s insight that every translation is necessarily an interpretation. Borges characteristically provides most memorable instance of this hermeneutic principle with his story of Don Quixote translation, identical to original yet immeasurably altered in its message for latter-day reader. Literary translation certainly does heighten sensitivity to both languages. It increases powers of observation, unfolds multivalence and reveals stylistic and rhetorical features easily overlooked. …

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