GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

This paper examines theoretical and practical questions involved in the translation of Sharon Dodua Otoo's transnational and polyphonic novel Adas Raum. Using translation theory and the Benjaminian notion of a translation's ‘Fortleben’, I build on my concept of ‘conversive reading’, as well as on extensive real-time collaboration with Otoo and fellow translators to ask: How does one negotiate questions of identity, positionality and voice in a work whose narrative so intricately intertwines these dimensions? How can the literary inheritance which informs a source text influence its translation into the target language? To what extent must a successful translation move away from the source text to facilitate its nuances in the target language? Expanding on the experience and practice of translating this novel, I demonstrate that my understanding of translation as an ongoing process represents a renegotiation of the source – building upon a work's literary forebears and diverging, when necessary, from the language of the source to best facilitate voice and reception in the cultural context of the target language.

In Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), Ernst Haeckel systematised the biological study of morphology along evolutionary lines and proposed that the ‘Anthropozoic Age’ should be considered the most recent paleontological time period. This article first examines Haeckelʼs early concept of the Anthropozoic Age in relation to his ambiguous use of the words ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ in his life's work. It then illustrates how his later travel narrative, Indische Reisebriefe (1882), projects notions of the Anthropozoic Age onto landscapes from his journey to British-governed Ceylon. Haeckel presents two diverging paleontological timescales: a deep and interconnected past of the island's organisms and the currently escalating consequences of human cultivation of the land. Lending different scientific and aesthetic attention to the depiction of the two environmental developments, discrepant images are fused in his hopes and visions of a new and better ‘Age of Culture’. The travel report is thus a very early literary response to the scientific concept of living during a time in which humanity dominates the world's environments. From today's perspective, the text raises familiar questions regarding how humans should conceive their own agency in the Anthropocene. At the same time, it highlights the concept's entanglement with contemporary philosophical and socio-political discourses.

As an important site of cross-cultural exchange, theatre translations performed in Britain form key routes for international writers to be introduced to, and to influence, British audiences and theatre-makers. This article introduces Jack Thorne's 2017 adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London, as a case study to trace how British theatre practitioners and institutions frame and utilise German texts and playwrights to construct an image of German (theatrical) culture in Britain. I will focus on institutional practice in the first instance, tracing how the Old Vic Theatre framed this production as appealing to two different ‘crowds’ and how Woyzeck relates to the Old Vic's stated institutional aims. This will be combined with performance and textual analysis that draws out the ways in which the production thematises borders and cultural difference. While theatre in translation can be seen as a bridge between different national cultures, I ultimately argue that this Woyzeck adaptation highlights, and indeed propagates, divisions between British and German (theatrical) cultures.

This chapter examines poetic works by the Swiss-German performance poet Nora-Eugenie Gomringer that draw on monsters as a conceptual lens to engage with experiences of vulnerable subjects, that is, those that have experienced harm or violence or are considered especially susceptible to these risks. The anthology Monster Morbus Moden (2013–17), with its initial collection Monster Poems (2013), reflects poetically on how female subjects and their bodies, which are conventionally represented as weak, are simultaneously and paradoxically considered dangerously non-normative and in need of policing. Gomringer explores how this paradox emerges from the interplay of textual and media surfaces, institutional logic and intersubjective power imbalances. The author employs an experimental mix of intertextual, intermedial and performative strategies that draws attention to the embodied and culturally iterative nature of such subject constructions. Putting emphasis on visualising and voicing victimisation, these works can be seen to probe to what extent a monstrous poeticisation of such experiences might shift stereotyping scopic regimes that produce the conditions for the widespread sexual violence against women or curtail reproductive freedoms. This experimentation, this article argues, seeks to establish awareness around the potential mobility of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ that has also been raised in recent feminist discussions.