Transparent, Fluent, ReadableIngeborg Bachmann’s Prose in English

This article examines the English translations of Ingeborg Bachmann’s prose from the early 1980s through the early 2000s. It clarifies the process by which translations adapt the culture and ideology of source texts and shows how these adaptations reflect agendas of the target culture. It draws on Bachmann scholarship, translation studies, and personal interviews with American translators of Bachmann and looks at the prose works published in Bachmann’s lifetime. The analysis identifies parallels between the rewriting Bachmann’s prose has undergone in translation and the shifts in US views on Austrian and feminist literature since the 1980s. It shows that US translators view Bachmann’s Austrianness and her feminist proposition as mutually exclusive and that the translators struggle with Bachmann’s ideologically charged intertextual irony because it is incompatible with their notion of Bachmann as a modernist poet.