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9 Bringing Voice to Life: Bonhoeffer’s Spirituality in Translation Lisa E. Dahill Introduction For English-speaking readers curious about the spirituality of Bonhoeffer, the translation of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE) is a signal event. The “B” series in particular—volumes 8 through 161 —gathers for the first time in English the full range of just the sort of writings spirituality scholars covet for the fine-grained access to Bonhoeffer’s life and heart they open: here we see the texture of his thinking and relationships, how his voice moves into and through and behind the more familiar formal language of his published writings. Above all, the study of spirituality listens—through such layers and complexities of texts and artifacts—for the visible and vanishing traces of the God-experience disclosed or evoked here: What does Bonhoeffer’s experience of God contribute to broader streams of Christian spirituality, and how do these fragmented texts “work” to mediate glimpses of the triune One to new generations of disciples?2 As a scholar of spirituality, I am privileged to have been invited into these texts with the intimacy and nuance required by the practice of translation. As sole translator of Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945 (DBWE 16)3 and 1. I am informally including DBWE 8, Letters and Papers from Prison, here as part of the “B” series since its letters and other documents stand—logically and chronologically—as the culmination of the arc traced in volumes 9–16. 2. This essay assumes but cannot more fully outline the hermeneutical complexity of such listening to (or for) the spirituality mediated in a particular text or other artifact of Christian study. For an introduction to the study of Christian spirituality as a scholarly discipline, see the essays collected in Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), as well as David B. Perrin, Studying Christian Spirituality (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 79 one of a team of translators of Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8),4 I—like all those involved in editing and translating the DBWE volumes—have wrestled with words, sentences, documents, and the stretching, shifting limits of language for years in the process of listening to these texts in English. This process has nourished my capacity to listen as well to Bonhoeffer’s spirituality in the last five years of his life as it comes alive in these texts. In this essay I will begin with broader comments on the significance of DBWE and translation for the study of spirituality and then move into particular features of Bonhoeffer’s spirituality I glimpse in these texts from the end of his life. Translating Spirituality: On Violins and Voice The fact that translation is not somehow static or mechanical but a primary form of interpretation is well known. In my work on these volumes I have been curious about the metaphor of “voice” in the process of translating. I have attended to questions of voice both in the process of translation itself (as my collaborators, editors, and I in a given volume or across the DBWE volumes tried to convey a consistent sense of Bonhoeffer’s tone and cadence into English) and on a more metaphoric level: how a human voice—here, Bonhoeffer’s—gives expression to a person’s spirituality. First, in terms of language: How shall a translator or group of translators establish and convey, across a given volume or the breadth of Bonhoeffer’s life and genres of writing, the sense of a consistent, maturing voice? How, further, shall we convey in English the ranges of tone, shadow, emotion, and authority in that voice, as well as the even greater diversity of voices also present in these volumes—letters from loved ones and professional colleagues, official documents, even the cold voices of Nazi interrogation reports? Attention to such questions is of course among the important tasks of volume editors also, and of the general editors and editorial board overseeing the entire project. I note it here both because attunement to voice is perhaps the most important—and ephemeral—aspect of the translator’s distinctive vocation and because it is a primary means of access to a given spirituality. The liturgical musician and scholar Kathleen Harmon writes, The sound a body projects is the consequence of interior properties and relationships. Sound reveals this hidden interiority. The 3. DBWE 16. 4. DBWE...

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