Die literarische Übersetzung in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Kulturgeschichte in der Neuzeit (review)

This book is not for practical translators. Edited by two professors emeriti at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, it deals almost entirely with the methodology of their twelve-year study funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. An undisclosed number of scholars worked together for twelve years in Sonder-forschungsbereich 309, yet the reader is told nothing about them, not even about the ten who contributed reports to this book. The content remains as shadowy and elusive as the authors. It refers in theoretical language to other publications that apparently contain the substance of the study. In the lengthy introduction, Frank and Harald Kittel make tantalizing references to translations of T. S. Eliot, but provide no examples, nor do the reports that follow, most of which are devoid even of tantalizing references. Slowly but surely, the reader begins to identify with Kafka's K in his frustrated attempts to reach the castle. At the end of the volume, one reads that Sonderforschungsbereich 309 will be continuing its work as Sonderforschungsbereich 529. They received more funding? It is all very abstruse and, judging by the closing sentence of the introduction, just now on the verge of making some discoveries: "Die Übersetzungsforschung steht vor Entdeckungen, die sich der Schulumgang mit Übersetzungen nicht träumen läßt" (63).

The book is divided into three sections, each containing four or five reports: the results of completed projects; the results of continuing projects; and studies of anthologies and series of world literature in German translation. Few of these reports offer enough concrete detail to be intellectually accessible to anyone outside the working group. From these, it becomes evident that the project's purpose was massive data compilation.

Armin Paul Frank and Brigitte Schultze summarize one working group's results as "Kometenschweifstudien" and provide an overview in two informative tables (82–83). For seven works of American literature published between 1791 and 1903, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Jack London's The Call of the Wild, they document the number of words in the original, the number of different translations (which is distinct from those marketed as different!), and the dates when the earliest and the most recent translations appeared. From this data, they extrapolate the frequency of translation in the first five years following publication, in the years following the Second World War, and the overall frequency. With few exceptions, the translators emerge as an unsavory group who blanket copy from each other, adopt pseudonyms (Fanny Fitting and Hanny Kitting) in order to sell identical translations to unsuspecting publishers, omit clues in murder mysteries, rush their translations towards the end to meet deadlines, and write untrustworthy introductions.

Wilhelm Graeber's report on the prevalence of second-hand translations prior to the romantic movement is also entertainingly informative: "Englische Übersetzer aus dem Französischen: Eine Forschungsbilanz der Übersetzungen aus zweiter Hand." The French translated very freely from the English, the Germans then copied very freely from the French translations, and the final product bore little resemblance to the original.

The most interesting application of the enormous study undertaken by Sonderforschungsbereich 309 is the linguistic detective work referred to all too briefly in Fritz Paul's report on individual styles: "Übersetzer und Individualstil im Spannungsfeld verschiedener Sprachen, Literaturen und Kulturen." By compiling statistics on two separate translators' prosody, their use of rhyme and metaphor, the working group was able definitively to rule out one of the translators as the possible author of an anonymous translation (118).

Finally, Bernd Weitemeier's report on "Übersetzungsserien im deutschen Sprachraum 1820–1910" also offers enough detail to be comprehensible to someone not steeped in translation theory. After carefully defining the criteria used by the working group to determine what constitutes a literary translation series and what constitutes an anthology, Weitemeier describes how they laboriously searched...