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Reviewed by:
  • Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung ed. by Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska
  • Pamela S. Saur
Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska, eds., Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. 270 pp.

Occasionally collections of essays emerging from scholarly conferences suffer from lack of unity and central purpose, but this is far from true of the highly focused and organized volume Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung. In fact, if a reader finished the collection without knowing that it was the product of a workshop held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 2011, he or she might be surprised to hear it. The book is tightly organized into three parts: The first, “Stilbezogene Analysen der deutschen Originaltexte,” focuses on stylistic elements of Joseph Roth’s fiction and journalistic writing, the second two on translations of his works. The essays in the first section and the second, “Stilbezogene Analysen der Übersetzungen,” are meticulous scholarly studies accompanied by abstracts. In addition to the careful analyses of Roth’s texts, several studies also present and analyze Roth’s own statements about style. The third, somewhat more personal section containing reflections of the translators themselves is titled “Stilbezogene Erfahrungsberichte der Übersetzer/innen.” Context and background are provided by a foreword by August Obermayer, an introduction by the book’s editors, Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska, and an epilogue by Roth scholar Fritz Hackert.

The book’s introduction begins thus, “Joseph Roth gilt als großer Stilist. Forschung und Kritik preisen seinen bildhaften, musikalischen und biblischen Stil.” Also often praised is his “magisch wirkende Sprache” (15). This passage identifies— and meets— a major challenge of analyzing “style”: evaluating such generalized statements and judgments and assessing their validity on the basis of actual language choices and their patterns. The results tell us that statements about “style,” on the surface subjective and impressionistic, become quite technical when they are backed up by evidence. A case in point is Shchyhlevska’s fascinating linguistic study “Biblische Spuren im Stil Joseph Roths.” It focuses on Roth’s novel Hiob, which a casual reader might call “biblical” because of its subject matter and a vague impression of its language and tone. The author confirms the validity of the term, not only demonstrating that Roth imitated Biblical rhetoric, particularly in references to light and sound, but also presenting a series of charts pairing a startling number of expressions in the novel with actual biblical passages. Similarly [End Page 144] specific and precise is a study of Roth’s “Phraseologische Modifikationen als Darstellungsmittel” by Nadija Tymostschuk. She analyzes techniques such as substitution, expansion, and ellipsis in Roth’s novels and identifies some of their purposes and results as “Bedeutungserweiterung, Intensivierung der Expressivität, Verstärkung der Bildhaftigkeit,” and “Veränderung der Bewertung” (111). The article thus addresses both technical and aesthetic aspects of literary style.

The first section is rounded out with Erica Weitzman’s study of “documentary” humor (“dokumentarische Komik”) in Roth’s feuilletons and a piece on irony in his signature novel Radetzkymarsch by Katharina Krčal. Weitzman analyzes Roth’s fruitful combination of journalistic objectivity and subjective observation and interpretation, using such techniques as unexpected juxtapositions and apparent suspension of logic. Humor, satire, and the grotesque are often seen in Roth’s writing, but their importance is not always recognized. Weitzman finds these techniques significant to the genre and the times: “nicht nur für das Genre des Feuilletons selbst, sondern auch für eine Epoche maßgebend” (116). Krčal’s study of irony focuses on such pertinent topics as flexible narrative perspective, unreliable narrators, use of the impersonal pronoun man, and irony as related to fate.

Many insights into the challenges of the art of translation are provided by both the second section of the volume, comprised of scholarly studies of translations, and the third, authored by translators themselves, representing a range of target languages. The analytical essays, all rich in specific examples to support their points, include Vera Viehöver’s analysis of the French, Italian, and English translations of Das falsche Gewicht, which is followed by two...

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