Sprachobsession und Rhetorik: Stilentwicklung und Übersetzungsfragen im Theater Elfriede Jelineks by Roberto Nicoli (review)

Roberto Nicoli's new study of the theater of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, focuses on language as the central obsession of her work. According to Nicoli, the stylistic elements employed by Jelinek in her plays make them particularly difficult to translate into other languages. That is not to say they are untranslatable, but that inevitably, something will be lost in the translation. Nicoli sets out to trace the evolution of Jelinek's style through three of her theater works from three different creative periods. For each text, he presents a macro-and micro-analysis of the style, considers the role of rhetoric, and looks at the peculiarities and challenges of translating and staging the work.

Nicoli divides his book into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to Jelinek and her work, drawing attention to recurring themes and reception abroad. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis and methodology used, defining elements of style and providing an overview of translation theory. Chapters 3 through 5 analyze three theater texts from three periods, Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hat; oder Stützen der Gesellschaft en (1979), Totenauberg (1991), and Bambiland (2004). Was geschah, Jelinek's first play, follows the character of Nora from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House as she tries to live an independent life but ultimately fails. Totenauberg deals with Austria's Nazi past and the Holocaust through the characters and of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger and their opposing attitudes. Bambiland, Jelinek's play about the Iraq War, was created on her website running parallel to the war itself and offers a sharp critique of the role of the media.

Throughout the book, Nicoli emphasizes Jelinek's political engagement and her critique of power relationships in the oppression of women, racism, Nazism, and war. He also draws attention to her use of a mixture of sources, both intellectual and trivial, the controversy surrounding her work, the complexity of her language, the non-theatrical quality of the texts, Austrian references in her work, and misunderstandings of the author as a pornographic writer that have complicated the reception of her work abroad. At the same time, he demonstrates a growing interest in Jelinek's works abroad due to the universality of her themes. For example, a Jelinek Festival was organized in Italy in 2014–15 in order to bring attention to her work in that country.

Nicoli's focus on style is appropriate and important. For an author like Jelinek, style must be examined in order to understand content (64). Jelinek violates traditional genre norms by blending different types of texts, redefining conventional categories, alternating between engagement and distancing, blending spoken and written language, and using fragmentary sentence structures. Nicoli discusses the translation of her texts in the context of theories of translation, which question whether individual literary texts can or should be translated. When a text uses idioms, double meanings, creative vocabulary, cultural references, plays on words, and other similar techniques, a translator must be creative in order to get across the nuances of the original text.

The structure of the book leads to some repetition and redundancy as in each chapter on a specific play, many of the same elements of her style, such as sentence structure, vocabulary, word choice, and so on are discussed. Although Nicoli does refer back to the previous works in each subsequent chapter in order to draw comparisons and contrasts among them and highlight the evolution of Jelinek's style, a more synthetic approach to the material might have highlighted the common and contrasting themes and styles of these plays more clearly. The short conclusion does address these points to some extent by looking back to identify the similarities, differences, and evolution of Jelinek's style. Here, Nicoli suggests that the plays share common themes—destruction of the Jews, racism, critique of capitalism—and...