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Reviewed by:
  • B. Traven. Autor—Werk—Werkgeschichte by Günther Dammann
  • Alan Corkhill
B. Traven. Autor—Werk—WerkgeschichteHerausgegeben von Günther Dammann. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. xii + 256 Seiten. €39,80.

The lack of access to a complete Traven Nachlass has not impeded the steady flow of critical literature on Traven the man and homme de lettres. This collection of critical essays, the harvest of an international conference held in March 2010 at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, attests to the ongoing zeal with which researchers seek to fit some of the missing pieces into the puzzle surrounding the enigmatic persona of Ret Marut/B. Traven and to enhance the standing of his literary œuvre. The book’s editor, Günter Dammann, who is no stranger to Traven scholarship, as his earlier volume B. Travens Erzählwerk in der Konstellation von Sprachen und Kulturen (Würzburg 2005) attests, has again assembled a series of contributions that provide a raft of new or re-orienting biographical, linguistic, and socio-cultural perspectives on topics as diverse as Traven’s network of intellectual alliances, the subtleties of his narrative technique, his employment of performative language, and his attitude towards women. At the same time, a sharp and cohesive focus is given to the problematic [End Page 165] of Traven Editionsgeschichte, most notably the vexed issue of authenticity and reliability with regard to Traven’s translations, text revisions, and retranslations.

Heading the volume is Heidi Zogbaum’s discussion of synergies between Traven and the Czech-born ‘roving reporter’ Egon Kisch against the background of the intellectual and political activities of the German Communist Party in Mexico during World War Two. Günter Dammann follows with a critical reappraisal, based on valuable American and German archival sources, of the English-language retranslations of the popular ‘adventure’ novels Das Totenschiff (1940) and Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (1942), both re-published at a time when Traven’s relations with the Büchergilde Gutenberg in Zurich were severely strained. In turn, Karl S. Guthke, Traven authority par excellence, subjects the successive German, English, and American versions of the Baumwollpflücker (1928) to close textual scrutiny, establishing, as elsewhere in his work on Traven, the close nexus between Traven’s textual revisions and the changing trajectories of his social criticism. Gerhard Bauer treats the same opus in terms of the employment of specific narrative devices such as Traven’s unique brand of humour and humanistic ‘casualness,’ and the extent to which these strategies ‘transform’ the subgenre of the adventure novel.

A further significant contribution to Traven Editionsgeschichte is Galina Potapova’s study of the rationale and processes behind Traven’s editorial reworking of Das Totenschiff. Potapova tackles such pivotal questions as: how, when, and why did he correct his texts? To what extent were such ‘corrections’ driven and conditioned by the respective “Zeitkontext” (58)? What do they reveal about Traven’s “implizite Poetik und ‘Selbstbewusstsein’” (ibid.) as a writer? In a similar vein, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann interrogates semantic and stylistic divergences in three Spanish-language versions of Traven’s novel Die Brücke im Dschungel (German 1929), published in 1936, 1941, and 1991 respectively, the middle one competently executed by Esperanza López Mateo with Traven’s own stamp of approval. A distinctive feature of Pilar Ávaros’s later rendition, Meyer-Minnemann demonstrates, is the reader-friendly adaption of “sprachliche Mexikanismen” (111) to Iberian Spanish. In another essay Dieter Rall takes a cognate approach in his exploration of the degree to which the various translations and expanded editions of Traven’s tale Der Grossindustrielle (1928) were attuned to different cultural traditions and sensibilities.

A welcome bibliographical contribution is Heidi Hutchinson’s overview of the history and contents of two important Traven collections housed at the library of the University of California, Riverside. A further cluster of narratological studies includes Jörg Thunecke’s investigation of the role of digressions in Ret Marut’s early anti-colonial novel Die Fackel des Fürsten (ca. 1910/12) and Günter Helmes’ reappraisal of the main protagonist’s role as narrator and “Akteur” (184) within the framework and interior action of Das Totenschiff and as a participant on...

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