The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation

Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa, Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319757520
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319757537
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This Handbook offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of contemporary issues in Literary Translation research through in-depth investigations of actual case studies of particular works, authors or translators. Leading researchers from across the globe discuss best practice, problems, and possibilities in the translation of poetry, novels, memoir and theatre.
Divided into three sections, these illuminating analyses also address broad themes including translation style, the author-translator-reader relationship, and relationships between national identity and literary translation. The case studies are drawn from languages and language varieties, such as Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Nigerian English, Russian, Spanish, Scottish English and Turkish. The editors provide thorough introductory and concluding chapters, which highlight the value of case study research, and explore in detail the importance ofthe theory-practice link.
Covering a wide range of topics, perspectives, methods, languages and geographies, this handbook will provide a valuable resource for researchers not only in Translation Studies, but also in the related fields of Linguistics, Languages and Cultural Studies, Stylistics, Comparative Literature or Literary Studies.

Section ILiterary Translation and Style

© The Author(s) 2018

Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher and Hiroko Furukawa (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Literary TranslationPalgrave Studies in Translating and Interpretinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_2

Begin Abstract

Translating the Poetry of Nelly Sachs

Jean Boase-Beier¹

(1)

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Jean Boase-Beier

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

In the English-speaking world, Nelly Sachs is perhaps best known as the German Jewish poet who wrote “difficult” poetry (Domin 1977: 110), and whose works often address the Holocaust . She is perhaps also known as a Nobel Prize winner (she was awarded the prize in 1966). Her work has been translated into Swedish , French , Spanish , Hebrew, Yiddish , Japanese , and other languages. There are many translations of her work into English , in particular by Michael Hamburger (e.g. Hamburger et al. 1970), but also by Ruth and Matthew Mead (Hamburger et al. 1970, 2011), and Michael Roloff (Hamburger et al. 2011), among others, and several biographical and critical studies, for example by Kathrin Bower (2000), Aris Fioretos (2011), Jennifer Hoyer (2014), and Elaine Martin (2011).

Though the first English translation of her work appeared in 1970 (Hamburger et al. 1970), Nelly Sachs is not a widely-read poet in English (Shanks 2016: n.p.). And yet she is one of the most interesting and challenging of Holocaust poets to translate, not least because her poetry changed and developed over time, as the influence of historical events, of her changing circumstances, and of the poets she translated, all had profound effects on her poetic expression.

In this chapter I shall consider how Sachs’ poetry has been translated, and what particular challenges its translation poses. I shall ask whether the insights we gain by studying the translation of her work can have consequences for its future translation. One conclusion I come to is that we need to provide readers with enough background to locate the poetry in its historical, political, religious, cultural and poetic context , and we need a careful selection of her translated work that will both demonstrate the broad range of her poetry and emphasize its relevance for readers today. Another conclusion is that, by considering the translation of her poetry, we gain greater insight into the poetry itself. This benefits criticism of her work, which then also has the potential to affect future translation.

Understanding a case study as an examination of “a particular unit of human activity” (Gillham 2000: 1) which is in some way “singular” (Simons 2009: 3), and which will lead to an interpretative narrative (Susam-Sarajeva 2009: 39), I aim in this chapter to outline a narrative that is based on a close consideration of the translation of Sachs’ poetry. Nelly Sachs appears particularly suited to a translation case study: her life was interesting and unusual, she was writing at and beyond a time of almost ungraspable pain, disruption, upheaval and tragedy. Her work can only be understood in context , because it is heavily informed by her own situation, secure though this may seem in comparison with that of the millions who died. Yet she was not secure, or content, or balanced: she was deeply traumatized by historical events, and, as she came to understand more about her Jewish roots, her trauma became greater, her poetry both more inward-looking and more complex.

In German -speaking countries her poetry experienced what Martin calls “a tumultuous reception history” (2011: 9), and a brief consideration of the reception of Sachs’ original poetry will further help to illustrate the background against which these translations have been undertaken.

Though the purpose of a case study is to provide the basis for a detailed description and analysis of at least some elements of the case in question, it does not exhaust its usefulness with the description itself. It can be used as the basis for inferences about other cases, or to question assumptions made by theories or views of the world. As Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva (2009: 45) points out, there are differing views on the extent to which case studies can be, or need to be, generalizable to other contexts . My intention here is to focus on a few specific exemplary translations, which, together with the facts of Sachs’ background and reception , should provide the basis for a more general picture of the translation of Sachs’ poetry. The conclusions I draw from this picture are not concerned with the questioning of theoretical considerations but with their possible consequences for future translation of Sachs’ work.

Nelly Sachs as Poet and Translator

Nelly (Leonie) Sachs was born in 1891 into an assimilated German -Jewish family in Berlin. Her mother’s family appear to have been Sephardic Jews, possibly coming originally from Spain (Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 9). On both sides, the family were fairly wealthy business people, her father’s family well-known in Berlin as rubber manufacturers: Sachs’ father Georg William Sachs had in 1887 invented the expander (Fioretos 2011: 28–30), an elastic muscle-exerciser still in use today. Her cousin, Manfred Georg, was the biographer of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism (Georg 1932). Around 1908, at the age of 17, Sachs suffered an unhappy love affair, which she only spoke of much later to the critic Walter Berendsohn (Fioretos 2011: 56–8). As a consequence she had a breakdown in her late teens that resulted in a stay in a clinic, and this was to be the first of several throughout her life (Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 37–42).

Though her biographer and editor Ruth Dinesen remarks that the “love crisis led Nelly Sachs to the word” (Dinesen 1995: 25), she was already writing prose, drama and poetry before this (Fioretos 2011: 21). The poems she wrote up to the outbreak of war in 1939 were generally simple rhymed verses about nature and animals, though some were less conventional. As Fioretos observes, this early, highly conventional poetry with its “prim rhymes and bittersweet tones” (Fioretos 2011: 53) gives hints of what was to come, when, suddenly, “it is as if Sachs has plugged her poetry into the power circuit of her later works” (ibid.). Conversely, her later poems sometimes take up the themes and images of early ones: in her 1959 poem ‘Kleiner Frieden’ (Small Peace), for example, the music-box is remembered in the light of later knowledge (Sachs 1988: 284). But it was the opinion of German poet Hilde Domin, writing the ‘Afterword’ to a 1977 collection of Sachs’ poetry, that we do not need to know anything written by Sachs before 1940 (Domin 1977: 111), and, indeed, this was Sachs’ own view (Bahr 1995: 43). In May 1940, shortly before she was to be transported to a concentration camp (Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 76–7), she escaped to Sweden, a flight made possible with the help of Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, whom she much admired, and with whom she had been corresponding since her teenage years (Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 32).

Sachs had first attempted publication of her prose and poems, unsuccessfully, in 1915. Her first work, Legenden und Erzählungen (Legends and Stories), had appeared in 1921, and consisted of prose tales that explore relationships, and questions of loyalty, love and death (Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 51–53). Before her escape to Sweden, a few single poems had appeared, but further publication was impossible for a Jewish writer (Dinesen 1995: 28; Fioretos 2011: 98–99). Dinesen mentions a handwritten copy of poems about a “lost beloved”, composed up to 1923 (Dinesen 1995: 25; see also Dinesen 1995: 38–9, FN 3). Sachs also read very widely at this time: Christian mysticism, such as Jakob Böhme and Meister E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Section I. Literary Translation and Style
• Section II. The Author-Translator-Reader Relationship
• Section III. Literary Translation and Identity
• Back Matter