Kulturelle Übersetzungsprozesse in der transnationalen deutschsprachigen Literatur

Translation has been increasingly present in literary and cultural studies. This concept helps describe ‘hybrid’ phenomena, as it avoids some of the pitfalls and main issues regarding the concept of hybridity. Cultural contact, be it as a result of migration or any other phenomenon, takes place at a specific time, in a specific historical context, in a specific place and space. Translation therefore becomes a useful conceptual tool that allows to focus on the dialogue and movement between two cultural realms, without needing to conceive cultures as fixed, immutable entities. By focussing on communication and negotiation processes between addresser and addressee, translation avoids universalism and potential essentialising tendencies of multiculturalism. While the concept of hybridity can lead to analyses that lack proper contextualization, “a translational view suggests paying more attention to microtheoretical approaches, and proposes focusing on small-scale units” (Bachmann-Medick 2018), thereby allowing a contextualizing, yet non-deterministic approach to the results of cultural contact.
In Born Translated (2015), Rebecca Walkowitz defines “reading in translation” as a perspective that would observe all texts as translations, i.e. also texts that have not been translated, or texts that do not contain visible traces of foreign languages. Having this in mind, and using Anthony Pym’s definition of cultural translation as a “process in which there is no start text and usually no fixed text”, where the “prime cause […] is the movement of people (subjects) rather than the movement of texts (objects)” (2009), I argue that the transnational novels of migrant authors should be read not simply as hybrids, but rather as ‘translations with no originals’ (Apter 2006), in which the authors translate cultural references from a source to a target frame of reference (Vermeer 2004), in this specific case, the contemporary German-speaking context. Using translation theory as a methodological starting point allows to shift the focus away from the idea of hybridity, putting it instead on its part in the dialog between two specific cultural realms, as the text reterritorializes the experience of the author/narrator in a German speaking context.
This approach is inspired by research done in the wake of the ‘translational turn’ in cultural and literary studies, which presupposes a move away from the simple use of the translation concept as a metaphor. In that spirit, I aim to systematically employ a set of conceptual tools adapted from translation theory in order to analyse the translation strategies that are used to negotiate questions of space, time, language and gender in the translational novels that compose my corpus: Wer ist Martha? (Marjana Gaponenko, Suhrkamp, 2012), Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe (Olga Grjasnowa, Carl Hanser, 2014), Das achte Leben (Für Brilka) (Nino Haratischwili, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2014), Sogar Papageien überleben uns (Olga Martynova, Droschl, 2010), Vielleicht Esther (Katja Petrowskaja, Suhrkamp, 2014), and Berlin liegt im Osten (Nellja Veremej, Jung und Jung, 2013).