#04
«Found in (Mis)Translation »
DOSSIER
This article analyses mistranslations in the Parisian lectures of the Polish author Adam Mickiewicz at the Collège de France. The texts were published between 1841 and 1849 in different versions in French, Polish, and German. Initially, mistranslations are defined as deliberate decisions of the translators, after which their aesthetic, linguistic, and linguistic-political functions are discussed. The analysis shows that those mistranslations were deliberately used by the author and the translators to achieve linguistic-political and aesthetic effects that were not intended in the original. This explains the mistranslations in the text, which are not to be understood as translation mistakes.
This article discusses the cooperation in translation between philologists and poets In a case study, three German versions of a poem by the Chinese Author Lu Xun were compared which were created out of a collaboration between the philologists Egbert Baqué and Michael Streffer together with the poets Sarah Kirsch, Jürgen Theobaldy and Gisela Kraft. Analyzing the different versions allows insights into the interplay between philology and poetry which brings forth a special potential for integrating foreign texts into new literary and cultural contexts despite or because of some instances of ‘mistranslation’. Moreover, it shows how inextricably translating and writing are intertwined.
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