chapter 11 Found in Translation: Vladimir Vertlib’s Early Prose and the Creative Process1

Andrea Reiter

Abstract

This essay argues that bilingualism plays a pivotal role in the creative process of the Austrian writer Vladimir Vertlib who was born in and, as a teenager, settled with his parents in after trying to do so in various other countries. Translation constitutes both a topic and a literary technique in a number of Vertlib’s novels. This connection between translation as topic and translation as technique is particularly close in his first two novels Abschiebung and Zwischen­ stationen. These texts also demonstrate that the creative impulse of the bilin- gual youngster emerges in conjunction with his transition from child to adult.

Vladimir Vertlib belongs to a younger generation of highly productive and suc- cessful Jewish writers in who have become increasingly prominent over the past quarter century. Vertlib was born in 1966 in Leningrad (once again, St. Petersburg), which he left aged five with his parents. The family’s subsequent attempts to settle in various European countries, in and the United States, are the subject of his first two book-length publications, Abschiebung2 and Zwischenstationen.3 While the latter covers the entire migra- tion experience, the former more narrowly focuses on the family’s efforts to avoid deportation from the United States of America where they would have preferred to take up residence. Both texts offer fascinating glimpses of the experience of migration. Additionally, the first book allows us to witness how Vertlib achieved the transformation from experience to text and, in particular, how switching languages played a part in this transformation. This essay aims to demonstrate how crucial translating between languages was for the

1 I would like to express my thanks to Joachim Schlör for his critical advice on this essay. 2 Vladimir Vertlib: Abschiebung. Erzählung. : Otto Müller 1995. Page references together with the initial ‘A’ in my text. 3 Vladimir Vertlib: Zwischenstationen. Roman. Wien: Deuticke 1999. I have quoted from the revised version München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2005. Page references together with the initial ‘Z’ in my text.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004296398_012

222 Reiter production of these texts, and indeed continues to be for the creative process Vertlib engages in as a writer of prose fiction. The twentieth century has witnessed the dislocation of considerable num- bers of people, not least as a legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. In the 1930s this migration’s direction was away from and its rapidly expanding zone of influence. However, after its defeat, and especially from the 1950s onwards, the rebuilding of the German economy attracted large numbers of migrants from Southern Europe, notably from Turkey.4 More recently, German reunification in 1989 and the dismantling of the ‘Iron Curtain’ effected significant migration from Eastern Europe, not least of Jews from the former , who came as so-called ‘Kontingentflüchtlinge’ [quota refugees].5 These demographic developments, which are part of a global phenomenon, have been met with interest by scholars in a variety of fields. Notably, migrants themselves and processes of migration have become the focus of post-modern and post-colonial theory.6 Looking at the ‘outsider’ has also helped concep- tionalise ‘identity’ as contingent and forever evolving.7 Linguists and literary scholars, too, have been studying the effects of migration on the concept of nation with respect to language and literature.8 Hardly any scholarly work on what Steven Kellman9 has termed ‘translingual’ writers has failed to mention Eva Hoffman’s iconic autobiographical novel Lost in Translation;10 Azade Seyhan11 and several others devote detailed analyses to this seminal text.12

4 See for example Ruth Mandel: Shifting Centres and Emergent Identities: Turkey and Germany in the Lives of Turkish Gastarbeiter. In: Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination. Ed. by Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori. Berkeley: University of California Press 1990, pp. 153–174. 5 See for example The New German Jewry and the European Context. The Return of the European Diaspora. Ed. by Y. Michal Bodemann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008. 6 See for example Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge 1994. 7 See notably Stuart Hall: The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In: Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. by Anthony King. London: Macmillan 1991, pp. 19–39. Stuart Hall: The Question of Cultural Identity. In: Identity and its Futures. Ed. by Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with the Open University, pp. 274–325. Stuart Hall: Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In: Colonial Discourses and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. by R.J.P. Williams. New York: Columbia University Press 1994, pp. 392–403. 8 See for example Azade Seyhan: Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton and Oxford: Prince­ ton University Press 2001. Brigitta Busch: Mehrsprachigkeit. Wien: Facultas 2013. 9 Steven Kellman: The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press 2000. 10 Eva Hoffman: Lost in Translation. Life in a New Language. London: Vintage Books 1989. 11 See note 8. 12 See for example Mary Besemeres: Translating One’s Self. Language and Selfhood in Cross- Cultural Autobiography. Oxford and Berne: Lang 2002. Mona Körte: Übergangsobjekte.