Introduction

Introduction The three concepts mentioned in the title of this volume imply the contact between two or more literary phenomena; they are based on similarities that are related to a form of ‘travelling’ and imitation or adaptation of entire texts, genres, forms or con- tents. Transfer may be regarded as the most comprehensive concept, as it comprises all sorts and modes of ‘travelling’, with translation as a major instrument of trans- ferring literature (and other cultural goods) across linguistic and cultural barriers. Transfer aims at the process of communication, starting with the source product and its cultural context and then highlighting the mediation by certain agents and institutions such as critics, translators, publishers, book-dealers, libraries, etc. to end up with inclusion in the target culture. Reception lays its focus on the receiving culture, especially on critcism, reading, and interpretation. Translation, therefore, forms a major factor in reception with the general aim of reception studies being to reveal the wide spectrum of interpretations each text offers. Moreover, translations are the prime instrument in the distribution of literature across linguistic and cultural borders; thus, they pave the way for gaining prestige in the world of literature and they are an important requirement for the admission to ‘world literature’. In former times the term ‘influence’ covered the whole field of relations between authors and literatures; in the 1960s the positivist touch to the idea of influence as an impetus in the mechanical imitation of prestigious works of genius be- came discredited and the concept was replaced by reception – cf. the titles of the important studies of Lawrence Marsden Price English-German Literary Influences (1920) and The Reception of United States Literature in Germany (1966). On the other hand, it is also clear that most authors are very well aware of what certain other authors have written, and the impact of such observations on their own writing, across a spectrum reaching from imitation and adaptation to outright rejec- tion, is still worth studying. The play of positive and negative reactions, of creative adoption, adaptation and differenciation, is an important factor in the history of literary relations. The number of papers dedicated to research in this area read at the ICLA conference 2016 in Vienna is ample proof that the field remains at the center of interest in Comparative Literature. Chapter One of our volume comprises ‘classical’ translation criticism of one or several works of an individual author. Besides textual analyses, translation criticism may concentrate on extrinsic circumstances and contexts such as translators’ biographies or the genesis and critical reception of certain translations. Thus, as Galina Alekseeva explains, Constance Garnett was introduced to the cir- cles of Russian emigrants in London, such as Prince Kropotkin and Sergei Step- niak, who advised her to learn Russian and helped her with translating Russian literature. During her long career as a translator she rendered authors as impor- Open Access. © 2020 Norbert Bachleitner, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641998-001 2 Introduction tant as Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol’, Chekhov, Goncharov, Hertsen, and Os- trovsky into English – altogether in some seventy volumes. One of her earliest translations was Tolstoy’s religious treatise The Kingdom of God Is within You that appeared in 1894. She exchanged letters with the author and even visitied him in Yasnaya Polyana in January of that year. Although Tolstoy was not yet well- known in England, his proposal of a better social system grounded in religion was well received by critics and praised as a counter-weight to a pagan, positivist and materialist view of humanity. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Ivan Ilych and Other Stories were to follow, with all of these translations offering evidence of the carefulness and competence of the translator. A further essay concentrating on external factors that exercise a decisive influence on translation is Elisa Fortunato’s study of two translations of Swift’s Gul- liver’s Travels into Italian that appeared during the early years of the Fascist regime. This regime wanted to avoid Italian culture being regarded as receptive; although on the other hand the Fascists argued that the country should stay included in international cultural life and business activities. Thus, a translation of Swift’s classic was made by Carlo Formichi in 1933 (published by Mondadori), with a second by Luigi Taroni following in 1934 (published by Barion). Both translations bear signs of self-censorship, aligning them with the Fascist cultural ideal of refined taste. Taroni – who addressed his version of Gulliver’s Travels to the widest possible public, including children – was even more prudent than Formi- chi. Both translators, however, tempered and softened Swift’s satire by omitting puns and word-plays and cutting ‘disgusting’ details such as depictions of, and references to, sexuality or diseases. Another aspect of ‘extrinsic’ translation criticism is the establishing of translation bibliographies. Gerald Sommer, on the basis of a bibliography he published in 2016, provides an overview of the translations of the work of Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer. He discusses the problems of gathering information on the worldwide publication of translations; the sources to be consulted included the Index translationum and the catalogues of ‘national’ libraries, but also the papers of Doderer’s publishing houses. In general, the war- and post-war-years were challenging for translations from German. Thus, with a delay of 15 years Doderer’s work started to be translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Russian; but also into ‘minor’ languages such as Estonian and Georgian. It is one of the curiosities of translation history that “Zwei Lügen oder Eine antikische Tra- gödie auf dem Dorfe” – a story that holds only a rather peripheral position in Doderer’s work – was translated into Georgian four times within two decades. That Die Strudlhofstiege – arguably his most important novel – was translated into Slovene, Croatian, Slovakian, Hungarian, Estonian and Dutch, but not into English, French or Russian is not less astonishing. Introduction 3 The conference panel organized by Gerald Sommer included three case studies. Vincent Kling compares two English translations of a Doderer story entitled “Ein anderer Kratki-Baschik”, which was the first work of Doderer to be rendered into this language. As the name of the protagonist, a nineteenth-century magician and showman, appears in the story’s title, Kling asks if exoticism clinging to this name should be maintained or not. The first translator decided to gloss over the sense of ‘otherness’ expressed in Doderer’s style and chose “The Magician’s Art”, whereas Kling himself stuck to the name and called the protagonist “a second Kratki-Baschik”. The first translator’s decision seems to be due to an English audi- ence in 1961 knowing very little about Doderer. On the contrary, Kling, writing in 2005, had reason to imagine a comparatively well-informed readership and, therefore, prioritized the preservation of the source text’s complexity, exoticism, and colloquial phrases over generic ‘readability’. Johanna Lenhart dedicates her paper to the comparison of two translations of two other Doderer stories. Once again, different audiences are the backdrop for differing styles of translation. Doderer’s elaborate style in “Léon Pujot” – a story featuring a taxi driver jumping on a train without a chauffeur and stopping it – and in “Begegnung im Morgengrauen” – another story which narrates the en- counter of a young officer with a hangman during a train journey – is translated ‘faithfully’ in two collections destined for language teaching. On the other hand, two recent translations by a French scholar of German literature which address a wide, non-expert reading public tend to ‘nationalise’ the texts, a strategy that is perfectly in accordance with the tradition of translating into French reverting to the famous belles infidèles. The two types of translation strategies may be called ‘open’ and ‘covert’: in the first case the translation appears as a secondary text, in the second as an original. Erkan Osmanovic argues that Doderer’s style, especially his complex syntax, is virtually untranslatable. As a basis of his essay he refers to Roman Jakobson’s approach which regards every translation not as a rendering but as an interpretation of the source text. Due to cultural barriers, a complete reproduction of the original will, therefore, never be possible. Osmanovic demonstrates this through an analysis of the signification of colours in Serbian Doderer translations; moreover, he comments on the translations of the jargon of Austrian state officials which en- gendered words such as ‘Ruhegenußbemessung’ (calculation of the rent), and concepts such as ‘Altweibersommer’ (Indian summer) which do not exist in the Serbian language. Both words are rendered by explicative phrases, e.g. Indian summer appears as ‘threads of the flight of grand-motherly summer’. Finally, Thomas Buffet joins this chapter with a comparison of French and English translations of Hölderlin. Buffet establishes a dichotomy similar to those in the aforementioned essays. French translators

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