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“Palms Require Translation”: Derek Walcott's Poetry in German

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“Palms require translation”: Derek Walcott’s Poetry in German Three Case Studies “Palms require translation”: translation”: require “Palms Poetry in German Derek Walcott’s Sarah Pfeffer ISBN 978-3-7376-0122-1 9 783737 601221 Sarah PfefferSarah P QP Q S S S kassel university press ! " ! # $ %& ' ( ( " )*" *+* " & ** -" & ** . /0102/3 .! (" "! ! 4 !! 4 !! "! 4 !! ( 5 !! (" & ! 6 "77!*!* * 8( *' 9%&*9 *02/3 6.4:;<-=-;=;>-2/00-/)"+ 6.4:;<-=-;=;>-2/0=-<) -!+ %?4"77!- &(* 7! 2220-@2/0=; '02/>9 & " !$9' *" *- * Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Walcott’s poetry in Europe: An overview 6 1.2 Translating poetry: Theory and approach 8 2 Klaus Martens: Das Königreich des Sternapfels – A compilation 31 2.1 The translator 31 2.2 The German collection – three books in one 34 2.2.1 Settings 36 2.2.2 Themes and recurring motifs 39 2.2.3 Interconnectedness: The collections in the context of Walcott’s oeuvre 46 2.3 Tendencies in Martens’s translation 51 2.3.1 Questions of style 51 Archaisms and archaization 51, Inversion and metre 52, Sentence structure 53, Prenominal genitives 54, Discrepancies in tone 55, Self- reflexivity 56, Meandering sentences 59, Puns and wordplay 62 2.3.2 Translating the Local 66 Néo-logie 66, Localization vs. foreignization 69, History, flora, and fauna 70 2.3.3 Intertextuality 74 2.3.4 Translation as interpretation 77 2.4 Differences between the 1989 and 1993 editions 82 3 Raoul Schrott: Mittsommer/Midsummer – a bilingual edition 88 3.1 The translator 88 Schrott’s translations of ancient texts 90, Schrott on translation 92, Why Walcott? 94 3.2 The en-face edition 97 Advantages of the bilingual edition 99, Homonyms 101 3.3 Tendencies in Schrott’s translation 103 3.3.1 Questions of style 103 Rhyme 104, Explicitness 107, Complex structures and prosaic feel 108, Metre 109, Simile vs. metaphor 111 3.3.2 Translating the local 112 Geographical setting and localization 112, Foreignization vs. domestication 116, Relocalization 119, Flora and fauna 120 3.3.3 Painterly techniques 123 3.4 Differences between the 1994 and 2001 editions 129 4 Konrad Klotz: Omeros 133 4.1 The translator 133 4.2 The monolingual edition of Omeros 135 4.2.1 Questions of genre 137 4.2.2 Translating dialects 139 4.2.3 Recurring motifs and Homeric repetition 147 4.3 Tendencies in Klotz’s translation 153 4.3.1 Questions of style 153 Rhyme and prosody 153, Archaisms 157, Néo-logie 159, Semantic fields 161, Euphemism 164, Puns and idiomatic expressions 165, Simile vs. metaphor 166 4.3.2 Translating the local 167 Flora and fauna 167, Language in nature 170, Landscape and seascape 172, Localization vs. foreignization 174 4.3.3 Intertextuality 177 4.3.4 Translating characters 184 5 Conclusion 190 6 Works cited 194 7 Appendix 219 7.1 List of abbreviations 219 7.2 Interview with Raoul Schrott. 20 Aug. 2013 220 1 Introduction The comparatively young academic discipline of translation studies is a thriving field. The “proliferation of conferences, books and journals on translation in many languages” that started in the late 1990s continues to flourish (Munday 2008, 6). The UNESCO Index translationum provides a record of literary translation from 1930 to date and illustrates how widespread the practice of literary translation is. In addition, it conveys a sense of the importance of foreign literature as well as its influence on national literatures. According to this index, the number one target language for literary translations is German, the number one source language English (www.unesco.org/xtrans). The amount of research conducted on literary translations greatly varies depending on numerous factors; one of them is the author’s place of origin. Tomi Adeaga writes: There is no doubt that some books on translation in general have been in existence, but finding texts that deal specifically with the problems of transmitting the literary thoughts of African authors into German is a complex task taken on by very few. (2006, 10) This holds for writers from the West Indies, as well: the translations of Derek Walcott’s poetry into German, for instance, have not received any scholarly attention to date.1 In addition to the reason pointed out by Adeaga, translations are still considered inferior to ‘originals’ in academia. Lawrence Venuti makes this very clear when he writes: “Translation is […] an offense against a still prevailing concept of scholarship that rests on the assumption of original authorship.” (1998, 31) Moreover, in German-speaking countries2 the role of poetry is marginal. Two translators of Walcott, Raoul Schrott and Klaus Martens, both agree that the genre enjoys a much higher standing in the Anglophone world.3 Martens describes the situation in the United States thus: Many universities and colleges hire poets-in-residence to teach writing classes, do readings, invite other poets, travel to poetry conferences, are able to write in some peace and security and to broaden the minds of their students and enrich the curricula.4 What makes Walcott’s poetry unique also makes it especially challenging for a foreign audience: it is very complex in subject matter, extravagant in the use, variety, and abundance of metaphor, and rooted in a number of different cultural and literary traditions. These features pose great difficulties for readers and translators alike. Nevertheless, the number of translated works has steadily increased since Walcott received the Nobel Prize 1 With regard to other European languages, there are a few isolated essays on translations of Walcott’s poetry: Christine Raguet (2010) and Jessica Stephens (2012) discuss specific aspects of Claire Malroux’s translation of Walcott into French in two insightful essays. The Italian translator of Omeros, Andrea Molesini (2006) and Marija Bergam (not dated) who translated a fragment of Omeros into Croatian have each published an essay about the difficulties they encountered. 2 In the following I will use German with reference to the various German-speaking unless otherwise indicated. 3 cf. Schrott and Böhlau 2009, 433; <http://klausmartens-anthologie.de/criticism/index.html>. 4 <http://klausmartens-anthologie.de/criticism/index.html>. 1 for literature in 1992 “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” (Espmark 1992). In addition to individual poems published in magazines, German translations currently amount to six book-length volumes, which were rendered by five different translators. Michael Krüger – until recently head of Hanser publishing – told me that it was a great advantage to have Walcott ‘speak’ in many different voices through the various translators. One guiding question of this paper is how the different translators (re)interpret Walcott’s poems and, as a result, affect the perception of the Caribbean poet in a German- language setting. For the purpose of this book, I will limit my discussion of translation theory to those aspects that are relevant for the in-depth analyses of my corpus and for contextualizing this study in the broad field of translation studies. The core of this paper will concern itself with the analyses of three book-length translations of Walcott’s poetry into German in chronological order of the appearance of the source texts:5 Das Königreich des Sternapfels (1989) by Klaus Martens, Midsummer/Mittsommer (2001) by Raoul Schrott, and Omeros (1995) by Konrad Klotz, alias Kurt Bitschnau-Durga.6 For a number of reasons these volumes are especially fruitful for a translation analysis: Being the versatile poet that Walcott is, the source texts themselves vary substantially in genre, style, structure, thematic focus, volume, etc. Omeros is a poem of epic scale, its form reminiscent of Dante’s terza rima, while Midsummer is a sequence of 54 loosely connected lyrical poems that have repeatedly been compared with Robert Lowell’s Notebook (King 2004, 437; Birkerts 1993, 331; Pritchard 1984, 331). The poems that make up the first German volume Das Königreich des Sternapfels were selected by Martens from some of Walcott’s then most recent works The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and Midsummer (1984).7 This range of source texts offers a broad spectrum of translation problems to be discussed. Second, despite the fact that all three translations were published with the same publisher, the editions also differ from one another: Martens’s translation is a compilation and – with the exception of the title poem – a monolingual edition; Schrott’s 2001 translation of Midsummer was the first entirely bilingual volume of Walcott’s to be published in German, and Klotz’s translation of Omeros that appeared as a monolingual edition is the only one of the three to include annotations. The bilingual edition raises a number of unique questions. In case of Omeros, the epic scale of the poem made it impracticable for the publisher to include the source text. I will take into consideration the particulars of the publications in order to assess how they may have had an impact on the translation and its reception. Jeremy Munday describes how “the study of translators, rather than the texts and cultures, has become centre-stage in [recent] translation studies research.” (2008, 157 emphasis Munday) An investigation of “the role of the translator as active agent […] 5 A first translation of Midsummer by Raoul Schrott was published in 1994 in the literary magazine Akzente. Technically, the year of publication of the translations corresponds with the chronology of the publication of the original works. However, I will mainly concentrate on Schrott’s revised 2001 edition rather than the 1994 publication. 6 Klotz passed away shortly after completing the translation. 7 Martens did not include poems from the 1988 volume The Arkansas Testament.
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