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University of Alberta Translating Hedwig Dohm by Eva Jeanne Guenther A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages, Literatures and Linguistics Modern Languages and Cultural Studies ©Eva Jeanne Guenther Fall 2013 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. This dissertation is dedicated to my mum. You are the best. Abstract Hedwig Dohm was an important German woman writer and feminist at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. For a long time, she was recognized mainly for being Katia Mann’s – wife of the famous German author Thomas Mann – grandmother. However, her own work has been experiencing a renewed interest over the past fifteen to twenty years; one indication of this is the quite recent translation of her 1894 novella Werde, die du bist including the essay “Die alte Frau” (Become who you are, 2006, including the essay “The old woman”). This dissertation contributes to the still limited corpus of Dohm’s work available in English. I am offering a translation of Dohm’s 1876 political essay Der Frauen Natur und Recht (Women’s Nature and Right), of which a second revised and extended edition was translated into English in 1896. In addition I am offering the first translation of an as yet untranslated novella entitled Benjamin Heiling. The two translations show that older texts by authors such as Dohm can be adequately translated when following the tenets of the German tradition of translation, which propagates the foreignization rather than the domestication of translations, in combination with some of the less radical principles of feminist translation. Applying this methodology allows translators to retain feminist ideas present in the original, which otherwise may be lost in a translation. The appendix of this dissertation provides a thorough, yet uncommented, comparison of the two German editions of Der Frauen Natur und Recht (first edition 1876, second edition 1893), the translation of the second German edition into English under the title Women’s Nature and Privilege (1896), and my own translation of the first German edition, entitled Women’s Nature and Right. In addition to discussing the difficulties found in the first translation, there is also a brief explanation on the publication history of Dohm’s Der Frauen Natur und Recht. Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Raleigh Whitinger, for his advice, his encouragement and years of support, and for travelling this rocky road with me. Furthermore, I would like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Helga Mitterbauer and Dr. Susanne Luhmann, and especially the two external readers of this dissertation, Dr. Elisabeth Herrmann and Dr. Jean Wilson. I greatly value their contributions to this dissertation. I am immeasurably grateful to my mum for never losing faith in me, and for providing the moral support and inspiration to keep me going. I would also like to express my gratitude to and appreciation of my twin sister, Christine, and my brother, Till, and their families for strongly believing in me. Very special thanks go to my wonderful and adorable niece and nephew, Charlotte and Philipp, for enriching my life through their mere existence. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Rudolf Jung for recommending Gaby Pailer’s latest book on Hedwig Dohm, which ultimately gave new momentum to this dissertation, and Dr. Steve Knish for his years of help and support. Table of Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Publication history of Der Frauen Natur und Recht ........................................... 3 1.2 Hedwig Dohm’s Life and Times ......................................................................... 5 2. Translating Hedwig Dohm ............................................................................................ 11 2.1 Translation Theories ............................................................................................... 11 2.2 An Approach Drawing on the Modern German Tradition and Elements of Recent Feminist Translation ...................................................................................................... 11 3. Translation of Hedwig Dohm’s Der Frauen Natur und Recht ........................................ 17 Women’s Nature and Right ........................................................................................... 17 4. Comparison of the first English translation to the German original ........................... 120 4.1 Grammatical inaccuracies ..................................................................................... 121 4.2 Words added or left out, phrases left out ............................................................ 122 4.3 Mistranslations...................................................................................................... 125 4.4 Misunderstanding of the German original text .................................................... 128 5. Translation of Hedwig Dohm’s Benjamin Heiling ....................................................... 132 6. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 185 List of Works Cited .......................................................................................................... 190 7. Appendix ..................................................................................................................... 194 1. Introduction Hedwig Dohm was an important German woman writer and feminist at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite her importance, however, her work has remained relatively neglected, even in German-speaking countries. If she was talked about, it was mainly in connection with Thomas Mann who had married her granddaughter Katia. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, however, the interest in Dohm as a representative of the early feminist movement has grown again – not just in German speaking countries. Elisabeth Ametsbichler’s translation of Dohm’s 1894 novella Werde, die du bist (Become who you are, 2006) proves as much. Apart from the 1896 translation of Der Frauen Natur und Recht (1876), which will be a subject of discussion in this dissertation, it is the only other text available in English thus far. Both the novella and its translation include an essay on ageing entitled “Die alte Frau” (“The old Woman”). When choosing which of Dohm’s other texts I wanted to translate, that essay influenced my decision in favour of the novella Benjamin Heiling. Similar to “Die alte Frau,” Benjamin Heiling deals with another issue popular in Dohm’s later writing – that of ageing – and, as opposed to “Die alte Frau” tells the story of an ageing man. The novella was published in 1906 in a collection called Schwanenlieder: Novellen (Swan Songs: Novellas). The purpose of this dissertation is to add to the corpus of Dohm’s work available to an English speaking audience. With this dissertation, I want to make Dohm and her writing, both political and fictional, accessible to a larger audience who might have an academic interest in her and her writing. With this in mind, I am offering a new translation of Dohm’s important political essay Der Frauen Natur und Recht (1876) and the novella Benjamin Heiling. It is my goal to make Dohm’s texts available to both an academic as well as a general audience. The academic audience will profit from my updated translation of Der Frauen Natur und Recht and my new translation of Benjamin Heiling because they will contribute to the 1 discussion of Dohm as both an author and an activist for women’s rights. Gaby Pailer wrote in her 1994 monograph, “Heute, […], kann Hedwig Dohm kaum mehr als vergessen gelten, […]. Und doch wird sie in einem gewissen Sinn immer noch unterschätzt: als ‘Dichterin’” (Pailer 9)1. Matters have progressed since then, with Pailer and others contributing to an awareness of Dohm’s significance both as an activist and as a writer – in addition to Ametsbichler’s 2006 translation of Werde, die du bist, there are several articles and monographs that address Dohm’s contributions. The additional translations offered here and the reflections they invite on the reception and understanding of writing by women and by early representatives of the women’s movement are meant to add to them. On the other hand, my thesis will also offer a critique, by means of a direct comparison of the German and its English translation, of the existing translation of Dohm’s Der Frauen Natur und Recht, published in Britain in 1896 under the title Women’s Nature and Privilege. It is interesting to note that both texts