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Examining Text and Authorship in Translation pp 113–160Cite as

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The Author as Feminist: Kassandra

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Abstract

In this chapter, emphasis is on the framing of Wolf’s author-function by epitexts, focusing on the “feminist” value that has been assigned to her author-function in many English-language readings. This is particularly notable since the publication of Kassandra (1983; trans. 1984), one of Wolf’s most widely read and cited texts. Anglo-American narratives of feminism have been influential in readings of the translation, and the chapter looks in particular detail at the effect of this in journalistic epitexts. In general, the epitexts show that Wolf’s specifically (East) German identity and the socialist values at the heart of her feminism and pacifism have been marginalised in translation, in favour of identification with the author-function as recognisably “feminist”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Nachdenken über Christa T. was continually associated by its reception, particularly in the USA, with a tradition of female writing.”

  2. 2.

    An overview of the GDR context and some changes in the legal and social situation of East German women following 1989 are discussed in Anke Burckhardt and Uta Schlegel, “Frauen an ostdeutschen Hochschulen—in den gleichstellungspolitischen Koordinaten vor und nach der ‘Wende’”, in Edith Saurer et al. (eds) (2006) Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 79–102.

  3. 3.

    Morgner’s Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura (1976; translated by Jeanette Clausen, 2000) and Amanda (1983; not translated), for example, use more fantasy and humour than do Wolf’s texts to explore female subjectivity, desire and the tension between the sexes; however, they have been hardly recognised by the Anglophone or international literary field.

  4. 4.

    See, for example, Shulamith Firestone’s 1969 letter to the left in the Guardian, quoted in Marlene Legates (2001) In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society, New York: Routledge, pp. 353–354.

  5. 5.

    Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler discuss, for example, how Cassandra realises too late her complicity in the survival of the oppressive regime that brings about Troy’s downfall and her own death (Haines and Littler 2004: 79).

  6. 6.

    “Between killing and dying there is a third: living.”

  7. 7.

    “Only those can begin to write for whom reality is no longer self-explanatory.”

  8. 8.

    “Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive, she, herself the object of foreign intentions, possessed me.”

  9. 9.

    For example, “Die Nachrichten beider Seiten bombardieren uns mit der Notwendigkeit von Kriegsvorbereitungen, die auf beiden Seiten Verteidigungsvorbereitungen heißen” (Werke VII: 124). [“News reports on both sides bombard us with the necessity of war preparations, which on both sides are called defence preparations.”]

  10. 10.

    “I loved this country. I knew it was at its end, because it was no longer able to integrate the best people, because it was demanding human sacrifices. I described that in Kassandra, the censor poked around in the ‘lectures’; I waited curiously to see if they would dare to understand the message of the story, namely, that Troy must founder. They did not dare, and printed the story unabridged. Readers in the GDR understood it.”

  11. 11.

    Letters between van Heurck and her editor at FSG, Nancy Meiselas, suggest that some of these changes (such as punctuation choices) may have been editorial rather than translatorial (NYPL 712/21). It is impossible to trace the genesis of individual decisions in this way, but imperative to recognise the importance of the editor’s input into the translated text.

  12. 12.

    “History, deep down, is not the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, but between men and women, or even more grotesque: between ‘male’ and ‘female’ thought.”

  13. 13.

    “The charge raised against Christa Wolf in the GDR, that she is an adherent of a bourgeois feminism, cannot relate to this narrative.”

  14. 14.

    “If this is to count as a beginning for a newly imagined eroticism, then there is no such thing, sister.”

  15. 15.

    Luchterhand in West Germany published Kassandra separately from the Voraussetzungen, selling 90,000 copies of the lectures and 150,000 of the Cassandra narrative itself, which was hugely popular in the wake of the Frankfurt lectures (Magenau 2002: 338).

  16. 16.

    Other designs focusing on the solitary female figure include the Virago Modern Classics edition (1989) and the more recent Daunt Books edition (2013).

  17. 17.

    The Virago 1984 cover design can be viewed at http://flickriver-lb-1710691658.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/photos/ringaringarosa/3669122777/.

  18. 18.

    “A totally and utterly perverse question.”

  19. 19.

    See Virago’s editions of The Quest for Christa T. (1970), A Model Childhood (1980), No Place on Earth (1982) and Cassandra (1984).

  20. 20.

    “If one properly looked at it—only no one dared to see it like that—the men of both sides seemed united against our women.”

  21. 21.

    “Presumably not ‘academic’ enough to be included in a scholarly study. …With that of course my own concerns, demanding precisely this dialogic approach, were neglected.”

  22. 22.

    “In recent years, the tradition of female writing has become important to me. To expand on this would be a theme in itself, there is some discussion of it in the lectures for Cassandra. Here, I will just name a few names: Ingeborg Bachmann. Virginia Woolf. Marie-Luise Fleißer.”

  23. 23.

    “That, in ‘art’, she cannot kill the experience of the woman she is.”

  24. 24.

    Christa T. had been published in Britain in 1971 by Hutchinson, who subsequently opted out of their partnership with FSG.

  25. 25.

    See, for example, Woolf’s discussion of the male and female brain in A Room of One’s Own (2008: 126).

  26. 26.

    The front cover design for the FSG 1990 edition is identical to that of the 1984 edition.

  27. 27.

    “My overarching question aims at, that is: works against the sinister effects of alienation in aesthetics and art.”

  28. 28.

    “[It was] not through birth, oh no, through the narratives in the inner courts [that] I became a Trojan.”

  29. 29.

    Exceptions to this are Lehmann-Haupt (1984) and Crick (1985).

  30. 30.

    Straus, Wolf’s personal advocate at FSG, surrendered control of the company in 1994 to the German conglomerate Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. While still active at FSG following this change, Straus’s loss of executive control would have reduced his power to take decisions and actions that would promote the interests of Wolf as a translated author.

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  1. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Caroline Summers

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Summers, C. (2017). The Author as Feminist: Kassandra . In: Examining Text and Authorship in Translation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_4

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