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Post-1945 Austrian Literature in Translation: Ingeborg Bachmann in English

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The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation

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Abstract

The poetry and prose of Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) are concerned with the societal and human impact of the National Socialist regime. In this chapter Fisher compares the reception and the ideological and commercial positions of a novel, a novel fragment, and a collection of short stories in the German-language literary system with those of their English-language translations.

The contrast between the position of German-language translated literature in the Anglo-American literary polysystem and the way in which Bachmann’s success in German was anchored in the position she fulfilled in the German-language polysystem made it difficult for the translations to be successful. Bachmann’s case serves as a useful illustration of the interaction between these two systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party).

  2. 2.

    Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (Social Democratic Party of Austria).

  3. 3.

    Christliche Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany).

  4. 4.

    Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany).

  5. 5.

    Bachmann left Piper in protest at their publication of Anna Akhmatova’s poems in a translation by Hans Baumann, a poet favoured by the Nazis (Filkins 2006: 638). Malina was published by Suhrkamp, and Bachmann expressed the intention to work with this publisher for future publications in several letters to Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkamp’s editor.

  6. 6.

    Number one was the romance novel Love Story by American writer Erich Segal.

  7. 7.

    This is a rather simplistic explanation, of course, but is intended to serve merely as a brief comparison of the post-war situation and attitudes in the German -speaking territories, the UK and the US.

  8. 8.

    The distrust of Germany is exemplified, for instance, by the existence of US Army bases in Germany for several decades following the end of the war.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Scholar, Norwich, UK

    Lina Fisher

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  1. Lina Fisher
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  1. School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Jean Boase-Beier

  2. Independent Scholar, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Lina Fisher

  3. Department of English, Tohoku Gakuin University, Sendai, Japan

    Hiroko Furukawa

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Fisher, L. (2018). Post-1945 Austrian Literature in Translation: Ingeborg Bachmann in English. In: Boase-Beier, J., Fisher, L., Furukawa, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_23

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