Born Translated: The Linguistic Exiles of Stefan Zweig

Skolnik, Jonathan S.; Skolnik, Jonathan S.

Long maligned as an imperfect if not outright treacherous endeavor, the act of translation has more recently come to be celebrated as an emancipatory gesture of sorts, one that liberates texts from the perceived fetters of the mother tongue. Such is the implicit thrust of the “postlingual turn” heralded by scholars such as yasser elhariry, Michael Allen, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Yasemin Yildiz, all of whom champion “born-translated” texts, i.e. texts that present themselves as translations from the start by being written in a kind of translatese, as the exponents of a post-monolingual condition that moves us “beyond the mother tongue." If the focus on an authentic original serves to anchor, stabilize, and, ultimately, fetishize a work, then born-translated texts call into question the very validity of such hierarchical dichotomies as native vs. translated, original vs. copy, or source vs. target language. Instead, these scholars theorize and delineate an exilic corpus, one that refuses monolingual enclosure, highlighting instead the family resemblances that Walter Benjamin, in an important essay, famously identifies as the essential kinship of all languages as revealed by translation.

This diverse panel, composed of male and female scholars from the United States, Israel, and Austria, seeks to expand on these stimulating new insights by focusing on an author-cum-translator who is yet to receive his due within the current debate. A lifelong translator and a champion of translation, Stefan Zweig came to regard translation in a much more ambivalent light once the Nazi prohibition on publications by Jewish authors made it so that he was now being read primarily in translation only. How can one reconcile these differing viewpoints? Do Zweig's reservations call into question the liberating qualities of the postmonolingual condition as such, or are they but the symptoms of a writer unwilling to adapt to the linguistic demands of exile? Is the mother tongue a privilege to be unlearned, or is it rather the celebration of linguistic exile that constitutes the privilege, one that dissipates as soon as one loses the familiar footing of one’s native soil?

Birger Vanwesenbeeck offers a first foray into these questions by comparing the Baudelaire translations of the early Zweig with those by Walter Benjamin. Whereas Benjamin’s translations reveal a preference for the word-for-word interlinear translation that he famously champions in his “Task of the Translator” preface, Zweig takes a much more liberal if not leisurely approach. His Baudelaire is made to sound like a German-language poet, revealing less the kinship between French and German, as Benjamin’s translations set out to do, than that the source language finds itself eclipsed by the target language. It follows that Zweig’s fear of linguistic exile, as experienced and testified to later in his life, is already in evidence here, in the style and practice of these early translations.

Martina Wörgötter traces Zweig’s poetics of translation by examining paratexts (e.g. prefaces and epilogues in anthologies) and Zweig’s own translations. In The World of Yesterday, his autobiographical memoir, Zweig emphasizes the intellectual and creative value of the act of translation. Even as a young writer, he found in it a way to “understand more deeply and creatively the spirit of his own language”. At the same time, he speaks of a “struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it as plastically into one’s own language”, which he always felt was “a particular artistic desire”.

Mark H. Gelber, finally, focuses on the record, background, and reception of translations of Zweig’s writings into Yiddish and Hebrew, which are yet to be fully documented and analyzed, as are other aspects of his very different relationships to these two Jewish languages. In fact, Yiddish appeared to Zweig to be the promising Jewish language of the future and he regretted the development and adoption of Hebrew as the lingua franca in the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, also at the Hebrew University after it was established in Jerusalem. But, Zweig’s relationship to Hebrew and to Hebrew translation is in fact complex. Although his attendance at, and enthusiastic response to, a well- known Hebrew language production of his Jeremiah play are quite well- known, very little in fact has been written about the anthology of Hebrew writings (in Hebrew) he initiated in his Bibliotheca Mundi project, and which, as recently surfaced correspondence shows, was very dear to him.

The presider will speak for 6 minutes; each panelist will speak for about 18 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for questions at the end.

89 Born Translated: The Linguistic Exiles of Stefan Zweig: Calls for Papers