Translation Review

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Who Does a Translated Text Belong To?

Claudia Hamm & Translated from the German by Jonathan Becker

To cite this article: Claudia Hamm & Translated from the German by Jonathan Becker
(2021) Who Does a Translated Text Belong To?, Translation Review, 111:1, 15-25, DOI:
10.1080/07374836.2021.1994244

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2021.1994244

Published online: 02 Dec 2021.

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 WHO DOES A TRANSLATED TEXT BELONG TO?*

Claudia Hamm

Translated from the German by Jonathan Becker

What is a translated text and who does it belong to? What does a translation do with the
“What” of the source language, when it is shifted into the “How” of the target language?
Can the “What” of a text even be separated from its respective linguistic expression?
These questions have been of interest to me since I began translating, which, aside from
a few earlier incidental encounters, was about fifteen years ago.
What do literary translators do before they translate? “They read the original,” we
are inclined to answer. But am I not already translating a foreign-language original as
I read it? Where does the appropriation begin that constitutes not just every translation
but every reading? It might begin with opening the book, with the process of selecting it,
or even with all the historical and cultural background knowledge one has to assemble to
end up with this exact book. (This is part of what is known as the “hermeneutic circle,”
and determines not only our reading choices, but also the “paratexts” we read before we
get to the actual corpus.) So, the “Before” is already part of the process. And for
translators, this “Before” rather frequently results in the discovery of a literary, emo­
tional, intellectual, or even biographical closeness to the author, which then prompts
them to find a publishing house because they are convinced that this work has to be
available to read in one’s own language.1
Let us assume all these steps have been completed and the translator sits (or lies)
before the original to be translated. In addition to the desire for an aesthetic or emotional
experience, we read with the impulse to understand. What we are able and willing to
understand, however, differs among individuals. Everyone reads their own book. Beyond
that, the “How” of a text appears more important in the case of literature than the
“What” I have to somehow extract from within the “How.” (“Everything has been said,
just not by everybody,” Karl Valentin said of the “How” overhanging the “What.”) Once
I, the translator, have constructed the “What” bound in the “How” of the other language,
based on the horizon of my own comprehension, I can look for a linguistic form in
German that organizes the linguistic material of my mother tongue in such a way that it
achieves even close to the same effect the original had on me—one would think.
But is that right? In translation circles there is much talk of the “equivalent effect”
as the aim of translating wherein one attempts to infer, sense, analyze the kind of
impression the original leaves in the source language in order to reconstruct it in one’s
own. After considering the aforementioned hermeneutic circle and everything that it

1
*Based on an essay titled “Wem gehört ein übersetzter Text?” (Merkur 72, no. 827 (2018): 42–52.) and a talk of the same
title given at the international literature festival berlin on September 9, 2018.

Translation Review 111: 15–25, 2021

Copyright © The Center for Translation Studies
ISSN: 0737–4836 print/2164–0564 online
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2021.1994244
16 CLAUDIA HAMM

encompasses, the picture of equivalence hangs crooked. And not merely because there is
always something intangible in a book that is impossible to grasp, but that can re-emerge
in the translation, without ever having been grasped.
No, for me personally it is something else. After all, in my case, growing up
monolingually and having encountered all other languages as foreign languages, there
is only one language in which I feel emotionally and intellectually at home, and that is in
German, my native language. When I say emotionally, I mean a deeply felt thinking,
a thinking experience. Personally, I translate in order to bring a foreign-language text
closer to me. I therefore am not reconstructing the effect the text had on me but creating
it in the first place. Even if I cognitively understand the meaning of the successive
sentences and they point me toward a certain emotional register, and even if I ask
a native French speaker about the effect the text had on them and they respond with
certain adjectives, I can only truly sense the original sentences when I hear and write
them in my own language:

C’est la première nuit. La nuit qui suit le jour ou leur fille est morte. Ce matin elle était
vivante, elle s’est réveillée, elle est venue jouer dans leur lit, elle les appelait papa et maman,
elle riait, elle était chaude, elle était ce qui existe de plus beau et de plus chaud et de plus doux
sur terre, et maintenant elle est morte. Elle sera toujours morte.1

How does a foreign-language text impact us on an affective level? Most likely through its
sound, its rhythmic and compositional qualities, its prosody, its music. Perhaps also,
especially in the case of poetry, through its visual appearance, its typeface, its organiza­
tion within the space of the page or the book. And of course, certain semantic expres­
sions trigger emotions when I hear them in a foreign language that I speak. But this
experience only becomes actualized and differentiated when I translate it into my native
language—so differentiated, specifically, that it evokes a broad spectrum of memories,
experiences, imagination, fears, and hopes, because for me the linguistic dimension of
these affects and intellects is shaped by the German language. Not just words, but
feelings are constituted linguistically, and it appears that in that respect one language
dominates, seemingly even for those who grew up multilingually.

Es ist die erste Nacht. Die Nacht, die auf den Tag folgt, an dem ihre Tochter gestorben ist.
Heute morgen war sie noch lebendig, sie ist aufgewacht, sie ist zum Spielen in ihr Bett
gekrochen, sie hat Papa und Mama gerufen und gelacht, sie war warm, sie war das Schönste,
Wärmste und Süßeste, was es auf dieser Welt gab, und jetzt ist sie tot. Sie wird für immer tot
sein.2

It’s the first night. The night of the day their daughter died. This morning she was alive, she
woke up, she came to play in their bed, she called them Mama and Papa, she was laughing,
she was warm, she was the loveliest and warmest and sweetest thing on earth, and now she’s
dead. She will always be dead.3
 TRANSLATION REVIEW 17

Generally, however, it can be said that exactly that which opens up the aesthetic,
intellectual, and emotional space in the original (which defines the text as literary),
that which creates the sound, the associative and architectural, is exactly what the
translator needs to abandon first—because only in the rarest of cases are there true
equivalences on the plane of the linguistic material, the idiomatic, the syntactic, and even
punctuation (after all, the very idea of the bilingual dictionary is already an illusion). We
will return to the subcutaneous dimension of sound later as we discuss what happens
during the transition of the medium of the book to the medium of the stage.
Generally, it can be said that translating literature from a foreign language necessarily
includes a relationship with the foreign. There are dissenting opinions as to whether the
foreign is to be preserved or overcome. But even if I—following the creed of Walter
Benjamin, for example—wanted to let the foreignness of the French shine through in the
German (something I personally do not aim to do),4 I could not avoid a comprehensional
appropriation, an emotional processing, and a resulting re-design of the text in the target
language. Even reconstructing French syntax in German would be a new construction,
a change in effect.
Translating and being translated are processes of transformation. A translation is
therefore not a substitute for the original. Seeing it as such can only be avoided, and the
transformation achieved, if the substitute is not thought of as a loss, but as its own, lively
new speech act. (The criterion of liveliness would be worth its own essay.) For this, it is
necessary to break loose of the original with all of its suggestive grammar, semantic and
sound aspects (because they can almost never be retained) and to write the sentence, the
text, anew with the characteristics of the target language. This is a paradox: I am forced
to give up characteristics only to then have to reconstruct them. But this is likely exactly
what makes a literary translation literary, and this is where the authorship of the literary
translator arises (according to copyright law, literary translators are authors of an
“original intellectual creation”).
Where does this transformation process leave the author of the original? An
encounter with a text can engender very different realities from the perspective of the
producer and the recipient. In terms of production aesthetics, it is clear that the author
knows they wrote the text in their language, they have applied their entire art to it, they
have labored intensely over content, perspective, and linguistic form, have perhaps risked
health, relationships, and living conditions, have potentially confronted themselves with
the most painful and inexpressible or the most libidinous aspects of their personalities.
And they know very well that they did not write the text in the translation’s target
language, thus their latent fear, their possible anticipation of betrayal.
The readers, the recipients, however, are less aware of this and while reading the
translation often imagine the author of the original standing behind the text as its
originator. And they have good reason to do so, because of all the “barriers” that have
to be crossed when engaging with the text—paratexts, the author’s name on the cover,
the jacket copy, potentially similar names in the book—point toward the author of the
original. It requires greater expertise to be able to identify the linguistic effect of
18 CLAUDIA HAMM

a translated book as the work of the translator. And it requires deliberate publishing
decisions in order to overcome the invisibility of the translator inherent in the work, be it
by mentioning their name, potentially including biographical details, and to point
toward the linguistic creator of the text in the target language. (This invisibility is
inherent because a translation is perceived as successful precisely when it is invisible.
Most readers only notice “translatedness” when something “trips them up,” when some­
thing “doesn’t sound right,” or is “dissonant.”)
It is actually self-evident but may be difficult to reconstruct for someone who has
never gone through this process themselves because engaging in literary translation
demands a lot of linguistic analysis, a feeling for language, and more generally for
intellect and affect, often over a long period of time. Above all, to engage with the
complex world, a text, aside from all the necessary rhetorical competencies, demands
empathy. At the same time, translating is an unending process. Recently, at a conference
at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, the poet Ulf Stolterfoth, who also translates,
described how at a certain point a self-authored text feels complete to him, while
a translation only rarely evokes such a feeling. So, the translator pours a significant
portion of a lifetime (usually months, sometimes years) into a translation, thinking it
over and over, empathizing, inquiring, going on walks, riding trains, leaving the text
alone, self-editing and reading aloud again and again, until the new voice is as “coherent”
as though there were not a second author present in the text.
Because it is all about voices. We do not translate words—if we did there would be
a never-ending succession of synonyms—and we do not translate sentences or para­
graphs. We translate voice, speech: its timbre and its attitude, its rhetorical power, and its
varying attitude toward what is being said. Translating has much to do with listening to
voices—and with giving voice.
Through the act of translation, a text thus becomes a joint work. I alluded to it
earlier: a translation is not a substitute, but a work of a different order. A second author
enters into the text, sometimes even several of them; often it cannot be helped, because
linguistic systems differ not only in their vocabulary and punctuation, but also in their
use of tenses and syntax. They also differ in their “thinking logic” (the author George-
Arthur Goldschmidt, who wrote in French and German, once explained that he wrote
his books differently according to which language he was writing in and that he would
choose one or the other for a particular narrative perspective. In the French, for example,
what is important comes first. To perhaps offer a well-known example: the church tower
in Proust’s account of a walk is inflected downward, past the grass and the insects toward
the observer, while the opposite happens in German, where our view rises from the
insect toward the steeple. That is to say: from premise and purpose to the philosophical
conclusion, which by this point is nearly beyond all doubt). Languages also differ in
“sound material” (“Silence,” or “Schweigen” in German, in Icelandic becomes „Þögn“)
and in their economy (“I am not to speak to you,” the lyrical “I” forbids itself in one of
Walt Whitman’s poems. I would challenge anyone to find an equally taciturn expression
in German). Languages also differ in their literary ideals (the French, for example, love
 TRANSLATION REVIEW 19

ambiguous words rich in associations and playing with context and sound color, whereas
we Germans often look for the more precise and accurate expression—the clearly defined
line so to speak), not to mention the historical baggage (even within individual words
such as “revolution” or “bread”) of expressions of courtesy and politeness, realia (which
potentially do not even exist in the target language), or even sign systems and what they
determine or do not determine (such as in Chinese or Arabic).
All these aspects of a text change during the transfer into a different language. And
as soon as multiple authors become involved in the same text, so do very basic assump­
tions about who is speaking in it. Two examples from Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom.
In this book, which among other things is a broad account of the first century A.D.,
canonized literature such as biblical or antique literary or historical texts is sometimes
cited, but more often re-written, to make it audible and accessible in a contemporary
context. Before citing a passage from the Odyssey, Carrère thus declares: Je cite la
traduction, en alexandrins, de Victor Bérard. In my German translation, this turns into:
Ich zitiere die Übersetzung in deutschen Hexametern von Johann Heinrich Voß, and John
Lambert, the translator of the English edition, finally writes: I’m quoting Robert Fagles’s
translation, in verse. So, what was translated in this sentence? And who is doing the
citing? Who is the I of this sentence? The narrator of course, but it reveals more than
ever the chasm between the narrator of a text and the author who guides said narrator;
a translation has multiple authors after all. In another example, the French-speaking
author prefaces his rendition of 1 Corinthians 13 by saying: Auf eigene Gefahr schlage ich
folgenden Übersetzungsversuch vor [At my own peril, I propose the following attempt at
a translation]. But whose peril is it exactly, now that the text and the “translation
attempt” appear in German? Who is responsible for the speech that occurs here?
Whose attempt is it?
The fact of this joint labor becomes even more apparent when comparing multiple
translations of the same text—or, for many readers, becomes apparent for the first time.
What accounts for the difference between two translations? The linguistic Gestus? The
stance, vocabulary, register and style of the narrator and characters? These can vary
greatly even if they are based on the same original, which demonstrates one thing above
anything else: the wide-open nature of a verbally constituted artwork, openness for
a variety of readings and interpretations. A literary work maintains a peculiar relation­
ship with the concept of meaning because it does not pursue meaning itself, but lets it
emerge through the multifaceted relationships between language material, motifs, sub­
jects, images, and sounds. Everyone hears such a text differently and will therefore
recreate it differently in their translated language.
There can only be one original; translations, however, because they are collabora­
tions, can be created by several originating collectives.
Collaborative works generally have a hard time being recognized as such. For the
most part, only Andy Warhol’s name remains associated with the works that came out of
The Factory, and bands live off the names of their front men and women. Joint
compositions and texts elicit suspicion regarding their artistic value. Even in team efforts
20 CLAUDIA HAMM

such as film and theater it is apparently difficult to promote collective works as such.
Whose name goes on the poster? Which names never appear on them? Who is fully
aware of the set designer as the one defining the world in which a theatrical situation
takes place, and who even knows what the artistic director of a movie does? We like to
ascribe creative processes to individual artists. The world of geniuses, stars, and market­
ing campaigns that we live in struggles with recognizing collective processes. Even more
so with ones like the translation process, in which authors generally are not actively
involved. After all, they are being virtually forced to relinquish their individual work, are
dispossessed, even if they are happy with the resulting translations, because in some
sense they multiply their work.
I say all this as a preamble, to get to the by now perhaps not very surprising “After”
of translated texts: what happens after the translation has been submitted, edited, proof­
read, and printed, after the attention is no longer on the process of transfer and
transformation?
One thing that happens may be the appearance of the first reviews (or so we hope).
As translators, we count ourselves lucky if a review, even a lengthy one, features an
adjective such as “congenial,” even if that appears to be a passepartout word. The
translator is elated when a critic speaks of an “unperfumed” translation and exhilarated
whenever the “beguiling diction of the translation” is mentioned. Usually, however, we
are lucky if our name is even referenced in the bibliographical details, even if we happen
to be the ones who discovered the author for our language area or community. Hardly
any reviewer who speaks of flowing sentences, fine humor, lyrical sound, or the like is
aware that in a different translation all those characteristics may have disappeared, that
they are therefore linked to the work of the respective translator, because those effects are
directly tied to the linguistic form. After all, it is not that easy to notice the differences
between the translated language (with all the hybridity of its authorship) and the original
language if the translators’ names are scarcely found on covers and literature classes from
high school to university almost exclusively cover national literature (even though our
bookshelves are full of translations).
So far, so good. We are still within the medium of the book, and an increasingly
differentiated discourse over such linguistic peculiarities is palpably emerging, if slowly—
the fact that you are reading this text proves this. However, what happens if the medium of
the book wanders onto the stage, say, during a book premiere, presentation, or reading?
Who does the translated text belong to now? Who does the text belong to anyway? And—
perhaps this is what is ultimately behind all of this—who does the author belong to?
If an original work is being featured, it is often possible to invite the author, who is
joined by a moderator. As the audience, we then usually experience a reading and
a conversation about the book. Our interest in this arrangement possibly stems from
a desire to “experience” the author, we want to verify to what extent the author we
imagined corresponds to the real-life person, we want to see them, hear their voice,
perhaps feel the rhythm in which they read their own text. We want to learn something
about the “making” of the text or get to know it in the first place, save ourselves the
 TRANSLATION REVIEW 21

reading, and instead enjoy a pleasant evening. We might want to learn something
extratextual, additional, perhaps even something intimate, more human, less perfect,
less abstracted than the text. We want to be moved by this person, their view of the
world, and their language.
For translated texts, the situation generally plays out differently. While hardly
anyone would dare to have an actor (instead of the author) read the original and then
to have the author sit on the same stage (or not even invite the author in the first place),
there is often a standard setting for readings of translations, at least in cultural institu­
tions: the author of the original (if they are unavailable, events for translated literature
are rarely organized in the first place), a moderator, and a “speaker” (as the actor is
known). The translator, meaning the originator of the translated text, is not involved.
This then leads to situations like the following example: Emmanuel Carrère sits on
the stage with a moderator and an actor at some literary event and does not even know
which excerpt of his book, A Russian Novel, is being read in German—out of respect for
his busy schedule no one wanted to bother him with such details. He has not selected the
text either, otherwise he would have hardly chosen such a provocatively intimate passage.
Now he sits there, naked, and does not know what the imagination of the listener might
be projecting onto him. His book actually weaves together many different narrative
strands, but the audience does not learn about this; the author is unable to provide that
information because he does not understand the text being read. Admittedly, this is an
extreme example, but it is not an exception.
On occasions where translators can be found among the cast of such an evening,
they tend to have organized the event themselves (for example through the translator’s
association “Weltlesebühne,” which was founded for this very purpose). If this is not the
case, however, many organizers, once they have received the text in their native language
and have been able to read and understand it, seem to view translators as a hindrance to
initiating their own lively interaction with the author. And yet this intimacy would not
have been possible without the translation and the work the translator has put into
creating an evocative and engaging reading experience. Without the text in the transla­
tion language, the organizers would likely have never heard of most of the authors of
world literature; after all, who has read Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Karl Ove
Knausgård in Norwegian, or Svetlana Alexievich in Russian.
If the translator is even told about the event (which is usually not the case, even if
their text is being read, unless they have organized the event themselves), they generally
sit in the audience, like a regular attendee, and listen to an actor read their text.
Exceptions aside, this experience is in most cases painful. A text wants to be intellectually
and emotionally penetrated; in order to do so, it is not enough to have stage training (in
fact it is enough to have no such training, but to be able to intellectually and emotionally
penetrate the text). So, what is the problem with actors reading prose?
As a theater director, I have a suspicion that the first thing actors learn in training
is to construct characters. It is their task to imbue each character with all the physical,
vocal, emotional, and intellectual attributes that are necessary for an effective
22 CLAUDIA HAMM

embodiment. The different speech acts that a character performs on a stage text have to
be interpreted and represented—here, a dramatic text works with entirely different blank
spaces than a prose text, and the exploration of a “subtext” is a major aspect of theatrical
works.5 Such a penetration of the dramatic text generally occurs over several weeks of
rehearsals and rehearsal conversations. This time (and the ensemble, which jointly
experiences the specifics of the text) is not allowed for readings. The consequence is
that the actor often holds on to the sound shape of the text or constructs an emotional
corset for themselves that is not filled with a substance that corresponds to the text.
Because the narrator of a prose text “acts” differently with their language, their
speech act is different from that of a character’s speech act. Which perspective does the
narrator speak from? Who are they speaking to? What do they want to achieve with their
speech? The answer is as easy as it is complicated: the narrator narrates. In addition,
a prose text is formed in a different temporality. A narrator remembers. Even if they
narrate in the present or in the future, they know how the story ends. They narrate from
the end and the reader feels this. Many actors, however, who play the narrator as a role,
and therefore confound narrator and character, make it present. They bring the narra­
tion into an immediate experience in the here and now. Intuitively, we perceive this as
somehow wrong, too much, exaggerated. (As previously said, there are major exceptions.
But if we are allowed to call plurality a rule, with regard to live readings at festivals etc., it
is indeed a rule.) The mode of the narrator, which has much to do with the inherent
tension arcs and the push and pull of a text, becomes imperceptible in a character speech.
The translator, as a spectator, squirms in their seat in the auditorium: after all,
a significant portion of their work went into allowing the text to have these very
effects—otherwise there is a likelihood that the reader will quickly put the book down
on their nightstand! And they ask themselves: why is the author allowed to read the text
in their own language, in as mumbling, quiet, or monotone a fashion as they please, but
not the translator? Why are they not allowed to sit next to “their” author whose
intellectual and emotional world they have inhabited for so long? Is the author not
theirs? And are they not the author’s? Are they not a pair and, as originators, entangled
in the text? The translator is hurt. And hurt that someone has put them in a position to
be hurt. At the same time, they know that a text belongs to everybody, and the author
belongs to himself and does not want to cut in line.
We have landed in the world of resentment, but there are better worlds. And better
reasons why translators might be suitable readers of their texts.
What is the point of re-experiencing the book at hand by having it read it out loud?
Why “stage” the written word? Every artistic medium has its own potentials and
possibilities. For a transition from book to stage we therefore deal with the question of
how the space of the performative arts can be used to enhance the medium of the
“silently read book” but also allow for its very own interaction with the text.
The stage creates a live situation, meaning a fundamentally different mode of
communication from that found in the book. Because in a live situation, for a limited
time, we share with the audience the same space and with it all the possibilities of
 TRANSLATION REVIEW 23

visibility, audibility, presentation, communication, and focused attention. These possibi­

lities are numerous and not even close to being exhausted in a typical literary reading.
But here, I would like to limit myself to one such possibility that is perhaps essential: the
spoken word, the voice that gives the text a voice, that makes it harmonious, or rather
that helps the voice of the text—the voice in the text—gain a voice itself. The voice that
only sounds once and cannot be reread. This literally means the tonality, the cadence, the
breathing, the rhythm, the silence of the text, as well as the silence in the text. It is exactly
these moments in a translated work—a re-written work—that were created by the
translator. Because they are directly tied to the linguistic composition, the “How” of
the text, and the attention of the translator was very passionately directed toward these
very aspects.
The voice that rings out during a reading, in its tonality, its timbre, and its
liveliness, fills something that the written text, in its particular silence, leaves open. By
being read out loud, the voice inside the text leaves the inner world of the book and
becomes the perceptible voice of the speaker, which creates a connection with the listener
sharing the same space and perhaps allows them to feel the tone and the rhythm of the
text, its musical dimension, where otherwise it is primarily the words and the content
that are being read.
Perhaps one can imagine the text as a room that the speaker enters to use their
voice to create the tone that has been set up by the text and that the text needs (literally)
in order to resonate. Another element of this is the unsaid, the soundless. Breathing and
taking breaths is part of speaking, and of meaningful speech. This is where tempo and
articulation originate, and the voice can transform into something beguiling that allows
the incorporeal to be experienced.
Reading, therefore, shapes the recitation in terms of cadence, vocal range, vocal
placement, variation in tempo and volume, pauses, breathing, sense of rhythm, and
underlying attitude with respect to the narrative voice. This method of making the
narrative voice audible draws on oral literary traditions and their spirit. Even if every­
body experiences every text differently, during successful readings there is often that
moment of the joy of a shared experience. Here, translators hold a peculiar intermediate
position. Because on the one hand, they have written these sounds into the text in their
language, and on the other hand they did not invent the subject matter. The latter is
perhaps even the reason why, for the translator, unlike for the author, the individual
emotional closeness to the text does not resemble a nakedness that the author will be
more likely to attempt to hide, rather than exhibit. Once a translator has interpreted
every sentence and every comma in their work and recreated it through the means of
their own language, the tone during readings is nearly always intuitively on point,
perhaps it is monotone, perhaps mumbling, or hesitant and quiet, but the speaker herself
has arranged the linguistic elements in their hierarchy of significance and there is
unlikely to be any confusion between narrator and character.
In addition, when the translator and the author of the original are on the stage
together, another dimension of language is automatically present: its ability (or inability)
24 CLAUDIA HAMM

to travel. A joint presentation of source and target language will always induce in the
audience a contemplation of languages in the plural or of the space between two
languages; it highlights an essential aspect of any literary language and its potential for
transformation through translation. In doing so, there are a lot of different options to
interlace the original and the translation during the course of a reading. The staggered
reading of one paragraph in one language after the other, as is generally practiced, is the
most rudimentary of these. These “voices,” which can overlie one another or interlock
themselves and assist the narrative voices, which are written into a translated text in both
languages, produce a tone. These bilingual formats, precisely matched to the text, can
only be developed by those (in the way the literary industry and its temporal economies
are constituted) intimately familiar with it: the translator, perhaps also an editor who
speaks both languages, and/or a passionate reader. (It could of course also be an actor or
event organizer, who, however, would then have to acquire this very same intimate
familiarity).
All this is not just to lament the fact that—oops—something has been forgotten
when the name of the translator is not included in a bibliographical reference or the
original author has been invited to a reading, but the creator of the German text has not,
but is rather about allowing those aspects of the translation language—which tend to
escape readers who approach texts with “contentivistic” reading habits—to be
experienced.
For me, speaking from the perspective of a director, there is another reason for the
very general suggestion that I intend for this text to be, as to why translators should be
included in the cast of a literary event. Exploring a work often leads us to having
questions for the author that penetrate deeply into the creative process and the composi­
tion of the work. Generally, authors are interested in these questions since they capture
what they themselves were struggling with the most and they advance their future
writing. These types of questions, which transcend traditional interviews and audience
discussions, can motivate authors (especially frequently translated ones who may other­
wise try to avoid readings) to leave their desks, and do more events. The same goes for
event formats that open up new dimensions of their texts. The audience can only profit
from such an arrangement.
My characterization of stereotypical event formats may seem very one-sided
because there are many other formats that imagine the stage in a more differentiated
and performative fashion. For example, the Dead Ladies Show in Berlin, a literary salon
where various speakers, and especially translators, present dead female authors (an
essential difference) and other “fabulous women,” uses techniques such as slide shows,
lectures, cabaret, stand-up comedy, or biopic. Or, for example, at the ceremony for the
International Literature Award at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2016,
drawings, objects, photos, notes, books, and other working materials were passed out by
translators and authors and projected onto a large screen via a camera. These are, more
or less, dramatic readings—events accompanied by musicians, fine artists, scholars, other
authors and translators, and various collaborators in a variety of spaces, which they have
 TRANSLATION REVIEW 25

frequently conceptually designed themselves. These events, in their open-minded inter­

action with everything that resonates and is negotiated within the space, can offer great
intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional pleasure. Big literary festivals and centers, however,
are still far from conceptualizing readings with the stage in mind.
A quarter of all newly published fiction titles in Germany are translations. They
have, through multidimensional filters, been recognized as texts that can, and should,
travel. And they only travel because a second author has linguistically and culturally
unlocked and adopted them into the new language space. This is what we need to be
conscious of, and represent accordingly, in the vision of translated literature.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Claudia Hamm is a theater director, author, and translator based in Berlin. She also lectures and teaches
translation workshops and performs on stage. Her translations include works by French authors
Emmanuel Carrère, Édouard Levé, Mathias Énard, Nathalie Quintane, and Joseph Andras. Most
recently, she co-founded and curated the translation festival translationale berlin, which was first
held in October 2021.

Jonathan Becker is a translator who lives in Dallas. He has previously worked on Translation Review and at
the Center for Translation Studies at UT Dallas, where he also received his master’s degree in 2017.

NOTES

1. Emmanuel Carrère, D’autres vies que la mienne. Paris: P.O.L. 2009.

2. Emmanuel Carreere, Alles ist wahr. Translated from the French by Claudia Hamm. Berlin: Matthes &
Seitz 2014.
3. Emmanuel Carrère, Lives Other Than My Own, translated by Linda Coverdale, New York: Metropo­
litan Books 2012.
4. Why not? Because my prose text, it seems to me, holds different internal requirements than, say,
a Hölderlin poem. Carrère’s prose feeds from a sweeping undertow of narration, the reader dives into
a movie, which in my opinion would not be aided by a syntax that is resistant. Do we perhaps extract
theories of translation from the internal logic of the type of text or the texts we intend to apply them
to?
5. I am assuming here a dialogically written theater text with acting characters. Forms of post-dramatic
theater challenge the actor in different ways; still, they hardly have to become the narrator of a prose
text. After all, the point of theater is to narrate using bodies in spaces.