Es war mir ein Anliegen, das Geheimnis nicht zu lüften Sieben Formen von Unübersetzbarkeit in Ilija Trojanows Der Weltensammler

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses the thesis, developed in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), on the limits of literary translation, using the example of Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006). The tension between the multilingual worlds of experience in the novel and the seemingly dominant literary monolingualism of the first German publication is addressed in the novel itself as a problem of untranslatability. On the textual level, the novel refuses to be translatable and takes its refuge in Bhabha’s Third Space, »which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously as an integrated, open, expanding code.« I will reveal seven forms of untranslatability that simultaneously open up different interpretive perspectives. In reference to Emily Apter’s monography, untranslatability will be decoded as a textual precondition, and hybridity will be seen as the fundament on which world literature is based upon.