Exophony and literary translation

Chantal Wright

doi:10.1075/target.22.1.03wri

Abstract

When writers of literary prose adopt a new language—a phenomenon known as exophony—this often leads them to mould the new language until it becomes suitable for their purposes, in a manner analogous to the strategies of appropriation observed in post-colonial literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). This process often results in a defamiliarisation of the new language through stylistic innovation, which, in turn, has implications for the translation of these texts. This article, influenced byBerman’s ‘analytique négative’ (1985), proposes a series of guidelines for the translation of exophonic texts and illustrates these with examples taken from German exophonic prose texts by Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada.

Highlights

[I was a creature with horns, he said I would always linger in the first seven years of life If I left them, I would die If I stayed, there’d be no sex My attempt to find an age to live in You’ve found it already The hilly landscape is open, locked into the camera’s frame There’s no haiku about what’s inside where seasons don’t exist]
Germany can be outdone by its international competitors in the realms of theatre and the novel, but where poetry is concerned, he continues, the nation holds its own, boasting such illustrious sons as Goethe, Hölderlin, Eichendorff and Mörike. Entitled to his criticism, but it does highlight his failure to understand the nature of the poster campaign, which is undoubtedly populist
Greiner is presumably maintaining that this line, which contains a suppressed wenn-dann [if-] structure, should read ›verließe ich sie, ginge ich ein‹

Summary

Introduction

[I was a creature with horns, he said I would always linger in the first seven years of life If I left them, I would die If I stayed, there’d be no sex My attempt to find an age to live in You’ve found it already The hilly landscape is open, locked into the camera’s frame There’s no haiku about what’s inside where seasons don’t exist].

Results

Conclusion