Paratextual visibility and academic authorship of Monika Motsch, Qian Zhongshu’s German translator, scholar and friend

Abstract

ABSTRACT Monika Motsch is the German translator of Qian Zhongshu’s novel Wei cheng (1947) and his wife Yang Jiang’s memoir Wo’men sa (2003), which are entitled Die umzingelte Festung and Wir Drei, respectively. A close friend of the renowned couple for over two decades, Motsch is also a sinologist who has written tirelessly on Qian and whose academic interests and methodology are greatly influenced by him. This paper references Gérard Genette’s notion of paratexts and Lawrence Venuti’s notion of invisibility to examine how Motsch’s visibility as a translator and her academic authorship as a sinologist are fully revealed through her peritexts accompanying her German translations and her epitexts closely associated with Qian. Her diverse paratextual apparatus includes texts and photos, serving as a threshold that German readers of Die umzingelte Festung and Wir Drei must transcend. Moreover, to an extent, her devices serve as independent spaces through which German readers receive professional information on Qian and Chinese literature. Therefore, her strategic use of peritexts and epitexts offers an opportunity to reconsider the conventional opinions of the subsidiary status of paratexts and the invisibility of translators.