Translation Austria / Translating Austria: Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Austrian Studies assembles eight articles which investigate the pro cesses, outcomes and determinants of the transmission of Austrian culture into non-German linguistic environments. They look at the issues arising when a German text is rendered in a foreign linguistic system, the factors which determine its re-creation and its reception in the target culture; they high light the frictions that arise when the act of transposition meets with the cultural, political and medial conditions on the receiving side of the linguistic binary, but also the ways in which translational cross-cultural ventures are determined by conditions on the source side. The articles, in short, illustrate that understanding the translation process transcends the idea of a binary — German, on one side; a target language (here: english, Greek, brazilian portuguese) on the other — and that it also transcends the confines of merely linguistic transfer. The productive and controversial moment is ‘in transition’, i.e. in the in-between space of contact, overlap, demarcation, where difference and sameness are negotiated, frictions and obstacles surface, decisions are made and factors such as personal predilections, idiosyncrasies and wider historical circumstances exert their influence. The cultural artefacts examined in this issue were produced in German by Austrian authors from the immediate aftermath of the First World War to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Their translation into foreign languages and cultural systems spans a time period from their initial publication up to the present day. There are discussions here not only of texts and authors who have entered the canon of Austrian modern classics (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Joseph Roth, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig, Karl Kraus, Ilse Aichinger), but also of a number of different forms of expression: high and popular culture, journalism, reportage and autobiographical fiction as well as the art magazine, film, drama and novel. The authors’ backgrounds: Hungarian, bohemian, Galician, Jewish — and often a combination thereof — mirror the legacy of cultural plurality and diversity in the Habsburg empire, whereas common features, such as their residence in Vienna (some permanently, some temporarily), their distinctive use of the German language and their pronounced literary or essayistic treatment of often very Austrian issues, suggest a cultural coherence — a distinct Austrianness — as the flip-side of this