Project Description
The project has two central objectives: First, it sets out to investigate the role of literary translations as media of transcultural memory, i.e. their impact on the transnational remediation, transmission and circulation of memories of past violence. Second, it aims at mapping the role of translation in literary memory studies in order to counteract the oblivion of translation in this academic field. It is grounded on the idea that literary translations are important media of transcultural memory which negotiate between the source and the target culture, guarantee the “afterlife” (Walter Benjamin) of texts in other contexts and contribute to memories’ migrations and transformations across the borders of book markets, languages and cultural spheres. “Translation” is both understood as interlingual transfer (“translation proper” in Roman Jakobson’s terms) and – in a broader perspective – as transmission and relocation across different kinds of spatial, temporal and cultural borders.
The investigation is centred on memories of violent pasts in contemporary novels in the source languages French and Spanish and in the target languages German, French and Spanish. It consists of two case studies that will be analysed in three project areas: 1) French and Algerian novels on the Algerian War of Independence written in French and their translations into German and Spanish; 2) Argentinian and Chilean novels on the last military dictatorships written in Spanish and their translations into German and French. The method builds on insights from literary studies, memory studies and translation studies and distinguishes between the poetics of memory and translation (focus on textual aspects of the novels and their translations: literary construction of memories, translational features, translation strategies, translational paratexts) and the cultures and politics of memory and translation (focus on contextual aspects of the novels and their translations: the text’s reception and embedding in the source and target memory cultures, ethical aspects, different agents and institutions involved (translators, publishers, book markets, literary prizes etc.)).
Generally speaking, the project explores the transcultural migration and transformation of literary memories of the Algerian War of Independence and the last dictatorships in the Southern Cone in different transcultural, transnational and interlingual constellations; it outlines a new research design that results from an opening up of literary memory studies towards the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of translation studies and the “translational turn” in the humanities; it examines what translations "do" when they are "doing memory" and maps the role of translation in literary memory studies, particularly in the research on transcultural, transnational and “multidirectional” (Michael Rothberg) memory.
This project area is dedicated to the memory of decolonisation in French and francophone Algerian novels on the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), their translations into German and their circulation in the German-speaking sphere.
The Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), officially recognized as a ‘war’ by the French National Assembly in June 1999 and for a long time excluded from historiography on both sides of the Mediterranean, reveals a specific moment in the Algerian and French culture of remembrance. Embedded in varied (contrasting) dynamics of social, political and cultural attitudes toward memory and commemorative practices, the thinking about “the war without a name” (guerre sans nom) and its effects has also given serious consideration in different writing and narrative styles of literary texts. Following the concept of ‘cultural memory’ according to Jan and Aleida Assmann, literary writings both ‘store’ and transmit memories of the past and can be thought of as a medium of memory.
Situated at the intersection of literary studies, translation studies and memory studies, the subproject follows up on this approach and is dedicated to the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) in novels written in French and investigates their translations into German as media of transcultural memory. In this context, the translations are not only considered as interlingual rephrasings of the source texts (linguistic transfer), but also – within the framework of the ‘translational turn’ in the humanities – interpreted in a broad and metaphorical sense that goes beyond the genuinely (inter)linguistic dimension. By ‘transferring’ knowledge, physically lived experiences and memories represented in the source texts into new linguistic and cultural environments (‘travelling memories’), the literary translations guarantee not only the ‘afterlife’ of these texts; considering the translations as a form of rewriting and remediation, they are also adapted to the new (target) memory culture and therefore undergo transformations and (semantic) shifts. How do translations enable their reception and circulation in memory cultures other than the original one? How do French and Francophone Algerian novels remember the Algerian War of Independence, and how do the literary translations as media of transcultural memory reconstruct and shape the transcultural and transnational reappraisal, transmission and transformation of these memories?
The subproject analyses a corpus of selected novels representing different views (mémoires croisées; passés (re-)composés) on the Algerian War of Independence in the interplay of ‘histoire(s)’ and ‘Histoire’. In addition to narratives from a French perspective and an Algerian point of view, the project takes into account aspects of gender and investigates literary voices of different (social) groups and individuals affected by the war (e.g. FLN, OAS, pieds-noirs, harkis, appelés) as well as (traumatic) memories of the past and their ‘(living) connection’ transmitted to the second and third generation (postmemory).
This project area analyses the memory of political violence in Argentinian and Chilean novels about the last military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990), their translations into German and their circulation in the German-speaking sphere.
The subproject focuses on the role of translation in transcultural memory dynamics, specifically in relation to the memory of the last military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990) in current Argentinean and Chilean novels, as well as their translation into German and their circulation in German-speaking countries. The study focuses on the analysis of a selected corpus of novels by authors of the segunda generación or ‘generation of postmemory’ (Hirsch), who (re)construct and imagine the violent past of the dictatorships in their (auto)fictional narrative texts. In doing so, they close existing gaps in the respective memory cultures and reflect and negotiate competitive memories. On the one hand, the novels articulate the needs and concerns of those who remember; on the other hand, they continuously update the local/national memory discourse about the respective military dictatorship. Through the process of translation, which, like remembering and narrating, is a selective-syntagmatic and combinatorial-paradigmatic act, the texts and the literary memories are de- and recontextualized, which enables and guarantees their ‘survival’ (W. Benjamin) across linguistic, cultural, temporal and spatial boundaries.
The aim of the subproject is to examine and describe the construction of memories in a number of Argentinean and Chilean novels about the last military dictatorships, to analyse the German translations of these novels and to explore their transfer and re-localizations in new German-speaking mnemoscapes. One central hypothesis is that translation is an important category in transcultural memory transfers and is significant in the process of circulation, remediation (Erll) and refiguration (Ricœur) of collective memory.
This project area investigates the memory of decolonisation and of the Algerian War of Independence and the memory of the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, examining the Spanish translations of the French source texts on the Algerian-French conflict and the French translations of the Spanish source texts on the Argentinian and Chilian dictatorships. In doing so, it complements the two other project areas and contributes to fully unfold the potential of the project’s comparative approach.