Translating Literatures, Translating Cultures. New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies

Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, and Michael Irmscher, eds. Translating Literatures, Translating Cultures. New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 214 pp. $17.95 paperback, $49.50 hardcover. Originating from an international conference held at Stanford University in 1995, the papers collected in this useful volume have a twofold purpose, acquaint the North American reader and academic community with some prominent trends in studies presently pursued in Europe and to provide a forum for current research undertaken by American scholars in the field of literary and cultural transfer (ix). This is all the more important, as Kurt Mueller-Vollmer contends in his short but lucid introduction, since is still accorded an auxiliary status within literary studies and is often relegated to the language departments as one of their less significant concerns (x). The situation differs from that in some European countries where a number of academic centers, programs and research initiatives have come into existence that focus not just on the science of translation in the more traditional sense (meaning, by and large, how to produce a wellwrought translation), but rather on the dynamics, and vicissitudes, that govern cross-language cultural exchange. One of these new centers is the Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Studies in Literary at University (DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich 309) which was established in 1985 and was recently succeeded by the DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich 529 Internationalitat nationaler Literaturen. The Gottingen is transfer-oriented and primarily on the translated text within the target literary system (xii). And this is the very approach that characterizes the contributions to this volume as a whole. Indeed, while three of the eleven contributors were associated with the original Gottinger Sonderforschungsbereich, all essays develop vistas that stem either directly from or relate indirectly to a pragmatically contextualizing approach toward that highlights a translation's situational relevance in the target culture's context rather than debating the more limited issue of actual veracity and precision of translation. The first section is entitled Translation Studies as Cultural History and Criticism. Harald Kittel first provides a detailed survey and bibliographical summary of the central objectives, research program and numerous scholarly publications of the Sonderforschungsbereich 309. Armin Paul Frank then focuses our attention on what he terms shadow culture, the contacts and transfers that take place between literary systems but never seem to be taken into account in the actual writing of (national) literary histories. Because by nature precedes any interpretation, not just the literary kind, Rainer Schulte calls for studies to be regarded as a Dynamic Model for the Revitalization ofthe Humanities-translation studies here metamorphose into a super-discipline of sorts. Liselotte Gumpel more narrowly looks at the tenuous relationship of meaning, metaphor and world in verbal translation, proposing in the process a non-Aristotelian answer to the question of translating metaphor-and as metaphor. …