This is the official module outline:-|
When in 1897, Mark Twain complained to the Vienna Press Club about ‘Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache’, he drew on a long tradition of bemoaning the difficulties of translating into German. We will look into the history behind this discussion on the theory of translation as well as into practical examples of how poets dealt with literary models from other languages. The repeated translation of the Bible into German, most notably by Martin Luther, provides us with excellent comparative material for analysing how translators have set about their task and what the issues were that they had to resolve. From this base we will move on to look at how the poets of the that period of literature known as Weimar Classicism (Goethe, Schiller) combined translation theory and practice in their lyric poetry by drawing on the literature of other cultures
Part I: Historical overview about translation theory, following extracts from dedications and introductory letters like Luther’s: Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen
Part II: Theory and Practice of Translation in Weimar Classicism: The effects of enthusiasm for Ossian and Shakespeare (early translations and the ‘Ossian-Manie’ of Herder and Goethe), the fascination of foreign ‘folk’ lyrics (Herder’s collection ‘Stimmen der Völker’ with translations of poetry from all over the world) and the orient fashion (Goethe’s ‘West-östlicher Divan’ and his notes on adopting poetry).
And this is the inofficial version;-)
Translation is not only a linguistic task but a cultural challenge: when ‘bringing over’ the words from one language into the other, the concepts behind the sounds must be taken into account. This is a basic fact which gave headaches from antiquity through to modern times: is a ‘word-to-word’-rendering more faithful to the ‘original’ than a ‘sense-to-sense’-reworking which tries to capture the spirit? We will look into some of the answers authors tried to formulate – and into their own translations and whether they hold true to what they proclaimed. Did Luther really manage to create a German bible-language which would be understood by ‘the woman on the street’? Is Goethe a good messenger for oriental poetry when he creates his ‘West-östlicher Divan’ mixing translations of Persian poems between his own lyrics without making explicit which was which? A pathway through the periods of German literature and their attitude towards foreign languages is to compare translations of ever popular English poems like Shakespeare’s sonnets: we will look into attempts to poetically render ‘Shall I compare thee’ – and compare the translations one might, but providing a judgement on the quality could prove to be difficult!