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This book, the first in-depth study of authorship in translation, explores how authorial identity is 'translated' in the literary text. In a detailed exploration of the writing of East German author Christa Wolf in English translation, it examines how the work of translators, publishers, readers and reviewers reframes the writer's identity for a new reading public. This detailed study of Wolf, an author with a complex and contested public profile, intervenes in wide-ranging contemporary debates on globalised literary culture by examining how the fragmented identity of the 'international' author is contested by different stakeholders in the construction of a world literature. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, representing new work in Translation Studies and German Studies that is also of interest and relevance to scholars of literature in other languages.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Christa Wolf and the Problem of International Authorship.- 2. Understanding Translated Authorship.- 3. The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T..- 4. The Author as Feminist: Kassandra.- 5. Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations of Was bleibt.- 6. Conclusion: What Remains? The Quest for Christa Wolf
About the author
Caroline Summers is Lecturer in Comparative Literary Translation at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the literary text as an object of cultural exchange and on the construction of authorial identities through literary translation, especially the status of the text as a point of intersection between the activities of different agents in the translation process.
Summary
This book, the first in-depth study of authorship in translation, explores how authorial identity is ‘translated’ in the literary text. In a detailed exploration of the writing of East German author Christa Wolf in English translation, it examines how the work of translators, publishers, readers and reviewers reframes the writer’s identity for a new reading public. This detailed study of Wolf, an author with a complex and contested public profile, intervenes in wide-ranging contemporary debates on globalised literary culture by examining how the fragmented identity of the ‘international’ author is contested by different stakeholders in the construction of a world literature. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, representing new work in Translation Studies and German Studies that is also of interest and relevance to scholars of literature in other languages.
