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In the novel The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas's superimposition of a Freudian-style case history onto a traumatic event of World War II explores both the necessity and the gratuitousness of representing trauma. The novel's primary device of relating the sexual fantasies of its protagonist Lisa Erdman/‘Frau Anna G.’, depicted as being a psychoanalytic patient of Freud's, to the massacre of over 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941, is an enduringly controversial one. The notoriety of Thomas's novel though, stems not only from its difficult treatment of the sexual desire of a victim of the Shoah, but also from the critical disbelief regarding the author's production of an original text. In this article we suggest that these sites of controversy are intimately linked. Allegations that Thomas was guilty of literary theft – of plagiarizing a more ‘authentic’ account of the historical events at Babi Yar – resonate with criticisms of the novel's gratuitous representations of sex. Ultimately, however, it is through this gratuitousness, evident in the novel's formal commitment to repetition, that Thomas's work invites reflection on the difficulty of an ethics of representation by implicating the aesthetic concerns of literature with those of psychoanalysis and historical fact. Specifically, we shall suggest that Thomas's positioning of the term anagnorisis – a critical term referring to the moment of recognition or clarification in tragic drama – is central to this project.
Englishmen and Scotsmen forget how much they owe to mature traditions of all kinds -traditions of feeling, traditions of thought, traditions of expression -for they have never dreamed of life without these things. They write or paint or think or feel, and believe they do so to please no taste but their own, while in reality they obey rules and instincts which have been accumulating for centuries; their wine of life has been mellowed in ancient cellars, and they see but the ruby light in the glass. In a new country like Ireland -and English-speaking Ireland is very new -we are continually reminded of this long ripening by the immaturity of the traditions about us; if we are writers, for instance, we find it takes longer to learn to write than it takes an Englishman, and the more resolute we are to express the national character, and the more we understand the impossibility of putting our new wine in old bottles, the longer is our struggle with the trivial, the incoherent, the uncomely. (Yeats, Uncollected Prose 1 361-2) For a monoglot Yeats notched-up a surprising number of important translation credits. As well as the Irish folklore considered in the last chapter, and two late translations (of translations) of the Oedipus plays, he worked to improve Rabindranath Tagore's translation of Gitanjali (1912), offered advice to Ezra Pound on the Ernest Fenollosa manuscript for the twin 1916 publications Certain Noble Plays of Japan and Noh or Accomplishment: A Study of the classical Stage of Japan, and '[p]ut into English' a new abridged version of the Upanishads with Shri Purohit Swãmi (1937). 1 Since these were all works of adaptation or collaboration, we may be inclined to dismiss out of hand the notion that the English-fixated Yeats was a translator at all. However, it will be my argument in this chapter that the work of translation haunts the poet, not only as a self-professed Irish writer writing in English, but also as a writer cast upon the swelling tide of world English in the early-twentieth century.I argue that in Yeats's Irish brand of English, intended for world consumption, we can hear a strange echo of Goethe's formative ambition for a World Literature. Goethe famously wrote to Thomas Carlyle of translators that they were engaged in a 'universal spiritual commerce'. Translation, he wrote, '[w]hatever one may say of [its] inadequacy [. . .] nonetheless remains one of the most essential tasks and one of the worthiest of esteem in the universal market of world trade'. 2 For Goethe an address from one linguistic culture to another, though liable to distortion, expresses a conventionally Kantian version of frictional sociability between subject nations. In Yeats's case, however, writing from the perspective of Irishness in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it is a significantly different predicament: the perils of transmission do not lie between different languages, but within one hegemonic language containing multiple and mutually interfering cultural registers. When the impoverishment of ...
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