Englishing Max

Troubling Signs

“…Thus, there are expressions from southern Germany to be found in a story set in his native Allgäu, while Austerlitz features expressions specific to National Socialism. This discourse, in particular, is impossible to translate appropriately into English, as there is no corresponding fascist tradition (see Hulse 2011;Bell 2011). But these, as it were, misfit terms, phrases, and expressions add an important quality to Sebald's prose and, at the same time, undermine what Emily Apter calls the "translatability assumption" in her Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability; she remind critics to "recognize the importance of nontranslation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability" (2003: 4).…”

Inherited Traditions of Narrative Framing in W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten

“…The change of his wife's name is another example of Sebald's mixing of biography and fiction. Yet Sebald's own perspective, according to a letter he wrote in 1995 to Michael Hulse, English translator of Die Ausgewanderten , was that “all four stories are, almost entirely, grounded in fact,” short of a few exceptions, such as “the appearances Nabokov makes in all four stories” (Hulse , 198) . A critical reader of Die Ausgewanderten will likely suspect that this claim is a stretch, but it is not unlike claims made by writers such as Schiller or Kleist, who tended to place an unbelievable occurrence at the center of their Novellen that nonetheless had some historical truth at its core.…”

“… As Hulse notes with regard to Die Ringe des Saturn , however, Sebald took great liberties with his use of source material, even changing quotations to such an extent that when Hulse found original English quotations and attempted to use them for the English edition of the book, Sebald rejected this documentary approach, putting Hulse's instinct not to falsify historical documents at odds with his desire to give the author the final say. He says that he nonetheless honored Sebald's wishes 90 percent of the time (Hulse , 200–204). …”

W. G. Sebald and Joseph Conrad’s ‘Swiss Governess’

“…It includes this telling sentence: 'Behind this stance and style is always the ethical awareness that the act of remembering, of naming and detailing, is the one sure way to show respect to the past'. 7 Hulse's essay reveals that translating Sebald involved a number of ethical challenges of its own, especially those relating to the inclusion of fictional elements in what are presented as fundamentally factual accounts. A written reply from Sebald to a query from Hulse concedes: 'About the degree of fictionality in Die Ausgewanderten: I quite understand your concern', and he tells his translator that the four stories in the collection 'are, almost entirely, grounded in fact, except that, in the Bereyter story I have added (a very few) touches of Wittgenstein's life as a primary teacher & that the fourth story is a sort of collation of two lives.'…”