The Translation Process & Justification

A great deal of preparation went into the translation process. I began my work by deeply engaging with theoretical work on translation. Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility became the work I studied closely, taking notes on what would remain critical for me and my translation, as well as notes on what I did not think was quite right. I continued by reading every translated Salomé work: first the original, then the translated. I looked for patterns and disagreements across translations, bits of translation that I thought went well, and other bits of translation that I thought missed the mark. A part of this was engaging with the secondary literature, immersing myself in interpretations of her works that may have come only from the translation and not from the original. On this topic of translation, I corresponded with Raleigh Whitinger, a scholar who has translated other key Salomé works; he gave me insight into his process, what he looks for, and what kind of translation he finds unpalatable. 

This was one aspect of my research. The other entailed becoming as informed about her thoughts and character as possible. I read (what I consider to be the most informative) biography on her (the biography written by Ursula Welsch and Michaela Wiesner) as well as those biographies that I thought do not do her life justice. In addition to getting to know what she thought and how she thought, I also spent time with her diary and memoirs; knowing who she was would help me understand how she wrote and why she made certain choices in her writing. Furthermore, I closely read her other works on motherhood and womanhood, given that Ma is, to my mind, largely about those topics; a change (or the lack of) in her argument was an important context for my translation. Finally, I read the significant works from her psychoanalytic writings with the hopes of understanding this version of her that emerged right after Ma was published. Again, I turned to (the small selection of) secondary literature to see what others have said about these works. 

Regarding the translation itself, it ultimately follows two tenets, as it were: (1) to preserve Salomé’s idiosyncratic language filled with imagery and (2) to preserve her often vague writing and incidents of grammatical or idiomatic usage that involve passivity or agency. Often, if the original shows a female figure as the passive subject or as the recipient or object of something, I decided that I would not adhere to the English preference for shifting her into the active-subject role. Preserving how Salomé conceives of gender, even in grammatical constructions, is often overlooked though ought not to be, certainly not given that the text is about the question of Woman to begin with. These two guiding thoughts tenets, however, come at the cost of clarity: the German is often more present than one might want it to be in a translation. Because various implications of the German grammatical structures are so closely tied to the novel’s main topics, I decided that this would be a worthwhile sacrifice. In simple terms, I chose to translate not just the content but the language (its attached implications and history) as well: a difficult feat for work written by such a prolific writer who made very idiosyncratic and often difficult-to-follow choices. 

From this research, I have produced a translation of the first (of three chapters) of Ma, a paper offering an interpretation of Salomé on freedom (see "Motherhood, Womanhood, and Freedom in the Novel), and a longer paper (under revision) offering an extensive interpretation of the novel more generally. 

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