We wanted to end in madness and joy.
Onward. Onward. They thought.
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most celebrated German-language writers. She turned to writing after completing her doctorate at the University of Vienna, producing radio plays, poems, prose, and libretti, and winning, throughout her career, the Gruppe 47 and Georg Büchner literary prizes, among others.
In her centenary year, this volume, Fragmented, presents a collection of previously untranslated drafts of Bachmann's work. These drafts are from unfinished stories, or are pieces cut out from works as they approached their final forms, and are grouped into four fragments: Eugen-Roman I; Ein Ort für Zufälle: Paralipomenon; Geschichte(n) einer Liebe; and Eugen-Roman II. This translation has been carried out by six undergraduates studying German at Oxford: Elizabeth Dallosso, Sam Edwards, Anwen Jones, Anna Standish, Sophie Stewart and Adesh Takhar. It is edited by Oxford lecturer Isabel Parkinson.
The collaborative translators' introduction takes stock of the difficulties of translating Bachmann: her neologisms, her rushing, roaming syntax, her wordplay, as well as her prominent position in Austrian literature and culture. It sets out the collaborative approach taken and how six voices can arrive at one single rendering. The translators ask, likewise, about what it means to translate today as a human, on which the editor's introduction also dwells. Parkinson discusses what may be individual, creative, and distinct about work written and processed by humans, and asks what emerges when the process of translation, and of reading the finished work, is treated as a distinct literary lens in itself.
The fragments themselves stem from Bachmann's work on what was intended to be a significant cycle of novels, the Todesarten, of which only one (Malina) was complete at the time of her death in 1973. The fragments are not intended to present a distinct narrative in themselves, being taken from different phases of work, but they nonetheless tell stories in miniature, of leaving home and returning; of love and belonging; of history; and of illness, all illuminated throughout with atmospheric artwork. The syntax of the fragments is recreated as far as possible, resulting in sentences far longer than is common in English. The translators also follow Bachmann's lead in neologisms and wordplay. The result, then, is that the English-language reader is not merely told what Bachmann said, but experiences afresh the force and flavour of her words.
But this language barrier which lay between us was at the same time also a playing field of hope, which wouldn't have existed had we shared the same language and been capable of judging each other.
Two languages that want to be spoken as though they were a single one ...
The edition is part of the Writers in Residence series of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford which started with volumes by writers in residence Ulrike Draesner and Yoko Tawada and recently included a collaborative translation of Hedwig Dohm's 'Werde, die du bist'. More information available via https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/publications/.
