The fall into confusion: Babel, translation, Auden.

摘要

Criticism of the Auden canon largely ignores his many translations, which range from German to Old Norse and Swedish and cover all three literary genres (prose, drama, poetry). Auden himself always acknowledged the importance of translation in his own poetic career, seeing in it the inner workings of a particular language and language as a whole. The aim of the dissertation is firstly to draw attention to these translations and secondly to analyze them in light of Auden's own translation theory, and contemporary theories, focussing particularly on the concepts of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.Chapter Two looks at Auden's own theories of language, poetry, and translation, which are largely informed by theology and Neo-Classicism and which seek to fully recuperate the source text into the target context and language. These two chapters together establish the critical framework of the dissertation.Chapter Three moves on to analyse Auden's rendering of Goethe's Italienische Reise and Dag Hammarskjold's Vagmarken. Here deconstructive leverage exposes the resistance of the texts to Auden's attempts at domestication and recuperation.Chapter Four examines Auden's translations for the stage, namely, Bertolt Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, where concern for stagecraft and performability exerts a unique pressure, since the target text is meant to be sung. Again close analysis reveals traces of hegemonization.Chapter One contextualizes contemporary theories and attempts to arrive at a critical understanding of deconstructive translation praxis.Chapter Five, the final one, looks at the poetry translated by Auden, i.e., The Voluspa, Gunnar Ekelof, Par Lagerkvist, Andrei Voznesensky, and Goethe. These translations cover the entire career of Auden as a translator and clearly demonstrate a movement away from the early methodology of recuperation to the later praxis that respects the source text his attempt now is to write a third text which survives on its own, dependent neither on the source nor target contexts and languages, but drawing upon both.The conclusion advances the idea that Auden's translations show a movement from a domesticating, taming, and recuperative praxis to a deconstructive one which creates a text that falls perpetually into the middle, never really a part of the source or target languages or contexts, always already existing as an alien.