Abstract
The final chapter of analysis returns to the moment of authorial crisis discussed in the book’s introduction, comparing the peritexts of two translations of Wolf’s Was bleibt (1990). Examining material such as cover images, promotional summaries and notes on the author, this chapter demonstrates how the physical appearance of the writing shapes the reader’s understanding of a text and its author. In this case, the two different translations each selectively present Wolf and her writing in line with a unifying narrative that draws together the stories in each volume. While they differ in focus, the peritexts to both translations draw attention away from the troubled role of “moral authority” assigned to Wolf by her German readers and critics.
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Notes
- 1.
“It is possible that many of us [Americans] unconsciously wanted to project our anachronistic political hopes from the 1970s onto this author; if that is the case, then Wolf played a similar role for us to the one she performed in the GDR. Nonetheless, she never became the political-moral authority here that she was apparently considered to be over there—hence our amazement at the vehement debates surrounding her ‘fall’.”
- 2.
“I myself. Those two words, for a long time I could not get past them. I myself. Who was that. Which of the multiple beings from which ‘I myself’ was put together. The one that wanted to know itself? The one that wanted to preserve itself? Or that third, that was still tempted to dance to the same pipe as the young men out there in front of my door? Hey, friend: which of the three are you siding with?”
- 3.
These sentiments were echoed, for example, in France, where the Nouvel Observateur noted that “certains intellectuels—ceux-mêmes qui avaient dans le passé porté Christa Wolf aux nues—commencèrent à s’acharner contre cette femme qui avait collectionné les plus grands prix littéraires et dont les livres atteignaient un triage important depuis vingt ans”. [Certain intellectuals—those same ones who in the past had praised Christa Wolf to the skies—have begun to attack this woman, who has been awarded the greatest literary prizes and whose books have been accorded particular importance for twenty years.] (Valentini 1990: 111)
- 4.
Roswitha Skare’s study of the German text (2007) includes an analysis of the peritexts to the various German editions and their negotiation of the book’s fiercely debated content. She also briefly mentions the English and Swedish translations (2007: 95–101).
- 5.
The 1983 list included Martin Amis and Julian Barnes; in 1993, Will Self and Jeanette Winterson were listed and the 2003 listings included David Mitchell and Zadie Smith while 2013 featured Kamila Shamsie and Adam Thirlwell. Granta announced the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 1996 and 2007, issued a “New Fiction Special” in 2009, and has also listed new writers in the Spanish language (2010), from Brazil (2012) and from Ireland (2016).
- 6.
These details change over time: observations here relate to standard formatting at the time of Wolf’s publication. Changes to the front cover design since 1990 include the omission of the Penguin logo (inconsistently, from Granta 54 [1996]), and the addition of the altered Granta subtitle, “The Magazine of New Writing” beneath the logo (from Granta 62 [1998]).
- 7.
A Bourdieusian account of the relationship between publication and authors shows how editors select a mixture of well-known and unknown contributors, and some that specifically reflect the “ideological” aims of the issue and its accrued narrative (Parker and Philpotts 2009).
- 8.
The front cover can be viewed at http://granta.com/issues/granta-33-what-went-wrong/.
- 9.
Genette identifies the blurb as the “please-insert”, that is, a printed text containing information about the work, designed to be included in its publication (1997a: 104–105). The term comes from typical usage in the early twentieth century, when the please-insert was typically printed separately and inserted; Genette observes that this is no longer the case and that this text often appears on the back cover of a book (ibid.: 25).
- 10.
Following Genette’s classification, the covers are designated here as 1 (front cover), 2 (internal face of the front cover), 3 (internal face of the back cover) and 4 (back cover).
- 11.
The specific image also recalls (and thus adds emphasis to) an anecdote Wolf’s narrator hears from the woman in the off-licence, about her Jewish friend Elfi and how she was almost caught by the Gestapo officers waiting for her in her boyfriend’s car (GR 150).
- 12.
It is interesting that the Granta extract does in fact end with a passage that more clearly demonstrates the narrator’s ambivalent position: “The young gentlemen who sat outside my door—they would simply walk through his: that was the difference between the two of us—a decisive difference. A ditch. Did I have to jump over it?” (Granta 33: 158). This question, positioned at the end of the narrative of oppression, seems to lead the reader towards an understanding of how revolution can begin.
- 13.
For Wolf’s second Granta appearance (Granta 42), the Contributor’s Note reflects her admittance into the institutional narrative of the Granta canon, finding it necessary to say only that “Christa Wolf’s previous contribution to Granta, ‘What Remains’, appeared in issue 33” (Granta 1992: 256).
- 14.
In rare cases a contribution may be serialised over several issues: Amis’s “Time’s Arrow”, seen in Granta 33, is the first of a three-part serialisation which is completed in issues 34 and 36 of the magazine.
- 15.
For a detailed discussion of how this can work, see Parker and Philpotts (2009: 282–291).
- 16.
Wolf’s biographer Magenau (2002: 408) comments on the German “totalitarianism debate” sparked by the Literaturstreit and notes that “[m]anche Vergangenheitsbewältigungsexegeten schienen nun an der DDR nachholen zu wollen, was die Bundesrepublik gegenüber dem Dritten Reich versäumt hatte”. [“Some exegetes focused on confronting the German past now seemed to want to use the GDR to make up for the FRG’s failure to deal with (the legacy of) the Third Reich.”] Magenau’s comment suggests that in the German debate too, though for different reasons, the two states were sometimes conflated by critics of the GDR’s writers.
- 17.
Amis develops this theme in the complete published version of Time’s Arrow (or The Nature of the Offence, 1991).
- 18.
Other Wolf translations published by NGC during this period are her 1980 Büchner Prize acceptance speech “Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?” (translated by Henry J. Schmidt, NGC 23, 1981) and her 1982 interview “Culture is What You Experience” (translated by Jeanette Clausen, NGC 27, 1982).
- 19.
A standardised Virago Modern Classics format, applied to editions of texts from the late 1980s onwards including Christa T. (e.g. the 1989 edition), did not extend to What Remains.
- 20.
- 21.
“The coffee had to be strong and hot, filtered, the egg not too soft, home-made jam was desired, rye bread. Luxury! Luxury! I thought just like every morning, as I saw it all standing together—a never-fading feeling of guilt that, for those of us who know deprivation, pervades and increases every pleasure.”
- 22.
Skare (2007: 97–98) draws a comparison between the 1995 edition and the 1990 Aufbau front cover, though the Aufbau design does not feature a human figure.
- 23.
“I can still observe the first crossings-over into images before falling asleep, a street emerges that leads to that landscape which I know so well without having ever seen it.”
- 24.
“In my bitter shame I stepped onto the street. I scorned it: straight-laced street, I scoffed. Street to the heart of the matter … Coincidence street, I berated it. Phoney street.”
- 25.
Interestingly, Kovala (1996: 136–137) finds the opposite is true of the early twentieth-century Finnish paratexts studied: these demonstrate an emphasis on biographical and social context, rather than on the literary context of the writing.
- 26.
It is relevant to note that the blurb for the cover of the 1993 edition was most probably written before Wolf’s Stasi revelation and therefore might not be expected to include reference to it; however, the FSG/Chicago edition was first published in 1995, making the ongoing use of this euphemistic reference to the scandal significant.
- 27.
The 1993 edition includes a similar paragraph on the inside of the dust cover: “Christa Wolf’s novels include Accident, which was a bestseller in Germany, and The Quest for Christa T. She has worked as an editor, lecturer, journalist and critic. She lives in Berlin.”
- 28.
The photograph is dated by Böthig as 1980 (2004: 123).
- 29.
Peritextual exceptions to this trend, all from publishers other than FSG/Virago, are the earliest British edition of Christa T. (Hutchinson, 1971), The Reader and the Writer (Seven Seas, 1977), The Fourth Dimension (Verso, 1988) and In the Flesh (Verba Mundi, 2005). Divided Heaven is either listed amongst Wolf’s previous texts or briefly mentioned in a note on the author in each of these four editions.
- 30.
As well as The Author’s Dimension with FSG (1993), UCP later published Parting From Phantoms (1997): both essay collections are distinguished from Wolf’s “fiction” by the presence of a foreword in the peritext, in the first case written as an introduction by Grace Paley and in the second provided by the translator, Jan van Heurck.
- 31.
“Ja, ich habe Kritiken geschreiben—im falschen Sinne. Ein Kritiker, der Bücher nach einem bestimmten Maßstab beurteilt. Das habe ich dann mit Entsetzen sein lassen.” [“Yes, I wrote criticism—in the wrong sense. The kind of critic who judges books by pre-determined criteria. With horror I then let that be”] (Werke XIII: 307). Wolf also looks back critically at Moskauer Novelle in “Über Sinn und Unsinn von Naivität” [On the Sense and Nonsense of Naivety] (Werke IV: 438–450).
- 32.
“I hope the ‘improbability’ of these stories, their displacement into dream, utopia, the grotesque, can engender estrangement in relation to events, conditions and ways of thinking to which we are already far too accustomed for them to stand out and disturb us. But they should disturb us—said again in the confidence that we can change that which disturbs us.”
- 33.
This ending is notably missing from the Granta translation, which ends abruptly halfway through Wolf’s text.
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Summers, C. (2017). Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations of Was bleibt . In: Examining Text and Authorship in Translation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_5
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