Translational Hermeneutics

2015

Translational Hermeneutics

Rainer Kohlmayer
Pages 235-257

Die Stimme im Text als tertium comparationis beim Literaturubersetzen

By neglecting to integrate the final step of rhetorics into theory, i. e. pronuntiatio and actio, modern text linguistics passed a theoretical deficit on to modern translation studies. Literary texts must be read aloud in order to realize the acoustic potential programmed into the text by the author. The rhetorical tradition of writing and reading aloud was marginalized in the course of the 18th century when reading became a private and silent affair. Herder’s (and others’) foregrounding of the ‘tone’ or the ‘voice’ in literary texts and their translations is a theoretical attempt to return to the holistic view of text production, integrating performance into the process of literary production and reception. In practice, however, great literary translators always paid attention to the ‘voice in the text’. The tradition of orality – distinguishing precise voices in literary texts – seems to come to an end in Jelinek’s anti-individualistic texts.