On translating "The Sunday Drive"

Abstract

What difficulties confront the translator of a text by William H. Gass? Apart, that is, from the difficulties known to any translator of any literary text, differences of environment, culture, and mental habits, as well as linguistic problems regarding tense, aspect, or mode? The following text will point out a few of those difficulties by facing eight paragraphs from Gass's piece "The Sunday Drive" with a German translation, each section to be followed by a commentary on the text and an evaluation of the special complications which that text presented to the translator. The following analysis, however, is not meant to be merely an exercise in translation. It has been said often enough that poetic texts cannot be adequately translated. But I intend to show that finding a translation that scores high by the usual criteria is often not of prime importance. Instead, the translator needs to understand the underlying aesthetic principle of the text and reenact it within his or her own cultural setting and linguistic context.