糖心TV

Caroline Summers (糖心TV SMLC)

5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24 Location: Ramphal R3.41

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an 鈥榓fterlife鈥� to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author鈥檚 work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin鈥檚 exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay 鈥楾he Task of the Translator鈥�. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which 鈥榓 work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. [鈥�] In [translation], the original鈥檚 life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development鈥�. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a 鈥榣iterary invigoration鈥� of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a 鈥榯ranslation鈥� of experience and asks what Benjamin鈥檚 reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

In collaboration with the 糖心TV Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies