This dissertation examines interpreter figures in European literature and film since the Second World War, from the implementation of simultaneous interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials to the growth of the European Union and the rise of a global information economy. I approach interpreting as an embodied act of translation, and the works I analyze explore the frictions that arise when an embodied subject is employed as a supposedly neutral medium of communication. In contrast to fantasies of instantaneous transfer and unlimited convertibility enabled by digital translation technologies, the interpreter’s corporeality attests to the material and culturally specific aspects of linguistic communication within larger processes of international exchange. Working against a tradition of effacement, I investigate aesthetic representations that render the interpreter’s body visible, audible, and even tangible, and thereby offer new possibilities for conceiving of translation as a multi-directional encounter rather than a form of hermeneutic extraction and transfer. This approach also highlights the gendered nature of interpreting as a form of intimate, affective service work, which is further figured in relation to traditional discourses of translators as potentially duplicitous women.

Both Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story “Simultan” (1968/72) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) employ female interpreter figures to stage the ongoing relevance of Germany and Austria’s National Socialist past to the historical moments in which they originated. While the protagonist of “Simultan” experiences historical and linguistic fragmentation as an instrumentalized “language machine,” Maria Braun attempts to exercise agency through sexual, economic, and linguistic exchanges that are nonetheless constrained by larger social forces. In Yoko Tawada’s novella Das Bad (1989) and novel Das nackte Auge (2004), the dangers of translation as hermeneutic violence are inscribed upon female bodies, yet these bodies also hold the potential for alternative forms of translation as a shared experience of encounter. Finally, Hans-Christian Schmid’s film Lichter (2003) positions interpreters as key points of facilitation, friction, and intimate exchange within an unstable border zone.

Feridun Zaimoglu’s second major book, Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1998), resists common conceptions of belonging and challenges readers to rethink conventions of religion, nationalism and femininity. As a group of three translators working within an academic setting, we seek both to unpack what it means to be an agent and to exercise our own individual and collective agency as translating subjects in the “mainstream.” This involves providing greater access to Koppstoff through the English language, while respecting the complexity of Zaimoglu’s original texts and their subversive power to both build and obscure notions of community. In this introduction to our collaborative translations of two exemplary texts, “Sistem versus Soopcoolture” (Sistem gegen Süppkültür) and “Everything in this World is Fleeting” (Alles in dieser Welt ist vergänglich), we will discuss our translation process in reference to existing theories of translation and current criticism on Zaimoglu’s work, underscoring the ways in which Zaimoglu complicates prominent models of community formation and the relevance of these models to current German society. In accordance with the nature of Zaimoglu’s work, which constantly undermines the possibility of finite interpretation, this discussion will highlight the act of translation as an exercise in subjectivity. Rather than objectifying the “translatable” or “untranslatable” qualities of Koppstoff, we hope to demonstrate that our translations represent one of multiple ways Zaimoglu’s texts could be effectively rendered into English.

A conversation with the translator and scholar Bernard Banoun. The following conversation took place in Berkeley on October 29, 2009.