Wie übersetzt man ein Buch zur Übersetzungstheorie? George Steiners After Babel wiedergelesen im Original und verglichen mit der deutschen und der französischen Übersetzung

Abstract

Decades ago, on the occasion of a lecture I gave in Geneva at the Faculté de Traduction et d’Interprétation, I was asked for my opinion on After Babel, the book by a Geneva colleague called George Steiner in Comparative Literature. My ad­mis­sion alone that I had read it and found some of its contents interesting caused un­ease among my interviewees. As a representative of traductology, one had to view such things with condescending distance. In the meantime, I have often taken Steiner’s opus magnum off the bookshelf, not so much as an aid in questions of trans­la­tion studies, but as a contribution to the history of translation and the history of the philosophy of language (cf. Albrecht/Plack 2018). The quotations from Hei­deg­ger, Borges and Meschonnic that precede After Babel show that George Steiner, in contrast to many a translatologist, is not afraid to translate himself – here from German, Spanish and French. This impressive prelude is missing in Monika Pless­ner’s German translation. My contribution to Steiner’s treatment of the “nexus be­tween translation and understanding” should not only be directed at the author’s own comments, but also at the way his reviewers have judged them and how they have been interpreted and reproduced in the German and French translations.