German as Contact Zone

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Russell West-Pavlov. German as Contact Zone

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin]

Berlin coming and goings

German as contact zone

Generalized translation

Plan of the book

Chapter 1: Turning Translation

From translation in culture to culture as translation

Defending and infringing the translational border

Translation and cultural catachresis

The relationality of translation

Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist

Language beyond language

Provincializing language … or not

Objection 1.1: Self-referentiality, systemicity, sovereignty

Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust

Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol

Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman

Translation at the heart of things themselves

Interlude: Provincializing language means provincialization as process

Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing

Chapter 4: Translation as information

Translation, information, life

The semiosphere as translation worlds

Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation

Quantum (gravity) theory

Quantum translation theory

Chapter 6: Quantizing German

Quantizing language

Quantizing German

Foreign languages in German

Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad

Reconnection

Translating Sebald Translating Conrad

Marlow’s grove of death

Text as contact zone

Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner

Translation and Transition

Translating Translation

Eich as translator

Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin …

Walking

History

War

Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83

The near-future

Translating (or failing to translate) for the future

What says the clock?

Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott

Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’

The sonnet and creative constraint

Postcolonial resistance?

Landscape, teaching and translating

Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone

Ausländisch für Deutsche—Foreignish for Germans

Foreign languages in the German-language school

Translation in the classroom

Resonance as translation

Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation

Racism as a global phenomenon

Systemic connections

Connections: Performatives, Affect and Agency

The Classroom in the World

Conclusion: Before I die

Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom

The fate of the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century

Polylingual schools and a pluricultural society

EFL as a model for diversity learning

Ambivalent evidence from textbooks

The ‘real existing’ classroom as opportunity: what now?

Bibliography

Отрывок из книги

Russell West-Pavlov

German as a Contact Zone

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What I am proposing, via my inaugural but patently decentred reading of Rostov-Luanda that focuses upon the almost complete absence of its elided third term (Berlin), is the centrifugal displacement—the expatriation—of German and Germany itself. The film is all about language, but at the end, language becomes mute, and takes its naturally subordinate place within the material world that is the other major subject of Sissako’s filmic gaze. This shift of emphasis does not merely work to alienate and denaturalize human language—but rather, in the final analysis, to renaturalize it and to place it in networks of productive translation. Such networks of renaturalized translation are inevitably obfuscated, tamped down and controlled by the nation state and its attendant national languages in the first instance, and by extension all language that is conceptualized as the marker par excellence of the human. The post- and dehumanization of language leads ineluctably towards the re-naturalization of language as translation within a larger framework of universal translation.

Chapter 10 embarks upon a close reading of the temporal models proposed by the Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s frenetic novel Tram 83 (2014). The reading suggests that Mujila provides a template for a temporal regime apposite for Global South polities in semi-institutional collapse, typical of the post-Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and post-civil-war polities of some parts of Africa (Mujila is de facto describing post-2000 Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] whence he hails). Mujila’s project mobilizes a form of temporal translation that is highly relevant not only for the post-apocalyptic polities of the Global South, but also for the pre-apocalyptic societies of the Global North, for whom, according to some readings, the South provides a grim future roadmap. The temporal template Mujila’s prose embodies is effectively and affectively very close to that described by quantum translation. In the light of this temporal template and its translative resonances, the chapter critiques the German translation of Tram 83 for the way it systematically undercuts Mujila’s project of temporal translation.

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