What is it about?
This chapter provides an insight into the translatorial workbench of the translations produced for the bilingual edition “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”. Outlined are translational approaches – largely based on Friedrich Schleiermacher ideas towards foreignisation – as well as practical decisions pertaining to Kleistian lexis and syntax, relevant historicising strategies, and perhaps translatologically most interestingly, a systematic and pragmatic approach to retranslation. While a lot of retranslations aim for a clearly defined distance to prior translations, in many cases by either ignoring those or at least not acknowledging them in any detail, this translator decided that the only scholarly approach – in contrast to a commercially-informed approach – is one of utmost transparency, whereby interesting past solutions are noted, and any borrowings, conducted in an ethical, non-plagiaristic manner, are acknowledged in full detail. This approach, and the translatorial agency that it represents, is evident throughout the edition.
Featured Image
Photo by Meri Vasilevski on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In the two volumes of this edition, “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”, the stories are presented bilingually with copious amounts of annotation in aid of textual comprehension, drawing attention to lexical shifts in meaning, to intertextual references and parallels, to commonalities between the stories, and to translatological points of interest, including the citation of interesting alternative translations from the past; individual story commentaries provide further historical context as well as basic interpretational angles. The article at hand is the appendix of the second volume.
Perspectives
Rendering Kleist’s breathless yet detached prose style in English is the kind of challenge that literary translators thrive on, and I am honoured to have had the opportunity of retranslating the entirety of his stories, as well as systematically examining the exact workings of his stylistics. Working in an academic context free of the demands of trade publishing, I have striven to produce a truly foreignised translation, one that rather than hiding Kleist’s perceived flaws and idiosyncrasies reveals them to be unique qualities of his style – and indeed the disruptivity that is so inherent to foreignised translations is an ideal match for Kleist’s own predilection for narrative disruption.
Johannes Contag
Massey University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Appendix: Kleist Translation in Practice, October 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004742376_013.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
