Sabine Strümper-Krobb

Pretending not to be original – pseudotranslations and their functions

Pseudotranslation has been discussed as an intriguing phenomenon in literary history, not least as a masking device that allows authors who are trying to avert censorship or who simply want to avoid the reception of a certain work to be determined by preconceptions associated with an established authorial name. Pseudotranslations have a long history and a wide variety of functions. I will look at two very different examples in which pseudotranslation determines the narrative frame of the text: Christoph Martin Wieland’s German novel Der goldne Spiegel oder Die Könige von Scheschian (1772) [The golden mirror or the kings of Scheshian], a political utopia aimed at providing contemporary absolutist Germany with a blue-print for an enlightened political organization, and Jose Carlos Somoza La Caverna de las Ideas (2000) [The Athenian Murders, 2002], a detective novel in which a fiction of translation contributes to a decidedly postmodern metafictional discourse.

Keywords: pseudotranslation, authorship, originality

Biography

Sabine Strümper-Krobb is Lecturer in German at the School of Languages and Literatures at University College Dublin. She obtained her PhD from the University of Göttingen, where she was involved in the initial phases of the special research institute for Literary Translation Studies. She has been teaching at UCD since 1993. Her research focuses on Translation Studies, German Modernism and German-Scandinavian literary relations. She is the author of two monographs on literary translation and has co-edited several volumes, including Crossing Borders. Space Beyond Disciplines (2011). She is also co-editor of the Germanistik in Ireland Yearbook and has published numerous articles on various aspects of Translation Studies and German and Scandinavian literature.