Project Details
Projekt
Translation and Transnationality: Practices, Aesthetics and Reflections of Translation in Networks of German and Spanish-speaking Exiles in Mexico
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523073917
The sub-project examines exchange relations and transnational interaction between the two central groups of exiles in Mexico, the German-speaking and the Spanish-speaking. The guiding concept for the description of transexilic dynamics is that of translation, by which we mean both diverse linguistic or interlingual transfers between natural languages and forms of cultural and medial transformation in a broader cultural studies perspective. It analyzes the extent to which translation activities promoted reciprocal networking, for example when representatives of the Spanish Republican exile translated texts by German-speaking exiles into Spanish and vice versa. It also considers how the necessity and practice of translation established contacts with exiles of other origins and with Mexican institutions and actors. Finally, the comparative study will examine how the experience of exile and the translation phenomena associated with it become the subject of literary and essayistic reflection and which (trans)figurations of community result from this. With the participating PIs, perspectives from German respectively Hispanic studies on Mexico as a country of exile will be intertwined in order to overcome, in close cooperation, the still dominant national-historical and national-philological constrictions in the research of biographical testimonies and aesthetic articulations of the exile experience. The focus on translation phenomena makes it possible to describe the emergence and dynamics of transnationalization processes more precisely in a concrete context and to sound out their resonances in the various (exile) literatures. Among others, transnational pairs of translators and Jewish translators, whose biographies are often characterized by transnationality and multilingualism, will be examined. The particular relevance of the gender category in the exploration of this field arises from the observation that translations in exile were often carried out by unnamed women, as well as from the finding that exile texts in both languages often have female protagonists who are designed as translators and cultural mediators. Overall, a terrain that has so far only been touched on very selectively by research will be systematically explored and analyzed in more detail in case studies. The cross-media and cross-genre text corpus to be constituted (books, newspapers, various non-fiction texts, etc.) will be examined with regard to the question of how community terms are translated and to what extent semantic polyvalences and (re)codings become recognizable in the process. A comparative analysis will also be made of the way in which particular features of the Mexican environment are 'translated' into the language of the terms and narratives brought into exile, and how the transformations initiated by this can be described in detail.
DFG Programme
Research Units
