"It's a joke that he
doesn't have the Nobel Prize, and I have it.
I consider Pynchon to be one of the
most important living writers, [...].
I can't get the Nobel Prize
if Pynchon doesn't have it!"
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek is one of the best known and most important authors of our time. She has been known to an international audience ever since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, exactly twenty years ago now. A miracle, really, because her prose is unwieldy, her dramas scandalous, and her radio work niche products. And yet, against all odds, she is read and listened to, especially in her home country of Austria. There are good reasons for this. For example, Jelinek's special style, which she developed from her beginnings in pop literature to such successful novels as The Piano Teacher (1983) and Lust (1989). Or her feeling for political topics, terrorism ( Ulrike Maria Stuart , 2006 and The Silent Girl , 2014) and economic liberalism ( The Merchant's Contracts , 2009). Her commitment to the rights of refugees and freedom of thought also plays a role.
Less well known, however, is Jelinek's work as a translator, although she has been pursuing this since her literary beginnings. In 1976, for example, the Austrian avant-garde magazine Manuskripte published the first edition of Jelinek's ongoing work on the translation of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , the epoch-making novel on which she both comments and reflects in an accompanying essay. She titled the resulting text The Ends of the Parabola , a formulation which in its congeniality goes far beyond any simple form of translation; after all, in the ambiguity of the parable it alludes to the mathematical curve as well as to the allegorical symbolic narrative. This shows that Jelinek also developed her own poetics further in her engagement with Pynchon: "Fundamentally, translating is a fascinating, creative job because the product of the work is ultimately always different from the original. It becomes a new work. The translation clings to the original like a lamb to a wolf.” Jelinek and Pynchon become accomplices in the search for aesthetic form.
The small anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize invites us not to concern ourselves with the author's 'great' works and themes or with Pynchon's aura as a 'phantom of literature', but with her everyday writing work, which includes not only the reception and production of texts but also the laborious task of translating.
PROGRAM
10.30 a.m.
Welcome
Martin Stingelin, Dortmund
10.45 a.m.
Introduction
Walter Grünzweig, Dortmund
11.15 a.m.
Absent voices.
Materials and documents for translation < Gravity's Rainbow The ends of the parable>
12.00 p.m.
"'Greed is better than none.' Translation, humor and the cultural myth of Gravity's Rainbow "
Sascha Pöhlmann, Dortmund
1.00 p.m.
Break
2.00 p.m.
"Translating the media"
Ute Holl, Basel
3.00 p.m.
"Vibrations of capital: Jelinek and Pynchon in the transatlantic dialogue about money, power and decadence"
Rebecca Schönsee, Vienna
4.00 p.m.
Break
4.30 p.m.
"Cynical accomplices. Thomas Pynchon, Elfriede Jelinek and the literary counterculture”
Tobias Lachmann, Dortmund
5.30 pm
“Of stiff boners and drop faces: Pynchon sings in German”
Christian Hänggi, Basel, with musical interludes by Tyler Burba, New York
6.30 pm
End of the symposium
Contact Information
TIME AND PLACE
Friday, October 25, 2024
Literaturhaus Dortmund
Neuer Graben 78
44139 Dortmund
T 0231 33048497
info@literaturhaus-dortmund.de
www.literaturhaus-dortmund.de
ORGANIZER
Technical University of Dortmund
Faculty of Cultural Studies
Professorship for Modern German Literature from 1750 to the Present with a Focus on Literary Theory with a Cultural Studies Emphasis
Prof. Dr. Martin Stingelin
Emil-Figge-Str. 50
44227 Dortmund
CONTACT
tobias.lachmann@tu-dortmund.de
claas.morgenroth@tu-dortmund.de