00:50 Marie Martine: Opening 04:45 Emily Dicker on creating the visual imagery 07:09 Victoria Mckinley-Smith on the translation process 09:03 Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill, and Isabella Reese: Reading
The launch presented a new bilingual edition of ‘Werde, die du bist !’, a novella by the German feminist essayist and writer, Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919), with a collaborative translation by Oxford students Emily Dicker, Victoria Mckinley-Smith, Lia Neill, and Isabella Reese, edited by Marie Martine. ‘Werde, die du bist’ (The Woman You Become), published in 1894, is the story of an old woman, Agnes Schmidt, and her search for meaning after a life of self-sacrifice as a wife and mother. Her diary recounts her travels and efforts to discover her true self which are complicated by societal judgements on her old age that contradict her inner feeling of being young again. This short story is in dialogue with Dohm’s essayistic production which analyses women’s condition in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. The editor’s and translators’ introductions offer an insight into the collaborative process that shaped this new translation. This text presented several challenges which the students reflect on in their collective introduction. They discuss how they strove to make a nineteenth-century German text accessible and interesting to a twenty-first-century English-speaking audience, while staying faithful to Dohm’s poetic language without falling into clichés. The introduction also explores how Dohm uses grammatical gender to highlight how women are marginalised through language and how it can be expressed in English, a language without a gendered grammatical system. The translation endeavoured to emphasise the significance of the natural world as a feminine realm and Dohm’s modern and political representation of madness in her short story. The introduction also offers a reflection on translation as feminist practice – one that strives to foreground the author’s feminist message while adapting it for a contemporary audience. On a more practical level, the introductions also address the use of capitalization and the inclusion of footnotes.
This edition is part of the ‘Writers in Residence’ series of ‘Taylor Editions’, a publishing venture run by Henrike Lähnemann and Emma Huber from the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford, which publishes works by students at the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty in open access. Translation is a core part of the faculty’s curriculum, and this project was an opportunity for students to reflect on translation as a creative and collaborative process. This edition also includes artwork by the students which illustrates the meaning of the short story. For the first time, readers are able to engage with Dohm’s original German text alongside a creative English translation and reflect on the translators’ choices.