Officina di trascendenza. Note di poetica e traduzione in Wolfgang Hildesheimer

Abstract

According to the writer and translator Hildesheimer, writing and translating are similar and partly coincidental activities. As a translator, Hildesheimer mainly worked on translations from English to German, and his only published work from German to English was Kafka’s short story Elf Söhne. Apart from his translating practice, he produced some theoretical annotations that, despite not representing a consistent contribution to the theory and methodology of translation, can be very interesting in order to draw a picture of the author’s sober poetics. Hildesheimer’s reflections on translating, in fact, can be seen as a corollary to his conception of writing as ‘transcendence’. This concept, introduced in his essay The End of Fiction (1975), serves to illustrate the writer’s ability to penetrate and give shape to the aspects of reality perceived as authentic