From ‘Living On’ to ‘Still Alive’ and ‘Lost On the Way’: Exile, Memory and Intersectionality as a Translation ‘of One’s Own’ in Ruth Klüger’s Autobiographical Texts
Résumé
What happens to (self-)translation when performed in and through exile? And what difference does it make when ‘memories of violent pasts’ are translated in a woman’s voice? The autobiographical texts of Ruth Klüger offer a multifaceted field of inquiry at the intersection of memory and translation studies. Following Klüger’s statement that “Still Alive is not a translation […] but another version for my American students,” most critics interpret the rewriting of Still Alive as an ‘American text’. Yet, this contribution aims at complicating the binary view of cultural translation as the ‘passing’ from one cultural (con)text into another. Drawing on a concept of translation that does not reduce cultures to monolingual hegemonic archives and providing a close analysis of the paratextual and intertextual (re)framing of Still Alive, it demonstrates that Klüger’s translation strategies produce a complex politics and 'poethics' of address. It does so by building an ethos and ethics of translation that highlight the intersectional dynamics of memory and metaphorically conceives of translation as a bridge between her memories and that of other minorities. Her (re)writing can thus be read as a reflection on the (un)translatability of not only trauma into language, but also of her story into history.