Translation and the representation of thought: The case of Herta Müller

Abstract

A number of recent studies consider how the style of a text is recreated by a translator, and what issues this raises for the study of the translated text and its reception, and for both stylistics and translation studies more generally. But the changes that translation makes to perspective and structures of narrative in the text have rarely been studied. In this article I suggest how one might consider changes of this nature that have come about when the works of the Nobel-Prize-winning German-Romanian writer Herta Müller were translated into English, and the possible effects of such changes on the construction of fictional minds by the English reader. These changes are of particular importance in this case because the novels deal with repression of various types – in the community and the family, by the state – and focus especially on the disjunction between thinking and speaking, and the uncertainty of what others are thinking. Considering how specific aspects of narrative perspective change when these novels are translated raises potentially interesting questions both for the study of translation and for the study of narrative.