The Writer as Translator and the Translator as Writer. Two interwoven literary Processes in the Works of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt and Peter Handke.

The starting point of this dissertation is the unique, symbiotic relationship between Peter Handke, Nobel Prize Winner Literature in 2019, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt – two writer-translators coming from completely different European traditions, bound to each other by a tight friendship and a close cooperation, who translated each other’s work. More specifically, this PhD thesis examines how Handke translated Goldschmidts novels, Le miroir quotidien (1981) and La forêt interrompue (1991), into German, and the way in which he dealt with the Holocaust-representations of the source texts. The first part of the dissertation focuses on Handke’s poetics as a writer and a translator, as well as on Walter Benjamin’s translation tradition, a tradition to which both Handke and Goldschmidt belong. The second part offers a detailed study of Handke’s Goldschmidt-translations on a paratextual level as well as on a textual level (narratological, linguistic-stylistic, and thematic). The corpus analysis illustrates that Handke’s translations unravel a posture of master-pupil and that they concentrate on the poetic function of language (Jakobson).