Poetics of the deconstruction of Reinhard Jirgl’s text: A trans­lational perspective

Abstract

This article explores Reinhard Jirgl’s concept of literary writing, which uses linguistic and textual deconstruction, alphanumeric encoding, and intra- and intertextual strategies. Semiotic and discursive analyses allow identifying lexical, syntactic, and semantic elements of the structural and functional performativity of Jirgl’s texts. His prose exploits the enor­mous poetic potential of the alphanumeric code, the aesthetics of narrative simultaneity and hypertextuality, and the fragmentedness of the agent. The principle of aberrant text produc­tion helps the author stage the process of sense formation and brings to the fore the concept of hierarchical rule destruction, which applies to language, society, and reality. By deconstruct­ing syntax and orthography, Jirgl’s system of language and script generates new senses. It also compels the recipient to destroy customary mental matrices and analyse processes taking place in society. Narrative staging of Jirgl’s texts is performed to identify the main problems that student translators are faced with when decoding the writer’s prose. Rendering a contemporary fic­tional text into a different language requires paying attention to meaning construction and (de)construction, the extralinguistic context, and links and interactions between linguistic and social meanings. Moreover, it is necessary to explore connections between the performa­tive and narrative characteristics of utterances. New literary contexts and the alarmist forms of narrative peculiar to Jirgl’s writing urge the translator to develop specific professional skills and philological competencies.

Keywords

• reinhard jirgl
• semiotics
• pre-translation literary text analysis
• literature of reunification