For Poetry's Sake: Resistance to Translation in the German Versions of Oscar Wilde's THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL

Abstract

While Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol is frequently examined within the genre of prison writing, translations of the poem push one to consider the relevance of its aestheticism within the genre of poetry. This article comparatively examines three German-language versions of the poem by Emma Clausen, Wilhelm Schölermann, and Albrecht Schaeffer to show how the practice of poetry translation resists the source object, translating for poetry’s sake. Key refrains reveal individual translators embracing their own artistic aims to create more poetry, even as the source poem simultaneously resists translation in its own way. Consideration of the genre of poetry, or what Walter Pater describes as its formal “width, variety, [and] delicacy,” ultimately encourages one to follow an aesthetic model of translation, rather than an interpretive model such as that of Lawrence Venuti. This article also draws out the value of thinking about German translations of Wilde’s prison poem, which are consistently underexamined yet prolific in number, for situating the aestheticism of one of the most widely translated literary authors in modern times.

Keywords

• poetry
• translation
• comparative studies
• aestheticism
• Oscar Wilde studies
• German studies