Editorial and Translation Method

Viktorija Bilić

THE WORK OF SELECTING LETTERS AND DETERMINING AND IMplementing translation strategy heavily affected this collection of sources on the Civil War. The letters that appear in this book represent only a fraction of the contents of two large archival collections. The Fritz Anneke and Mathilde Anneke Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison span the years between 1791 and 1884, containing over six thousand individual document pages. Both prolific writers, Mathilde and Fritz produced about two thousand personal letters and several speech drafts, notebook entries, poem and essay collections, as well as newspaper clippings. Donated by their daughter Hertha Anneke Sanne in 1940, these documents form the main source on the family’s history.¹ While most of the letters in this volume are translated from Fritz’s or Mathilde’s German, a smaller number were written in English originally by Mary Booth. The Booth letters come from the Sherman M. Booth Family Papers, owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society and housed at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

The selected letters illustrate the correspondents’ personal lives against the backdrop of the historical events of the years 1859 to 1865. We balanced several goals in the selection process: providing an engaging narrative that tracked the physical movements of the “characters,” including revealing information about their relationships with each other and their children, showing how they were involved in the Civil War and in public activism, and capturing transnational interactions. With some exceptions, the letters were exchanged among the three protagonists—Mathilde, Fritz, and Mary. The letters included in Radical Relationships make up about 10 percent of the letters in the Anneke collection and about 3 percent of the letters in the Booth collection for the years we cover. In general, we tried to avoid making too many cuts to the letters in order to convey the texture of the originals.

During the transcription and editing phase, we sought to preserve the authenticity of the original letters. We kept all misspellings such as “carraige” and “does’nt” in Mary Booth’s letters. We strove to maintain all capitalization and punctuation as it appears in the letters, although it was often difficult to distinguish between Mary’s periods and dashes. We did make minor changes, such as replacing Mary’s “xc” with “&c” and plus signs with ampersands for ease of reading, as indicated in the first footnote in chapter 1, so that the formatting has been adapted and interpolations added to the relevant sentences. Ellipses (“…”) indicate the few places where text has been cut.

Mathilde and Fritz wrote most of their letters in Kurrentschrift, an old form of German handwriting that can be difficult to decipher and daunts even experienced German scholars.² Our transcription of the German letters followed the same editorial guidelines as those of the English letters, preserving the originals precisely. We initially expected that Maria Wagner’s Mathilde Franziska Anneke in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten (1980) might prove a useful transcription aid, as it includes several paragraphs of the German letters selected for this volume. Wagner did not, however, make her selection and editing process clear, and her transcriptions contain numerous mistakes, omissions, additions, and other errors.

The process of translation has obviously affected most of the letters in this collection, so it is important to describe the decisions that have shaped the texts. Two broad theories in translation studies underpin my choice of translation strategy: the notion of domestication/foreignization and the skopos theory. An introduction to these two fundamental theories will help the reader understand the decisions involved in rendering a text in a new language.³

Friedrich Schleiermacher articulated the distinction between domestication and foreignization back in the nineteenth century. In 1813, Schleiermacher introduced two paths a translator can take in his well-known lecture “On the Different Methods of Translating” (“Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens”): “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”⁴

One path, domestication, intends to bring the author closer to the reader by making her speak as a domestic author would speak to people in her own language. The second path, foreignization, aims at bringing the reader closer to the author and stresses the foreignness of the original and source text culture. The methods of domestication (“Einbürgern”) and foreignization (“Verfremden”) are entirely different and have been debated in translation studies for hundreds of years. Several translation scholars have taken up the issue and further developed these basic approaches to translation practice. German translation scholar Juliane House distinguishes between overt translation and covert translation. Overt translations (foreignization) are obviously translations that are to be recognized as such. Covert translations (domestication), as the name implies, are not to be recognized as translations. Instead, covert translations enjoy “the status of an original text in the receiving lingua-culture.”⁵ If translators are cultural “bridge-builders,” an overt translation takes the reader “over the bridge” to learn about different cultures. In covert translation, the reader stays “on his or her side of the bridge,” and when the text has been translated well, the reader is unaware that the target text at hand is a translation.

More recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, German translation scholar Hans J. Vermeer established a strategy that is based on the aim or purpose (skopos) of a translation. According to Vermeer, there are different ways of translating a text depending on its function and the target audience. He declares the function to be the main factor influencing the translation process.⁶

I was mainly guided by a foreignizing translation approach, although there are elements of domesticating translation as well. I endeavored to approximate the style of the source material by using American English that was common in the nineteenth century. My intention has been to remain faithful to the tone of the original text. The function or skopos of the source text is distinctive in the case of personal letters. Fritz and Mathilde exchanged the originals with no intention of publishing them. The translations inform readers about this correspondence by making it available in English. My goal was to translate the historical letters for a general audience who may or may not be familiar with the Annekes. For this reason, historical footnotes inform our audience about various references in the letters. The historian and the translator are coauthors who fill in knowledge gaps and contextualize the letter contents for a modern audience. In places, long German sentence structures needed to be changed, and in other places culture-specific elements (realia) needed to be explained either in the target text or in a footnote. In-text explanations were inserted subtly. For example, in 1859, Mathilde wrote to Fritz, “The Gradaus is now published under the name Volksblatt” (“Gradaus ist zum Volksblatt geworden”).⁷ In German, “Volksblatt” could also mean “a people’s paper” or “a paper for the people.” Since in this case the newspaper was in fact renamed, however, I chose a translation that reflected this meaning and was as stylistically smooth as the original but included additional explanatory words.

My overarching approach to foreignization and skopos guided my response to specific translation challenges in Mathilde and Fritz’s letters. The unique writing styles of Mathilde and Fritz presented several translation challenges. The letter writers occasionally mixed German and English, for example, a common phenomenon in immigrant letters. In such cases, as an element of foreignization, I kept the Annekes’ English words and German-English word creations, italicizing them in the English translations to highlight that Mathilde or Fritz were using these English words in the German original.⁸ For example, in a letter dated September 23, 1859, Mathilde wrote to Fritz about events in Milwaukee: “These things always provide interesting material for my papers. Maria has written you all about the political affairs.”⁹ Other translation challenges included stylistic elements such as irony, sarcasm, and literary references. I attempted to preserve all instances of irony and sarcasm in the target text. One of many examples is Mathilde Anneke’s sarcastic tone when referring to men who had disappointed her. Mathilde, who had published Catholic prayer books in 1837 but rejected religion by the mid-1840s, frequently used the German abbreviation “Hl” (Heiliger, der Heilige) to mock sanctimonious men who wielded some sort of power. I translated “Hl” as “St.” (Saint). She referred to Mary’s husband in this disparaging way on March 16, 1862: “The noble St. Booth, who had promised Mary to send money around this time, says he can’t send anything but that she should not despair and should trust the heavens instead.”¹⁰ In their letters, both Mathilde and Fritz frequently made references to German-speaking poets and philosophers. For literary quotations, whenever the Annekes quoted a German poet like Heinrich Heine, I cited a prominent English translation if such a translation exists, and in other cases, I translated the quotation myself. Footnotes inform the reader about such literary references and their translations.

In line with the notion that one can only translate a text when fully understanding its (historical) context, researching not only the main letter protagonists but also all persons and events referenced in the letter corpus has been an invaluable step in ensuring a high-quality translation.¹¹ Archival research in the Zürich-based Beust-Lipka collection at the Stadtarchiv (City Archives) and the Staatsarchiv (Canton Archives), for example, provided invaluable background information. The literary works published by the Annekes can be considered helpful parallel texts in the translation process as well. Mathilde published German novels and plays, for example, while Fritz contributed numerous articles to German American newspapers. These texts serve as background texts and provide a deeper understanding of the content discussed in the letters. An important part of this research prior to translating was consulting with and collaborating with an expert historian who provided the historical introduction and explanatory footnotes for the letter translations. In general, the translation process was influenced by productive debates between a translator and a historian. From start to finish, the historical challenge influenced my translation process.

Interested readers can find translation exercises—along with supplemental information and assignments suitable for German, history, and gender studies classrooms—online. An open-access website offers digital resources for students and scholars to interact with the primary material included in the volume. Search for this book on www.ugapress.org.

1. Finding Aid, Anneke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, accessed July 30, 2020, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wiarchives.uw-whs-wis000lw.

2. Harald Süß, Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lehrbuch (Munich: Knaur, 2004), 1–80.

3. Other schools of thought in translation studies that have influenced my approach to historical translation include hermeneutic approaches to translation (George Steiner, Larisa Cercel), descriptive translation studies and cultural translation (Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere), and the theory of translatorial action (Justa Holz-Mänttäri). See Holger Siever, Übersetzungswissenschaft: Eine Einführung (Tübingen: Narr, 2015); Mary Snell-Hornby, Hans G. Hönig, Paul Kußmaul, and Peter A. Schmitt, eds., Handbuch Translation (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998); Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

4. “Entweder der Uebersezer läßt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgegen; oder er läßt den Leser möglichst in Ruhe und bewegt den Schriftsteller ihm entgegen.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersetzens (1813),” in Das Problem des Übersetzens, ed. Hans Joachim Störig (Stuttgart: Goverts, 1963), 5; trans. Susan Bernofsky, as “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 49.

5. Juliane House, “Overt and Covert Translation,” in Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 245–46.

6. Katharina Reiß and Hans Josef Vermeer, Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translations-theorie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984).

7. Mathilde to Fritz, July 15, 1859, Box 3, Folder 5, Anneke Papers, p. 48.

8. When Mathilde and Fritz wanted to emphasize something themselves, they used underlining. We replicate the originals in that regard.

9. “Diese Sachen geben mir immer interessanten Stoff für meine Päpers. Ueber die polit. Affaires hat Maria Dir geschrieben. …” Mathilde to Fritz, September 23, 1859, Box 3, Folder 5, Anneke Papers, p. 67.

10. “Der edle Hl Booth, der wie Mary erwartete nach seinem Versprechen, Geld in diese Zeit senden werde, sagt er kann nicht—aber sie solle nicht in Dispair dort gerathen sondern auf den Himmel bauen.” Mathilde to Fritz, March 16, 1862, Box 3, Folder 5, Anneke Papers, p. 127.

11. Viktorija Bilić, Historische amerikanische und deutsche Briefsammlungen: Alltagstexte als Gegenstand des Kooperativen Übersetzens (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014), 154–60.