Journal of Austrian Studies

Edited by three of our French colleagues, Les traducteurs, passeurs culturels entre la France et l'Autriche (Translators, Ferrying Culture between France and Austria) is another of the fine volumes emerging from Austrian studies in France. Irène Cagneau is from the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France [End Page 156] at Valenciennes, Sylvie Grimm-Hamen from the l'Université de Lorraine at Nancy, and Marc Lacheny from l'Université de Lorraine at Metz. It comprises contributions from a Franco-Austrian Colloquium held in October 2018 at the Université de Lorraine, one of a series of such meetings held since 2008 in conjunction with a larger project that engages Innsbruck, Lille, Valenciennes, and Lorraine.

The project tracks translators as agents of cultural transfer between France and Austria from the nineteenth century onward. The various contributions nuance what translating implicates: the personalities of the translators, their environments for work and reception, and the stakes of their work—facets of the literary networks all too often overlooked. Many times, such networks recede behind inherited nineteenth- century nationalist and isolationist narratives, but the editors here present translation studies as integral to cultural studies, including not only familiar issues (whether or not a translation is faithful, if and how a translator is credited, which engages her frequent invisibility), but also, and particularly, the distribution of power within translation networks.

This volume provides interesting, well-documented, and solidly theorized case studies that address three major areas of interest for the current generation of translation studies.

The first section presents four "Portraits of Translators." Norbert Bachleitner's "Übersetzen nach Vorgaben," takes on the case of Joseph Laudes's late eighteenth-century "translations to measure," which are shown to have been made to serve particular agendas or users. Laudes translated into the environment of the theater the reforms of Joseph von Sonnleitner, which imposed not only certain censorship issues but also aesthetic norms like translating verse into normal speech; Bachleitner examines how they function within the era's networks of production, circulation, and consumption for translations.

After that, Éric Leroy du Cardonnoy discusses Xavier Marmier, the translator who introduced early nineteenth-century French readers to the "northern" literature and popular tales. The essay traces how authors like Grillparzer and Caroline Pickler are identified as Austrian but have generally been subsumed into discussions of German aesthetics—an important distinction that belies Austria's wavering opinions of Classicism and Romanticism.

The third contribution in this section has Fanny Platelle tracking the Viennese translator of Jacques Offenbach's operett as, Carl Treumann. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Treumann was a translator, director, [End Page 157] and actor who worked alongside Nestroy in the Carltheater. Platelle uses his published work to track his strategies of adaptations from the originals.

Wolfgang Pöckl offers, as the final contribution of the first section, a discussion of translator K. L. Ammer (actually, Karl Klammer, 1879–1959) in the context of a new generation of German translation studies. Klammer was himself a poet, and his translations of symbolist poetry (including Maeterlinck, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Villon), celebrated by no less than Richard Dehmel, set the tone for their reception.

The second section of the book is about "Questions de réception," focusing on the translations themselves rather than the translators in six individual contributions.

The first is Sylvie Le Moël's essay on the translations of Caroline Pichler's work in the first third of the nineteenth century—arguably, the first "femme de lett res" in Austrian literature (87). Irène Cagneau addresses translations of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an admirer of French culture, whose reception in France was overly focused on Venus in Furs.

Perhaps the most significant essay for U.S.-based readers, especially anyone and everyone interested in critical theory, Lacan, and poststructuralism, is Audrey Giboux's discussion of twentieth-century translations of Freud—a corpus...