Die Metapher als hermeneutisch-performatives Sprachereignis

Translation is a performance in between collectivity and in­di­vid­u­ality. Literary translation as a social action in language combines knowledge and feeling of a person. It involves an informed openness towards the world and, as a result, responsible introspection as a reflection on one’s own ac­tions. Translation as performance does not happen without the mental frame­work of enculturation, and this in turn includes personal and collective knowl­edge of the world and language, as well as emotionality in individual creative writing. This problem is illustrated by comparing German trans­la­tions of the poem “The Hill we Climb” by Amanda Gorman read at the in­auguration of the new U.S. President Joe Biden in January 2021. Aspects of trans­la­tion such as language imagery, spoken style, and emotional prosody in the text show how a personal identity that becomes meaningful is in ten­sion with an author’s collective identity brought in from the outside. In terms of trans­lation hermeneutics, a translator will try to convey the message rec­og­nized as authentic.