Reading (Like) a Translator: The Sensory Life and Travel Writing of Danish Literary Translator Anne Marie Bjerg

ABSTRACT

The hermeneutic similarities between translation and travelling have been widely debated in translation studies and travel writing, with scholars such as Cronin, Polezzi, Italiano, Simon and Bassnett arguing that they are linked by way of both physical and metaphorical notions of movement and transportation. A neglected take on this idea is to pursue the sentiment that ‘reading like a translator’ is an embodied process, conditioned by sensorimotor possibilities and a shared physical space akin to geographical travel, as expressed by Searls. However, the memoirs of Danish literary translator Anne Marie Bjerg fills this gap as she regards such reading as a process of sensory being, knowing and doing, and her particularly (in)tense immigrant experiences in Sweden and with the Swedish language invite us to visualise a life of translation as a narrative of both delightful wanderlust and a disturbing sentimental journey. Moreover, throughout her odyssey, her ‘reading’ of texts, people, language and culture is infused with rich sensory and bodily sense-making. In my study, I will draw on relevant ideas in the above theoretical works in order to explore these themes in depth and thus reveal the previously unexplored connections between reading and travelling as a translator.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• reading
• travel writing
• Denmark

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Ida Klitgård

Ida Klitgård is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. She holds a Danish cand.mag. degree in English and Translation Studies and an MPhil degree in Modernist Studies from Glasgow University. In 2007 she was awarded a Dr. Phil (Habilitation degree) with the monograph Fictions of Hybridity: Translating Style in James Joyce’s Ulysses (2007). Klitgård has published widely on Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and translation studies. Recent studies include covert interlingual translation in Danish university students’ academic writing and studies in satire, disinformation and health communication.