William Faulkner´s „A Rose for Emily“. The Story’s First Person Plural Narrator and its German Translation

Inhaltsangabe oder Einleitung

There are different German translated versions of the short story „A Rose for Emily“ by William Faulkner, for example by award-winning Swiss translator Elisabeth Schnack from 1959 and German author and translator Maria von Schweinitz from 1976. Due the fact that both translators had to cope with specific stylistic elements in Faulkner´s short story and translate them into a different language, the existence of two different translated versions is crucial in order to find out in how far translations can be different from each other.

This leads to the main subjects of this term paper, which will be the specific stylistic feature of the “first person plural narrator” in both, the English short story and its German translations.

The aim of this paper is to find out in how far the portrait of Emily supplies the reader with hints about the residents´ as well as the narrators’ personal view about Emily. On this basis, this paper wants to examine in how far different translations create a certain effect when reading the short story in English and German, respectively.

Before taking a deeper look into the story and in order to understand how stylistic features of the short story have been translated it is crucial to get to know a shade more about the translators. Throughout the paper, the focus is on the American short story “A Rose for Emily” alongside its German translations, one rather unknown version by Maria von Schweinitz and the well-known translation by Elisabeth Schnack.