Vereinigungen / Uniões / Intimate Ties: Glimpses of critical considerations

Abstract

In this article, co-authored with my colleague and co-translator Lawrence Flores Pereira, we begin with thoughts on the specific difficulties of translating Musil's Unions. Based on Peter Utz's contributions to translation theory, particular attention will be paid to the problem that, according to Musil, the narrative should be less "understood" and rather more sensitively "felt", so that possible contexts of meaning can only be reconstituted followin the labyrinth of flowing emotions. This renunciation of rational comprehensibility brings Musil's prose closer to the symbolist method mentioned by Stephan Mallarmé in his letter to Henri Cazalis in October 1864. In the final part, we will consider alternative approaches to a highly critical review by Michael Hofmann of Peter Wortsmann's American version of The Unions, Intimate Ties. The critic's arguments and reading will be examined for their critical and hermeneutical validity by comparing the first Portuguese translation with the simultaneously completed one by the Austro-American writer and translator Peter Wortsmann, also drawing on the translations by Jaccottet and Wilkins-Kaiser.