It was a small sensation when a youth work by US poet Walt Whitman was rediscovered in 2017. The run of German publishers on the novel was so great that the book was translated three times. All the transfers are successful – and they show how differently one can express the same thing.
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Good literary translations are new creations of works of art from other languages, reincarnations of linguistic bodies to a certain extent. Since nowadays the translation often sees the light of day almost simultaneously with the original, the birth of a sibling in another linguistic province is nothing special. Triplets, on the other hand, do. And there are some to be reported here: The New York novel “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; An Auto-Biography; in Which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters “by Walt Whitman has been translated into German three times.
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