Education Commons^™

Words In Edgewise: Monika Rinck’S Experimental Translation Of Magnus William-Olsson’S Homullus Absconditus, Heidi Hart

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Monicka Rinck's 2016 translation of Magnus William‐Olsson's collection Homullus absconditus (2013) is more than a Swedish‐to‐German rendering of already multilayered text. As an experimental poet working under hypnosis, Rinck engages with a language she does not know, intentionally misreading homophones, cutting lines, adding small‐print comments in the margins, and translating titles left in Greek, as she interrogates her source's words from within and without. Rather than making an earnest effort to “correct” a male‐authored text, Rinck gets her words in edgewise on each page, in a playfully parasitic mode that also upends age‐old ideas of the passive, hypnotized woman. Paradoxically, …