Stefan George as self-translator

Stefan George, one of the few literary self-translators, rendered two of his original English and three of his original French poems into German. These self-translations may serve as case studies for the problem of "equivalence" in literary as well as linguistic and cultural terms. Recent translation theories (e.g. Rose, Pym, Fitch) problematize the overlap or the interliminal space between languages, cultures, literary traditions, and texts. Rather than binary-based source-target models, recent theory helps elucidate equivalence in George. Indeed only a self-translation can reveal how the many micro-adjustments made in linguistic and literary succeed in rendering the semantic content of the original and in comparison establish a perfect functional and stylistic correspondence with comparable effects in the two languages. Thus, such expressions as his "own language," or his "own culture," traditionally used by his critics to refer solely to German, are inappropriate to George's oeuvre.