Kääntäjä poeettisessa välitilassa: Friederike Mayröcker

The article considers the possibility of sharing a writer’s experience, and the translatability of such experience, as seen from within the space of literature and social neuroscience. The starting point is that the writer’s experience of the world as produced in a text passes through the filter of the translator’s sense of language which, arising from her/his prefiguration, results in her/his own experience of the text and of the world. Such a process is here epitomised by three poems written by the Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker. The first example indicates how the iconic aspect of lyrics orients the translator’s work towards the main theme of a text, and the second shows how the surrealist tone of language can function for the same purpose. This leads to the third example, which introduces Mayröcker’s perspectival technique as a method producing an interpersonal, empathic simulation between the writer/reader and the ‘other’ throughout the text.