Manfred Gregor's Die Brücke: an exercise in literary translation

This thesis is a practical exploration o f literary translation. The novel chosen as the focus for this research is Manfred Gregor’s Die Brucke (‘The Bridge’) (1958). This is a fictional anti-war novel, written about a group o f seven sixteen-year-old schoolboys who are drafted in the final days of the Second World War and sent to the front to defend a bridge. A section of the novel (the preface and chapters one to five) was selected for translation. The thesis consists of three mam parts. The first is a detailed text analysis section, the purpose of which is to explore likely difficulties which will be encountered dunng the translation process. The central section of the work consists of my own translation into English of the novel’s opening chapters (9,700 words). The final section offers a translation commentary, in which the reasons for certain translation decisions and solutions are outlined. The issues which are examined include shared assumptions (knowledge which Gregor could assume his readership to have, but which cannot be assumed of a contemporary English-speaking readership), military terminology, cultural references, slang and colloquial language, swear words, paragraph and sentence boundaries and nicknames. There is also a short introductory section which provides a short biography of Manfred Gregor and examines some basic issues m literary translation theory. This section also contains a brief discussion of the 1960 published translation of the novel (The Bridge, translated by Robert Rosen), and outlines the reasons for which chapters one to five were selected as the focus for this translation project