Talk: Anneleen Spiessens
Guest speaker Anneleen Spiessens presented the impact of translation on the voices of perpetrators of mass violence.
The Perpetrator’s “testimony”: Trauma, voice and translation
Anneleen Spiessens's talk focused on the impact of translation on the voices of perpetrators of mass violence. Rudolf Hoess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, wrote his memoirs while awaiting trial in 1946. The manuscript was later edited by a German historian and translated into many languages. Jean Hatzfeld, a French war reporter, collected oral testimonies of a band of killers in the wake of the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis. The accounts were translated into English and Dutch, among other languages.
How can we evaluate these stories and their translations? What is their testimonial status when compared to survivor accounts, and how can they contribute to the memory-work? Drawing on discourse analysis, Spiessens argues that one of the most striking, and instructive, aspects of the perpetrator’s story is the quality of the author’s ‘voice’ – technical and detached, revealing a problematic state of mind. Translators face the difficult task to reconstruct the particularities of the perpetrator’s voice in order to help the reader understand the mechanisms of collective violence.
Read a discursive analysis of Rudolf Hoess’s memoirs