Jeff Castle, a Ph.D. student in the German Department and CTS certificate student at UIUC is publishing a literary translation project he recently completed as part of the CTS's Certificate in Applied Literary Translation program. Jeff's primary research focuses on the role of intermediality in German and Austrian modernist literature. The novel he translated, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Tynset, is set to be published by the Dalkey Archive Press in September of this year.
Widely acknowledged as a precursor to the works of both Gert Jonke and W.G. Sebald, Tynset takes place on a single sleepless night, during which the restless narrator takes a town name—Tynset—from a Norwegian train schedule near his bed as a point of departure for a wide-ranging narrative about pre- and postwar Europe. Plagued by incessant rumination, the narrator’s mind spins thread after thread of history, fantasy, and memory into an elaborate tapestry spanning centuries and covering thousands of miles—all without the narrator ever leaving his house. Hildesheimer famously refused to describe Tynset as a novel. He chose instead to think of the work as an extended monologue whose structure derives from musical form, with the recurrence of the titular Norwegian town functioning as a refrain: a point not only of departure, but also of return.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer (December 9, 1916–August 21, 1991) was a German writer, dramatist, and painter known for his contributions to the so-called Theater of the Absurd, as well as his inventive treatments of the biographical genre. He was born in Hamburg, but studied in worked in England and Palestine before returning to Germany to serve as an interpreter in the Nuremberg Trials. He later became associated with the acclaimed Gruppe 47, and in 1957 settled in Poschiavo, Switzerland, where he spent the remaining years of his life.
