Traduzione e intercomprensione come metodo di analisi letteraria: Tawada interprete di Celan

This paper aims to answer two questions. The first is whether intercomprehension and translation—two theoretically opposing methodologies—are in fact complementary and can therefore be combined in the learning of foreign languages, even those that are very different from one another, such as alphabetic and ideographic languages. The second, however, is whether the methodology of intercomprehension can also be fruitfully employed in the analysis of literary works, especially those situated within the realm of transculturality and grounded in the transfer between languages and cultures. Through the metaphor of Verknüpfen and a novel perspective on language, two cultures far removed from one another—represented by the two fictional protagonists of the novel about Celan—along with the intersection of novel perspectives (medical and geographical), come together and achieve mutual understanding. The analysis of the novel presented here draws on the key principles of intercomprehension between related languages (lexical transparency, cross-linguistic learning, partial competencies, the centrality of both comprehension and the mother tongue, openness to others, and motivation) to interpret the content from a transcultural perspective that is semantically and culturally rich in meaning.