emphasizes that “jeder medizinisch-technische Eingriff [verändert] nicht nur den Körper als Objekt, sondern immer auch die physische, psychische und soziale Existenz des Menschen”31 (Italics in Original, Manzei 2003: 187). Wagner, whose quote opens this section, writes about the unknown donor of the liver he received “Ich spüre Dich bei jedem Atemzug,”32 and thus connects his identity with the donor, that he imagined to have been female, through a reference to the ultimate life source, the breath, as it signifies the moment the individual (body) literally takes in environmental information (Wagner 2016: online source). [47] Every breath is a fractured moment of Einverleibung33 and in this sense connects to the social existence of the person. Thus, while the skin is the only organ that connects to the outside world and the (material) inside of a body, breath is the individual rhythmic activity that “transcends” notions of inside and outside.
Historically speaking, it is interesting in this context, as Duden lays out “that until the fifth century (and for many centuries thereafter) the eye not only sent out rays with which it saw, the eye also ‘breathed in’ what it perceived. Breathing, smell, and sight were still all of the same stuff: the breath” (Duden 1991b: 33f.). Given that it is not touch but gaze that determines medical diagnosis, the historical relationship between seeing and breathing is intriguing.
Much of Duden’s work has been translated into English, and in translations the term “Leib” in her work has frequently been translated into body (ibid). I have been present in various discussions of her work, with or without her present, in English and German, and speaking from my experience, I would say that how her writings were discussed, for example, which other authors or theories it was related to and how, was interdependent with the term “Leib” having been translated or not. In most of the literature I have been engaging with for this study, in translations from English to German, the word body is commonly translated into the word Körper. However, translating from German into English, the German term Leib is often also translated into body, with the English term body therefore capturing characteristics of both terms Körper and Leib. Thus, from my perspective, an awareness of the need to attend not only to the relationships between words used in English or German, but also to the relationship between the concepts is necessary. It is specifically important, when looking at and working with the sources used for the analysis within this study, but also when looking at how individual and social experiences are rooted and co-produced through “cultured” language and use of terminology itself.
I decided, at the beginning of this study, when formulating the questionnaires for the conversations to be held that I would be using the German term “Leib” within this study. What felt like an instinctive decision as I began my research, made more sense as time progressed. The discussions of concepts as they relate to the terms Leib or Körper in German, which were conducted in various sites, including English speaking settings, oftentimes initiated interesting and deep interdisciplinary reflections on the relationship between language, individual and social experiences, and culture.
During the same timeframe, I started to read “the same” novels in both English and German, one after the other, as a means to train my everyday English. More often than not, I felt that I had read two different stories, two different books. [48] While I thought at the beginning of this experience that I am just differently “at home” in reading German novels and that the difference between the books lies in my readership only, I soon came to understand that there is more to the phenomena of translation and the creation of meaning in different languages. I continued to use the word “Leib” in all of my English writing and oral presentations and am most certain that this decision impacted “how” I thought and wrote about developments, on how I build an argument, and where I let my analysis “wander to.” A question arising from the practice of leaving a term untranslated is, for example, what components of the analyses did leaving the term Leib untranslated allow for, or trigger? It wasn’t until 2016 that I listened and spoke to a scholar from translation studies, a field that I was only vaguely aware of until then. In a presentation, translation studies scholar Carolyn Shread talked about her decision to sometimes “not translate” a word, but to more so acknowledge “that this word is a stranger here” (Shread 2016: work in progress presentation). When listening to her “scales fell from my eyes” and I understood, that I purposefully had decided to “have a stranger” in my English research and that this stranger had on many levels fulfilled crucial tasks for this study.
Using the German word “Leib” had led to thought-provoking conversations with colleagues, which in turn led me to reflect on certain parts of my writing. Through the process of using the term, I started to acknowledge its specific history. Using the term in this study furthermore invites readers to engage with the space “in-between” the two main languages of this study. Such engagement takes place when reading the text, as one switches from reading English to reading a German word which, if one is a German speaker, invites familiarity or, if one is not a German speaker, requires that this “stranger word” be filled with meaning as it is read. Words rooted in the term “Leib” and or containing it, such as “einverleibt” or “leibliches,” also remain untranslated. This in turn makes some sentences within this study “hard to read,” yet at the same time requests bilingual attention and supports decisions to leave power to “strangers within a text” in order to foster an investigation of what is called the “translational space” in translation studies: the space between languages that gives rise to (discursive) “newness” within and between them.34
In my introduction, I wrote about the crucial contribution that the space in-between has to offer. In addition, in leaving the term “Leib” un-translated, somewhat stranded without a companion, I move from being primarily the researcher and writer of this study to being a translator, a position that Jacques Derrida describes as “beautiful and terrifying responsibility” (Derrida 20l3: 350). In doing so, I yield transparent the power writers in any language hold, as they utilize words and thus create and support certain readings and interpretations of realities (Venuti 1998).
[49] Taking a lead from Manzei’s remarkable work on the relationship between body and Leib, as it came to matter within her analyses of medical interventions (such as those involved in organ transfers); a theoretical approach to the understanding of bodies in biomedicine must pay attention to the non-comparable fabric of individual experiences and be adaptable to this premise (Manzei 2003). Out of these thoughts, questions that arose for me included: How should I work with the spoken data I have collected? How can I read and work with texts written or translated into two different languages in different cultural and disciplinary contexts and possibly times, yet which are all concerned with what is referred to when using the term body?
As the reference to the composition of the conversation guidelines in the methodology chapter of this study will illustrate, the development of the theoretical matrix that surrounds and grounds this study is not only linked to my own observations of public reflections as presented above, but furthermore to the content of the conversations carried out for this project. In my conversations, what (amongst other things) became interesting to me were narratively structured explanations, used to explain the stream of thought referred to in answers. In asking about the (term) body (most of the times at the start of a conversation), I placed the reflections of my conversational partners into the historical situatedness or context of the present. What does “body” mean (that is, here and now, referred to in our conversation)? Working with bilingual material has, from my point of view, the potential to bring yet a different awareness of the inability to ask identical questions even when using identical words (with the additional complexity that different cultural and social meanings may be embedded in the same word). Hence, even if questions are translated, cultural and social translations vary, with cultural referring more to culturally specific notions of terms, the historicity of the same, and taboos related to them, and with social referring to the social embeddedness of terms, that is, the kind of relationship between different conversational actors which is created through the use of specific terms, the possible social rules being expressed using a term, and so forth.
Conversation partners’ reflections
