![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mni*Sigh*
I'm currently working through Google's auto-translation* from the German of "Das Mädchen ohne Hände" (The Girl Without Hands in good English Translation).
It's ... not as happy a story of disability as Thumbling was. Full of Fatherly abuse of daughter to save his own skin/soul, this one, with the added ableist trope of: "Pray to God, and be good, and you'll be healed (YAY)!"
But as I'm rereading it for the first time in (a while), I'm struck with how well it corresponds to what I wrote on monsters, disability, and being "marked" as a bad omen, a while back (here), especially as "monster" originally meant someone with missing limbs -- okay, so this daughter had her hands chopped off instead of being born without them. But in the realm of motifs and story tropes, that's splitting spider web strands. So it's useful in building up my thesis-oid** of the place given to the "Disabled Class" within larger society.
So, as I'm reading through this, I'm formulating the critique / response to it that I'll write as an afterword. And I'm wondering whether to critique previous critiques (notably from the Jungian mytho-psychological crowd) that interpret the loss of her hands as a purely metaphorical thing, rather than something that some women actually have to live with -- yes, even back in olden days (because we all know that only the "Whole" healthy person the 'true' default, and anything that deviates from that is merely symbolic. Right?).
Or should just focus on my own interpretation, and skip critiquing past critic?
Thoughts?
*It's my modus operandi for making sure I don't subconsciously plagiarize someone else's work -- I'm already familiar with the English versions, in the back of my head, so I can turn around the funky missed translations of words' second and third meanings -- I'm not trusting the 'bots blindly... Mostly, as I'm reading, I'm thinking: "oh, yeah... I see what you did there..." So I can be sure my reading / interpretation of the story is my own, and not colored by another translator's ideas of what's pretty or sensible... especially since I'm pretty sure that all the translations easily accessible out there are/were crafted from a point of able-bodied privilege...
**A thesis-like thing -- kind of amorphous and shifting -- without actually being a proper Thesis.
I'm currently working through Google's auto-translation* from the German of "Das Mädchen ohne Hände" (The Girl Without Hands in good English Translation).
It's ... not as happy a story of disability as Thumbling was. Full of Fatherly abuse of daughter to save his own skin/soul, this one, with the added ableist trope of: "Pray to God, and be good, and you'll be healed (YAY)!"
But as I'm rereading it for the first time in (a while), I'm struck with how well it corresponds to what I wrote on monsters, disability, and being "marked" as a bad omen, a while back (here), especially as "monster" originally meant someone with missing limbs -- okay, so this daughter had her hands chopped off instead of being born without them. But in the realm of motifs and story tropes, that's splitting spider web strands. So it's useful in building up my thesis-oid** of the place given to the "Disabled Class" within larger society.
So, as I'm reading through this, I'm formulating the critique / response to it that I'll write as an afterword. And I'm wondering whether to critique previous critiques (notably from the Jungian mytho-psychological crowd) that interpret the loss of her hands as a purely metaphorical thing, rather than something that some women actually have to live with -- yes, even back in olden days (because we all know that only the "Whole" healthy person the 'true' default, and anything that deviates from that is merely symbolic. Right?).
Or should just focus on my own interpretation, and skip critiquing past critic?
Thoughts?
*It's my modus operandi for making sure I don't subconsciously plagiarize someone else's work -- I'm already familiar with the English versions, in the back of my head, so I can turn around the funky missed translations of words' second and third meanings -- I'm not trusting the 'bots blindly... Mostly, as I'm reading, I'm thinking: "oh, yeah... I see what you did there..." So I can be sure my reading / interpretation of the story is my own, and not colored by another translator's ideas of what's pretty or sensible... especially since I'm pretty sure that all the translations easily accessible out there are/were crafted from a point of able-bodied privilege...
**A thesis-like thing -- kind of amorphous and shifting -- without actually being a proper Thesis.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 11:20 pm (UTC)