The Politics of Cultural Mediation

Translators mediate between cultures; they negotiate the transfer of meaning from one word and world to another. Writers who migrate, uprooting themselves from one world and settling in another, also mediate between cultures and are mediated by them. This collection of essays explores the contact zones produced by the migrations of two German-born cultural figures: New York Dada poet and artist Else Plötz (1874–1927), better known as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or simply "the Baroness"; and writer and translator Felix Paul Greve (1879–1948), aka the Canadian author Frederick Philip Grove. Both figures negotiated languages beyond their mother tongue (German); both moved between geographic and cultural worlds; both produced cultural works in their adopted countries (the United States and Canada); and both "translated" themselves into new contexts. The Politics of Cultural Mediation features contributions by Richard Cavell, Jutta Ernst, Irene Gammel, Paul Hjartarson, Klaus Martens and Paul Morris and includes Morris’s translation of Greve’s "Randarabesken Zu Oscar Wilde."