The Storm of Steel

The Storm of Steel is memoir by Ernst Junger, a German soldier, about World War I. The memoir was published in 1920 which became popular in no time. It was translated and published in English in 1929. What I am really interested in at first is the reaction of German reader versus the English reader or the International reader since English was a universal language. Moreover,  since the memoir has two translations to English I want to compare the textual differences between the two in a stylistic study that shows statistics of sentences length, number of adjectives used, nouns, grammatical structure and so on. The imaginary project will allow scholars and students to make a cross culture studies that show how people react to the same text. It would be also a great opportunity to study how a translation might change the authorial “intent” and make readers respond to it in a different way. This kind of study would be really interesting to be done by bilingual scholars because they would find the problem with the translation compared to a regular reader. I believe some of the well-known works are perfect or famous because of the work of the translator who might be better in appealing to the readers than the original author which makes them second authors. The idea behind choosing this specific memoir is because it happen to be read by “the enemies” of the writer and his nation as well. As a result, the readers, especially those who read it around is publication in English, would read it with some kind of bias that would focus their minds on different aspects of the work compared to those reading it now.

Note: the DH tool that I want to use is an imaginary one I do not believe that there is a tool that would allow you to do a stylistic study in a click of a mouse.