The many faces of Jay Gatsby

The translation of a text from one language into another is a science of its own, especially within literary works. The standards a translator has to meet these days are high and it is therefore hard to take as a coincidence that The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous work, has been translated into German three times up to now.
This remarkable number of translations for a book written not even a century ago might have something to do with the expectations the translator has to satisfy and which tend to be quite exalted when a lot of readers, who are not familiar with the language of the original work, and many publishers, who are aware of the fact that the translated work often sells better than the original, await its translation eagerly.

Once the translation is published, the question of the authenticity, of how much of the author the translated book still contains, is a common problem especially in the critique and the feuilleton but also among a books major recipients, the common readers. Everybody that ever had the chance to have a thorough talk with a foreigner about a literary work known to both sides might have come across the phenomenon that certain aspects of that book were perceived in different ways - maybe the irony of a main character suddenly bordered sarcasm, maybe his felicitous language did not sound eloquent at all or maybe the character’s whole appearance was bathed in a slightly different light.

The aim of this term paper is to analyse if there are such differences between two versions of The Great Gatsby, furthermore if and to which extent they can influence the perception of a character and finally to analyse how such aberrations can come into existence.