Translation and soft power

Tatsiana Haiden examines the Jewish Viennese publishing house Paul Zsolnay Verlag between 1924 and 1938 showing how translation became a tool of soft power in resisting against rising National Socialism. The study reconstructs the company’s translation culture, translators’ networks, and habitualised behaviours, employing the multi-level approach based on the histoire croisée method. The author zooms from the broader context of Jewish difference and the publishing field in interwar Austria (macrohistory) to the company’s translation policies (meso-history). Finally, she studies the professional biographies of the publisher Paul von Zsolnay, the director Felix Costa, and numerous translators (microhistory). These biographies highlight the role of translators as active cultural actors equally with authors and publishers. Drawing on the paratext of the published books, Haiden suggests a classification of the translators, demonstrating their various degrees of influence on the company based on their networks.