The protagonist of Herta Müller’s Traveling on One Leg is Irene, a fragile woman, born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from Romania to Germany.
The novel focuses on Irene’s relationship with three men: Franz, whom she met in Romania and who is unwilling to respond to her love for him; Stefan, a friend of Franz’s; and Thomas, a bookseller in perpetual crisis about his identity.
Despite her being born to a German family, Irene’s place in Germany is as a recent émigré and an unassimilated Romanian German. She feels neither longing for Romania nor any comfort in her newly adopted Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within the emotional orbit of these three men, while at the same time moving between West Berlin, Marburg, and Frankfurt, taking a dissonant journey within strange yet familiar territory. Characterized by a sense of profound isolation, Traveling on One Leg is a poignant exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.
Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2009) and Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Kleist Prize (1994), Herta Müller was born to a German family in Romania in 1953. After refusing to cooperate with Ceaușescu’s Securitate, she lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate to Germany in 1987. She is the author of several other books, including The Land of Green Plums, winner of the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
• Valentina Glajar teaches in the Germanic languages department at the University of Texas at Austin.
• André Lefevere (1945–96) was a distinguished professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the leading scholars in the field of translation theory. His Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (Routledge, 1992) is a key document in the field.
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