Translation Sites

A Field Guide

Sherry Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315311074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

In Translation Sites, leading theorist Sherry Simon shows how the processes and effects of translation pervade contemporary life. This field guide is an invitation to explore hotels, markets, museums, checkpoints, gardens, bridges, towers and streets as sites of translation. These are spaces whose meanings are shaped by language traffic and by a clash of memories.

Touching on a host of issues from migration to the future of Indigenous cultures, from the politics of architecture to contemporary metrolingualism, Translation Sites powerfully illuminates questions of public interest. Abundantly illustrated, the guidebook creates new connections between translation studies and memory studies, urban geography, architecture and history. This ground-breaking book is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in broadening the scope of translation studies.

Part I
Architectures of memory

1 THE MONUMENT The struggle for memory

Space of Synagogues, Lviv

A traveller to Lviv, transiting through Munich Airport, might react with astonishment to a sign announcing the flight. The sign says Lemberg, the Habsburg name by which this city was known until the fall of the Empire in 1918. Flying there today is like catching a plane for Constantinople.

The author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands notes the anomalous sign in the Munich Airport in the introduction to his 2016 book East West Street, a remarkable detective-like investigation that reaches back into the imperial history of the city. Sands would well understand the resonances of this apparition from the Habsburg past. His book is the story of the intertwined lives of three Jewish men born in interwar Lwów, then a Polish city. While researching the life of his grandfather Leon, Sands discovered that two remarkable figures in the history of modern human rights law had also lived and studied in the city. These were Hersch Lauterpacht, the inventor of the term “crimes against humanity”, and Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”. Both would considerably influence the procedure and outcome of the Nuremberg Trials.

Sands uses the acute mind of the legal expert to reconstitute an extraordinary chronicle. It shows the interwar Lemberg/Lwów/Lvov to have been a breeding ground for new ideas, a cosmopolitan and modern city, until its future was hijacked by World War II and its aftermath.

Sands was in Lviv in September 2017 to launch the Ukrainian translation of East West Street. He was adept at conveying his passion for the city, but he was especially effective in communicating this enthusiasm to young people. Because of the circumstances of history, he told them in essence, you may not know of the extraordinary men who were born here or some of the contributions your city has made to modern history. But with his lectures and his book, Sands was trying to correct this neglect. What he was saying to them was: this city has experienced remarkable events, and the memory of these happenings – the bad and the good – also belongs to you. The translation of his book was not only a report on what he had discovered, but an invitation to his Ukrainian readers to make the story theirs.

The import of such an invitation is especially meaningful in a city like Lviv. Here history and memory meet at odd angles, and belonging comes with heavy baggage. Translation, whether of a book, a personal testimony or a public inscription, has significant resonance. When languages have been eliminated, restoring them to public presence becomes all the more powerful. To be effective, translations must be embedded in a collective desire to reinstate a forgotten, repressed or wilfully suppressed memory. Both Philippe Sands’ book and the memorial known as the Space of Synagogues in Lviv are such attempts – reflecting a will to reinscribe the Jewish presence into the urban fabric of the city.

Shallow roots

Today’s Lviv (Ukrainian) has been called Leopolis (Italian), Lemberg (German and Yiddish), Lwów (Polish), and Lvov (Russian). Until 1918, the city was called Lemberg and had been the capital of the province of Galicia. Between 1918 and 1945, the city changed hands no fewer than eight times.

The name of the street that the Grand Opera sits on, according to the “renaming history” which appears on the website of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, changed ten times between 1940 and the present – from Untere Karl Ludwig Strasse in Habsburg times to Opernstrasse, Adolf-Hitler-Ring and Prospekt Lenina, to today’s Prospeckt Svobody. The successive city maps that can be called up today with an easy click on this website are chapters in a turbulent history of murderous conflicts.

Lviv’s Jews, fully one third of the city’s pre-World War II population and one of the largest Jewish populations in Poland, were obliterated by the Nazis. The Polish residents of the city disappeared too after the War, forcibly resettled in Poland after Lviv became Soviet and Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian population was a minority in Lviv until after the war, when the populations of the surrounding rural areas resettled the city, along with displaced persons from Eastern Ukraine and Russia – significantly changing its character. The new citizens of Lviv would have had little connection with the historical fabric of the city and its memories.

Travelling through Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, the historian Anne Applebaum remarked that the people she saw on the streets of Lviv did not seem to fit the city they were a part of. There was a disconnect between the look of the population and the grand city they inhabited. Exactly what clues triggered Applebaum’s observation is not clear – was it the bad clothes and babushkas, was it the hesitation in the stride of the pedestrians, the improvised rows of barterers? Whatever her reasons for making the observation, she underlined an important truth. Like many other Eastern European cities (such as Vilnius, for instance, which only became Lithuanian at the end of World War II), Lviv now has a population of citizens whose urban roots are very shallow. Their knowledge of the city and its past is inevitably partial.

Figure 1.1 This display of Lemberg’s languages (German, Polish and Yiddish) in modern-day Lviv is purely nostalgic. There is no food for sale. Rather there is a photocopy shop inside, as indicated in Ukrainian over the windows.

Polylingual Lviv: Wittlin

Lviv has had its great chroniclers, but none as compelling as Józef Wittlin. Wittlin was a novelist and translator who lived much of his life in the city then called Lwów, before being forced to leave Europe as an exile during the Second World War. My Lwów is an account full of charm, wit and nostalgia – telling stories of what was one of the grand cultural centres of Europe during the interwar period. With the distinctive irony of the East European writer, Wittlin gives a sense of the polylingual streets of Lwów, as he sprinkles his own story with different languages.

Wittlin’s book was written in Polish and published in New York in 1946. The languages he calls upon are not only the ones that would be heard on Lwów sidewalks, but also Latin and French – the languages of the intelligentsia.

Des Lebens Ausgang! Exitus vitae. I was not born in Lwów, but for a very long time I flirted with the idea that I’d spend the last Polish autumn of my life there, nodding quietly to myself. Point de reveries!

(2016, 80)

All the same, for the “key” he has contributed to the “keyboard of my native lingo”, he hopes one day to have a street named for him in Lwów. “Not a major thoroughfare with mansions, banks, a court, a prison, a school, a chamber of trade and commerce and a Turkish bath. God forbid! All I need is a small side street without any sewers and with just ten houses” (80).

Wittlin did win real acclaim during his lifetime. He was especially well-known for his anti-war novel Salt of the Earth, first published as Sól ziemi in Polish in 1936 and subsequently translated into fourteen languages. The book was published in English in 1939 and was considered a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize. In the tradition of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, Wittlin gives voice to a simple conscript in Franz Joseph’s army. In the course of a few weeks following the outbreak of the First World War, he is transformed from an illiterate citizen into a cog in the Emperor’s war machine.

Wittlin’s compassionate portrait of Peter Neviadomski, whose Polish family name means “of unknown origin”, opens a window onto the polyglot Habsburg world. The novel is saturated with the sounds and sensibilities of the languages of the realm, a music which is familiar and dear to Peter until it closes down on him. Peter finds himself in the company of a motley group of fellow villagers, all conscripted and shunted off across the empire. Each stage of travel, each encounter with high-ranking officials, introduces new languages. The illiterate peasant is all the more sensitive to these tongues, because he cannot decipher the written orders that ultimately determine his fate. Published at the start of a new European conflagration, the novel denounces a war apparatus that spouted violence in all the official languages of the realm.

Wittlin was also a prolific, award-winning translator of Homer, Cervantes and many other classics into Polish. He was the Polish translator of his good friend Joseph Roth. Roth returned the favour by arranging for the German translation of Wittlin’s novel.

The Space of Synagogues

Because of the successive layers that make up the history of Lviv, language is a powerful vehicle of memory. Ukrainian is now the language of the modern city. Russian has a role to play, with a significant minority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But what of the languages that were once seen and heard on the city’s streets and in its shops, the languages so present in Wittlin’s writings? Following Philippe Sands’s invitation, can the memories of Yiddish, Polish or German be claimed and shared by those whose link with the past is simply that of urban citizenship?

Figure 1.2 Stones in the Space of Synagogues. The many languages of the testimonies engraved on the stones are a map tracking the voyage of memory into the lands of displacement and diaspora. Visitors must make their way through the stones and stoop to read the inscriptions.

These languages have indeed begun to resound again in the city. But the conversations are not those of locals but rather of tourists, as they make their way from one symbolic landmark to another. Visitors have become the bearers of linguistic memory. Large groups of noisy Polish tourists visit the iconic restaurants, palaces and museums that celebrate the pre-war version of the city. Somewhat less prominent groups of German-language tourists visit Habsburg sites. And Jewish tourists have begun to return to the city in search of a tragic past.

There is a renewed mixing of languages, then, but a confusion over which ones count as insider tongues, which ones are considered mere observers. In “Landscapes of Guilt, Landscapes of Rescue”, the poet Iryna Starovoyt (2018) worries that textbook explanations of the Holocaust are perceived as words from the “outside”, and not testimonies that issue from the “inside” spaces of the neighbourhoods and buildings that still belong to today’s Lviv. The story of the past, the Jewish history of Lviv, she argues, must be told in the idiom of shared citizenship rather than that of a distant, foreign reality.

Of all Lviv’s languages, Yiddish is the one that has the least public presence. Spoken by one of Lviv’s most populous communities before the war, this tongue is absent from the city, as it is absent from the entire region of Central Europe. A single memorial in Yiddish, created in 1989 during the final moments of the Soviet era, honours the Russian Yiddish-language writer Sholem Aleichem who spent some time in the city.

The project called The Space of Synagogues is an attempt to change this, to inscribe Jewish history into the urban fabric. This memorial, opened officially in 2016, is located on Staroievreiska (“Old Jewish”) Street next to the main Rynok Square. The Space encloses traces of three synagogues which were all destroyed during the Second World War – the Great City Synagogue, the Beis Midrash and the Renaissance (1582) Golden Rose Synagogue. This area was allowed to become largely derelict during Soviet time, abandoned rather than preserved. And, so, the project to restore this zone, begun in 2008, indicated a significant turn in the city’s history. The monument is artfully designed as a minimalist garden, carrying traces of the past and yet leaving empty spaces where absence can be strongly felt.

The Space of Synagogues was the first instance in Ukraine where commemoration of a Jewish historical location was initiated by city administration in cooperation with various community groups, and therefore as an object of shared civic responsibility. Town-hall discussions were conducted and the prize-winning design (2010) by German architect Franz Reschke was informed by extensive dialogue with international Jewish studies experts, historians and local Jewish organizations. This is in stark contrast to previous haphazard efforts under the Soviet regime to put up minimalist plaques, or commercial ventures like the Jewish-themed restaurant “The Golden Rose”, which offers a facsimile of Jewish food and a display of pre-war memorabilia. The effective reappearance of Jewish memory in Lviv is the outcome, rather, of a concerted and collective effort.

Translating absence

At the centre of the Space of Synagogues is a row of thirty-nine stone tablets, which resemble tombstones. Some stones are imprinted with grainy images of shops and houses from pre-war Lviv. Others are engraved with quotations from former residents about their lives in Lviv, their experiences of the Holocaust or their lives in the aftermath. These sixteen quotes take visitors on a physical journey as they walk among the stones – and an emotional journey as they absorb the dramas of history as told by its witnesses. In order to see the images and read the text, visitors are required to bend down, to move between the stones, to make an effort to enter into these testimonies. Each quotation is in its original language – German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch and French – and supplemented by English, Hebrew and Ukrainian translations.

These fragments of language evoke both ordinary and extraordinary events. They recall daily life in Lviv before the war, when its many populations shared the spaces of sidewalks and cafés, as they evoke the events of the war and the Holocaust. Three examples are particularly striking for their translational resonances.

The quote from Inka Katz was first published in Philippe Sands’s book East West Street. Inka Katz is a niece of the legal scholar Hersch Lauterpacht, who lost her parents to Nazi violence in Lviv at the start of the war. Living in France today, she told her story to Philippe Sands and contributed the following testimony of the devastating murder of her parents:

My mother had been taken… . I saw everything looking out of the window. I was twelve, not a child anymore… . I saw my father running after my mother, behind her, on the st...