Writing in Tongues

Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century

Anita Norich

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295804958
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Writing in Tongues examines the complexities of translating Yiddish literature at a time when the Yiddish language is in decline. After the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and American assimilation, the survival of traditional Yiddish literature depends on translation, yet a few Yiddish classics have been translated repeatedly while many others have been ignored. Anita Norich traces historical and aesthetic shifts through versions of these canonical texts, and she argues that these works and their translations form an enlightening conversation about Jewish history and identity.

CHAPTER 1

Translation Theory and Practice

THE YIDDISH DIFFERENCE

[W]hat objection can be made if a translator says to his reader: Here I bring you the book as the man would have written it had he written in German; and the reader responds: I am just as obliged to you as if you had brought me the picture of a man the way he would look if his mother had conceived him by a different father?

—Friedrich Schleiermacher

^{1, 2, 3}

As the twenty-first century proceeds, Avrom Sutzkever's (1913–2010) questions are haunting. With each passing year, his queries read increasingly like a meditation on the fate of his poetic language, on the future of memory and of poetry, on the fate of the Jews. Who and what, indeed, will remain of Eastern European Jewish culture? What will remain of Yiddish?

One inescapable response is that translations will remain. Of course, even raising the issue of Yiddish texts no longer in Yiddish is treading on dangerous ground. I do not want to distract our task with the familiar, and more voluble, polemics: that Yiddish as a spoken language is in drastic decline; that it is spoken now primarily in Haredi or Hasidic (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish communities; that it has acquired a strange, almost cultic and certainly heralded status in universities; that a shockingly small number of people can read and write in the once abundant language. Jews and scholars around the world have gotten very good at arguing about all of these issues. But there can be no argument about the existence and necessity of translation. For most of the late twentieth century, and certainly in our own day, Yiddish texts have unquestionably been more familiar to more people in English translation than in their original.

That fact is not likely to change anytime soon, and it makes translation an increasingly urgent project. It also raises a number of questions we must now add to Sutzkever's pressing ones. What considerations guide translators in their choice of what to translate and how? To what extent are the old arguments about fidelity to the original or focus on the recipient still at work in the choices that translators make? Although most of Yiddish literature has never been translated, a large number of works have been translated many times. Why? This book is particularly concerned with that last question, as we follow the translation histories—what have been called (most famously by Walter Benjamin) the afterlives or second lives—of a number of well-known Yiddish texts as they have been interpreted and reinterpreted by translators in the past century. I ask what we can learn by comparing these translations, what they tell us about the history of Yiddish in America, about transformations both in Jewish American culture and in translation theory and practice. I seek, as well, to read translations back through the originals, considering the nuances of word choices, the resonance of Yiddish words lost and gained in translation, grammatical shifts, and the role of varying intertexts we may trace in Yiddish and English.

The two translations of Sutzkever's poem were published at almost exactly the same time, a time when Sutzkever himself was still the éminence grise of Yiddish letters, living in Tel Aviv, a vibrant answer to the question of ver vet blaybn (who would remain). Some of the challenges faced by translators are certainly contained in that pivotal word blaybn, which emerges as a refrain in the poem.

Blaybn: to remain, to stay, to be left over.

Cynthia Ozick's questions—who and what will last?—may seem ever so slightly more anxious than Barbara and Benjamin Harshavs’ version, which asks, more neutrally, what will remain. Ozick expresses a more fatalistic sense of the future, underscoring the question of endurance, wondering whether or not we are witnessing the last of Yiddish. It is important to note that the Yiddish original is in the future tense, repeating the future auxiliary (

/vet) a total of fourteen times in ten of its twelve lines. Ozick's translation explicitly names the English future tense (will) only four times, in three of its lines, and the Harshavs use it twelve times in seven lines. Ozick, then, gives us a poem that is grammatically as well as hermeneutically more focused on the past than the future, less willing or able to name that future, less secure in the belief that it can be articulated.

In their final lines, too, the translators ask questions that are variations on Sutzkever's line, which can be literally translated as “What will remain, God will remain, isn't that enough for you?” The Harshavs keep the awkward punctuation but drop the negative construction; Ozick keeps the negative but neither the addressee (you in the familiar

/du form) nor the future tense, nor Sutzkever's punctuation. Ozick's questions are more rhetorical than the Harshavs’, answering the question of who remains with an assertion about the timelessness of God and a question (“isn't that enough?”) that invites an affirmative answer. The Harshavs, on the other hand, reproduce Sutzkever's run-on sentence, but in erasing the rhetorical negative, they leave more open the question of whether God is a sufficient answer.

From a mere few words emerges a great span of choices and possibilities; we suddenly see the same poem but in three quite different casts. There are other significant differences between the translations, but this close reading of this one line already reveals a central premise of this book: translation sends us back to the original, asking us not to adjudicate among variant translations or to enter into debates about the Yiddish author's intention, but rather to reread the original or to compare the translations in order to enter into the ongoing act of interpretation. Taken together, these two translations contain the tensions revealed in Sutzkever's poem. Their different emphases echo his questions about the future and the past, about mourning, about Yiddish in Israel or anywhere in the world, about God and the possibilities for re-Genesis. They remind us, as Sutzkever does in so much of his poetry, about the necessity of confronting these questions and the impossibility of definitive, timeless answers to them.

The need for translation in Western culture, and among Jews, is commonly traced to the familiar Tower of Babel story, which is to say that it is traced to the human desire to understand and interpret and the hubris implied in that desire. (One of the most influential studies of translation, published by George Steiner in 1975, is titled After Babel.) Jewish thought and theories of translation meet in and around the Bible, not only in the Tower of Babel or the many studies of Bible translation that are foundational for translation studies, but also in a number of verses and liturgical allusions. In her comprehensive study of translation, Naomi Seidman calls our attention to a compelling interpretation of a verse from the Book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah 8:8 (“they read in the book, in the Law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense and caused them to understand the reading” [Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation]) has been read as referring both to translation (into the vernacular) and to interpretive commentary, underscoring the inextricable bonds between these two enterprises.⁴

Sometime between the third and first centuries BCE (scholars differ about this dating), the Septuagint—the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek—was produced, undeniable evidence of the need for and anxiety about translation. According to a familiar legend, the Septuagint was the product of seventy-two (some say seventy) scholars who were summoned from all the tribes of Israel and placed in separate rooms for seventy-two (or seventy) days. At the end of this period, each one emerged with a perfect translation, and, in keeping with the nature of perfection, all of their translations were identical, ultimate proof of the divinely inspired success of this enterprise. Furthermore, some considered this translation (or these identical translations) superior to the original.

This is, no doubt, an exceedingly intimidating model of translation. It suggests that successful translations can only be achieved by divine intervention, surely a view of the translator that even the most inspired poets have been reluctant to claim for themselves. It suggests, further, not only that translators seek to create the one definitive translation of a text but also that such a translation must suffice for all eternity. Moreover, it challenges translators to improve on the originals before them. As if daunted into a kind of dull literalness by this vision of what translation should be, some later versions of the Bible sought exact renditions that resulted in stilted, word-for-word literal translations that ignored grammar, syntax, and even meaning in the target language.

The translation of more worldly texts must be held to more mundane standards than these. Yet in the case of modern translations of Yiddish, the expectations and the resulting disappointments seem almost as fraught. With its decline, Yiddish has become the sacred Jewish tongue, the language that must be preserved intact, the ineffable connection to a lost past—threatened by yet more losses each time it is given over to another idiom. In almost every text and commentary, Yiddish translators seem to remind themselves and their readers with startling regularity of the etymological links among translation, transgression, and aggression. Translators literally carry something over from one place (or language) to another. In doing so, they transgress by definition—they step across or beyond their point of origin. And the act of aggression—attack—thus performed is inevitable. The etymological connections are almost identical in Yiddish. The Yiddish

(iberzetsung/translation)—like the German Übersetzung from which it derives—contains a similar notion of things being placed elsewhere, carried over, set down.⁵ And it is aggressive, containing within it a verb used for hitting or striking. Hebrew has its own version of this homology. In Hebrew, to cross over (l’avor) is not necessarily a sin (aveira), but the roots are identical and so are the dangers. Hebrew, however, does not make translation (tirgum) a threatening act in Jewish culture.

Yiddish has several words for the act of translation, each of them derived from German. Taken together they offer a view of the wide range of translational possibilities. In addition to iberzetsn, we have fartaytshn and dolmetchn. A dolmetcher is a simultaneous translator, an interpreter (as in the English use of “interpreter for the deaf”) who works primarily with oral speech; a dolmetcher is constrained by stricter notions of literalness and fidelity to the original.⁶ Fartaytshn refers specifically to rendering something into the vernacular, Yiddish. Deriving from the German, or daytsh (the name of the language itself), it connotes “meaning” or “interpretation.” Originally used for the rendition of biblical and exegetical material into the vernacular of medieval Ashkenazic Jews, the focus in taytsh is on making these texts comprehensible and thereby useful. A literary translation is most commonly called an iberzetsung, and its concern is inextricably with meaning, interpretation, and form at once. To some extent, these have become overlapping terms, but they are not interchangeable since, like the theories of translation we will encounter below, they emphasize different aspects of the translation process.

Yiddish translations of every kind often receive the kind of criticism famously attributed to Rabbi Yehuda centuries after the appearance of the Septuagint. The Talmud (B. Kiddushin, 49a) records Rabbi Yehuda's pronouncement that “one who translates a verse literally is a liar; one who adds to it is a blasphemer and a libeler.” (The Yiddish nonjudgmental version might be that one who translates a verse literally is a dolmetcher; one who adds to it is an iberzetser and a fartaytsher.) The contemporary lament, expressed less provocatively perhaps but with no less vehemence, is that—almost inevitably—“something is lost in the translation.”

Yiddish readers fear that what is lost is not only culturally specific nuances, the tam (taste, flavor) of the original, but the history and culture of a people. Yiddish may make contradictory but nonetheless accurate claims of being, at once, tied to a specific past that assimilation, the Holocaust, and Stalin have decimated and, also, to being a world literature, part of secular Western culture, in conversation with the European languages among which it lived. More common, among translators and their critics, is the question of how this Jewish language, steeped as it is in Jewish ritual and lore, can be understood in non-Jewish languages. Yiddish readers need no gloss for tallis un t’fillin, Elul, Parshas Noyekh, vaser af kashe, but English readers will need a fair amount of patience—or footnotes—to understand the resonance of “prayer shawl and phylacteries,” “the Hebrew month in which the Jewish New Year is celebrated,” “the week in which the Torah portion (beginning with Genesis 6:9) concerning Noah is read,” and “water for a kind of porridge.” This, of course, is precisely the issue with which translators are always struggling, and Yiddish should be considered no more or less difficult to translate than any other modern language. But in Yiddish these commonplace translation problems can assume epic proportions as speaking populations diminish, and we recall their turbulent histories in this century.

The lament about what is lost in translation is actually a lament about the history of the Jews in the twentieth century and about the present (and presence) and future of Yiddish. Some of the prickliness among Yiddishists is due to the inescapable necessity of translation—the increasingly frenzied sense by writers of or about Yiddish that one has no choice but to work in, think in, and translate into another language—and also to the kinds of popular and scholarly responses much of our work elicits. As a reader, speaker, teacher, and critic of Yiddish literature I am frequently asked a series of questions that I wish I could dismiss wittily, with no hint of pique. After lectures on Yiddish literature, more than a few audience members have asked, “Do you really speak Yiddish?” Also common: “Can there be a future for Yiddish?” “Do non-Jews take your classes? Why?” “What's it like to work in a dead language?” With academic audiences, the questions change, but one can hear the similar concerns underlying them: “How does one write about noncanonical texts without plot summaries or a deluge of elementary explanations of cultural context?” “What's it like to work in a language most of your readers cannot read?” “Who is your audience?” And above all else, there is always that other question that lingers: “Why? Why Yiddish? What is the point?”

Even if all of these questions were answered—indeed, could be answered—there would still be the often unuttered but always underlying questions about the history of Yiddish and its speakers: “Isn't your enterprise a kind of rescue operation, made all the more poignant or all the more urgent by (what is euphemistically referred to as) twentieth-century Jewish history?” “If Yiddish offers a view of pre-Holocaust Jewish culture, how can you be ‘critical’ or ‘objective’ or dispassionate about that culture after its horrible destruction?” “Who speaks for this culture now? And how?”

Increasingly, all of us—translators, teachers, critics, readers—speak for and of Yiddish in tongues that are foreign to it. Every teacher of Yiddish I know laments the situational plight of our students and ourselves. Even though we can send our students to various university language programs all over the world, there is no home, no Yiddishland where they can go to be immersed in the language. Similarly, many of us feel just a little silly when we set up language exercises in which we ask our students to engage in the kinds of role-playing conversational practices that are the staple of introductory courses in other languages. Unless they plan to live in a (very) few select neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Jerusalem or elsewhere—in whic...