Naturellement: Variant Translations Of The Accounts Given By Holocaust Bystanders In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah 

The article discusses testimonies of bystanders as presented in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. It proposes to apply norms and practices developed in analysis of victims’testimonies within Holocaust studies to the newly-emerging field of bystander studies. The Polish bystanders’utterances in the documentary were edited and simplified through the process of interpretation and re-translation, and this inaccurate rendition has been used in debates about the Holocaust since then. Lack of sensibility to this aspect of communication in Lanzmann’s film may result in skewed interpretation of the bystanders’engagement in the scenes of violence. The analysis proves that without renewed examination of the bystanders’speech, Holocaust studies may lose some important insights. Signs of violence impact, traces of traumatization or brutalization, and the specific cognitive and affective response may be overlooked. The article calls for an universalizing epistemic approach to all types of speech emerging from the Holocaust, beyond the (debatable) divisions of its social fabric into victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

“Why don’t you tell them…” Unheard Voices in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is a rich source of knowledge on the Nazi extermination of Jews in Central Europe. Its main material consists of interviews with people who witnessed the Holocaust, conducted in the very locations of the wartime events. The present paper analyses an iconic scene from Chełmno on Ner, where between 1940–1943 and later 1944–1945 the first Nazi death camp was located. A group of locals –gathered in front of the parish church, around one of the survivors of the camp –recall the events, sometimes in stunning technical detail. Their Polish utterances are translated into French; English subtitles are based on the French of the interpreter. The Polish linguistic material is not neutral: it is marked with dialectal and sociolectal features; the speakers engage in conversation on the side, comment on the situation of the interview in various ways, verbal and non-verbal. In the translation, both into French and English, sentences are skipped, the plurality of voices is flattened, and differences in memory are smoothed out. The resulting text is rather a summary than a translation. The paper offers close-up analyses of chosen sequences from the interview to show the complexity of the communication situation and the extent of distortion caused by the way translation works in the film. It also offers an alternative translation, which aims at giving voice to the actual people of Chełmno and acknowledging as fully as possible the complication and difficulty of memory construction through language, especially in a highly traumatic area. It hopes to offer insights into the bystander position in Holocaust discourse.

Bystanders Speaking. The Language Identity of the People of Chełmno in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

The main problem discussed in the paper is the authenticity of speech of the inhabitants of Chełmno in the sequence filmed outside the parish church in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The authors analyze a number of characteristic features of the bystanders’language vis a vis the French translation provided on-stage by the interpreter Barbara Janicka, and the English subtitles. It is argued that the language of the bystanders carries important information on the speakers’individual and collective identity, and gives clues on the construction of memory, not just on the level of meanings, but also in its materiality. The analysis focuses on four planes which were identified as important for the construction of the implicit messages: semantic ambiguity of the utterances; narrative techniques used by the speakers; verb forms, especially the impersonal use of verbs; and syntax. The specific linguistic traits of the language used testify to the fact that the speakers lack adequate tools to verbalize their traumatic memories and to reflect on the reality that they were part of. The analysis of the linguistic landscape of the scene also leads to conclusions about the instrumentalization of speakers on the part of the film director. The French and English translation in and of the sequence –a summary rather than a rendition –clearly, albeit perhaps not intentionally, contributes to this effect. Through linguistic analysis and wide contextual interpretation, unpacking the way the bystanders speak, creates a new, hitherto unacknowledged, source of knowledge on witnessing and trauma.

The Sequence Outside the Church in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Some Comments From a Linguist

Based on an analysis of phonetic, lexical and pragmatic (linguistic politeness) aspects of the symbolic sequence outside the church in Chełmno on Ner in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, this article offers insights into the communicative situation portrayed in the film, which has not been discussed in existing interpretations. It addresses the relations between the participants of the exchange (the film director, Szymon Srebrnik, the interpreter, the inhabitants of Chełmno), the time and space (religious service taking place in the church), and historical context: Poland under communist rule, where the Holocaust was not spoken about and/or subject to manipulation.

The Meeting with Szymon Srebrnik from the Perspective of Communication and Performative Studies

The article offers a performative and communicative analysis of one scene from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, in which the director talks with the inhabitants of Chełmno on Ner. I will be particularly interested in the theatrical character of the conversation outside the church. In Lanzmann’s film one can find many individual gestures that connect the interlocutors with the described story and place. That is why I will discuss the ways in which they behave, theit gestures and the way they speak about past events and the crime scene in front of which they stand with the survivor Szymon Srebrnik, many years later. Although they seem to form a choir, the individuality of their experience is crucial for the residents of Chełmno, and, what is more important reveals the emotions evoked by the recalled story.

The Cinematic Figure of the Interpreter in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The Case of Marta Weiss in The Last Stage by Wanda Jakubowska

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives.”It is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the fate of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women solidarity and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The present paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies.

It Gives You Shivers: Translating Polish Holocaust Testimony into Brazilian Portuguese

In this article, I try to lay out clearly and discuss selected issues encountered during the translation (with Eda Nagayama) of Bogdan Bartinkowski’s collection of stories Dzieciństwo w pasiakach (1969) into Brazilian Portuguese. My text combines a scholarly dimension with one of self-commentary in order to offer some general reflection on the subject of the ethics of translating testimony. It consists of three parts. In the first, I provide a concise overview of the state of research on the connections between translation and studies on cultural memory. Next, I present a series of observations relating to the emotional dimension of the process of translating Holocaust testimonies. In the final section, I compare solutions adopted in translations of Bartnikowski’s memoir into German, English, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese. In the conclusions, I try to define the memory-(re)productive role of translation: reproductive, in that the translation of testimony demands a respect for the truth of the signs present in the original and their rendering in the target culture; and productive (creative) inasmuch as it demands of the author of the translation a series of procedures with the aim of inscribing a universal theme within the specific field of cultural memory.

*Niniejszy tekst powstałdzięki wsparciu programu SPECTRESS (Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and the Reestablishing of Solid Sovereignties), w ramach którego w sierpniu i wrześniu 2017 przebywałem na Uniwersytecie São Paulo.

Jerzy Jarniewicz, 2014. Tłumacz między innymi. Szkice o przekładach, językach i literaturze. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Ossolineum

Explained in Translation: on Jerzy Jarniewcz’s Volume of Essays Tłumacz między innymi

The paper offers a discussion on a recent volume by the renowned critic and translator Jerzy Jarniewicz, a selection of 24 essays, mostly published before in the press and collected volumes. Among the many publications within the flourishing field of Polish translation studies, Jarniewicz’s book stands out because of its clear and reader-friendly style, which makes for an interesting reading not only for the specialists but for everyone interested in literature and translation. Although the volume includes both academicoriented and essayistic texts, it does give a sense of homogeneity, thanks to the recurrent themes and problems. The central concept, developed as a kind of leitmotiv in several chapters, is that of translator as author, and of translation as a creative process, equal in status to original writing. Jarniewicz combines a theoretical approach to translation with the more down-to-earth considerations on translator’s status and role in the contemporary culture. Also, as announced in the title (“Translator among others”) his texts are related, but not limited to the topic of translation and deal –among others –with such questions as literary paratexts, critical reception of Polish poetry abroad and the ways of keeping alive the interest in literary classics.