This article considers Holocaust testimonies and the question of translation, understood here as both exchanges between languages within a text and renditions of a text into another language. According to Imre Kertész, Holocaust has no language that could express its meaning, and no national language has been able to coin words and expressions capable of conveying its catastrophic dimension. Since Holocaust survivors must express themselves in one of the national languages, Holocaust testimony is always a form of translation, even in the case of writers who wrote their memoirs in their native tongues (such as Kertész, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Ida Fink, and Hanna Krall, whose work is discussed here). The choice of language in which survivors’ memoirs (as well as other literary forms) were written had a profound impact on their authors’ sense of self-identity, their ability to heal, and the way they remembered the past. The largest number of memoirs appeared in English, the survivors’ second tongue, whose neutrality enabled them to overcome associations with the language in which they experienced traumatic events. Others, such as Elie Wiesel and Isabella Leitner, translated their initial accounts written in their native tongues (Yiddish and Hungarian, respectively) into smoothed-out versions in the languages of their adopted country (France and the United States).
The article examines selected instances of important translatory exchanges taking place in Holocaust testimonies. Some of them (Primo Levi’s narratives in particular) demonstrate that, during the Holocaust, translation was a crucial survival strategy, allowing the victim to navigate the incomprehensible “Babel” of the events. Other works, however, such as translation sequences in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah or Hanna Krall’s story of Izolda Regensberg (in Król kier znów na wylocie), disclose a failure and treachery of translation. The study employs Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical conception of language and Walter Benjamin’s reflection on translation in “The Task of the Translator” (both thinkers were also translators and their lives were profoundly affected by the Holocaust). Drawing attention to an affinity between Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” and Levinas’ “Saying”, it concludes that – considering the centrality of translation in Holocaust testimony – translation should be acknowledged as a modality of bearing witness in its own right. While Holocaust translations reveal the abyssal, Babelian condition of post-Holocaust speech, they also hope for the renewal of communication and for the tikkun olam of language.
