Magdalena Sitarz

Yitzhok Katzenelson’s Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishn folk – in Polish

Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People is widely recognized as one of the most significant literary documents of the Shoah. Hence, its very limited reception after WW2 is at first glance baffling. We provide the necessary historical background to explain why Katzenelson’s “Lament” was for several decades unwanted and why it still remains difficult to appropriate in translation. To show this in one particular context, we focus on the Polish translation by Jerzy Ficowski. We analyse selected examples of Ficowski’s justly praised poetic achievement to point out the limitations of his declared goal: “My intention was to make the translation invisible, to allow the murdered poet say again the same – but this time, in Polish” (Ficowski 1982: 11).

This paper presents the reception of Heinrich Heine’s “Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen” in Yiddish translation. For many of his younger colleagues he was “der grester liriker fun 19tn jorhundert, der sharfster humorist und biterster satiriker in der daytsher literatur” [the greatest poet of the 19th century, the sharpest humorist and bitterest satirist in the German literature]. My aim is to show on the example of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] (1844) how Heine’s subversive drawing on Romantic ideas and language is rendered into Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Moyshe Khashtshevatsky.

In this essay we offer a preliminary discussion of Biermann’s phenomenally successful rendering of Katsenelson’s elegy. First, we place Biermann’s attempt in a wider historical and biographical context to throw some light on his motivation to grapple with the text written in a language he did not know (Yiddish) and thus was forced to rely on a literal version provided by a native speaker. Second, we provide some examples from the work in question of Biermann’s more general attitude to translation, as epitomized by the Yiddish phrase he likes to quote: ‘fartaytsht un farbesert’ (translated and improved). We conclude that Biermann’s adaptation should be assessed first of all as an act of cross-cultural communication rather than according to the criteria of strictly textual equivalence.