A Misbehaved Testimony of the Shoah and the Disciplines of Memory: Vera Gran: The Accused by Agata Tuszyńska in the Original and in Translation

Oskarżona: Wiera Gran (Vera Gran: The Accused), a hybrid biographical work relating the life story and testimony of the Warsaw ghetto singer by the Polish second generation author Agata Tuszyńska, was translated to many languages. Yet, all the translations were made on the basis of the French one, which in fact reflects a strongly edited version of the original text. As the author of the article argues, the modifications introduced to Oskarżona: Wiera Gran upon its release on the foreign markets go far beyond the standard editing procedures and have to do with the fact that Tuszyńska’s original text openly questions a certain fixed paradigm of representing the Holocaust and some of the socially sanctioned patterns of Shoah remembrance. The comparative analysis of the Polish and the American editions of the book presented in the article traces the most significant changes introduced to the foreign adaptation, identifying three main areas where the misbehaved testimony to the Shoah – of the survivor and the secondary witness alike – was disciplined to conform to the largely globalised discourse of Holocaust memory, subjected to the regime of conventional representation and culturally reproduced reception patterns. 

Oskarżona: Wiera Gran (Vera Gran: The Accused), a hybrid biographical work relating the life story and testimony of the Warsaw ghetto singer by the Polish second generation author Agata Tuszyńska, was translated to many languages. Yet, all the translations were made on the basis of the French one, which in fact reflects a strongly edited version of the original text. As the author of the article argues, the modifications introduced to Oskarżona: Wiera Gran upon its release on the foreign markets go far beyond the standard editing procedures and have to do with the fact that Tuszyńska’s original text openly questions a certain fixed paradigm of representing the Holocaust and some of the socially sanctioned patterns of Shoah remembrance. The comparative analysis of the Polish and the American editions of the book presented in the article traces the most significant changes introduced to the foreign adaptation, identifying three main areas where the misbehaved testimony to the Shoah – of the survivor and the secondary witness alike – was disciplined to conform to the largely globalised discourse of Holocaust memory, subjected to the regime of conventional representation and culturally reproduced reception patterns.