Issue 29

2014

Publication date: 08.12.2014

Description

The present issue of Przekładaniec is looking at both the Polish-Jewish realm of translation and the history of Jewish translation projects in a wider, transnational context. The double title of this theme issue Jewish Translation / Translating Jewishness subsumes a wide range of topics, including not only Jews as translators, but also the ways in which the Jewish experience has been translated by others.

Among the contributors to this volume are not only translation scholars, but also literary and cultural scholars, as well as historians and theologians, who discuss processes of cultural translation in many different contexts, ranging from literature, through politics and publishing strategies, to popular magical practices. The common denominator for all these interdisciplinary explorations is, however, the role of translation as a tool in constructing the image of the Other and one’s own group identity.

The texts gathered in this issue concentrate around four main themes: the translations of the foundational text of Judaism -- the Torah, the Jewish/non-Jewish cultural borderlands, migration, and translation in the aftermath of the Shoah. Although Poland remains the geographical focus of this issue, Germany, Russia, Israel and the United States, as the modern centres of Jewish translation, are also important reference points.

Apart from the scholarly analyses, the reader will also find here voices of the practitioners. Interviews with four Polish- and German-language authors: Joanna Bator, Robert Schindel, Bożena Keff and Erica Fischer, who all faced the challenge of translating war-time Jewish experience into different literary genres, and reflect in their work on the nature of memory and its transferability, shed light on the wider debate on the translatability of trauma. Their translators, Esther Kinsky, Jacek St. Buras, Michael Zgodzay and Katarzyna Weintraub, in turn, speak about the strategies they used to render these literary texts understandable for German and Polish readers, respectively. These conversations not only offer a fascinating perspective on the differing mythologies, taboos and languages of speaking about the Other in Poland, Germany and Austria, but also open a discussion about the limits of translation.

Licence: None

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Magda Heydel

Volume Editor Magdalena Waligórska

Issue content

Aramejskie przekłady Tory jako świadectwo interpretacji tekstu biblijnego w tradycji żydowskiej

Anna Kuśmirek

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 23 - 40

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.014.2999

The Targums are early Jewish translations of books of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic. According to the definition, but also in practice, Aramaic translations operate at two levels: translation of the Hebrew text and its interpretation. The Pentateuch is at the centre of Jewish life, therefore more than one Aramaic versions of the Torah have been created: Targum Onqelos, Palestinian Targum (Targum Neofiti, fragments from Cairo Geniza, Fragment Targums, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan). The character of these versions depends on the date, place and dialect of at the original targumic tradition. The targumists read the Torah as the Scripture transmitted to them and their contemporaries. Their reflection on the text led to the contribution of new elements to it. The material was added to the Aramaic translations of the biblical text not for linguistic reasons, but because of current theological exegesis, formed inside Jewish religious communities. The Aramaic translators used a variety of methods and techniques of translation. Significantly, they resorted to contemporarization of the Sacred texts, which occurred at three levels: historical, cultural, and religious. The targumists tried not only to convey the text of the Pentateuch, which included the law of Moses, but also to solve problems associated with the interpretation of the meaning of the Torah. Thus the Targums can be seen as an attempt to adapt the Scripture to the official Jewish law (halakah). With regard to the liturgical context, the Aramaic translations became midrashic and exgegetical commentaries. The targumists aimed at reconciling the ancient text books of the Hebrew Bible with its later theological vision. This phenomenon is defined as the targumization or ideologization of the Biblical Hebrew text. The aim of this article is to describe the characteristics of targumic literature and present selected examples of different Aramaic “actualizations” of the Torah.

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Upadli (czy) giganci? Kilka uwag o nefilim i gigantes w Biblii hebrajskiej i Septuagincie

Wojciech Kosior

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 41 - 64

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.015.3000

The larger the gap between languages, cultures and religions involved in the translation process, the more challenging it becomes, as was the case with the Septuagint [LXX] rendition of the Hebrew Bible [HB], which aimed at compromising Hellenistic and Semitic entourages. Valuable insight into the translator’s work is offered by an analysis of a particular word or phrase which undergoes a linguistic and cultural transmission. The word nephilim appears just three times in the Masoretic text of the HB: once in Genesis 6:4 and twice in Numbers 13:33. In the LXX both of these instances have been rendered by the Greek gigantes, which means that the translator identified the mysterious antediluvian figures as the primeval inhabitants of one of the Canaanite valleys and, at the same time, interpreted both of them as the Semitic equivalent of the Greek giants. Given the etymological and semantic differences between nephilim and gigantes, the question arises: why was this particular decision made? This study follows the hypothetical process of interpretation and translation by reconstructing the ancient Greek mythical complex of giants and by analyzing the biblical sources (Genesis 6:1–4; Numbers 13:28–33; Ezekiel 32:22–27) where the nephilim/nophelim appear. Moreover, this article outlines the factors that have influenced the translation. Finally, by scrutinizing the issue of the nefilim–gigantes this article describes the ancient biblical translator’s workshop on the particular example. Given the limitations of every translation, it is crucial to acknowledge the ambivalent nature of this process: undoubtedly, the translator strives to find the most appropriate term being the closest semantic equivalent of the word in question at the same time, however, the particular decision reducing the semantic uncertainty blurs other interpretative options. In other words, whatever had been the initial interpretation of the mysterious nephilim in these passages, it was in a way “overwritten” and thus substituted by the Greek gigantes.

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„W imię naglących potrzeb literatury narodowej”. Tłumaczenie i żydowski nacjonalizm kulturowy w Europie Wschodniej

Kenneth Moss

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 67 - 91

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.016.3001

This essay examines the rhetoric and practice of translation in the Russian Empire’s Hebrew and Yiddish cultural communities and focuses on the intriguing fact that by 1917, many of the writers, critics, intellectuals, and publishers committed to a Jewish nationalist vision of Hebrew or Yiddish cultural renaissance were convinced that a massive program of literary translation was their most essential task. The study reconstructs the guiding translation program of this divided intelligentsia, which posited a universal canon of European and even world literature that had to be incorporated whole into Hebrew and Yiddish literature systematically and rapidly, without any sort of Judaization or popularization, and with an emphasis on the expansion of the expressive capacities of the target language and its writers. The essay traces how this commitment was expressed and embodied in translation theory, practices of selection and publishing, and in several acts of translation themselves. It further demonstrates how this translation program and its practices were linked to a larger vision of programmatic ‘de-Judaization’ or ‘de-parochialization’ of Hebrew and Yiddish culture propounded by some of the most committed Hebraists and Yiddishists in Russia. Finally, it argues that this translation program expresses a more general and seemingly paradoxical variant of East European Jewish cultural nationalism which held that a modern Jewish national culture could only be truly worthwhile and compelling to modern creators and consumers if it was universal in its expressive potentials and demarcated from other national cultures by language rather than content.

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Manewry wokół “muru chińskiego”. Tłumaczenia z literatury jidysz na polski przed pierwszą wojną światową

Natalia Krynicka

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 92 - 117

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.017.3002

This article addresses the complex relationship of both Jews and non-Jews to Yiddish language and Jewish literature in Poland. It analyses the evolution of translators’ motivations and their approach to the original texts, as well as the reactions of readers of Jewish literature during three decades (1885–1914). The study opens with the first translations from Yiddish into Polish (and at the same time the first translations from Yiddish to foreign languages in general): Klemens Junosza-Szaniawski’s Donkiszot żydowski (The Jewish Don Quixote, 1885) and Szkapa (The Nag, 1886) by Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh). Their publication was a notable event in Warsaw’s intellectual circles and provoked lively polemics in the press. In his introduction, Junosza used the expression “the Great Wall of China” to define the barriers dividing the Jewish and Polish societies, which he hoped to overcome at least in part through his translations. The phrase was later adopted by critics and the following generation of translators, who regularly, albeit with different intentions, made references to the work of their predecessor. Apart from the translations of Mendele’s novels, the article also discusses the texts published by Yiddish-language writers in assimilatory periodicals in Congress Poland (Izraelita in Warsaw) and in Galicia (Ojczyzna in Lwów). They were programmatically hostile to the language of Ashkenazi Jews, but their relationship to Yiddish literature turns out to have been more complex and changing with time. The analysis also includes: the anthology Miliony! (Millions!, 1903) translated by Jerzy Ohr, a journalist close to the extreme right circles; Miasteczko (The Shtetl, 1910) by Sholem Ash, whose introduction reflected the radicalization of Polish-Jewish relations; and Safrus (1905), a collection of fiction and essays edited by Jan Kirszrot, who represented the Jewish nationalist milieu. These translations and their reception illustrate well the complex issues of identity, cultural belonging, assimilation, return to the roots, image of the Other, cultural stereotypes or fascination and rejection, characteristic of a multicultural and a multinational society.

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Polskie przekłady literatury pięknej z języków hebrajskiego i jidysz jako książki (1918-1939) – rekonesans badawczy

Monika Jaremków

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 118 - 136

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.018.3003

Existing studies on interwar Polish editions of translations of Hebrew and Yiddish literature have focused on various literary genres published in a book form (mostly prose but also poetry and drama). This article analyses Polish-Jewish cultural relations from the bibliological point of view, concentrating on the different book-forms in which translations from Jewish languages were published, such as almanacs, books for children, textbooks and series. The analysis of the editorial framework, designs, illustrations, information on covers, and book structure can not only provide insight into the editorial strategies of publishers but also give information on intended readers. Moreover, a comparison of pre-WWII and post-war editions sheds light on the changes in the reading public, its needs, expectations and knowledge about Jewish culture.

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Nieżydowskie języki magii żydowskiej. O swojskości, obcości i przekładzie

Marek Tuszewicki

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 137 - 154

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.019.3004

The article discusses foreign magical incantations within the healing practices of the East-European Jewry. Indicating the importance of the category of “strangeness”, it examines several magical texts, focusing on their adaptation and translation into Yiddish culture.

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„Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt!“ Robert Gilbert, Hermann Leopoldi i rola języków między wygnaniem a powrotem

Joachim Schlör

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 157 - 178

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.020.3005

Robert Gilbert (b. Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978) was one of Germany’s most successful writers of popular songs, many of them made famous by operettas and movies in the late years of the Weimar Republic (Ein Freund, ein guter Freund; Liebling, mein Herz läßt Dich grüßen; Was kann der Sigismund dafür?). In 1933, Gilbert emigrated to Vienna and later moved on to Paris, 1938, and New York, 1939. After his return to Europe in 1951, Gilbert started a second, again very successful, career as translator of American Musical Comedies, from My Fair Lady (1951) via Oklahoma or Annie Get Your Gun to Cabaret (1970). During his years in New York, he had acquired the English language he needed for this new activity. Recently discovered documents – manuscripts donated to the Vienna City Library by the Leopoldi family – give an insight into the translatory workshop and into the conditions of exile: Gilbert, together with the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959), produced a large number of songs, many of which were written in a mixture of German and English, with language (problems) as their subject. This paper traces Gilbert’s life and work, his translations and his thoughts on translation. The discussion focuses on the role of returning exiles as mediating agents and cultural translators between American (popular) culture and post-War Germany and Austria.

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Przekład jako polityka. Biblioteczka niemiecka po hebrajsku

Na’ama Sheffi

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 179 - 196

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.021.3006

Translation of books from German into Hebrew began in the late eighteenth century and was motivated not only by aesthetic reasons and the will to enrich the target literature. Throughout the years, the selection of German repertoire had also a political undercurrent and was related to the project of nation building and the creation of the new state. The initial years (1780–1880) saw the project to establish a secular Hebrew bookshelf, modeled on the benchmarks provided by German literature. The expansion years (1881–1932) and the will to provide the younger generation with daily access to Hebrew motivated a sharp rise in the translations of children’s books. In the following period (1933–1947), dominated by antifascist efforts, the massive project of translating works authored by German Jews became a political statement. In the formative years of the state (1948–1969), when Holocaust survivors constituted a significant segment of the Israeli society, the relations with the Federal Republic of Germany remained tense. Thus, the translations from German into Hebrew were limited to reprints and new translations of titles that had already been published. New critical writings by the younger generation of authors also enjoyed some attention. The 1970s and 1980s saw a significant change, with an increase in new translations of both highbrow and lowbrow literature. Literature referring to the period of Nazism still enjoyed a particular attention. The corpus built from 1990 onward suggests normalization in the attitude toward German culture, representing a range of subjects, with a special emphasis on contemporary children’s literature and highbrow literature.

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Święty socjalistycznej Palestyny: Józef Chaim Brenner po polsku

Agnieszka Podpora

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 197 - 225

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.022.3007

This article analyses the Polish translation of Yosef Haim Brenner’s short story The Way Out, carried out by Polish Zionist Józef Szofman and published in 1925 in Warsaw. It discusses the story’s origin and its reception, especially its writer’s status and his work with the Zionist discourse and imagery. Referring to interwar Polish-Jewish press, the article points to Szofman’s role in creating a mythological narrative about Brenner in the local Jewish milieus. The analysis of Szofman’s translation strategies raises the question about the intentions of the translator and the premises of his work.

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Wieża Babel. Świadectwa Holokaustu a etyka przekładu

Dorota Glowacka

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 229 - 255

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.023.3008

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.

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Granice przekładu: polsko-niemiecko-żydowskie pogranicze literackie

Magdalena Waligórska

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 259 - 264

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„O Żydzie na strychu i tożsamości mieszańca”. Rozmowa z Joanną Bator i Esther Kinsky

Magdalena Waligórska, Nina Müller

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 265 - 273

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„O nadawaniu imion umarłym”. Rozmowa z Robertem Schindelem i Jackiem Burasem

Magdalena Waligórska, Magdalena Marszałek, Nina Müller

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 274 - 282

oprac. Nina Müller, przeł. Izabela Suszczyńska

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„O Matce i ojczyźnie”. Rozmowa z Bożeną Keff i Michaelem Zgodzayem

Magdalena Waligórska, Magdalena Marszałek

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 283 - 293

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„O poszukiwaniu prawdy i przekładzie, który dotyka do żywego”. Rozmowa z Eryką Fischer i Katarzyną Weintraub

Magdalena Waligórska, Magdalena Marszałek, Nina Müller

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 294 - 303

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Ugościć obcego w języku. Paul Ricoeur o tłumaczeniu

Marek Kaplita

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 307 - 321

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.024.3009

The paper discusses Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translating, which is presented in three short texts published as On Translation. Centred on metaphor, this discussion focuses on the nature of language and translator’s ethical commitment to the other who speaks a different language.

First, the article tries to solve the inherent paradox of such a theory: the impossibility of reconciling two contradicory, yet equally justified views which specify that either perfect translation must exist or every attempt to translate must a priori be a failure. Expanding on Ricoeur’s argumentation and referring to some ideas of “late” Wittgenstein, the study tries to weaken this antinomy and to replace it with a dialectic in which radical stances are sublated. This dialectic is built on the notion of similarity, which in turn is a base for the notion of the metaphor. The second part, concerning the ethics of translation, poses the question whether the translator is committed in some way to the other whose utterance is being translated. It defines the conditions a good translation should fulfill (the word “good” is used here primarily in its ethical sense) and concentrates on “linguistic hospitality”. This metaphor suggests thinking about the translator as someone who respects autonomy and otherness of the other, yet at the same time attempting to communicate with the other to learn more about them. The article concludes with the statement that we can know ourselves only through dialogue with others who differ from ourselves. Thus, good translation should be seen as a “live” metaphor of the original.

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Polska teoria przekładu literackiego a Translation Studies. O szkole poznańskiej na marginesie pierwszej polskiej antologii

Katarzyna Szymańska

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 325 - 341

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.14.025.3010

This article examines the place of Polish literary translation theory within the international context of translation studies. It starts with an overview of Polish translation thought as presented in the 2013 first Polish anthology Polska myśl przekładoznawcza edited by Piotr de Bończa Bukowski and Magda Heydel. Moreover, the article tests the significance of the Poznań School for international research on literary translation. In doing so, it also suggests that Anton Popovič’s works on translation could be analysed in terms of a common link between the Polish and more international tradition of Translation Studies.

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Sprostowanie i odpowiedź na pytania recenzentki

Agata Brajerska-Mazur

Przekładaniec, Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie , 2014, pp. 349 - 355

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Słowa kluczowe: aramaic translations of the Torah, targums to the Torah, ancient actualization the Torah, Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, nephilim, giants, rephaim, underworld, Bible translation, Yiddish literature, literary translations, Jews in Poland, Polish-Jewish relations, Jewish identity, Jewish literature, literary book, Jewish book culture, Jewish folklore, Slavic folklore, magic, medicine, Robert Gilbert, Hermann Leopoldi, German-Jewish emigration, „Little Vienna” in New York, My Fair Lady, Hebrew culture, German culture, nation building, ideology, Yosef Haim Brenner, The Way Out, Józef Szofman, interwar translation into Polish, Zionism, translation, Holocaust testimony, ethics, translation, metaphor, ethics, similarity, dissimilarity, szkoła poznańska, Balcerzan, Barańczak, Kraskowska, Popovič Translation Studies, polska teoria przekładu

Issue 29 – Przekład żydowski. Żydowskość w przekładzie

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2014