A serendipitous but instructive juxtaposition occurred while I was reading Anita Norich's compelling new book on translating Yiddish literature, Writing in Tongues, together with an as yet untranslated seminar of Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome. There Lacan states, of the Anglicisms that have made their way into French and the Irishisms figuring in James Joyce's English, “Ceci suppose ou implique qu'on choisit de parler la langue qu'on parle effectivement. En fait, on ne fait que s'imaginer la choisir.” With reciprocal help from a treacherous collaborator, Google Translate, I understood Lacan's remark as saying, “This assumes or implies that one chooses to speak the language that one actually speaks. In fact, one can but imagine the choice.” This observation recalls a comparable insight that Norich has made in a short essay on language “choice”: “I think … of the emphasis on [language] choice as a particularly American, or at least particularly modern phenomenon…. [F]or most people, in most of the world and most of the time, such conceptions are foreign, even unimaginable.” (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/language-choice.pdf?c=fia;idno=11879367.2011.006, 17). Though Lacan and Norich are motivated by divergent considerations, they arrive at a shared recognition that the concept of language “choice” is a fiction because, as Norich stresses, the task of writing draws on psychological resources that cannot be extricated from the language in which the author finds expression—but also because, as Lacan contends, language in the singular presupposes languages in the plural meeting at the crossroads between consciousness and the unconscious. These ideas converge to suggest that language as such manifests itself as a process of translation, so that the act of translation neither salvages nor corrupts an original version but only, at best, extends an internal dialogue within the translated work.
Translation, according to these uneasily compatible views, is not a Promethean act but—as George Steiner first proposed in After Babel, a study that closely informs Norich's own—a “Nimrodian” one, because the condition since the Tower of Babel has been in each utterance to speak not one language but multitudes. Yiddish literature from its medieval origins has been sensitive to this fact, because Yiddish writers have always lived among multiple languages, and also because Yiddish's Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic components call on such distinct and far-flung codes of grammar, culture, and sound. Translators of Yiddish in the past half century or so, whose work provides the focus of Norich's impeccable and persuasive study, have likewise prompted anxiety among Yiddish readers, perhaps to extremes of pessimism and paranoia, because in the drastic disappearance of Yiddish as a vernacular for all but the most insular of ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ability to command a native fluency of the language and culture (as Norich does, along with only a handful of her contemporaries, most of whom are, like her, the children of Holocaust survivors) becomes more and more difficult to acquire. At best, the most conscientious translators take as their charge the task of preserving a maculate facsimile from a literary culture that is vanishing at the moment of its transcription.
For the most part, Writing in Tongues focuses on three major figures in American Yiddish literature—Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), Isaac Bashevis Singer (c. 1904–1991), and Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971)—each of whom represent respective stances and challenges for translators. Sholem Aleichem was the writer most open to adaptation, and presumably to translation, yet he was the author most entwined with the language of tradition and the idioms least replicable in other languages; the power of his writing derives from this fact. Bashevis Singer not only cultivated translation successfully, but used the acclaim of his translations and his media persona in English to efface the many psychological and ideological conflicts that had motivated his creativity in Yiddish. Glatshteyn is a model of the cultural mandarin, whose career began in avant-garde experimentalism that would never have received a large audience in any language, and which in response to the catastrophes of its age retreated to a rhetorical rejection of an audience that would receive his writing in another language, or a non-Jewish culture that such a readership would bespeak. Paradoxically, his most famous poem, “A Gite nakht, velt” (“Good-night, World,” 1938), is devoted to this theme. As Norich's study demonstrates with unprecedented clarity, despite the posture of each writer, translation was a constant factor from the outset of his career. A “surplus value” between languages, specifically but not exclusively Yiddish and English, characterizes these writers and their literary reception in a way that would not be apparent for writers in a more situated, territorialized language. To a significant extent, the ability to remain in a single, “stable” language is precisely what is denied Yiddish writers because of the fate of their culture.
One of the most instructive aspects of Norich's study is the extent to which she compels her readers to confront not only multiple translations of the works she discusses but also the Yiddish version itself: in effect, she obligates of her readers a dialogical relationship between the author's writing and the translators, which requires nothing less than reimagining the task of translation as such. The purpose of her provocative yet constructive challenges to various translators’ choices—when to change tense, when to add words, when to drop difficult or potentially controversial references—illustrates a sense of translation's aesthetic stakes, as well as the requirements of attentive reading in both Yiddish and English translation. Ultimately, Norich argues, even the act of reading in English translation requires knowledge of Yiddish—not necessarily linguistic fluency, but at least cultural awareness and sensitivity, even when such values have to be furnished for readers. Although she impresses on readers the value of seeking knowledge of Yiddish language and culture, as well as the intricate awareness of cultural minutiae such knowledge bespeaks, she also provides insight into ways that reading in translation might be nearly as complicated, difficult, and potentially rewarding as reading in Yiddish.
Norich's work here, as always, is a model of economy, elegance, and exactitude. To the extent, therefore, that reviewing a book so cogently conceived and engagingly written obligates the reader to propose constructive criticism, one can only wish that there were a broader focus and thus more demonstrations of her skills as a critic to learn from. For example, while devoting the first chapter to a survey of translation theories and their aptness to the problem of translating from Yiddish, she writes, “Translators literally carry something over from one place (or language) to another. In doing so, they transgress by definition—they step across or beyond their point of origin” (8). The same could be said of Yiddish as a language: in every sentence Yiddish invokes numerous languages, temporalities, and social registers. Moreover, writing in Yiddish, until the early nineteenth century at least, like all premodern Jewish vernaculars, consisted primarily of translation, either of coterritorial non-Jewish literature, or of sacred Jewish sources, explicated and interpolated with elaboration, commentary, and digression. The contemporary circumstances that make translation from Yiddish to other languages so fraught, yet necessary, are a given for a reader of Norich's study. A further avenue for consideration in the context Norich has introduced is the way Yiddish as a premodern literary language already provided several models for the way in which writing can be translated and transformed.
Similarly, in her account of various adaptations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye monologues from Yiddish into English, Hebrew, and Russian—the most internationally famous of which is, of course, Fiddler on the Roof—Norich seems to equate the concepts of translation and adaptation, so that not only the differences among these various versions tend to be homogenized, but also the distinctions of media, from book to film, and genre, from the original stories' complex associations to later films' allegiances to popular formulas of melodrama or musical comedy, tend to be glossed over too quickly. Such formal considerations are as significant to understanding these works and their reception in translation as the historical or textual factors that Norich dwells on. Nonetheless, what this book presents most persuasively is neither the history nor the aesthetics of translating Yiddish, but the ethics of this undertaking: “… the very act of translation from Yiddish to English seems to hint … that Yiddish has no audience or future. Translation from Yiddish can feel like a capitulation to history. It implies that these texts … like their intended audience, will disappear” (43). This circumstance indicates precisely the exceptionality of Yiddish among modern (twentieth-century) literatures. Where translations from, say, Catalan to Hungarian, or Hebrew to Greek, bespeak a process of cultural interchange and at least implicit reciprocity, translation from Yiddish to any other language is, in the decades after the Holocaust, almost always a one-way street.
True, as Norich fairly notes, there have been a handful of translations into Yiddish over the past two decades; most of them works of children's literature (Cat in the Hat, Le petit prince), and all of them cultural curiosities. They do not constitute the exchange that occurs with other acts of translation, nor could they, because they lack connection to a larger linguistic infrastructure through which languages remain culturally and politically viable. Like a once abundant, now decimated species, modern Yiddish culture endures today, distinct from the vibrant but hermetic vernacular of present-day Hasidim, only in the protected enclaves of academic research, like a nature preserve or—to use a metaphor of Avrom Sutzkever, the greatest post-Holocaust Yiddish author—a “green aquarium.”
This is why Glatshteyn's great poem looms so significantly in Norich's writing, here as in her previous book, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, 2007). “A Gite nakht, velt” is the first Yiddish work to envision the fate of the language in the postwar era. It is a poem addressing the question of cultural translatability, posing as a rejection of translation; in it, Glatshteyn “defiantly” slams the gates of modern assimilation shut—a gesture that resonates throughout Jewish writing of the period, whether belletristic or critical, in Jewish languages or national vernaculars—only because the poet remains so close to the entrance. Glatshteyn addresses, simultaneously, the non-Jewish world he would reject as well as the Jewish world he would embrace, and however apparent it would be, in 1938, that these worlds are distinct, the intensity of the poem derives from its speaker's refusal to budge from the borderline. This is a position that Glatshteyn's poetry never abandons. Norich also stands, less melodramatically but just as purposefully, at a border between Yiddish and English, and it is no accident that the heyday she cites for both the flowering of translation studies and the reception of Yiddish translations into American popular culture, the 1970s, was also the moment in which she began her scholarly career. As much as one can hope for a continuing dialogue between Yiddish and the languages into which its literature must now be translated, one hopes equally that Norich will continue to reflect upon the implications of this process, in all the languages through which her writing speaks.
