A Response from Anita Norich

Abstract

A Response from ANITA NORICH Anita Norich I would like to enter into Kathryn Hellerstein and Lawrence Rosenwald's discussion about the possibilities for feminist translations of Yiddish women's poetry by reflecting on the sometimes overlapping concerns of Jewish and feminist discourse. What can it mean-in either context-to discuss translation as an act "performed upon" a text, an act that enlivens a text, without which that text would remain inert? Yiddish is a particularly apt site of contention for these issues because of its status in Jewish and, more recently, American, culture and because of renewed interest in its role as mame-loshn (mother tongue), the language gendered as female. With its decline, Yiddish has become the sacred Jewish tongue, the language that must be preserved intact, that is threatened by yet more losses by being given over to another idiom. With each text and commentary, Yiddish translators remind themselves of the etymological links among translation, transgression, and aggression. Translators literally carry something over from one place (or language) to another. In doing so, they necessarily transgress-step across or beyond their point of origin. And the act of aggression-attack-thus performed is inevitable. Hebrew has its own version of this homology. In Hebrew, to cross over (laʿavor) is not necessarily a sin (ʿaveira), but the roots are identical and so are the dangers. Hebrew, however, unlike Latin, does not make translation (tirgum) a threatening act in Jewish culture. Translation from Yiddish may feel like a capitulation to history, hinting at the end of Yiddish culture by suggesting that, in the original, these texts will no longer be read by anyone but will, like their intended audience, disappear. At the same time, however, translation is also an act of resistance to history, an act of defiance that preserves a culture whose transformations should not be met with silence. In either case, however reluctant we may be to invoke it, the language of the Holocaust is pivotal to the discussion: collaborators or resisters, Yiddish translators are inevitably measured by daunting standards. The cultural politics of Yiddish translation thus impart an urgency to the task that rarely besets other translators. In the contradictions and tensions that have marked its development, Yiddish is not quite like most modern languages. [End Page 213] Combined with a well-established history of educational, political, and cultural institutions is its history of being without borders, always peripatetic, following the geographical shifts of Jewish history. It is now at rest only because it is considered barely capable of being prodded to move any more. The corollary to this wandering is that modern Yiddish has been a cosmopolitan, international, multilingual culture, thus perhaps ironically mitigating some of the problems faced by Yiddish translators. Every writer of Yiddish, and almost every reader as well, has always been multilingual. The relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew is particularly significant in this regard, since the two literatures have been analyzed as the two parts of one body of Jewish literature and the two have, more recently, reversed roles, with Yiddish increasingly the language of study and Hebrew the language of der yidisher gas (the Jewish street). Yiddish may be the literature of a minority, but it is not a minor literature in the Deleuze-Guattari sense, i.e., it is not the product of a minority writing within a major language (Kafka or other Jews writing in German). It is, rather, in the peculiar position of being a major literature in a minor language: major in quantity and quality, certainly in its own perception of itself; minor in the sense that the Jews who read it all over the world were a minority everywhere and could not rely on Yiddish alone. Of necessity, then, Yiddish has always been permeable, open to other literary influences, looking to other languages and traditions, in dialogue with them. This multilingual cultural exchange may make Yiddish literature peculiarly adaptive to translation. Furthermore, at least since the Holocaust and arguably even before it, Yiddish writers were already anticipating the translations of their works. Isaac Bashevis Singer is perhaps the best example of this, writing (at least since the early 1950s) with his English-speaking...