BETWEEN TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY

Abstract

Translation played an important role in the history of Old Yiddish literature. To highlight the problems posed by translation, I have chosen to analyse an ethical-mystical bilingual text, the Kav ha-Yosher by Tsvi Hirsh Koidanover (Frankfurt, 1705 and 1709). This text demonstrates the popularization of Kabbalah in Jewish Ashkenazi culture (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries). I analyse the discrepancies between the Hebrew and the Yiddish texts. The vernacular text is a midrashic commentary, which intertwines the literal adaptation of the original Hebrew text and interpretative extensions. I study the discursive structures, the changes due to the shifts of readership and the differences in cultural tradition between “lay” and “learned” tradition, especially concerning magic, demonology, social criticism, tales, legends and censorship. The Kav ha-Yosher is a remarkable laboratory for an understanding of the nature of translation in vernacular Jewish literature.