From Self-Translator to Cultural Ambassador: The Case of the Avant-Garde Yiddish Poet Debora Vogel

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to explore self-translators as what Olga Castro would call cultural and ideological ambassadors “situated in a privileged position to challenge power, to negotiate conflicting minorized versus hegemonic cultural identities.” The phenomenon of self-translation must be understood within the wider context of how historical events can not only shape the content of a literary work but also modify language identity when self-translating from a major language to a minor one. This article will explore the case of Debora Vogel, an avant-garde Yiddish poet who decided to self-translate her poems from German and Polish into Yiddish in her early years. By choosing to write and translate into a minor language, Vogel affirmed her Jewish cultural identity and, as Cordingley states, “challenges the myth of the nation’s monolithic culture” by bringing her peripheral and minority experiences to the fore in writing a transnational, Yiddish, feminist, and modernist aesthetic. Finally, this article will present Vogel as a two-way ambassador between Polish and Yiddish culture who, in turn, not only enriched the field of modern Yiddish poetry but also opened new viewpoints in the Polish world of the avant-garde.