Jewish Simulations of Pushkin's Stylization of Folk Poetry

Abstract

This article examines the prosody and other features of Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Eugene Onegin , which were composed as a part of Ashkenazi Jewish cultural movements in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Palestine. Russian literature played an important role within the history of modern literature in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Translating Russian literature tested the limits of the literary Yiddish and Hebrew languages. Due to the novel’s status in the Russian canon and its poetic forms, translating it was a coveted literary challenge for high-culture artistic production in Jewish languages. I examine this phenomenon using Pushkin’s simulation of folk poetry in the “Song of the Girls.” Due to the different social and textual functions of Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as their linguistic features, translatability of even formal characteristics differed from one Jewish language to another. The changes in Hebrew pronunciation during this period were reflected clearly in the changing limits of the ability of writers to translate Onegin . Though motivated by an inward-facing drive to produce modern and Western literature in one Jewish language or another, these translations were also a manifestation of the cultural bond between secular, East European Jewish intellectuals and Russian literature.