Translating the Memory of the Holocaust: Thomas Geve’s Memoir

Laura Miñano Mañero

doi:10.5209/estr.68877

Abstract

This paper explores the most significant challenges of translating the memory of the Holocaust, focusing on the difficulties of transferring a survivor’s testimonial account to a different linguistic and cultural system. Because the concentration camp experience is inherently multicultural, and survivors have chosen to pen their ordeal in several languages, translation epitomizes a discipline that intertwines directly with the construction of universal collective memory. Consequently, translating Holocaust memoirs poses challenging questions on hermeneutics and deontology. Throughout the following pages, I will critically analyze my own Spanish rendition of Thomas Geve’s memoir, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (1987), so as to delve into the ethical commitments borne by a translator, and into the formal and stylistic complexities inherent to the translation of concentrationary literature.

Highlights

Introduction2. Thomas Geve: Witness, Survivor and Author
Throughout these pages, I have tried to critically reflect on my own experience facing the translation of a concentration camp memoir
I believe that Holocaust translators partake in the authors’ skopos: just like survivors are committed to revealing the truth, lending their voices to the unspoken victims, translators hope to shape and endorse collective memory, manifesting their ethical engagement

Summary

Introduction

On January 27th, 2020, humankind assembled to solemnly commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Most of concentration camp survivors penned their experience in their mother tongues, but current academic discussion on the Holocaust is generally conducted in an Anglophone framework, even though English was neither the native language of the perpetrators, nor that of the victims (Kuhiwczak 2007: 62). Survivors like Geve, a German victim who decided to tell his story in English, underwent a process of mentally assimilating and translating their Holocaust memories into a foreign language. Their memoirs, echo the desperate struggle of trying to convey an already unspeakable truth in a foreign tongue. Once these matters have been duly discussed, I will begin to critically assess my own work by exploring the specific challenges confronted throughout the translation process

Thomas Geve

Bearing Witness

Translating Thomas Geve’s Memoir

Conclusions and Discussion