Witness between Languages: The Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context by Peter Davies

Abstract

 Reviews Goethe specialists, but to all of us who are inclined to hope that literature might make things better. M E C, C C L Witness between Languages: e Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context. By P D. (Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature , Culture, and ought) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Tantalizingly written and dely argued, this monograph by Peter Davies offers a fresh perspective on the study of testimonies of the Holocaust through the lens of translation. In the Introduction, Davies argues that ‘without translation there would be no Holocaust’ (p. , author’s emphasis), by which he means that the proliferation of knowledge about the Holocaust, as we understand it today, influenced to great extent by eyewitness accounts, would be unthinkable without the oen occluded or de-emphasized work done by translators. Davies’s argument works from a central tenet, namely that the work of translation entails a highly dialogic practice. Translations, and the translators that make them possible, form an important part of the larger transnational, multilingual conversation connected to source texts. To put it another way, translators are active participants, key players in the discrete intertextual networks that arise out of the translation of source texts into other languages. Indeed, this study’s principal strength lies in its tightly interwoven combination of close textual analysis with the insightful exploration of how social and political expectations regarding Holocaust representation within specific historical contexts have affected the translation of Holocaust testimonies. is study takes care to document how authors and translators interact with varying practices of Holocaust memory at particular historical moments and in particular geographic areas. As one might expect from a study of this scope, Davies explores a wide variety of Holocaust testimonies, including texts originally penned in Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. In Chapter , ‘Translation and the Witness Text’, Davies situates his study as a ‘mediati[on] between Holocaust studies and translation studies’, which ‘will discuss methods that offer points of contact between descriptions of translations and the philosophical, literary, ethical, and political concerns of Holocaust scholars, and that take into account the agency of the translator and the expectations placed on a Holocaust testimony in particular cultural and historical circumstances’ (p. ). Chapter , ‘Making Translation Visible’, explores how translators treat the question of voice, specifically translating the ‘voice’ of a Holocaust survivor and eyewitness from one linguistic and cultural context to another. Using the theoretical framework established in the first two chapters as a point of departure, the third chapter reconsiders the complex, to some extent controversial, translation history surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night () by analysing the German and two separate English translations that orbit to varying degrees around the iconic  French La Nuit, which MLR, .,   has until more recently overshadowed its textual predecessor, the  . . . un di velt hot geshvign. In Chapter  Davies switches gears from Holocaust memory in the West, exploring the question of Soviet memory in Vasily Grossman’s ‘e Hell of Treblinka’ () and Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babii Yar (). Using these two accounts as his primary examples, Davies investigates the effects the Cold War had on the translation and dissemination of Holocaust texts from East to West. Krstyna Żywulska’s Auschwitz testimony and the question of self-translation form the focal point of Chapter . Davies traces Żywulska’s conscious articulation of herself as a Polish anti-Fascist resistance fighter in her  autobiographical account Przeżyłam Oświęcim (I Survived Auschwitz), and her attempt to maintain this identity in the German translation (Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau), which she prepared and published in  aer resettling in West Germany. Davies demonstrates how Żywulska’s selftranslation , both as the literal act of translating her own text from one language to another (i.e. Polish to German) and as the metaphorical cultivation of a particular narrating persona, had to contend with ‘quite incompatible “victim cultures”’, at one end of the spectrum, ‘a postwar Polish Stalinist culture that stressed the martyrdom of the nation as a whole’, and at the other end ‘a West German society that [. . .] was in the process of renegotiating its...