The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory

Sharon Deane-Cox, Anneleen Spiessens, Sharon Deane-Cox, Anneleen Spiessens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000587531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory serves as a timely and unique resource for the current boom in thinking around translation and memory. The Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of a contemporary, and as yet unconsolidated, research landscape with a four-section structure which encompasses both current debate and future trajectories.

Twenty-four chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars provide a cross-sectional snapshot of the diverse angles of approach and case studies that have thus far driven research into translation and memory. A valuable, far-reaching range of theoretical, empirical, reflective, comparative, and archival approaches are brought to bear on translational sites of memory and mnemonic sites of translation through the examination of topics such as traumatic, postcolonial, cultural, literary, and translator memory.

This Handbook is key reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in translation studies, memory studies, and related areas.

Part I Translation and memory of trauma

1 Translating Holocaust testimonyA translator’s perspective

David Bellos

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273417-3

Introduction: testimony and translation

Testimony – the kind that concerns us here – consists of first-person narratives of events that would count as evidence for the prosecution if they were given as witness statements under oath in a court of law. Save in exceptional circumstances, however, they are not uttered in a court of law, nor are they intended to be used in that way. The texts that concern us here have qualities of gravity and authenticity that would lend weight to formal witness statements, but in key respects they are distinct from depositions or testimonies in the legal sense.

Testimony in our sense is not easy or straightforward to translate. That is not to say that the translation of testimony in courts of law is easy. Indeed, I would like to stress just how fragile inter-lingual communication can be in a legal environment. In most jurisdictions, witnesses and defendants have the right to speak to the court in their preferred language. To facilitate this, qualified interpreters are provided in criminal cases. Translating testimonies of this kind is a stressful professional task. Even when it is well done – which is not always the case – it remains an approximate and paradoxical undertaking. The special difficulty of translating witnesses in court is this: judges routinely instruct juries to pay attention not only to what witnesses have said, but also to the way in which they said it. That may seem no more than common sense in a single-language domain: hesitations, slips of the tongue, changes of voice pitch and volume, body language, and facial expression all communicate shades of meaning that may significantly strengthen or weaken the credibility and significance of what is said. But that routine instruction to jurors creates a nightmare for interpreters.

Language professionals do not and normally must not reproduce the way something is said, and it would likely cause a riot if they did. For example, Khrushchev’s interpreter at that famous UN General Assembly meeting did not and could not have slammed his own shoe on the desk. Nowadays, an interpreter giving the words of Donald Trump in simultaneous translation does not and must not mimic the president’s grammatical errors, mistaken vocabulary, vulgar diction, and ugly hand gestures. It’s not just a convention. It is in the nature of translation to give the meaning of the source within the norms of unmarked, socially neutral, and polite speech in the target language. Because of this unspoken but virtually unbreakable rule, a translator of testimony in a court of law always falls short of providing the jury with all the information the judge thinks it should have. For that reason, the best advice I’ve ever had from a court interpreter is this: if you are going to get arrested, make sure you aren’t out of the country at the time.

This advice and its underlying meaning – that there can be no real justice unless a trial takes place within a single-language environment – set the broad stage for translating testimony in the sense in which we want to give it today. For it is manifest from a hundred examples that the kinds of narratives that constitute historical testimony only rarely and exceptionally refer to events that take place within a single language community. Whether it’s the suppression of the Anglo-Saxon nobility after the Norman Conquest, the Highland Clearances in eighteenth-century Scotland, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the conquest of the Incas, the pacification of Vietnam, or the slaughter of European Jews, humanity’s worst behaviour is typically exercised in a multilingual space, not a monolingual one. Testimony to these great and bloody gashes in the course of centuries nearly always requires, relies on, or actually takes place in translation. And that is our subject today.

Translatedness is particularly marked in the German assault on Jews between 1933 and 1945. Like Roman soldiers of old, the Nazis did not translate their own commands and regulations in occupied lands, so the first level of their victims – ordinary French and Norwegian and Belgian and Polish citizens – were obliged to learn or half-learn the partly new dialect of administrative German used by the authorities and lived in what you could call a permanent and terrifying state of semi-translation. But that was relatively benign. The millions who were deported and then held or enslaved in huge camps before being murdered spoke many languages. Some coped by learning bits of other languages, all learned bits of the oppressors’ language, and from these fragments emerged a kind of camp language, a rough and ready inter-language. Primo Levi gives a memorable and sober account of this fragmentary Eurospeak in the chapter called ‘Communication’ in The Drowned and the Saved (1989). Other survivors imagined for a time that the ‘accidental Esperanto’ of the camps might have given rise to a greater sense of common heritage in post-war Europe, perhaps even to a regular blending of tongues that would have diminished the sharp divisions that had been part of the prelude to the tragedy. That is not what happened. Post-war Europe reasserted its linguistic diversity and the right to linguistic self-definition not just out of habit and routine but in a full and formal consciousness. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 ends with an unprecedented declaration that each member state would address the European Commission in its own language and that the Commission would address member states in their own languages. You can imagine that there were other ways to build a new and unified Europe, but that was the way chosen. It inaugurated a new age of translation and of translatedness. Since 1957, Europe has created a fictional state of being in language where there is no translation, because everything is in translation already. European documents now exist ‘in a single original’ in twenty-six different languages, ‘all texts being equally authentic’ (Treaty of Rome, article 248); none has any force until it can be proclaimed in all of the Union’s official languages. I will supplement this with a provocative corollary: no testimony of the Holocaust has any force unless it exists in some other language as well.

The Holocaust as a multilingual experience: La Nuit (Wiesel) and Shoah (Lanzmann)

In 1945, in Paris, returnees from the camps together with people displaced from central and Eastern Europe and the Jewish immigrant groups that had survived through the period of Occupation mourned the disappearance of their old communities by publishing ‘Books of Memory.’ These now rare volumes consisted mainly of old photographs that had survived together with lists of the names of those who had died, with whatever other biographical details could be assembled. These Books of Memory were devoted to a specific village or a quarter or even a street in a city and were published by voluntary associations called Landsmannschaften. The title pages were usually in Hebrew and the text often incorporated prayers and passages from the Torah, but the primary language of these Books of Memory was Yiddish. The books were surely treasured by the immediate circle for which they were written, but they never reached a wider audience. The alleged silence of French Jews in the decade after 1945 can be partly explained by the fact that the activities of the Yiddish presses never crossed the boundary of translation. Testimony made available in the language of the victims was inaccessible to the host culture and in that sense did not function as testimony.

Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit, which appeared in Paris in 1958 (English translations date from 1960 and 2006), had an entirely different fate. Wiesel had grown up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, and Yiddish in Sighet, Transylvania, where he was also taught to read Biblical Hebrew at a young age; he learned German and camp language at Auschwitz in his early teens and was one of the five hundred orphaned children that de Gaulle brought to France from Buchenwald in 1945. Wiesel learned French within a few months and passed his baccalaureate at much the same age as he would have if he had grown up in France. He was lively, talented, and very angry. Ten years after Liberation, he decided to write a testimonial narrative of his experience of the death camps. He wrote it in Yiddish and published it in Buenos Aires with a Polish-Jewish publishing house. Un die Velt hot geschwign (1956) [And the world remained silent] is a denunciation of the complicity of the West in the destruction of Jews by the Nazis. Some Argentinian Yiddishists no doubt read it. But nobody in Europe could get hold of it, and if anyone had got hold of it, only Yiddishists could have read it – and they already knew what Wiesel had to say.

On his return to Paris from his journalistic assignments in South America, Wiesel happened to have an interview with François Mauriac, the catholic French novelist. We have no reason to doubt the story told by Wiesel that Mauriac urged the young man to rewrite his story and to tell it in French. Wiesel did more than just translate his Yiddish original. He compressed it, reshaped it, de-biblified, and thoroughly gallicized Un die Velt hot geschwign. La Nuit is not the first ‘Holocaust Novel’ in any language – John Hersey’s The Wall almost certainly deserves that title – but it is the first in Europe and the first to reach a worldwide audience in a whole series of subsequent translations. For the first forty years of the book’s existence, in fact, only a small number of Jewish scholars even knew that La Nuit was a translation already.

Wiesel’s crossing from Yiddish to the French of the 1950s illustrates some of the politically sensitive issues that arise in translating testimony. Nobody in La Nuit wears a kippah: when it’s mentioned, it’s called a calotte, which is a skullcap of the kind also worn by French priests. In the camp there is a secret celebration of Shavuot; in La Nuit, it is referred to as Pentecôte, a Christian festival that occurs on the same days (Wiesel 1958: 25). In the Yiddish pre-text, there are frequent invocations of Old Testament passages. These disappear in La Nuit, whose style models seem more Baudelairean than biblical (‘du fond du miroir, un cadavre me contemplait’ on page 175 is perhaps the most striking example). Wiesel knew what he wanted: to get ordinary French people to take on board what had happened. He also knew how to do it – by re-acculturating his text and making it fit the conventions of the contemporary French novel. You could object that this almost complete assimilation is a betrayal of the specificity of the experience Wiesel had lived through. But Wiesel’s first priority was to be heard. Given the importance of what he had to say in 1958, being heard overrode the preservation of cultural authenticity. In later decades, Wiesel’s own opinion went back and forth on this issue. Fifty years after writing the book in Yiddish, Wiesel authorized his wife to make a new translation that re-injected into it some of the details and some of the stylistic features not of the French, but of the Yiddish pre-original.

Wiesel could do that because he was Elie Wiesel (though he also had to put up with a good deal of criticism). But we translators cannot do any of the things he did. We would not dare to de-judaize an authentic testimony just to make it more palatable to French or English or Dutch readers; nor would we dare to alter a novel like La Nuit to make it more consonant with some external or pre-original text. Our remit must be narrower than the project of an actual witness, let alone of the Witness in Chief.

What Wiesel obscures in the French text of La Nuit – precisely because his aim is to produce a French work – is the multilingual nature of the Auschwitz experience, if I may use such a term. Polyglossia is a striking feature of texts like Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1959, If This Is a Man), where there is hardly a page without words in Polish, German, Fre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Translation and memory of trauma
• Part II End-users
• Part III Figuring memory and translation
• Part IV Future trajectories
• Index