Yiddish in Amerike: translating multilingual texts: Jacob Gordin's "Moses, Jesus Christ and Karl Marx Visit New York" - Critical Essay - 2
In "Moyshe Rabeynu," topical humor includes unflattering references to the Reverend Charles Henry Parkhurst (1842-1933), a Presbyterian reformer; Terence Vincent Powderly (1849-1924), head of the Knights of Labor from 1879-1893, who was appointed US Commissioner General of Immigration by President McKinley, a position he held from 1897-1902; and Daniel De Leon (18521914), the Jewish Writing Essays socialist who split from the Socialist Labor Party in 1895, after calling trade union leaders "labor fakers," a reference that turns up in the Karl Marx segment. (16)
Many of the situations in "Moyshe Rabeynu" are still timely today: immigration restrictions, dishonesty and ruthlessness in business, factional political in-fighting that prevents any real progress, etc. The only truly dated element is the upbeat ending, in which Gordin envisions an army of workers leading a triumphant struggle Writing Essays to establish a just and humane socialism in the US. Bakhtin writes that the carnivalesque represents the "living possibility" of the return of Saturn's Golden Age on earth (Bakhtin, Rabelais 48). Gordin, a true Marxist, places this Golden Age in the future. It is a sad commentary on our times that prejudice, brutality, and corruption are still with us, but hope for a utopian future is not.
Recent developments in the fields of literary, popular, and Writing Essays cultural studies have legitimized the claim that popular works once deemed marginal or even trivial can yield complex revelations about the societies that produce and consume them. The translation issues in this deceptively simple tale are multiform. Even the title poses some problems, appearing in variant forms in different manuscripts.(17)The name "Moses" is also a problem. The Yiddish text uses the Hebrew spelling, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (mem-shin-hey), which would be pronounced "Moshe" in Writing Essays Biblical and modern Hebrew, but certainly would have been pronounced "Moyshe" by the American Yiddish audience around 1900 (and of course the modern English reader calls him "Moses"). This translation favors "Moyshe Rabeynu" when that familiar, formal title is used in the Yiddish, and "Moses" most other times. (18)
The Yiddish of this satire reproduces the polyglot speech of the community that inspired it. Zalmen Zylbercweig lists "Yezus Kristus" along with a few other sketches in Writing Essays which Gordin "uses simple folk-jests and 'builds' stories around them"(Zylbercweig 398). This strongly suggests a cultural precedent: there must have been Jewish jokes about what would really happen if Moses (or Jesus) came down to visit "our" world, and how they would be treated. In this sense, this satire is a far cry from Gordin's better-known "Realist and Modernist renderings" for the stage (Wamke 247). In "Moyshe Rabeynu," we have the textualization of a popular Writing Essays joke motif, one man's version of an oral folk-tale aimed at urban Jews speaking Yiddish mixed with American English, written by a man whose first literary language was Russian, employing a great deal of Biblical Hebrew, dozens of daytshmerisms (Germanisms) that Uriel Weinreich's Modern English/Yiddish, Yiddish/English Dictionary informs us are "inadmissible in the standard language" (Weinreich xl), in addition to a few words that are only to be found in Russian, Polish, and German dictionaries.
Although Writing Essays Bakhtinian dialogics propose that no language is monolithic, Yiddish literature is based on the "procedure of mixing several registers of language" (Stora-Sander 216). Yiddish itself is "shot through with the carnivalesque" (Steinlauf 58; indeed, the modern reader may have some difficulty with turn-of-the-century Yiddish texts because of the variant spellings and non-standard vocabulary).(19) Gordin was no stranger to the literary uses of the various Yiddishes. In Got, mentsh un tayvl, Satan speaks a high-toned Germanic Writing Essays Yiddish in heaven; "when he comes to earth disguised as a lottery ticket peddler" he speaks the same Yiddish as anyone else on Hester Street (Sandrow 151).
How is a translator to address these diverse linguistic complexities and accomodate the modern reader at the same time? In a remarkably prescient essay in the 1956/1957 volume of the YIVO Annual, Rhoda S. Kachuck states that
Yiddish, unlike French, German or Spanish, is studied today by
relatively few Writing Essays young people; the reputation of Yiddish literature is
therefore more dependent upon responsible translators than is that
of the other languages mentioned. (Kachuck 41)
In order to do justice to this multilingual representation of an immigrant society, I have retained some Yiddish terms, most of the Biblical Hebrew (rendered in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Gordin's audience, the vast majority of the Jewish immigrant population, rather than the Sephardic [modern Israeli] pronunciation), and even a few of Writing Essays the English words, which would have been foreign in the original, are treated as "foreign" in the translation.
The tendency from the 1950s until quite recently has been for translators to eliminate the Hebrew completely as "too foreign" and unfamiliar to the English reader, or for the sake of "smoothness," yet they often substitute jarringly inappropriate stock English-language cliches in the place of passages that are marked in the original as being indisputably sacred, even if Writing Essays deliberately misused by a character such as Sholem Aleichem's Tevye. Kachuck cites Sholem Aleichem's active participation in the translation of several volumes of his works into Russian in 1910-11: his translator proposed
rendering Tevye's quotations in Hebrew in a Latin transcription,
with their meaning explained by means of footnotes in Russian....
Sholem Aleichem objected vehemently, proposing instead that Tevye's
quotations be translated into a stylized Church Slavonic. (60)
One must ask: if a translator is going Writing Essays to transcribe a source language that the average target language reader does not know and supply explanatory footnotes, why not transcribe the Hebrew? Obviously, Tsarist Russia circa 1910 is a very specific historical time and place that may have required such displacement devices, but these devices should not have been used in the US in the 1950s, nor are they relevant today. Contemporary translators have been increasingly willing to retain some of the foreign words Writing Essays and concepts from the source texts, challenging the reader to make the effort to look up the explanations in a glossary. While this practice could be dismissed as a lack of creativity--or just plain laziness in some cases it is necessary in order to avoid cheating the reader.
In this satire, Gordin often cites the Hebrew and then provides a Yiddish translation of it (clearly a significant portion of his intended audience was expected to be Writing Essays familiar with the sound but not necessarily the meaning of Biblical Hebrew). For example, he writes,
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[mayn fraynt, zogt tsu im Moyshe, veyst ir den nit, az Moyshe hot
aykh gezogt: Evven shleyma vetsedek yiheyeh lekha (A rikhtige vog
un gerekhtigkayt zoln zayn bay dir)? (Gordin, Ale shriftn 196)
The translation follows the parallel Hebrew-Yiddish phrasing of the original with a Hebrew-English phrasing
"My friend," Moses said to him, "don't you Writing Essays know that Moses has
commanded you: Evven shleyma vetsedek yiheyeh lekha (A perfect
and just weight shalt thou have)?"
and explains the reference to Devarim/Deuteronomy 25:15 in an endnote. Sometimes, however, Gordin gives the Hebrew only, without a Yiddish translation:
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
Gevalt, bay yidn zol zayn azoyns? Ikh hob dokh aykh gezogt: Loy
siheyeh kedeysha mi-bnoys Yisroel? (Ale shriftn 198)
Rather than send the reader to the glossary, it makes sense to reproduce Writing Essays the parallel pattern introduced previously by the author:(20)
Gevalt, how could Jews act this way? Haven't I told you Loy siheyeh
kedeysha mi-bnoys Yisroel?--There shall be no harlot of the
daughters of Israel?
That "gevalt" represents another translation issue: which handful of Yiddish words does one choose to keep? In this translation, I have kept balebos, gevalt, goyishe, khutspe and peyes, supplying definitions in a glossary (khutspe is actually in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary under "chutzpah"; goy Writing Essays is in there, too), and shnorers and meshugener are followed by the English in a parallel construction. But when Gordin at one point has Jesus say, "Vey iz mir" (200), I just had to leave that as is.
Although one may retain the flavor of Biblical Hebrew with the justifiable use of parallel Hebrew-English passages (such as those cited above), much of the Hebrew element of standard Yiddish sadly must be lost in translation (something is Writing Essays always lost in translation). As Moses Rischin has written, turn-of-the-century Jews were "a people whose esthetic joys sprang from the Hebrew word, who detected the flavor of Isaiah in ordinary family correspondence" (140). But we should also focus on how much a translation preserves of the original. And for this, there is no one recipe.
When Gordin, describing a scene in heaven, writes
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[untern altn eyts hakhayim iz gezesn Moyshe Ben Writing Essays Amrom] (Ale
shriftn 193)
the translation reads: "Under the ancient Eytz Hakhayim, the Tree of Life, sits Moyshe Ben Amrom, Moses son of Amrom." At this point, the average reader should be aware that we are in a Jewish heaven, with the original Hebrew words being presented and then translated, without any loss of narrative flow. Indeed, one of my goals in using such parallel constructions is precisely to make the reading experience richer by preserving Writing Essays as many of the original elements as is aesthetically reasonable.
If some high and lofty Hebrew adds an air of the divine to the humble Yiddish text, the borrowings from English do precisely the opposite: many of them represent American life at its most crass and materialistic. Some of the Englishisms in "'Moyshe Rabeynu" include: trost (trust, monopoly), grinhorn, biznes, "Get aut of hier," "Gad dem yu doirty sheenee," tenement, boss, fektori, polisman, and feyker. Such Writing Essays multilingual borrowing is a common immigrant phenomenon, and it seems reasonable to transliterate some of these terms back into English, retaining their Yiddish spellings to mark them as "foreign," particularly when they occur in dialogue or passages discussing life in the US. (21)
A recurrent translation issue involves those source culture concepts or expressions where some additional explanation must be added to preserve meaning or clarity. One such problem area is the use of diminutives. When Writing Essays Newton says
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[Es is merkverdig mit di yidelekh] (Gordin, Ale shriftn 194)
it would be awkward to give a literal translation such as, "That is noteworthy among the little Jews." If the diminutive is meant as a term of endearment (and "little Jews" is not a term of endearment in English), then some words must be shifted around to carry over more of the true meaning of the original, for example: Writing Essays "That's one thing I've noticed about our dear friends, the Jews." But it has been suggested that Newton's use of the diminutive may be less than flattering in this instance, so I have tweaked the text a little into the more ambiguous, "That's one thing I've noticed about our fine friends, the Jews."
One other example is the term hekhsheyrim. The Yiddish says:
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[Er hot gezen, az di rabonim anshtot akhtung Writing Essays tsu gebn oyf Moyshe's
Toyrah shraybn hekhsheyrim un fabritsirn naye mistves]. (Gordin,
Ale shriftn 198)
Weinreich defines hekhsheyrim simply as "rabbinical approval" (Weinreich 636), but a translation needs to explain both the term itself and the context in which it is placed in order for the target audience to get a more "accurate" rendition of the original. (22) I wrestled with many possible translations: "Kosher document"; "Certificate of Kosherization"; even a complete explanation, "documents certifying anything Writing Essays to be Kosher"; before I realized that the problem was not the noun hekhsheyrim, but the verb, shraybn (to write). The basic meaning of the passage is that instead of carrying out the spirit of the Torah, the rabbis are doing business selling their authority to declare things to be kosher. I therefore changed "writing" to "selling" and the rest fell into place: "He had seen how rabbis, instead of following his Torah, were busy Writing Essays selling Kosher Seals of Approval, and creating new mitzves, new commandments."
One other justification for the repetitive parallel phrases and extra explanatory words is that the original Yiddish contains so many instances of oral repetition. This is a characteristic of spoken Yiddish, and therefore of literary transcriptions of spoken Yiddish, that should be reproduced to some extent in the English text. These repetitions have permitted me the rare luxury of parallel phrasing without significantly altering the Writing Essays syntax of the original in many cases. Aside from the Yiddish/Hebrew parallelisms, Gordin's text sometimes uses two consecutive adjectives that basically have the same meaning, in order to double their effect. For example, when Moses opens a door
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[un zeta sheyne, prekhtige shul] (Gordin, Ale shriftn 198)
both of these words essentially mean "pretty," but rather than describing what he saw as "a pretty, pretty synagogue," it seems to suggest that Writing Essays he saw "a beautiful--a magnificent--synagogue." English rarely permits the stringing together of synonymous adjectives at the rate that a "carnivalesque" language such as Yiddish does, but excessive streamlining of Yiddish syntax in order to squeeze it into the dominant standards of English literary modernism is no longer justifiable. Another example would be when Moses laments that his religion only lives in
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
("toyte opgeshtorbene formen," Gordin, Ale shriftn 199), which really means "dead, Writing Essays dead forms," or, more idiomatically, "dead twice over." I have translated this as "dead, lifeless forms."
Our Jewish forebears may have drastically altered their customs and appearance in order to assimilate into American society, but the Yiddish stories that they told, and the Yiddish books that they read and wrote, should be brought into American English without cutting off their peyes, fixing their accents, and ignoring their politics--in short, without stripping them of precisely those elements Writing Essays that make them Yiddish. If not, why translate at all?
|
