Translating Holocaust Lives 9781474250283, 9781474250313, 9781474250306

Citation preview

Translating Holocaust Lives

Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series Series Editor: Jeremy Munday, Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, UK Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Studies publishes cutting-edge research in the field of translation studies. This field has grown in importance in the modern, globalized world, with international translation between languages a daily occurrence. Research into the practices, processes and theory of translation is essential and this series aims to showcase the best in international academic and professional output. Other titles in the series: Community Translation Mustapha Taibi and Uldis Ozolins Corpus-Based Translation Studies Edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach & Jeremy Munday Global Trends in Translator and Interpreter Training Edited by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson & Michał Borodo Music, Text and Translation Edited by Helen Julia Minors Quality in Professional Translation Joanna Drugan Retranslation Sharon Deane-Cox The Pragmatic Translator Massimiliano Morini Translation, Adaptation and Transformation Edited by Laurence Raw Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context Edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi Translation as Cognitive Activity Fabio Alves & Amparo Hurtado Albir Translating for Singing Mark Herman & Ronnie Apter Translation, Humour and Literature Edited by Delia Chiaro Translation, Humour and the Media Edited by Delia Chiaro Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust Jean Boase-Beier What Is Cultural Translation? Sarah Maitland

Translating Holocaust Lives Edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel, Marion Winters and Contributors, 2017 Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © kovalto1/shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5028-3 PB: 978-1-3500-7985-4 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5030-6 ePub: 978-1-4742-5029-0 Series: Bloomsbury in Advance Translation Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Figures Table List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1 2

3

4

5

Introduction Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters

vii viii ix xiii

1

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives Peter Davies

23

Response Susan Bassnett

45

Witnessing Complicity in English and French: Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Elle s’appelait Sarah Sue Vice

49

Response Michaela Wolf

69

A Textual and Paratextual Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation Marion Winters

73

Response Kirsten Malmkjær

93

In the Shadow of the Diary: Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation Marian de Vooght

97

Response Theo Hermans

123

vi

6

7

8

9

Contents

Translating Cultures and Languages: Exile Writers between German and English Andrea Hammel

127

Response Chantal Wright

145

Holocaust Poetry and Translation Jean Boase-Beier

149

Response Francis R. Jones

167

Voices from a Void: The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk

171

Response B.J. Epstein

195

Distant Stories, Belated Memories – Irène Némirovsky and Elisabeth Gille Angela Kershaw

199

Response Gabriela Saldanha

217

10 Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing: Leonora Carrington’s Down Below Jeannette Baxter Response Cecilia Rossi Index

221

241 245

Figures 4.1

Front covers Maturatreffen, Reunion in Vienna and Über die Jahre

77

4.2

Concordance of the term ‘Mischling’ in the section ‘Decoding’

84

4.3

Concordance of the term ‘concentration camp’ in the section ‘Decoding’

85

4.4

Concordance of the term ‘Nazi(s)’ in the section ‘Decoding’

86

Table 4.1 Paratexts of Reunion in Vienna and its two translations

76

List of Contributors Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. She has written extensively on diverse aspects of translation and of world literature. Her recent books include Translation Studies, 4th revised edition (2013), and Translation, a volume in the New Critical Idiom series (Routledge 2014). Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald (Manchester University Press, 2013). Her current research explores the Surrealist anti-fascist imagination. Jean Boase-Beier is Professor Emerita of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of many academic works on translation, poetry and stylistics. She is a poetry translator from and into German. Her current research is mainly concerned with the translation of Holocaust poetry. Her works include Stylistic Approaches to Translation (Routledge, 2006), A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2015). Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on the relationship between Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies, including essays on authors such as Tadeusz Borowski, Elie Wiesel and Krystyna Żywulska. His works include Holocaust Testimony and Translation (Translation and Literature special issue, 2014) and New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah (with Andrea Hammel, Edinburgh German Yearbook, 2014). B.J. Epstein is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of three monographs, including Are the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (HammerOn Press, 2013). She is the editor of two books on

x

List of Contributors

translation in the Nordic countries, including True North: Literary Translation in the Nordic Countries (Cambridge Scholars, 2014); she is also the editor, writer and translator from Swedish of many other texts. Andrea Hammel is Reader in German at Aberystwyth University. Her research interests include the history and culture of German-speaking refugees from National Socialism, especially those fleeing to the United Kingdom, exile writing, autobiographical writing and the translation of exile and refugee texts, and her works include New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah (with Peter Davies, Edinburgh German Yearbook, 2014) and Exile and Everyday Life (with Anthony Grenville, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 2015). Theo Hermans is Professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature at University College London. He researches mainly on the theory and history of translation. His monographs and edited books include The Manipulation of Literature (Routledge, 1985), Translation in Systems (Routledge, 1999) and The Conference of the Tongues (Routledge, 2007). Francis Jones is Reader in Translation Studies at Newcastle University. His research focusses on poetry translation. He is a translator of poetry, mostly from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch. His publications include Poetry Translating as Expert Action (2011) and many volumes of translated poetry. Angela Kershaw is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on literature and culture of the inter-war period and the Second World War in France. She is the author of Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (Rodopi, 2007) and Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France (Routledge, 2010). Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk teaches at the University of Oslo and also works for the Norwegian Institute for Children’s Books. She is currently working on the question of evil and trauma in children’s literature. Kirsten Malmkjær is Professor of Translation Studies at Leicester. After studying English and Philosophy and completing her PhD at Birmingham University, she taught at Birmingham, Cambridge and Middlesex Universities. Her publications

List of Contributors

xi

include Linguistics and the Language of Translation (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and the Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011, with Kevin Windle). Gabriela Saldanha is Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her current research focuses on translation stylistics and performance, looking in particular at the interaction between translators and readerships. She has published on translation stylistics, corpus linguistics and gender issues in translation. She is the author of Research Methodologies in Translation (Routledge, 2013) together with Sharon O’Brien and is currently co-editing the third edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, together with Mona Baker. Cecilia Rossi is Lecturer in Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia. Following her publication of Pizarnik’s Selected Poems (Waterloo Press, 2010), she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s journal entries and prose texts have appeared in Music and Literature No. 6. Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent publications include Shoah (British Film Institute, 2011), the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (Vallentine Mitchell, 2013) and Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Marian de Vooght has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex. She has taught at the universities of Texas, Trondheim, Konstanz and Essex. In 2013–2014 she worked on the AHRC project ‘Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust’ at the University of East Anglia. Marion Winters is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She is founding editor of New Voices in Translation Studies and member of the IATIS Publications Committee. She has published several articles on translator style and more recently on translated autobiographical writing. Her research interests include autobiographies in translation, corpus-linguistic methodologies in translation studies and more specifically translator style and characterization in translation.

xii

List of Contributors

Michaela Wolf is Associate Professor at the University of Graz. Her research interests include translation sociology, translation history, translation and visual anthropology and interpreting in Nazi concentration camps. She is the author of The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul: Translating and Interpreting, 1848–1918 (2015). Chantal Wright is Associate Professor of Translation as a Literary Practice at the University of Warwick. She is also a literary translator. Among her recent publications are Literary Translation (Routledge, 2016) and Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation (University of Ottawa Press, 2013).

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the following people and organizations: Anne Frank Fund, Basel, for quotation from the play The Diary of Anne Frank, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, reproduced from The Diary of Anne Frank, copyright © 1997. Anvil Press Poetry, London, for quotation from ‘Death Fugue’, by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, reproduced from Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, copyright © 2007. De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, for quotation from ‘4 mei’, by Maurits Mok, reproduced from Met Job geleefd, copyright © 1972. De Gids, Amsterdam, for quotation from ‘The hound’, by Ed. Hoornik, translated by James S. Holmes, reproduced from De Gids 133, copyright © 1970. Guus Luijters, Amsterdam, for quotation from Sterrenlied, by Guus Luijters, reproduced from Sterrenlied, copyright © 2011. Peter Van de Kamp, Tralee, for quotation from ‘The rejected gift’, by Ida Gerhardt, translated by van de Kamp, reproduced from Turning Tides: Modern Dutch and Flemish Verse in English Versions by Irish Poets, copyright ©1994. Random House, for quotation from ‘Totenhemd’, by Paul Celan, reproduced from Mohn und Gedächtnis, copyright © 1952, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. Singel Uitgeverijen, Amsterdam, for quotation from ‘De teruggewezen gave’, by Ida Gerhardt, reproduced from Verzamelde gedichten, copyright © 1988. Ariadne Press, Riverside, CA, for front cover image of Reunion in Vienna, and Milena Verlag, Vienna, for front cover images of Über die Jahre and Maturatreffen.

1

Introduction Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters

This collection aims to contribute to a developing scholarly debate about translation and Holocaust writing. There has always been discussion of questions of translation and their significance for our understanding of the Holocaust, but only relatively recently has that discussion begun to develop into a sustained field of enquiry combining theoretical approaches from Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies. Holocaust Studies, which is a large, dynamic and very varied field, has been characterized by openness towards the challenges brought by new methodological approaches, for example, Sociology (Christ 2014) and postmodern literary studies (Eaglestone 2004), to name just two, and encounters with the ideas, theories and methods of Translation Studies have brought to light gaps in Holocaust research. In particular, it is becoming increasingly difficult for research into Holocaust testimony to ignore the issue of translation, even though the full contribution of translators and the discipline of Translation Studies to the creation and transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust has yet to be acknowledged. The contributors to this collection do not aim to cover all of the available ground, but instead to discuss new approaches, ask new questions and introduce new kinds of writing to the discussion. They pick up interesting and original research agendas in other fields and bring them into an encounter with Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies. A number of contributors present case studies arising from particular genres of writing: fiction (Sue Vice, Chapter 3), poetry (Jean Boase-Beier, Chapter 7), children’s literature (Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk, Chapter 8). Others consider texts by particular victim groups – emigrant and refugee autobiographies (Marion Winters in Chapter 4 and Andrea Hammel in Chapter 6, respectively) – or proceed from theoretical questions (Peter Davies in Chapter 2, on ethics; Angela Kershaw in Chapter 9, on reception; Jeannette Baxter, in Chapter 10, on self-translation). We also include a chapter (by Marian

2

Translating Holocaust Lives

de Vooght, Chapter 5) on the influence of Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis (1947), showing that its success in translation has had consequences for Holocaust writing in the Netherlands. At this point a word on terminology with respect to the difference between ‘emigrants’ and ‘refugees’ seems in order. The question of what terminology to use when referring to those who fled from National Socialist-dominated Central Europe is a difficult one, made all the more so because there are differences in different languages. Initially, many of those who fled were persecuted because of their political convictions; thus the term ‘emigrants’ or ‘exiles’ was used by those trying to escape, acknowledging the political dimension and their desire for an eventual return, which is certainly implied in the term ‘exile’. While those who arrived at their receiving countries before 1939 might have wished for a speedy return, this possibility became increasingly unlikely afterwards. The British authorities used the term ‘refugees’ for those arriving in the United Kingdom. The children arriving on the so-called Kindertransport were aided by the Refugee Children’s Committee (RCM), and there was a Czech Refugee Trust, for example, which provided assistance. The large majority of those who had to flee and seek refuge were from a Jewish background. In the United Kingdom, most of them define themselves as refugees, not exiles or emigrants. To this day, the  organization representing former refugees in the United Kingdom is the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR). It becomes more complicated when we need to refer to the academic discipline that focusses on those who fled from National Socialism. In German the discipline is called ‘Exilforschung’, and British academia, a late starter in this area of research, adopted a direct translation of the term, for example in the name of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (IMLR, University of London). Thus, when we talk about research into writers and their works, for example, the terms ‘exile writers’ and ‘exile literature’ seem appropriate. However, respecting people’s right of self-definition, we feel that those who fled and sought refuge should be referred to as refugees. That brief excursus illustrates one way in which translation has affected even the terminology we use in different areas of Holocaust Studies. Our intention in this book has been to suggest, through the issues raised in its various chapters, ways in which scholars working in Holocaust Studies might take up some of the broader challenges to which questions of translation give rise. But our perspective is, in the end, the perspective of Translation Studies. For this reason, we have asked a Translation Studies researcher to respond to each chapter. This was partly necessary, we felt, because not all chapters could or should be written

Introduction

3

by someone familiar with the discussions and issues of Translation Studies. At the same time, we would like there to be clear indications of where dialogue between the two disciplines might most fruitfully take place. Amongst the most significant advances brought about by a theoretically informed engagement between Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies has been a welcome move away from the translation scandals that have sometimes broken out in the discussion of culturally significant texts (see e.g. Schroth 2014 on Anne Frank; Seidman 1996 on Elie Wiesel). Such scandals were for many years one of the only ways in which translation became visible: an unspoken assumption of the possibility of ‘transparent’ translation meant that criticism of translations could take the form of accusations of deliberate distortion or betrayal. Without the opportunities offered by an understanding of translation as an active process of co-creation and cultural mediation, without, as Michaela Wolf puts it in her response to Chapter 3, an understanding that translations are texts that both have their own identity and that interact with and reconstruct the original, translation can merely be a source of anxiety, rather than a source of understanding and a field of open debate. The challenge to Translation Studies from an engagement with the traditions of Holocaust scholarship comes from the way in which texts by survivors are read and discussed, and also from the way in which translated texts are viewed and discussed in disciplines that do not have the benefit of insights that are common in Translation Studies. While scholarship has moved from regarding testimonies as an authentic form of historical documentation to a more complex engagement with issues of memory, subjectivity, trauma and witnessing, there is still a reluctance to consider the various levels of textual mediation involved in producing a written text, as well as the influence of the social and cultural conditions under which texts are produced and ‘witnessing’ is defined (for a discussion of these issues, see Michaelis 2013; Weigel 2000). Even scholarship that deals in a sophisticated way with the troubling borderline between fictional and non-fictional texts arising from survivors’ experiences has yet to engage consistently with key issues of mediation through translation (see e.g. Bachmann 2010; Ibsch 2004). The writing of history is in itself, irrespective of translation, a form of mediation, as Gabriela Saldanha, in her response to Chapter  9, points out. And  given that so many of the texts, including fiction and poetry, that have shaped our understanding of the Holocaust, are read in translation, there is an extra layer of mediation that we need to be aware of, and that affects the reading and reception of Holocaust writing in ways that are rarely acknowledged.

4

Translating Holocaust Lives

Where theoretically informed discussion of translation can run into difficulty is in seeming to question the directness and authenticity of a reader’s desired encounter with the text, and, through it, with the author. And yet it is important to question the relationship of the reader with the original author, because, as Theo Hermans notes in his response to Chapter  5, the interactions between the author’s original text and its many possible permutations in translation and adaptation can be extremely complex. The vital cultural importance of Holocaust literature and the range of emotional reactions that it provokes are a challenge for any set of methods that appear to impose further barriers between the reader and what is seen to be most significant about the text, namely the voice of the author. If we are not to return to a state in which the effects of translation are simply ignored, then the task is twofold: to make translators and translation visible using the full range of analytical methods open to Translation Studies, ensuring that it is always part of the conversation about Holocaust writing of all kinds; and to keep a clear eye on the ethical issues that translation raises, and the sensitivity required when dealing with texts that are the focus for significant emotional investment. The field has diversified considerably since early discussions of their work by translators such as Felstiner (1992) and the impetus from within Translation Studies provided by pioneering studies by Zaia Alexander (2007), Piotr Kuhiwczak (2002), Andrea Hammel (2004) and Jean Boase-Beier (2004; 2005). One can identify a number of different concerns that also reflect areas of interest for Translation Studies more broadly. A particularly fruitful point of contact has been in the application of philosophical writing about translation – in particular works by Walter Benjamin (1973) and George Steiner (1998) – to thinking about the translation of Holocaust testimony (e.g. Glowacka 2012): here, the term ‘translation’ can be used in multiple ways, enabling a many-layered reflection on processes of transmission, mediation and reception. Other writers have taken up recent thinking about cultural exchange, migration and ‘in-between-ness’, as well as the long tradition of scholarship both on Jewish identities and on refugees from National Socialism, and have explored the effects of persecution and migration on the translation (and selftranslation) of testimonies and other autobiographical texts (Davies 2014a; Folkvord 2014; Schroth 2014; Vice 2014; Ward 2014). There has also been important work on the translation of literary texts, which asks questions of the boundary between fiction and testimony and about the creative role of translators (Boase-Beier 2004; Davies 2008; Finch 2015; Kershaw 2014; Timms 2014).

Introduction

5

For the most part, scholarship has focussed on the translation of texts that one can refer to as ‘canonical’ Holocaust testimonies, in the sense of being well known and having a significant influence in the English-speaking world: here one might name authors such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Tadeusz Borowski, Ruth Klüger and Robert Antelme. The texts under discussion tend to be of a level of literary sophistication that offers familiar angles to scholars trained in literary analysis, but they can hardly be considered typical of the many hundreds of works that have been translated since the Nazis’ victims first began to record their experiences. Scholarly activity connected with the Wiener Library’s vital project to translate and digitize its collection of refugee testimonies is a welcome shift of focus onto testimonies by survivors who are not professional writers; this is particularly significant since so much of the discussion about testimony, trauma and memory – not to mention historical writing about the Holocaust – is conducted using translated testimony texts, but without acknowledging the effects of translation. One of the most interesting aspects of the encounter between translation and Holocaust Studies methods is the fact that it began only after the ‘cultural turn’ in Translation Studies described by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (1990) away from what they perceived to be a largely linguistic focus in earlier studies on ideas of equivalence in favour of an openness to methods drawn from Cultural Studies, Reception Theory and literary Sociology. However we view the early development of Translation Studies, it is certainly true that translation scholars began to deal more often with a range of texts that are accompanied with a discourse of authenticity and witnessing after their discipline had begun to ask more profound questions about the notion of fidelity and had shifted the focus both onto the translator as creative agent and onto the reader of the translated text as active participant, as studies such as that by Iser (1974) became central to thinking in literary criticism. The anxiety that can arise from thinking about translation is illustrated in the words of witnesses themselves; the writings of Primo Levi about translation are one of the early high points, combining a profound engagement with the idea of translation as cultural mediation with a melancholy sense of the loss of the author’s ownership of the work and the possibility of distortion (Alexander 2007; Levi 2003). However, Levi’s thinking still revolves around both the opposition of linguistic equivalence and distortion – an opposition that has long been under assault in translation theory – and an unquestioning view of the primacy of the source text, an idea also at odds with much scholarship in Translation

6

Translating Holocaust Lives

Studies since the 1970 and 1980s, that saw a shift in focus to the function of a translation in its new cultural environment and that understood translation as an act of communication (see Nord 1997; Reiß 1989 (first published 1977); Vermeer 2004 (first published 1989)). Here, then, is the crux of the problem: the need of survivors to be assured that the translation is an authentic and transparent rendering of their words clashes with the discoveries of Translation Studies scholars that question not only this possibility, but also its desirability. If translation is seen as a re-telling that adds weight and authenticity to an original (cf. Boase-Beier 2015: 57–60), then the idea of transparency is called into question in a very fundamental way. This problem has meant that ethical considerations are at the heart of translation scholars’ engagement with Holocaust writing, even if the approaches to ethics developed in Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies occasionally clash in important ways (see Davies 2014b), as Bassnett discusses in her response to Chapter 2. We can identify concern for ethical questions as one of the key strands in current thinking about translation and Holocaust writing, with work such as that of Sharon Deane-Cox (2013) engaging creatively with the ethics of witnessing in a way that brings a nuanced approach to questions of fidelity and authorial intention: a discussion that, as we have seen, has often been characterized by scandal and accusations of bad faith. Scholars have yet to bring to bear the full range of available analytical methods to the study of translated Holocaust literature: discourse analytical methods (see e.g. Hatim and Mason 1990, 1997) and translational and corpus stylistic methods (see e.g. Malmkjær 2004; Saldanha 2011; Winters 2009, 2010, 2013) are obvious gaps, as are theoretically founded studies of reception or translation history (Kershaw and Saldanha 2013; Pym 1998), quantitative studies of translated testimonies over time (although Joanna Rzepa (2010) has given a brief overview of Polish texts in English) and exchanges with postcolonial theory (Tymoczko 1999) and other kinds of autobiographical writing. There is also a range of important recent work on the social and textual construction of witnessing and the witness, and on questions of authorship and authority in witness texts, that would benefit from Translation Studies’ clear focus on translation shifts and language in cultural context and on the essential creativity of translation (Bachmann 2010; Michaelis 2013; Weigel 2000). A recent shift in focus in Translation Studies towards the person of the translator as social agent (see Jones 2011; Pym 2012; Wolf and Fukari 2007) would provide opportunities to shine the spotlight on the innumerable individuals who have made knowledge about the Holocaust available across linguistic, cultural and

Introduction

7

generational boundaries, including not only the writers and translators, but also editors, publishers, booksellers and librarians, as responses by Francis Jones to Chapter 7 and B.J. Epstein to Chapter 8 highlight. Research on Holocaust poetry that considers in particular the role of the reader of translated texts (BoaseBeier 2015) could be extended to include other genres of Holocaust writing. Finally, in a list of desiderata, one should point out that studies of translation into or out of English still dominate the field; as Alan Rosen (2005) has noted, and as Sue Vice, in Chapter 3, also says, English is by no means a neutral medium of communication about the Holocaust, and we should be on our guard against it becoming the default language of comparison. There are a number of emerging areas of original work that are taking the critical discourse further: for example, translation sociology studies (Kershaw 2010), studies engaging with autobiography theory (Hammel 2004) or selftranslation (see Chapter  10, by Jeannette Baxter) and a range of studies exploring translation issues within memorial, archival and other institutional contexts (Deane-Cox 2014; Müller 2014); see also the Wiener Library project mentioned earlier. The contributions to this book aim to open up the discussion further, in particular by exploring kinds of text that are perhaps at the margins of what is normally considered Holocaust writing. ‘Holocaust writing’ is, of course, a rather loose category that is not amenable to a really satisfactory definition: do we define it by subject matter (texts about the Holocaust), by author biography (texts by those who experienced the Holocaust) or by genre (do novels, poems or philosophical or historical texts count as Holocaust writing)? What at first glance might seem like mere wordplay is interesting for a number of reasons. Drawing attention to issues of translation can open new doors into familiar texts and new angles onto familiar questions: texts that seem to belong to very different genres may in fact have to struggle with similar issues to do with cultural difference, the role of the translator as mediator, and the possibilities and limitations of language when confronted with the Shoah. Most importantly, perhaps, a discussion about the grouping of texts under the heading ‘Holocaust writing’ is unavoidably also a discussion about what we mean by the Holocaust: whose experiences are counted, and whose are not? Since ‘Holocaust’, along with other current terms (‘Shoah’, or ‘Khurbn’, or ‘Porrajmos’ for the Romani genocide), is a retrospective term employed to try to grasp and define a series of events of extraordinary complexity and extremity, ‘Holocaust writing’ is also a retrospective category. It is deliberately loose, defined according to subject matter rather than any aesthetic criteria (see Rowland 2005, which

8

Translating Holocaust Lives

focusses on aesthetic characteristics of Holocaust poetry). This broad definition has the advantage of grouping together very disparate texts in different languages, in order to explore common ground in the expression of victim experience; it has been a vital tool in ensuring the visibility of victim experiences in a world that has been reluctant to listen. It also allows us to set testimonial and other autobiographical writing alongside fictional genres with similar concerns (as does, for example, Lawrence Langer 1995), while always ensuring that the testimonies of the witnesses themselves are never displaced from the centre. On the other hand, for all its flexibility, the term ‘Holocaust writing’ has tended to be exclusive, with texts representing the experiences of many victim groups – social democrats, communists, homosexuals and Romani victims, to name but a few – only gradually being included. Another issue is the boundary between Holocaust writing and texts arising from other genocides and experiences of violence: is the Holocaust so different that comparisons are neither possible nor even admissible? Defining what counts as Holocaust writing is ultimately an ideological and political decision resting on answers to questions about the uniqueness or otherwise of the Holocaust and of particular kinds of victim experience: aesthetic judgements about texts come after that. There are serious questions to be asked about whether, for example, emigrant and refugee autobiographies written by Jews who left Germany and Austria before the beginning of the genocide can be counted as Holocaust writing, or whether they should not rather be seen in comparison with other refugee and migrant experiences. Can one count texts by anti-Nazi emigrants, or by resisters who experienced prison, as Holocaust writing? In defining the category of Holocaust writing, one of the most pressing questions about its authors concerns their status as victims rather than perpetrators. In many, perhaps most, cases there is a clear distinction. On the other hand, recent historical studies (e.g. Degen 2014; Fulbrook 2012) suggest the extremely complex nature of many people’s thoughts and actions before, during and after the Holocaust, which were often far more morally and philosophically complicated than the question of actual collaboration (see e.g. Davies 2004). For example, what is one to make of all those who, themselves victims in one sense or another, took the route of what they sometimes saw as the ‘lesser evil’, assisting their Nazi oppressors often in the hope of saving lives. Such cases, which will be judged differently by different scholars, include the case of Friedrich von Bodelschwing, head of the Bethel group of institutions for the mentally ill (see Degen 2014), or the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky, who

Introduction

9

was in a camp towards the end of the war but was, as Rowland (2005: 7) points out, ‘enrolled, rather than interned, by the retreating Nazis’. Writings by such authors will be considered by some to fall outside what might reasonably be considered to be Holocaust writing. And what of the next generation of writers who might be descended from perpetrators, such as poet Volker von Törne, the son of an SS (Schutzstaffel) man (see von Törne 1981), or biographer Karin Himmler (see Mitchell 2007), whose uncle was Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler? For the purposes of this collection, we have chosen to be flexible in our definition of Holocaust writing, as our aim is to show how Translation Studies approaches can give us new insight into a number of the questions that Holocaust scholars have been discussing for many years, and to demonstrate that translation raises similar issues for texts from across the spectrum of authors and genres. We take some unusual cases and set them alongside more familiar ones, in order to stake out the ground in a new way and raise different questions. Two of our chapters take on the issue of children’s experiences of the Holocaust in fiction, but in very different ways. Recent scholarship has focused attention on the child’s perspective, with studies exploring how children’s voices were, or were not, heard in the post-war years (Müller 2012, 2013). But what about writing for children? In Chapter 8, on Norwegian writing for children and young adults, Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk explores the difficulty of introducing children to the Holocaust in a way that is age-appropriate, without employing language that obscures or trivializes the subject. This is an issue that many writers for children have had to deal with, but Mørk argues that there is a distinctiveness to the way in which these Norwegian authors treat their subject – their formal adventurousness and trust in the ability of children to follow fragmented narratives – that makes them worth translating. Of course, the question that arises here is how well such culturally conditioned ideas about the child’s perspective will travel in translation, or whether a text might be translated and published more for its content – an informative narrative about the Holocaust in the Norwegian context – than for its potential challenge to modes of writing for children in other languages. Sue Vice, in Chapter  3, takes a different perspective on the child’s voice, discussing a text by the author Tatiana de Rosnay, who writes in both French and English. Vice shows that even a translation overseen by the author produces significant shifts in a text concerned with memory of the deportation of Jews from France, and Michaela Wolf ’s response suggests that reading a text with a ‘translational eye’, as Vice does, can be a very productive interpretative strategy.

10

Translating Holocaust Lives

The issue of self-translation links this discussion to the chapter by Jeannette Baxter (Chapter 10), which discusses a work – the memoir by British surrealist writer Leonora Carrington (Carrington 1988) – that is further away from any standard definition of ‘Holocaust writing’. Nevertheless, as a piece by a writer who, in her account of her descent into madness, reveals a sensitivity to the violence and terror the Nazis had unleashed, Carrington’s memoir demonstrates how the brute facts of external history could influence a writer struggling to establish a coherent autobiographical self. For this reason, Carrington’s text and the issues it raises connected with translation and self-translation make an important contribution to our understanding of the effects of the crises of the mid-twentieth century on the autobiographical project itself. Cecilia Rossi’s response broadens this discussion by considering the relationship between translation and autobiographical self-fashioning. Chapter and response raise intriguing questions about the comparability of different kinds of traumatic autobiographical writing and their translation, and serve furthermore to highlight the plight of those deemed mentally ill, another group of Holocaust victims often neglected. Jean Boase-Beier’s chapter addresses Holocaust poetry and its translation. There is little doubt that poetry arising from, or concerning, Holocaust experience should be counted under ‘Holocaust writing’, though there is still debate about whether poetry can be thought of as testimony (see e.g. Rowland 2014), and what this means for our reading. In a challenge to readings that understand Holocaust poetry first and foremost as a form of documentation or witness, Boase-Beier argues that making visible issues of translation allows us to see the writing of Holocaust poetry as a consciously communicative act, with the aesthetic sophistication and processes of mediation that this implies, as well as to do justice to the role of the translator as co-creator. If the category of Holocaust writing, as the source of texts for translation, is not easily defined, this is equally true of translation itself. When translation is regarded as a type of creative writing (see Perteghella and Loffredo 2006), its relation to the source text is called into question, since it can be seen to involve the particular background of the individual translator and to be subject to the translator’s interpretation of the text against that background, as well as to the translator’s views on how to refashion material for a new audience. This situation further impinges on the question of transparency, central to much debate in Translation Studies, at least since Schleiermacher first formulated, in 1813, his now famous opposition between two ways of translating: that which, being transparent, takes the reader to the source text author, and that

Introduction

11

which, being adapted and changed, brings the author to the reader in a new form (see Schleiermacher 1992). As is well known that debate was given a new interpretation in Venuti’s argument that translation tends to domesticate but in fact should foreignize (2008: 97). It is all too easy to understand Venuti as saying that the reader should be taken out of what is familiar and confronted with the foreign by reading as literal a translation as possible. Yet foreignization does not, for Venuti, mean that the translation is transparent. Indeed, he argues against transparency (2008: 263). What it means is that a translated text is made obviously to look like a translation, so that the reader has a sense of reading something foreign, unusual and new. This notion is taken up especially by recent scholars in Translation Studies who focus on the importance of a defamiliarizing aesthetic, as discussed by the Prague Structuralists Havránek, Mukařovský and others whose work was initially translated and collected in Garvin (1964). Defamiliarization, using stylistic elements of foregrounding (see van Peer 1986), marks texts as literary. Those scholars who are concerned with the experimental nature of literary translation, such as Perteghella and Loffredo (2006) and Scott (2012), and those who are concerned with poetics and stylistics (e.g. Boase-Beier 2006, 2015), often focus on the importance of such foregrounding elements as a way of encouraging the involvement of the target-text readers. When we consider the translation of Holocaust texts, there is thus another source of potential conflict between the concerns of Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies, besides the question of the ethics of witnessing, and it arises from the conflict within Translation Studies between the need to be transparent and true to the source text, on the one hand, as against the need, on the other, to make the translated text meaningful, different, striking and stylistically geared towards engaging the reader, as well as being clearly marked as a translation (see Boase-Beier 2015). This is a conflict which has implications for Holocaust writing because it takes into account the aesthetic needs of the text, not in the terms that Adorno is sometimes felt to have meant in his famous pronouncement on the barbarity of lyric poetry after Auschwitz (see Adorno 2003: 30), where such aesthetic considerations could be seen to be at odds with the concerns of truthfulness, but in terms of the need to speak to a reader. As we noted earlier, the advent of reader response theories in literary studies, such as those suggested by the work of Iser (1974), led to a focus on the work of readerly engagement, a focus that has been carried over into the discipline of cognitive stylistics by scholars such as Stockwell (2013) or Oatley (2011). The focus of such studies coincides with that of pragmatic studies of literary texts

12

Translating Holocaust Lives

which highlight the inferences made by the reader, particularly in cases where there is ambiguity, or understatement, or where there are gaps and absences in the text, as in much Holocaust writing (cf. Boase-Beier 2015: 14–22). This means that there is also a potential clash between the assumption (whether made by writers, publishers or readers) that a work of Holocaust writing can be presented in an unmediated way, and the assumption made by literary, stylistic or Translation Studies scholars that much of the understanding of a text is constructed by the reader, and that texts will be understood differently by each one. If the assumption of the reader’s importance holds for the original text, it will also hold for the translated text. When we consider the various metaphors used for translation, such as bridge-building, dressmaking, dancing and so on (cf. St André 2010), we can see that translation is viewed in quite different ways. These ways of seeing translation relate directly to the question of whether the primary allegiance of the translator is to the source text, to the source author or to the reader (cf. Boase-Beier 2011: 47–9). Walter Benjamin argued that translation arises less from the needs of an audience to read the target text than from the need of a text itself – the source text – to survive in its various historical and cultural manifestations as well as its inherent ability to do so (see Benjamin 1973: 70–82). In this view, translation represents an act of communication which responds, as it were, to the demands of the source text to be communicated rather than to those of the various potential readers of the translated text. This means that readers of a translated text would be advised to be fully aware of the type of text they are engaging with. They would then not need to assume that they were engaging with the source text; instead, readers, just like scholars of Translation Studies, could come to value the different takes on events, even when these are factual, that translations allow, as indeed Malmkjær suggests in her response to Chapter 4. Yet in Holocaust Studies, because this issue has not often been clearly discussed, there can be an unconsidered assumption that a translation should stand in for the original text, and this leads inevitably to the view that the extent to which it cannot be seen as equivalent to the original is therefore a measure of translation ‘loss’ (Langer 1995: 553). A similar assumption can be seen at work in reviews of translations. In Chapter  9, discussing the cases of Irène Némirovsky and her daughter Elisabeth Gille, Angela Kershaw argues that the connection of translation to the notion of distancing, familiar from historical study, is particularly useful when considering the readers of translated semi-autobiographical works. She shows how the mediating effect of translation can be especially strong in such cases,

Introduction

13

and yet largely be ignored in reviews of the work: for these reviewers, readers of the translation are regarded not as readers of a translated text, with all that implies, but as though they were readers of the original. As we noted earlier, a widespread view of translation outside the discipline of Translation Studies as that which attempts to transparently reproduce the original, or at least give unmediated access to it, means that the role of the translator as agent, as cultural mediator, has been too little focussed upon. Yet it is interesting to recall that many Holocaust writers who were themselves translators emphasized the importance of communication, of passing on a message (cf. Celan 1968: 133–48; Semprun 1997: 229). When the circumstances of the translators themselves are ignored, it is easy to assume that translation always happens from a foreign language into the mother tongue, and that this distinction, too, is clear-cut. But Andrea Hammel’s contribution, in Chapter  6, on exile writers, suggests that in many cases the language in which a writer writes is not fixed; it can change as circumstances change. Not only this, but their particular status as exile writers living in between cultures affects both their original work and translations of it, as well as their attitudes to translation. Hammel suggests that the discipline of Exile Studies also needs to work with Translation Studies in order that these issues can be fully explored. In discussing Peter Filkins’ translations of the novels of H. G. Adler in her response, Chantal Wright provides a positive model of a translator’s productive engagement with an exile text. It is also easy to assume, if translation is seen as a purely mechanical act, that only the translator and the source text are involved. Yet the chapter by Marion Winters, Chapter  4, which discusses the particular case of an emigrant autobiography by Edith Foster and its two translations into German, demonstrates that things are more complicated. What becomes especially clear in this case study is that it is not merely that the act of translation per se cannot be considered to be mechanical, transparent or free from ideological inflection, but also that the translation does not happen in isolation from other factors involved in the final shape of the translated text. As also discussed by Jones (2011) for translated poetry, a descriptive model of the production of translated texts must recognize the important role played by editors, publishers, cover designers and many others in the framing of a Holocaust narrative. We have already suggested the importance of ethical considerations for both Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies. Yet if texts already carry within them the ability and indeed the need to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries, as Benjamin (see 1973: 70–82) suggests, then, argues Glowacka (cf. 2012: 67),

14

Translating Holocaust Lives

translation is in itself an ethical act. It ensures that the acts of witnessing, documenting or engaging with the events and emotions of the Holocaust are given a chance to live on in a new environment. The source of translation ethics can thus be seen to lie not only in loyalty to the source text, or to the voice of the original witness, nor only in the ethical need to engage new readers, but also in a realization and fulfilment of the original nature of the source text and its need to communicate. A focus on the translator and the circumstances of translation also encourages us to enquire about the reasons for translating Holocaust texts. One of the main reasons, the intrinsic prerogative of the text to be passed on to recipients of other times, cultures and persuasions, can be seen particularly in Holocaust writing for and about children. Education of later generations is a major factor here, as the chapters on Anne Frank (de Vooght, Chapter 5) and children’s literature in Norway (Lersbryggen Mørk, Chapter  8) make clear. Yet the presence of work that has come to be seen as constituting a canon of Holocaust writing and therefore plays a large role in education (such as Anne Frank’s diary, the poetry of Paul Celan or Primo Levi, memoirs by Ruth Klüger or Filip Müller) can paradoxically make the translation of other work less likely. This is a point made by Marian de Vooght, discussing Anne Frank in Chapter 5. She shows furthermore how both unthinking acceptance of the image of Anne Frank created in America in the 1950s and ignorance of the issues of translation, adaptation and reading that its reception has involved have led to a greater overshadowing of other Holocaust writing than might be the case were more known about the diary’s history and its translations. It is particularly interesting to note how translation can cause a shift in reception from discussion of the qualities of style and voice to discussion of the events themselves, and, as de Vooght illustrates, how the presence of an internationally known work like The Diary of Anne Frank (Mooyaart-Doubleday 1952) can serve to focus interest away from writing about the aftermath of the Holocaust for its survivors and those who interact with them. The question of the ‘voices’ that speak in and through Holocaust writing is clearly important, since these voices are relayed through translation to a new audience. The concept of ‘voice’ itself in this context is far from clear. In Alan Rosen’s The Wonder of their Voices (2010), on David Boden’s interviews with displaced persons in Europe in 1946, there is emphasis on the fact that Boden tried, where possible, to record survivors speaking in their own language. Yet he later transcribed these recorded voices into English, his adopted but not native language, attempting to do justice to the original voices in three respects:

Introduction

15

by keeping as close to the linguistic nuances of the original as differences in grammar allowed, by maintaining as far as possible the language and register of the camps and other places in which his interviewees had lived, and by reproducing as far as possible the emotional charge of the language caused by the reliving, in the interview situation, of traumatic events (see Müller 2014; Rosen 2010: 204–7). And during the course of translation, these original voices would have been subject to Boder’s own comprehension, with its inevitable limitations, to his perception of the psychological effects of trauma on his interviewees, influenced by his background in psychology, to his skill in translating into English and so on. Again, as with previous examples, we see that the success or failure of the attempt to allow access to the voices of those whom the oppressors tried to silence is in part a question of the impossibility of linguistic equivalence and in part a question of the mediated nature of all testimony, and indeed of all communication. American journalist Alison Owings, whose 1993 book Frauen records her interviews with a large number of women who lived through the war years, and who she is at pains to present as ‘individual human beings’ (1993: xvi), attempts to reduce the effects of mediation by using an almost literal translation into English of the German her interviewees spoke. This translation of the German transcription allows the reader who knows German to imagine what the women actually said. It also gives an extremely good sense of what they sounded like, whether they spoke quickly or slowly, fluently or haltingly. However, much of the Holocaust writing that is or could be translated consists not of transcribed interviews but, as discussed in the contributions to this book, of memoirs, autobiographies, fictionalized accounts or poems. In all these cases, the issue of voice is less concrete, but just as important. Hilda Schiff ’s 1995 anthology of Holocaust poetry, for example, says on its blurb that it includes ‘the voices of 59 poets’. Yet these poets are often translated from other languages such as Polish or Italian or German, into English, and in any case represent in their poems the voices of others, including a variety of narrators, poetic personae, characters and perspectives. Yet in translating poetry or fiction, other methods than a close literal rendering of the type used so effectively by Owings are called for, because literary writing contains not actual voices but poeticized voices. That is, the voices in novels, poems and other types of fictionalized Holocaust literature are subject to stylistic presentation which in part aims to represent the particular characteristics of the Holocaust experience – fragmentation, multilingualism, gaps and silences – and in part the traumatized state of mind of all those survivors who suffered in the Holocaust, an aspect easily neglected in

16

Translating Holocaust Lives

a simplified picture of ‘Holocaust writing’, as de Vooght points out in Chapter 5. This state of mind, as reflected in fictional and poetic writing, gives rise to what can be called a post-Holocaust mind-style (Boase-Beier 2015: 77). The task of the translator of such writing is to understand the poetics that drove the writing of the text and attempt to translate in such a way that the reader’s engagement with the new text is possible. In discussing the translation of voice and style we must consider the multilingual nature of the source texts. It has been remarked many times that the Holocaust events were marked by multilingualism, arising from the situation in Europe prior to the Nazi period (see Rosen 2013: 8–9), and also from the Nazis’ response, which perceived people who had little or no cultural or linguistic heritage in common as a homogenous group, since they all possessed the characteristic of appearing to threaten the Nazi ideal of a unified, healthy, unequivocally Germanic race, devoid of individuality or individual thought. But what is less often discussed is that this particularly multilingual situation gives rise to writing which often combines words from different languages and thus causes particular challenges for the translator, since to unify it in a target language would not only be to lose its qualities of poetic foregrounding and difference, but would also ignore what Levinas (2006) distinguished as the importance of the Saying over the Said. That is, we can only bear witness by paying attention to the act of Saying, since that is when we realize there is a speaker, and, in Levinas’ philosophy, as in that of Buber (1923), it is the imperative to connect with another that marks out a human being as individual (cf. Glowacka 2012: 94; Levinas 2006: 29–36). Levinas argues that an ethical notion of subjectivity arises when we put ourselves in the place of someone else, by listening, a similar notion to that which pervades Benjamin’s work on translation: it is the ability to communicate and to be communicated that makes the translatability of a text into a parallel for what Benjamin regards as the essence of language, that which gives us a glimpse of the possibility of restoration. This brings us back to the question with which Peter Davies opens Chapter 2, on the ethics of translating Holocaust testimony, and which lies at the heart of the various ethical conflicts we have mentioned in this Introduction. Davies asks: does it matter that Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies proceed from different assumptions about fidelity and the ethics of fidelity? In this Introduction we have been arguing that these different assumptions arise from different views of transparency, of the creative nature of translation, of the aesthetic as an ethical concern for the engagement of the reader and of the ethical imperative to be

Introduction

17

translated and communicated that inhabits all utterances and texts, and especially those that communicate acts of testimony, whether understood in a broad or a narrower sense. One of the conclusions Davies comes to in his chapter is that, however different these assumptions might be, they can find common ground in a concern with not dehumanizing the translator, or ignoring the importance of the translator’s agency and responsibility. In common with all the authors and respondents who have contributed to this book, what Davies is arguing for in his chapter, and what we are arguing for here, is increased dialogue between Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies. One common concern in both areas, as studies that view translation as a form of witnessing (such as Deane-Cox 2013; Glowacka 2012) suggest, is the importance of communication, because it is through communication that events, emotions and ways of seeing the world can be understood by others. And  it is through striving for an understanding of how we communicate (whether by the translator, the historian or the critic) that the concerns of others are most obviously brought to mind. This book sees itself as part of that search for understanding, undertaken from the perspective of Translation Studies, and we hope it will promote an awareness of and openness to the concerns of Holocaust Studies and what they mean for our discipline. At the same time, it is to be hoped that, by setting out some of our own concerns, we will be able to enrich Holocaust Studies with an understanding of the importance of the translator as author of the translated work, of the context of translation, of the creative nature of the task of translation and of the link between aesthetics and the reader’s engagement with the text, since all these factors are elements of that act of communication upon which Holocaust writing depends.

References Alexander, Z. (2007), ‘Primo Levi and Translation’, in R. S. C. Gordon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–70. Adorno, T.W. (2003), Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bachmann, M. (2010), Der abwesende Zeuge: Autorisierungsstrategien in Darstellungen der Shoah, Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag. Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (1990), Translation, History and Culture, London: Pinter. Benjamin, W. (1973), ‘The Task of the Translator’, in H. Arendt (ed.), trans. H. Zohn, Illuminations, London: Fontana, pp. 69–82.

18

Translating Holocaust Lives

Boase-Beier, J. (2004), ‘Knowing and Not Knowing: Style, Intention and the Translation of a Holocaust Poem’, Language and Literature 13(1): 25–35. Boase-Beier, J. (2005), ‘Bringing Together Science and Poetry: Translating the Bystander in German Poetry after the Holocaust’, Comparative Critical Studies 2(1): 93–105. Boase-Beier, J. (2006), Stylistic Approaches to Translation, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Boase-Beier, J. (2011), A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, London: Continuum. Boase-Beier, J. (2015), Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust: Translation, Style and the Reader, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Buber, M. (1923), Ich und Du, Berlin: Schocken. Carrington, L. (1988), Down Below, in M. Warner (ed.), The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, New York: E. P Dutton, pp. 163–216. Christ. M. (2014), Soziologie und Nationalsozialismus: Positionen, Debatten, Perspektiven, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Celan, P. (1968), Ausgewählte Gedichte; Zwei Reden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Davies, P. (2004), Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two, London: Pearson Longman. Davies, P. J. (2008), ‘The Obligatory Horrors: Translating Tadeusz Borowski’s Holocaust Narratives into German and English’, Holocaust Studies 14(2): 23–40. Davies, P. J. (2014a), ‘“In the Land of the Perpetrators”: Krystyna Żywulska’s Holocaust Memoir and Her Migration from Poland to West Germany’, in L. Aiello (ed.), Displaced Women: Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 117–32. Davies, P. J. (2014b), ‘Translation and Holocaust Testimonies: A Matter for Holocaust Studies or Translation Studies?’, in J. Boase-Beier and A. Fawcett (eds), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 204–18. Deane-Cox, S. (2013), ‘The Translator as Secondary Witness: Mediating Memory in Antelme’s L'Espèce humaine’, Translation Studies 6(3): 309–23. Deane-Cox, S. (2014), ‘Remembering Oradour-sur-Glane: Collective Memory in Translation’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 272–83. Degen, B. (2014), Bethel in der NS-Zeit: Die verschwiegene Geschichte, Bad Homburg: Verlag für Akademische Schriften. Eaglestone, R. (2004), The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felstiner, J. (1992), ‘Translating Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Rhythm and Repetition as Metaphor’, in S. Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 240–54. Finch, H. (2015), ‘Holocaust Translation, Communication and Witness in the Work of H. G. Adler’, German Life and Letters 68(3): 427–43. Folkvord, I. (2014), ‘Acts of Translation: Ruth Maier’s Testimony and Its Reception’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 244–56.

Introduction

19

Frank, A. (1947), Het Achterhuis, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Fulbrook, M. (2012), A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garvin, P. (trans.) (ed.) (1964), A Prague School Reader in Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, Washington: Georgetown University Press. Glowacka, D. (2012), Disappearing Traces : Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Hammel, A. (2004), ‘The Destabilisation of Personal Histories: Rewriting and Translating Autobiographical Texts by German-Jewish Survivors’, Comparative Critical Studies 1(3): 295–308. Hatim, B. and Mason, I. (1990), Discourse and the Translator, Harlow, Essex: Longman. Hatim, B. and Mason, I. (1997), The Translator as Communicator, London, New York: Routledge. Ibsch, E. (2004), Die Shoah erzählt: Zeugnis und Experiment in der Literatur, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Iser, W. (1974), The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jones, F.R. (2011), Poetry Translating as Expert Action, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kershaw, A. (2010), ‘Sociology of Literature, Sociology of Translation: The Reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française in France and Britain’, Translation Studies 3(1): 1–16. Kershaw, A. (2014), ‘Intertextuality and Translation in Three Recent French Holocaust Novels’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 185–96. Kershaw, A. and Saldanha, G. (2013), ‘Introduction: Global Landscapes of Translation’, in A. Kershaw and G. Saldanha (eds), Translation in Globalized Literary Landscapes, special issue of Translation Studies 6(2): 135–49. Kuhiwczak, P. (2002), ‘Buried in Translation’, The Cambridge Quarterly 31(3): 199–211. Langer, L. (1995), Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, New York: Oxford University Press. Levi, P. (2003), ‘On Translating and Being Translated’, Los Angeles Times, 30 March 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/30/books/bk-levi30 (accessed 27 July 2015). Levinas, E. (2006), Humanism of the Other, trans. N. Poller, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Malmkjær, K. (2004), ‘Translational Stylistics: Dulcken’s Translations of H. C. Andersen’, Language and Literature 7(3): 298–309. Michaelis, A. (2013), Erzählräume nach Auschwitz: Literarische und videographierte Zeugnisse von Überlebenden der Shoah, WeltLiteraturen; World Literatures, II, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Mitchell, M. (trans.) (2007), Katrin Himmler: The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History, London: Macmillan. Mooyaart-Doubleday, B. (trans.) (1952), A. Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Garden City : Doubleday.

20

Translating Holocaust Lives

Müller, B. (2012), ‘Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC’s Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies’, History and Memory 24(2): 157–95. Müller, B. (2013), ‘The 1945 Bytom Notebook: Searching for the Lost Voices of Child Holocaust Survivors’, in B. Cohen and B. Müller (eds), Freilegungen: Überlebende – Erinnerungen – Transformationen, Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 122–37. Müller, B. (2014), ‘Translating Trauma: David Boder’s 1946 Interviews with Holocaust Survivors’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 257–71. Nord, C. (1997), Translating as a Purposeful Activity, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Oatley, K. (2011), Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Owings, A. (1993), Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Peer, W. van (1986), Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding, London: Croom Helm. Perteghella, M. and Loffredo, E. (eds) (2006), Translation and Creativity: Perspectives in Creative Writing and Translation Studies, London and New York: Continuum. Pym, A. (1998), Method in Translating History, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pym, A. (2012), On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation Between Cultures, trans. H. Walker, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reiß, K. (1989), ‘Text-types, Translation Types and Translation Assessment’, in A. Chesterman (trans.) (ed.), Readings in Translation Theory, Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab, pp. 105–15. Rosen, A. (2005), Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Rosen, A. (2010), The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, A. (ed.) (2013), Literature of the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowland, A. (2005), Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rowland, A. (2014), Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems, London: Routledge. Rzepa, J. (2010), ‘Literatura Polska w Przekładzie na Język Angielski 1999–2009’, Przekładaniec 24(2): 345. Saldanha, G. (2011), ‘Translator Style: Methodological Considerations’, The Translator 17(1): 25–50. Schiff, H. (ed.) (1995), Holocaust Poetry, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Schleiermacher, F. (1992), ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. W. Bartscht, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 36–54.

Introduction

21

St. André J. (ed.) (2010), Thinking through Translation with Metaphors, Manchester: St Jerome. Schroth, S. (2014), ‘Translating Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis’, Translation and Literature 23: 235–43. Scott, C. (2012), Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, N. (1996), ‘Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage’, Jewish Social Studies 3(1): 1–19. Semprun, J. (1997), Literature or Life, trans. L. Coverdale. New York: Viking. Steiner, G. (1998), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (3rd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stockwell, P. (2013), ‘The Positioned Reader’, Language and Literature 22(3): 263–77. Timms, E. (2014), ‘Combustion or Incineration? Notes on English Translations of Holocaust-Related Writings by W. G. Sebald’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 210–21. Törne, V., von (1981), Im Lande Vogelfrei, Berlin: Wagenbach. Tymoczko, M. (1999), Translation in a Postcolonial Context, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Venuti, L. (2008), The Translator’s Invisibility (2nd edn), London: Routledge. Vermeer, H. J. (2004), ‘Skopos and Commission in Translational Action’, in L. Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader (2nd edn), London: Routledge, pp. 227–38. Vice, S. (2014), ‘Translating the Self: False Holocaust Testimony’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 197–209. Ward, S. (2014), ‘Translating Testimony: Jakob Littner’s Typescript and the Versions of Wolfgang Koeppen and Kurt Nathan Grübler’, Edinburgh German Yearbook 8: 235–51. Weigel, S. (2000), ‘Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage: Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von “Identity Politics”, Juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs’, in R. Zill (ed.), Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 111–35. Winters, M. (2009), ‘Modal Particles Explained. How Modal Particles Creep into Translations and Reveal Translators’ Styles’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 21(1): 74–97. Winters, M. (2010), ‘From Modal Particles to Point of View: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Translator Attitude’, Translation and Interpreting Studies 5(2): 163–85. Winters, M. (2013), ‘German Modal Particles – From Lice in the Fur of Our Language to Manifestations of Translators’ Styles’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 21(3): 427–45. Wolf, M. and Fukari, A. (2007), Constructing a Sociology of Translation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives Peter Davies

You get a commission, do your best within the limited time available, hand it in, and then you are accused of having betrayed a whole people … –overheard at a conference on translating Holocaust writing

Introduction At first glance, it might seem relatively straightforward to locate common ground between two fields of enquiry that work productively with significant ethical questions of fidelity or loyalty. However, when one starts to engage with the slipperiness of these terms, it becomes clear that the traditions of thinking about ethics in Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies often proceed from very different assumptions, even if the language they use is similar. Does this matter? After all, two different disciplines may well approach their objects of study in quite different ways, and the different approaches may simply provide contrasting perspectives on the same question. It matters because claims to ethical standards lie at the heart of both disciplines’ self-understanding; neither has shown any real willingness to reinvent itself as a purely descriptive discipline. Scholars of Holocaust testimony are concerned with questions of respectfulness towards the person and experiences of the victim-witness, and with sensitivity to how such experiences may be expressed – or not expressed – in language, as well as with the broader political aims of achieving justice, preventing repetition of the genocide, working against Holocaust denial and ensuring that the voices of victims take centre stage in interpretation and commemoration of the Holocaust. Translation Studies has moved from a concern with ‘fidelity’ and linguistic equivalence – which are both, at root, ethical positions concerned with the authority and authenticity of the original text – to a much more complex

24

Translating Holocaust Lives

series of concerns, in which the agency and responsibility of the translator are foregrounded: care for the original text and its author are counterbalanced by care for the status of the translator and for the potential effects of a translated text in the target culture. Of course, the translator of a Holocaust testimony will be working with a sense of ethical imperative, though what this means in practice may vary, depending on the nature and purpose of the task. But a translator may read the text differently to the Holocaust scholar, and have a different sense of what works or is necessary or appropriate in the target language and culture. The key clash here is between two contrasting approaches. The first places value on the voice of the victim above all other possible factors, that often thinks of translation in terms of loss and distance, and that tends to work either with a philosophical ethics drawn from thinkers such as Levinas (1993) or with an ethics of engaged listening drawn from accounts of the therapeutic encounter, such as one finds in the work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, or Dominic LaCapra (Felman and Laub 1992; LaCapra 1994). The second, however, understands translation as taking place within a network of influences, constraints and obligations towards many different parties, that sees the translator as a creative and engaged agent, draws attention to cultural context and difference, and that does not consider translated texts to be inferior versions of an original. Both Holocaust Studies and Translation Studies have, in their own ways, engaged with postmodern critiques of normative or universalizing ethics. Levinas’s work has provided inspiration for much of the discussion in Holocaust Studies, despite critiques by left-wing thinkers for its neglect of the political specificity of the communication situation (Eagleton 2009: 227). Levinas’s work offers a congenial set of ideas for thinking about Holocaust testimony, as they place the ethical burden clearly on the reciprocal responsibility of an individual for the ‘Other’ in a relationship of obligation: ‘the face-to-face, concrete encounter with a unique human being for whom I am personally and inescapably responsible’ (Shankman 2010: 15). The encounter involves the radical questioning of one’s own position and ego in the face of the Other, the ‘laying down by the ego of its sovereignty’ (Levinas 1989: 85). Such a philosophical position provides a persuasive model for the necessary attitude when faced with a Holocaust testimony, though when discussing written testimony, it tends to downplay the complexity of the activities of writing and reading; imagining reading as an encounter with the Other can be used to short circuit the issue of the textual mediation of testimony. This tendency to wish

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

25

away the fact of textuality with all it entails has consequences for how we judge translation, as I will show. The discussion of testimony in Holocaust Studies provides a good example of how critiques of ethical norms can themselves make universalising claims: attempts to define Holocaust testimonies as texts that possess particular unique features requiring radical openness on the part of the reader in the encounter with the witness actually conceal instructions to the readers about how they are to be read (see e.g. Eaglestone 2004). If a translation is required to emphasize particular features of a text under the influence of a theory of Holocaust witnessing, are we not also dealing with a normative ethics that elides differences between texts and the witnesses who produce them, ignores cultural difference and the needs of the target readership and does not acknowledge the concreteness of the translation situation, the author status of the translator and the translator’s conditions of labour? Nevertheless, it cannot be sufficient to propose for Holocaust testimony a purely situational ethics, as does Anthony Pym for translation more generally: for Pym, ethics is not about applying a universal ethics to a particular group, but ‘sketching a regional (i.e. non-universal) ethics, intended only for a particular set of social activities, and thus self-consciously unable to make grand pronouncements on any wider humanity’ (Pym 2012: 4). However, a sense of the cultural centrality of the Holocaust – its status as the defining event of a self-critical Western commitment to values of openness and tolerance – has meant that universal ethical questions are rightly at the centre of all discussion of Holocaust testimony, its reading and translation. A particular issue for translation is the fact that the act of composing a testimony has come to be seen as an ethical act in its own right, over and above any particular documentary value or knowledge that may be gained from the testimony: there is always a Bedeutungsüberschuss (excess of meaning) (Weigel 2000: 123) over and above the epistemological categories we use to ask questions of a text. The value of a text is in the individual nuance, and in the way it bears witness to the possibility or impossibility of articulating experience in language. Scholars have begun to grapple with the consequences for translation of this view of testimony, with much of the work attempting to apply concepts from Holocaust Studies – such as ‘witnessing’ – to the study of translation (e.g. Glowacka 2012). Work such as Glowacka’s is very useful, but it does not always coincide with the concerns and theoretical positions of Translation Studies. I would suggest that this has a range of potential consequences: it can matter

26

Translating Holocaust Lives

for the way in which texts are translated and read; for how the history of the translation of testimonies is interpreted; and for how translations, and thus translators, are judged critically by those who have had their work translated as well as by scholars. When the ethical concerns of Holocaust Studies scholars are applied to the study of translations, the results can sometimes be unsatisfying: particular demands are made of translators – to be engaged in a committed way with the witness while never appropriating the witness’s voice, to respect the authenticity of the witness’s relation of their experiences, to be explicit about the translation strategies employed – that may clash with other realities of the translation situation, for example, the time and money available, the requirements of a publisher or target readership (e.g. for ‘readability’) or the translator’s expert understanding of target culture conditions. Spending time as a translator in intense conversation and exchange with a witness, as well as engaging with the history of scholarship about Holocaust testimony and witnessing, is perhaps an ideal situation, but it is a far cry from the reality for most professional translators. This, then, is a further area of concern: the critique of translators and translations by scholars who are acting in the name of loyalty to the witness, but who may not feel an ethical concern for the conditions under which translators work, instead underestimating the extent to which the stability, security and time to devote to a project are dependent on a privileged institutional context – a case of mistaking the opportunities of privilege for standards of moral action (what Anthony Pym (2012: 3) calls ‘ethics for translators with alternative means of support’)? Pym here usefully contrasts professional ethics with philosophical ethics, in a way that is of relevance to discussion of the translation of Holocaust testimonies. Most discussion of testimony and translation proceeds from the most significant philosophical discussions of the issue, taking as its starting point the work of Walter Benjamin (1973), George Steiner (1998) or Levinas or Primo Levi’s thoughts on translation (Alexander 2007): here, concern for the preciousness of the voice of the witness is combined with a theory of untranslatability, and accompanied either by a melancholy awareness of the losses entailed by translation or accusations of deliberate distortion. In these cases, ‘loss’ in translation can be compared to the loss of the witness him- or herself, and is an object of mourning. Distorted translations that make too many concessions to the target readership can be read as examples of the assimilation

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

27

of victim cultures to the requirements of the non-victim majority culture, and of the effacement of difference (Seidman 1996). Such discussion inevitably – and perhaps deliberately – ignores certain fundamental issues connected with translation as a professional activity: the insights of philosophical ethics work with a rather hazy conception of context and agency, and do not consider questions of professional ethics, standards and values, agreed codes of conduct, commercial considerations and career opportunities. One might argue, with some justice, that the questions raised by ethical enquiries into Holocaust testimonies are important enough that some pragmatic issues may need to be set aside, but the method of comparing source and target text, interpreting certain aspects of the difference and attributing the difference to a translator-figure may miss parts of the process that are ethically relevant. Pym puts it like this: ‘If you describe translation as a linguistic process revealed by the abstract comparison of two texts, translators become the product of that comparison, like anonymous but necessary agents’ (Pym 2012: 135). The  ‘translator’ thus becomes a composite figure eliding all the other agents at work in the translation process; the critic assumes a form of ethical agency that can be interpreted ideologically and simply, in terms of labels like ‘distortion’ or in terms of theories drawn from Holocaust Studies. What this means is that the ‘translator’ of a Holocaust text is the point of interface and exchange between critical disciplines, an abstract mediating figure that allows for concepts to be exchanged, but has little to do with the realities of the translation situation, the translator’s role or with the concrete individual or individuals at work on the text. To sum up, one can say that the translator of a Holocaust testimony is working in a field of tension between philosophical ethics and professional ethics; between ethical considerations arising from the encounter between thinking about the Holocaust and postmodernism, and an ethics that sees translators as agents working in concrete sociological conditions, requiring a clear commission and non-exploitative working conditions; between an emphasis on the encounter with otherness, trauma or incomprehensibility and an understanding of translation as a mode of interpretive reading for a specific purpose; between a rejection of totalizing interpretations and a concrete process of analysis and choice in which professional ethics requires target-cultural expertise; between a demand for fidelity to the witness text and an informed understanding of how problematic such a notion is.

28

Translating Holocaust Lives

Situational or universal? Even if we restrict our considerations to the translation of written testimonies (which may only represent a fraction of the translation activity that has shaped, and is continuing to shape, our understanding of the Holocaust), it becomes clear that the sheer variety of texts and translation situations makes it very difficult to generalize about what one should expect of the translator and how one should judge their work. How, for example, could we find common ground between the following fairly well known examples? 1.

2.

3.

As the Soviet Army advanced, retaking the territory it had lost during the German invasion, the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, along with many others, collected testimonies from Soviet Jewish survivors with the aim of publishing them as The Black Book of Soviet Jewry; working at great speed, and facing real uncertainty as to whether the Soviet authorities would actually permit publication, testimonies that were given in Yiddish or Ukrainian were translated into Russian, ensuring that the text appears to reflect a monolingual situation. In 1958, Elie Wiesel, along with the editor of the French publishing house Éditions de Minuit, Jérôme Lindon, produced a radically rewritten French translation of Wiesel’s Yiddish memoir, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed Silent), entitled La Nuit (The Night) (Wiesel 1956, 1958). The text, which forms the basis of all further translations, presents a testimony in a startlingly stark style, which has exerted a key influence on definitions of testimony since (far more than the very extensive Yiddish memoir literature that the text originated in). The text was now available to a larger, non-Yiddish-speaking audience in a world language, but it also takes a generalizing view of the original’s context, which was rooted in a specifically Hassidic cultural, religious and linguistic context. The text is brought nearer to the reader through compromises with French understandings of Jewish religion, rather than the reader being encouraged to step outside his or her own sphere of experience in engaging with the text. The first German edition of the diary of Anne Frank (1950), translated by Anneliese Schütz, has been criticized for particular compromises with its target audience by making substitutions that diluted the text’s accusatory tone; for example, substituting the word ‘Nazi’ where Frank had ‘German’, and various other things (see Schroth 2014).

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

29

These three cases show texts by Jewish victims being translated into international languages for the sake of a new, largely non-Jewish readership: do they all simply entail betrayal on the part of the translator, or assimilation to an ethics that makes a claim to universality while effacing the specificity of the victim? Or might a closer analysis of the specific situation lead us to understand the necessity for the translation strategies at that moment? Is comparing the original text with the translation really the only useful way of approaching the ethical questions raised by these texts? What about translations that excerpt or fragment texts and fillet them for information, as historians and other scholars constantly do, putting them to use in a very different context and for a different purpose to that for which the testimonies were originally given? The scandalized allegations of tendentious translation made against Daniel Jonah Goldhagen for his Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen 1996) show both that this is potentially a problem and that we do not have enough knowledge to make judgements about it beyond flinging accusations (see the discussion in Ball 2008: 19–44). Does breaking down a testimony text into quotation-length chunks, whether translated or not, not also falsify it in important ways? There are very many testimonies that go on long and complex journeys through translation and remediation, during which they lose all connection with their original language and context: the name of the witness, usually in the absence of the name of the translator(s), functions as a shortcut back to the original, allowing us to assume that the layers of mediation are irrelevant. Are these examples all inadmissible, or are they potentially understandable and acceptable given the context, the pressures on the translator and the purpose for which the translation was made? If the translations show a professional awareness of the target context, for example, by taking account of genre expectations, has the original been distorted and the witness betrayed? What happens if the translator notices different things in the text (such as narrative strategies or systems of metaphor) to the scholar of Holocaust writing? Is the only ethically acceptable mode of analysis one that proceeds from current thinking in Holocaust Studies? What criteria do we actually have for differentiating between these cases, beyond simple – and theoretically naïve – comparisons of original and translation that construct a ‘translator’ as scapegoat for a multitude of sins? A purely situational ethics with a sound understanding of cultural context and difference would seem to be the clearest way forward, but that would mean abandoning many of the fundamental precepts of our thinking about the Holocaust, the witnesses and the texts that they have produced. One

30

Translating Holocaust Lives

cannot simply break the Holocaust down into situation-dependent fragments and individual moments of cultural exchange. After all, was the concept of the Holocaust as a universal, culture-spanning event not developed precisely because the tendency to concentrate on individual national or group memories actually plays down the enormity of the genocide and effaces the experiences of the victims? The universal concept of the Holocaust has allowed us to see it not just as an assault on Poland, France or the USSR, or as an appalling escalation of ‘war crimes’, but as something new, as an assault on the Jews as Jews and as a universal negation of supposedly universal values. Abandoning this for a purely situational ethics might threaten the very universal ethical significance of the events themselves. We are, therefore, left with a dilemma. But I would propose treating it as an opportunity for thought, rather than as an aporia. I would propose that critical engagement with ethical questions should consider three distinct areas of investigation: comparative analysis of source and target text in a way that considers critically what it might mean to translate a Holocaust testimony in an ethical manner in a concrete situation; the concrete sociological analysis of the translation situation and the agents involved; and an understanding of how the ‘translator’ and ‘translation’ are interpreted and constructed in theory. In  this way, one can avoid unsatisfying critiques of ‘distortion’ in favour of a more complex view of the translation process and the agents involved; and one can engage with the question of what it means for Translation Studies concepts to be used uncritically in Holocaust Studies, and vice versa.

Uniqueness and translation One should perhaps start with a straight question: assuming that we accept the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, must we also accept the uniqueness of Holocaust testimonies as texts? Are Holocaust testimonies so special as texts that a good, professional translation job is not sufficient? Does the translator’s very professionalism, based on training, experience and expert knowledge, perhaps also entail an undesirable distancing, noncommittal ‘objectivity’ or even déformation professionelle, that is, treating the text – and thus, by extension, the witness and his or her experience – as an object of study or just another job? If, as a postmodern ethics might suggest, treating a text as an object upon which actions are carried out simply perpetuates a subject-object split that defines the object in such a way that it serves the needs of the subject, then

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

31

the translator fails in his or her ethical duty: there is no radical openness, no risk to the security of the subject in the face of the other and no genuine sense of encounter. It also shows no awareness of potential power imbalances in the translation situation, in which the victim can be victimized again by having his or her voice ventriloquized by another. This position relies on a set of assumptions, however, that often remain unspoken. For example, it assumes that reading a text by a witness is an activity comparable to experiencing direct oral testimony. A sense of ethical responsibility should perhaps urge us to treat an autobiographical text by a survivor as in some way a proxy for that individual, but the downgrading of the significance of text and reading, making them a poor substitute for voice and listening, is potentially problematic. If writing a text as a witness – that is composing or collaborating on the composition of a complex written artefact in a particular context, for a particular audience and under particular conditions – is not seen as an activity in its own right, but as one that stands in for a more valuable activity – giving oral testimony – then the translator’s job becomes difficult. The translator is not simply translating the text in front of him or her according to the commission, but is also mediating an encounter with the witness: if the text is transformed into an object that is more than simply a text, then the translator becomes more than a translator, too. Demands may be made of the translator that he or she work according to a set of ethical procedures that include ensuring that translation strategies are clear and that the voice and positioning of the translator are always explicit: in other words that the translator does not ventriloquize the witness in such a way that the reader may mistake the translator’s voice for the witness’s. Through an encounter with a witness text, the translator becomes him- or herself a ‘secondary witness’, in the formulation of Felman and Laub (1992: 15), with a responsibility to ensure that a translated text is the site of an act of witnessing. Such an ethical demand is useful and has produced some valuable scholarly work, as well as a range of striking translations that attempt to take this kind of ethical stance (Deane-Cox 2013; Degen 2008). Nevertheless, there are a number of hidden assumptions that make such demands problematic. For example, it assumes that translating a written text – a complex, mediated textual artefact in which certain linguistic, structural, narrative, interpretative and representational choices have already been made – is a similar process to eliciting an oral testimony from a witness in an intimate situation. The notion that a written text allows the witness opportunities for reflection, mediation,

32

Translating Holocaust Lives

distancing, complexity, narrative shaping, prioritizing, symbolism, analysis of self and situation and deliberate choice without pressure of time or questioning – in other words, that a written text is a different mode of testimony of equal value, rather than a poor substitute for oral testimony in the presence of the witness – is downplayed here. Further, if I am reading a testimony text, I am not enabling an ‘act of witnessing’: however engaging, moving, challenging, horrifying I find the text, what I am doing is reading about an act of witnessing that has already taken place, not participating in it. This creates a particularly difficult situation for the translator: what, actually, is he or she translating? Sharon Deane-Cox (2013) has proposed a way forward. Although she suggests that translators are ‘secondary witnesses’ in the sense described by Felman and Laub (1992), she is careful to acknowledge the textuality of a written testimony, in this case, Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (1957) (The Human Race), asking that the translators respect the choices made by writers, listen to their voices and render their illocutionary intentions as closely as possible: [T]he translator must resist the displacement (or misplacement) of what the survivor knows and cannot know into his or her own epistemological frames, in order to avoid betraying the illocutionary force and instability of the original testimony on the one hand and to allow the reader some access to destabilizing effects of trauma on the other. (Deane-Cox 2013: 315)

One can argue, as Deane-Cox does, for a reading that is ethically inflected from the start, as an appropriate response to a Holocaust testimony, and which therefore prioritizes particular strategic choices at the expense of others: in this case, conveying the ‘destabilizing effects of trauma’. This is compelling, but we should be open to the possibility that the translator’s reading may simply be different to the scholar’s, perhaps for bad reasons, but perhaps also for very good and necessary ones. We should also remember that the claim to locate ‘trauma’ in a testimony is not like the process of medical diagnosis of an individual, but is ultimately a mode of literary analysis that is informed by a set of current (and not universally accepted) theories and tools that borrow their language from psychiatry, and that therefore itself displaces aspects of the survivor’s text into a new epistemological frame. To put it bluntly, there is a risk of employing a contemporary epistemological framework and its associated reading strategies in order to seek and find trauma in a text whose author may have had very different priorities. Nevertheless, and despite these caveats, to dismiss the ethical force of the role of the translator as a mediator of an act of witnessing, as set out by

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

33

Deane-Cox, would be to dismiss a vital and productive tradition of thinking about Holocaust testimonies that has important challenges for Translation Studies scholars. A sense of the uniqueness of the situation when translating a Holocaust testimony, and therefore of the task of the translator, explains why prefaces and commentaries so often emphasize translators’ commitment, personal closeness to the witness or emotional involvement: the translator’s professionalism is equated with a distant, non-committed attitude or even simple commercial motivation. But could one not equally argue that a good, professional translation done by an expert with no immediate connection with the witness might be fairer to the text in an all-round way than one done by a close acquaintance? An interesting recent example is the retranslation into English of Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit (Wiesel 1958) by his wife Marion Wiesel (Wiesel 2006). The new text is advertised as being translated ‘in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent’,1 and the new foreword by Elie Wiesel explains that the new translation is an improvement on the older one as his wife understands his ‘voice’ better (Wiesel 2006: vii–xv). Certainly, the collaboration between the two has made for a fascinating new text, which restores some of the language of Jewish mysticism that had been lost in the French translation of Wiesel’s  original Yiddish memoir (Wiesel 1956), but if one asks which translation is more ‘faithful’ to La Nuit then things become more complicated. Comparing the two English translations, one finds that the earlier translation, by Stella Rodway (Rodway 1960), remains closer in style, vocabulary and syntax to the  French text, while Marion Wiesel’s is in many respects a fresh narration, making claim  to authenticity through personal connection and listening to the voice. Which, then, is more ‘faithful’? There are interesting questions to ask here about whether it is possible to reconstruct an original ‘intent’ some fifty years later, or whether the new translation might not instead be a response to more contemporary concerns (e.g. the emphasis on the witness’s ‘voice’ above all else). Creating a new original authorized by Wiesel himself is a different procedure from translating the text in order to give the English-speaking reader an impression of its considerable literary qualities. Both are entirely legitimate responses, but to suggest that the former is better than the latter on the basis of the closeness of the translator to the author demonstrates an unwillingness to engage with the specifics of the translation situations and the different aims of the translators and translation, not to mention changing conceptions of Holocaust testimony and appropriate ways of reading it.

34

Translating Holocaust Lives

One is left with a number of questions. Is the ‘intention’ of the witness – assuming that we can reconstruct it at all – more important than the actual text that forms the basis of the translation? What do we do with a poorly written text (after all, for many witnesses this may be the only published text that they ever produce, and most of the theory scholars draw on has been developed in readings of texts with a high degree of literary sophistication)? Does the translation intend to provide a new audience with an impression of the original, or to introduce them to the witness? And to what extent can the translator (or publisher) take an expert view of the reception context of the translation, and formulate the text accordingly?

The location of the translator If standard approaches to defining an ethics of translating Holocaust testimonies leave the translator in an impossible position, then it seems to me that we need to find new ways of understanding what translators do and why in undertaking this important work. An ethics that demands the impossible may be attractive for a discussion of the Holocaust that stresses the incommensurability of the Holocaust with modes of representation in language, but it leaves us with little practical or critical understanding of the translator’s role and task. Such an ethics also makes it difficult to acknowledge the manifold achievements of translators in creating, disseminating, preserving and passing on knowledge about the Holocaust over many years and in many different cultural and political contexts. In my view, any discussion of translation in a Holocaust context that aims to make any universally valid claim needs to acknowledge this achievement and appreciate its consequences, which go much deeper than the rather limited arguments over fidelity to the witness’s voice might suggest. What a translator does, or does not do, is always grounded in a complex, but concrete situation. Translation analysis can attempt to reconstruct this situation using sociological models (see Kershaw 2010; Wolf and Fukari 2007), and one can then begin to make judgements about the conditions under which the translation was made and the options that were open: this is a precondition for making genuinely informed ethical judgements. Contemporary theoretical discourses about Holocaust representation may be part of the discursive background to the translation situation, and may be taken into account by one or more of the agents involved in the translation process; such discourses may or may not be the most

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

35

important influence on the translation situation. However, it may be that the situation in which the translation is interpreted (potentially at a later date and by a scholarly audience for whom it was not originally intended) is dominated by discussion of theories of Holocaust representation; this is natural enough, since texts are always interpreted in a new context, but an understanding of translation contexts can help to guard against judgements drawn from simple ST-TT (source text and translation) comparisons, and which construct an abstractly understood translator-figure operating in a realm of absolute liberty and responsibility. There is little work as yet on the study of translators of Holocaust testimony, as opposed to translations. We therefore have little information about who does it, why and under what conditions. Some generalizations are possible, however, based on readings of translators’ prefaces and other paratextual documents. A significant proportion of translation work has always been carried out within victim groups and through the generations of the families of survivors: the international spread and linguistic diversity of victim communities has meant that interlingual translation has from the very beginning been a vital means of communicating and comparing experiences, forming and challenging interpretations, building group identities and promoting knowledge and understanding amongst non-victims. Oral and written communications are both vital in this respect. One could therefore hypothesize that the majority of translation work has been done in private and informal contexts, under conditions that it is now difficult to reconstruct many years later: however, such translation activity is still very much a feature of survivor groups today, and there would be important work to do to investigate the translators’ selfunderstanding and conception of their task. A key borderline along which ethical conceptions are negotiated is that between victims and their representatives, and non-victims: this can occur in acts of testimony intended to inform the ‘world’ about the nature and extent of Nazi crimes, in legal testimony, in testimony texts intended for broad public consumption or for particular contexts (educational, commemorative, etc.). Historians and other scholars regularly translate victim texts that they are using to underscore particular points, thus putting the testimonies to use in a new context and for a new purpose. Translators may act differently, and experience very different working conditions, in these different cases: they may be amateur or professional, working for pay or on a voluntary basis, depending on the situation and on who has commissioned the translation. They may be established literary or historical translators who are commissioned to translate a testimony, translators located through an agency or translators specializing in Holocaust-

36

Translating Holocaust Lives

related work; they may or may not belong to the specific victim community themselves. There is usually an element of political or ethical commitment to their work, but even where they work on a voluntary basis without the need to earn a living through the work, various kinds of capital are likely to play a role: status within a group and/or raising the profile of a group, reinforcing (or challenging) group identities, recognition of expertise, acknowledgement of ethical commitment and so on. It remains to be investigated how distinct the motivations of professional and non-professional translators are, and how their motivations might affect the translations they do (if at all). Do these motivations clash with the wishes of publishers, commissioning bodies and the victims themselves? We can gain some information from prefaces and other commentaries – these are valuable as a source for understanding motivation, but they don’t tell the whole story, and they only help us in cases where the translator has sufficient status to be able to talk about the task. We should also be open to the possibility that discussion of motivation in paratexts or conversations with translators is in fact often only tenuously connected with the actual outcomes of translation, rendering ethical judgements complicated. If translators act as (often unacknowledged) mediators not only across linguistic cultures but also within victim groups and between such groups and broader readerships, then their work often only becomes genuinely visible when something goes wrong. Controversies about translation often arise at the sensitive borderline between victim groups and the broader societies in which they are located. This border is the site of difficult negotiations and conflicts around ethical problems: who has the right to interpret or to judge? What is the relationship between the testimony text and the victim whose experiences it documents: does it stand in for the victim, as well as being a text produced by the victim? What is testimony for, and what is one allowed to do with testimony texts? How is the truth of a text to be understood, and what is most important about it? Is the identity of a victim, in terms of their chosen mode of cultural self-expression, likely to be diluted or distorted when translated for the benefit of a new readership, and are the feelings connected with this related to the status of a particular minority in a particular society? The difficulty of these issues makes it all the more important to identify the precise location of the translator, to reconstruct the translation situation carefully and to identify the values that influence interpretations of, and reactions to, translations. Simply comparing source and target text and complaining about ‘distortion’ will not do, but neither should one dismiss fears about distortion

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

37

and misappropriation as simply naïve. After all, such fears originate in deeply held beliefs about identity and truth, anxieties about forgetting and the precariousness of victim group identities in modern societies, not to mention the intense emotional investment in texts by individuals who have suffered greatly. Nevertheless, our aim is, ultimately, to increase knowledge and understanding, and so we should not shy away from coherent and persuasive challenges, even when they are emotionally difficult. However, this means that as scholars we need to reflect on the ethical consequences of our own positions, as well as those of the translators.

The scholar’s loyalties If we are to discuss the translator’s ethics, then a further level of reflection is required, namely on the ethical concerns of the scholar discussing the translation of Holocaust testimony. This is an expanding field of study, with ethical questions at its core, but there may be certain blind spots that are worth considering, in particular as regards the scholar’s understanding of the status of the translator. Translation scholarship has a vital role to play in making visible the contribution of translators to our understanding of the Holocaust, while also working through the problems and issues that translation brings with it: making visible is still a key task of the translation scholar working in Holocaust Studies, even if the process of understanding can raise uncomfortable questions about authenticity, mediation and witnesses’ ownership of the expression of their experiences. If the translator is invisible, or uncredited (which still happens occasionally even now in publications of collections of testimonies: e.g. Lewis 2012), or the effects of translation are excluded from discussion of texts, then our role is clear. Beyond this, translation scholars tend also to work with a sense of ethical loyalty to the witnesses themselves: through careful reading of translations against originals, they guard against distortions and expose the interests and ideological motivations that affect how testimony texts are translated and read in translation. In other words, scholars can feel they are acting as guardians of the integrity of the witness text, and through that, of the witness him- or herself. They often make a case for particular modes of translation that involve political and ethical commitment, making explicit and explaining the translation strategy, and, where possible, spending extended periods of time with living witnesses

38

Translating Holocaust Lives

in order to ensure that the translation corresponds as closely as possible to the wishes and ‘voice’ of the witness in the new language. Other approaches to translation are, by implication, inferior or less respectful, with the translator adopting a posture that effaces the individuality of the witness and potentially puts the experience at the service of a particular agenda or purely commercial considerations. If, for example, a scholar criticizes a translation in terms of an ethical injunction against effacing or ventriloquizing the Other, then it is surely relevant to ask whether the critique itself constructs the ‘translator’ as an object of study that effaces the complexity and specificity of the situation, elides the translator with the various other agents and interests involved and functions simply as a focus for the discussion of theoretical questions. Further, a scholar’s view of the nature of the original text – which may be informed by theories drawn from Holocaust Studies, typically working with ideas of trauma, incommunicability or fragmentation – can only ever itself be a partial interpretation that is designed to support a particular theoretical position; the danger here is that the scholar constructs an interpretation of the original that serves to support the critique of the translation, rather than to deepen understanding of the text. We can ask, bluntly, what we should do if we discover that the translator – as a particular kind of reader, working with different assumptions and perhaps in a different time and/or place – has simply interpreted the text in a different way? I would suggest that, for the scholar, reconstructing that reading and the conditions under which it was made is a more enlightening exercise for studies of Holocaust testimony than simply assessing the translation against our own preferred theoretical approach to testimony. This issue is compounded by the fact that scholars are far more likely to take an interest in translations of a small and unrepresentative number of well known, complex, challenging and literary testimonies that reflect in a sophisticated way on questions of trauma, language and communication: as scholars trained in Holocaust Studies, we tend to assume the existence of ‘trauma’ in such texts, and to seek out examples that back up this belief. A translator whose reading of the text is different may attract our criticism. However, reading a text in terms of ‘trauma’ depends on an array of theoretical positions that reflect recent thinking about the Holocaust: constructing a view of the original based on such preoccupations in order to critique a translation may not be far away from what the translator is accused of doing. Ethical critiques of translation practice are often compelling and useful, but they do have blind spots, particularly when it comes to the social position and

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

39

working conditions of the translator, to the complexity of translation processes and to the variety of agents that are involved. They also tend not to engage with translators’ codes of professional ethics or the theory and practice of translation current in the place and time in which the translation was made. Instead, they prefer to work with the philosophical armoury of Holocaust Studies, which is held to have a universal relevance. Of course, ethical universals are vital for critiques of practice in context, and a thoroughgoing cultural relativism would be inappropriate for studies of the Holocaust, but an analysis of the translation of a testimony should at least attempt to reconstruct the understanding of translation, of the Holocaust and of the nature and purpose of witnessing that the translator and the other agents involved are working with. A possible response might be to say that the translator should not take on a translation of a testimony in a situation in which he or she does not have time to act as a ‘secondary witness’. This is of course always an option, if one has the economic resources to turn down work. But if we think for a moment about how impoverished our stock of translated testimonies would be if such a rule had held since 1945, then raising it to a general principle seems unhelpful. The exception to this is the process of working with a still living witness who wishes to engage with the translation process: here, the preciousness of the witness’s presence trumps everything, and time must be found. As scholars, we should be loyal to translators as well as to the witnesses. It is easy, and perhaps also flattering, to adopt the role of guardian of the original text, and thus of the witness, against ideological distortion and misappropriation. Of course, this is useful and important work, as scholarship must be about unconditional truth seeking or it is worthless but it must also turn its critique on itself and investigate whether its own concepts and methods do not also perhaps reflect the blind spots of its own privileges. The translator should not become a scapegoat, but should be understood as a concrete individual identifiable in a particular context and network of relations. I would therefore suggest that studies differentiate clearly between the translator as real-world individual and ‘translation’ as focus for theoretical discussion in which ideas about meaning, authenticity, witnessing, experience, trauma and cultural difference are negotiated. Until we know more about the conditions under which Holocaust testimonies have been, and still are, translated, one should endeavour to keep these fields of enquiry separate. Understanding the real-world translation situation and the translator’s role and conditions of agency within it will itself entail defining and reconstructing the situation using sociological models, and so is by no means a value-neutral or

40

Translating Holocaust Lives

theory-free ‘commonsense’ exercise. But since this work has yet to be done, we do not know what the outcomes will be.

Conclusion Ethical considerations are a fundamental part of the discussion of the creation and mediation of knowledge about the Holocaust – a claim to neutrality would in itself be ethically dubious – but we need also to be aware both of the limitations of our understanding and of the dangers of using analytical categories that are unable to deal with the complexity of translation in context. The term ‘translation’ is currently used in studies of Holocaust writing as an analogy for all manner of things beyond the rendering of an utterance from one language to another: it is used to refer to remediation, transfer between genres, movement of texts from one place to another (by analogy with the ‘translation’ of relics) and even the process of trying to render (or ‘translate’) experience into language. These processes are all of defining interest in the study of the Holocaust, but bringing them together under the label ‘translation’ has real consequences, in that it simplifies the study of interlingual translation as a field in itself, and marginalizes methods drawn from Translation Studies. This may arise from an insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, meaning that the ideas, theories and methods used to analyse testimony texts must also be unique: approaching testimonies from a purely Translation Studies perspective would imply comparability with other fields of investigation, and thus ultimately be seen to relativize the uniqueness of the Holocaust itself. These are issues that should be approached with care. We could perhaps begin by acknowledging that reading a testimony text for translation will, to a greater or lesser extent, involve reading it like any other text to be translated, for structure, narrative, cultural specificity, tone, register, underlying structures of metaphor, allusion and many other things. It is a reading directed towards a specific purpose, but it may well be a more comprehensive reading than an analysis that concentrates on the preoccupations of theories arising from Holocaust Studies. By implication, translation shows that testimony texts are comparable with other kinds of text: this may be one source of the anxiety about translation, and it is something that we should be circumspect about. Nevertheless, in order to understand how and why texts have been translated, and how this has contributed to our knowledge about the Holocaust and its

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

41

consequences, we need to acknowledge the complexity, specificity and autonomy of translation as a skilled practice, and to investigate who the translators have been and the conditions in which they have worked. Neither Translation Studies nor Holocaust Studies can be made into purely descriptive disciplines – there are ethical positions implicated in all description, after all – though description, contextualization and analysis are still important as we still do not know enough about what happens to Holocaust texts in translation to be able to make absolutely robust ethical judgements, let alone prescriptions. If the task of scholarship is to work on behalf of the witness and to ensure that we clear a space for the voice to be heard, then we should still proceed with care and avoid scapegoating translators. The spaces in which voices speak  – including our own – are never neutral or value-free, after all. A ‘principle of maximum awareness of ethical implications’ is a useful imperative for all involved in translating testimonies and reading these translations (Jones 2004: 725). But there are other tasks ahead, too, most importantly the necessity to make translation visible as a defining element in the production, mediation and interpretation of knowledge about the Holocaust. Alongside that, we need to understand the translators themselves, their motivations and methods and their understanding of their task, as well as the conditions under which they work. Finally, since the work of documenting the failures of translators has a fair headstart, a good step forward would be to begin documenting their achievements, too.

Notes 1 See http://images.macmillan.com/folio-assets/readers-guides/9780374500016RG.pdf (accessed 12 March 2015).

References Alexander, Z. (2007), ‘Primo Levi and Translation’, in R.S.C. Gordon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–70. Antelme, R. (1957), L‘Espèce humaine, Paris: Gallimard. Ball, K. (2008), Disciplining the Holocaust, Albany : SUNY Press. Benjamin, W. (1973), ‘The Task of the Translator’, in H. Arendt (ed.) and H. Zohn (trans.), Illuminations, London: Fontana, pp. 69–82.

42

Translating Holocaust Lives

Deane-Cox, S. (2013), ‘The Translator as Secondary Witness: Mediating Memory in Antelme’s L’espèce humaine’, Translation Studies 6: 309–23. Degen, S.C. (2008), Das Problem der Perspektive: Die Übersetzung von ShoahÜberlebendenberichten ins Deutsche. Am Beispiel von Diana Wangs ‘Los Niños Escondidos – Del Holocausto a Buenos Aires’, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Eaglestone, R. (2004), The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, T. (2009), Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics, Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Glowacka, D. (2012), Disappearing Traces : Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Goldhagen, D.J. (1996), Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, London: Little, Brown. Jones, F. (2004), ‘Ethics, Aesthetics and Décision: Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession’, Meta 49: 711–28. Kershaw, A. (2010), ‘Sociology of Literature, Sociology of Translation: The Reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in France and Britain’, Translation Studies 3: 1–16. LaCapra, D. (1994), Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Levinas, E. (1989), ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 75–88. Levinas, E. (1993), Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre, Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Lewis, J.E. (2012), Voices from the Holocaust, London: Robinson. Pym, A. (2012), On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rodway, S. (trans.) (1960), E. Wiesel: Night, London: McGibbon and Key. Schroth, S. (2014), ‘Translating Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis’, Translation and Literature 23: 235–43. Schütz, A. (trans.) (1950), A. Frank: Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag. Seidman, N. (1996), ‘Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage’, Jewish Social Studies 3: 1–19. Shankman, S. (2010), Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies, New York: SUNY Press. Steiner, G. (1998), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (3rd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weigel, S. (2000), ‘Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage: Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von “Identity Politics”, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs’, in R. Zill (ed.), Berlin: Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Akademie Verlag, pp. 111–35.

Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives

43

Wiesel, M. (trans.) (2006), E. Wiesel: Night, London: Penguin. Wiesel, E. (1958), La Nuit, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Wiesel, E. (1956), Un di velt hot geshvign, Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylische Yidn in Argentine. Wolf, M. and Fukari, A. (2007), Constructing a Sociology of Translation, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Response to: Peter Davies, Ethics and the Translation of Holocaust Lives Susan Bassnett

In this chapter, Peter Davies engages with some fundamental ethical issues, all of which involve translation, understood in the broadest sense of the term. In his Introduction, Davies points out that ethical terms such as ‘fidelity’ or ‘loyalty’ used with reference both to Holocaust testimony and to translations are not only slippery but are used in accordance with very different traditions in the two fields. Whereas in Holocaust Studies what matters above all is to show sensitivity to the voices of Holocaust survivors, to allow them to speak out with authenticity, the emphasis in Translation Studies today is to focus on the creative role of the translator, as the principal agent in a network of other agencies. Both fields are engaged with ethical questions, but in very different, possible even contradictory ways. In the 1970s, when Translation Studies was establishing itself as a distinct field of study, scholars mounted an attack on the idea of equivalence as sameness (James Holmes described such an idea as ‘perverse’; see Holmes 1988: 53) and dismissed facile notions of fidelity. Translation, it was pointed out, involves the deconstruction of a text produced in one language followed by its reconstruction in another language, and those twin processes inevitably involve change. A translation therefore cannot ever be the same as its original, firstly because different linguistic systems demand different lexical and syntactical solutions, and secondly because a translation is the product of one translator’s reading. There is always an interpretative dimension to translation, which is clearly seen if several translators are given the same text to translate. Even when allowing for comparable linguistic competence, the language solutions of individual translators will reflect a host of elements in their backgrounds, including age, gender, class, education, religion, nationality and so forth. Davies points out that to date there has been very little research into who the actual translators of Holocaust testimony are, and concludes that probably the

46

Translating Holocaust Lives

majority of translation work has been done privately and informally and, we may assume, by translators in sympathy with the witnesses. However, a number of questions remain unanswered, the first of which concerns the recording process itself. Ethnographers are all too familiar with the problem of recording and transcribing interviews: does one retain the aporia, the hesitations, the ungrammaticalness of the speaker, or might such lapses produce a negative effect on a potential reader? Is it ethical to remove such elements, since by doing so this could detract from the ‘authenticity’ of the speech act? What should a translator do in such circumstances? And if a text is written, but badly, should a translator seek to improve it? In raising such questions with regard to translation, Davies asks about the skopos of the translation – is the objective to give a new audience ‘an impression of the original, or to introduce them to the witness’? Jürgen Habermas (1984) proposed that our world is represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns. It is the task of the translator to ensure that transmission also takes place across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and here the problems of interpretation and understanding are accentuated. Throughout the ages, translators have occupied a distinct territory, belonging to more than one cultural space, often described metaphorically as no-man’s-land, as a border zone. In that space, an exchange between texts takes place, but outside it, both those who produced the original and those who receive the translation have to engage in a relationship with the translator that is primarily about trust. The uneasiness and distrust of translators by both sides is well- documented, and we need only think of the treatment of translators today in war zones to see the extent to which that distrust can turn into violence. We have to trust translators, but there seems to be an atavistic fear of doing so, hence the discourse of loss, betrayal and unfaithfulness that has dominated so much thinking about translation. Davies tackles this issue in the latter part of his chapter, where he considers how translations are read and analysed in Holocaust scholarship. Having pointed out that sometimes translations have been criticized by Holocaust scholars because of a disagreement about interpretation, he calls for greater recognition of the processes of translation, and for a distinction to be made between translation, that is the text we have before us and the actual, real-world translator. This is an important distinction: however we might choose to theorize about a particular (translated) testimony text, it should be remembered that the text has been transformed during the translation process. It is also important to remember,

Response

47

as Aleida Assmann (2011) and others working in Memory Studies have pointed out, that every act of remembering is selective, partial and also involves, to some extent, forgetting. So the very testimonies themselves contain traces of cultural, political, social and institutional elements, which the translator may or may not be able to discern. Davies asks the difficult question of what happens if a translator notices different things in a text from a scholar of Holocaust writing – is there a single ethically acceptable mode of analysis and if so, what criteria apply? A related and equally difficult question is whether a Holocaust testimony is somehow different from other types of text, in which case what is the role of translator – does he or she become a kind of ‘secondary witness’? The answer to this question must surely be no. However sympathetic a translator may be towards the text he or she is translating (and the code for professional translators of the International Federation of Translators warns against taking on any translation that will compromise the ethical position of a translator), Holocaust testimony texts must be seen as comparable to other kinds of texts. This is Davies’ position; he sees Holocaust Studies as failing to grapple with the material problems of interlingual transfer, arguing that the field would benefit from using methods developed within Translation Studies. This is a timely reminder, given that Postcolonial Studies has also failed to engage with Translation Studies and also uses the term ‘translation’ as an analogy for a whole range of non-linguistic practices. Davies’ chapter makes a strong case for closely rapport between disciplines, and for more research into the history of the actual translators of Holocaust testimonies.

References Assmann, A. (2011), Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1984), The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1 Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarty, Boston: Beacon Press. Holmes, J. (1988), Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

3

Witnessing Complicity in English and French: Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Elle s’appelait Sarah Sue Vice

Cultural and linguistic translations are central to Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah’s Key (2007), in relation to its publication history as well as its plot. It concerns a disruptive and revelatory view of French complicity in wartime genocide from the perspective of an American woman living in present-day Paris, as well as the experience of that complicity from a child’s viewpoint during the war. In  each instance, French language and culture are viewed askance in the English original, while the French translation of the novel, entitled Elle s’appelait Sarah (2006), literally ‘She was called Sarah’, attempts to reproduce a version of this estrangement, in the process of which it establishes its own textual identity. The novel’s plot presents the efforts of an American journalist, Julia Jarmond, who lives in Paris with her French husband Bertrand Tézac and their daughter Zoë, to write an article to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the round-up of Jews in occupied Paris on 16  July  1942. As she conducts research for her article, and is increasingly horrified to learn about the fate of the Jews, who were incarcerated in an indoor cycling stadium, the Vélodrôme d’Hiver, before being sent to various transit camps in France and thence deported to Auschwitz, Julia discovers that her husband’s family acquired their apartment in the Marais after the Jewish Starzinsky family were evicted from it on the day of ‘le grand rafle’, the great round-up of 1942. She seeks to locate Sarah, the only surviving member of the Starzinsky family: her parents were murdered at Auschwitz, while her brother Michel died locked up in his hiding place in their apartment. Although Sarah herself died in the United States in 1972, Julia locates Sarah’s son William Rainsferd, who had been ignorant of his mother’s past. Such a confluence of public and private history intensifies as Julia learns that she is

50

Translating Holocaust Lives

pregnant. Neither this nor Julia’s investigation of his family’s wartime history, blameless though that turns out to be, is welcomed by Bertrand, and eventually their marriage founders. Julia, Zoë and her baby daughter leave Paris for New York, where they are reunited with William Rainsferd. The reader learns, along with William, that Julia’s baby girl is named Sarah in memory of his mother. Sarah’s Key (2007) is the first of Tatiana de Rosnay’s works to be published in English, its bilingual author’s first language; all her previous novels were written in French. De Rosnay, as the daughter of a French father and a British mother who lives in Paris, claims in an interview, ‘I felt that writing about such a sensitive French subject would be easier for me if I used my “English” side, which gave me a certain distance’ (Silverstein 2011). This implies that writing in English was an aesthetic choice made for the sake of balance, but an ethical and self-protective emphasis is apparent when de Rosnay expresses the decision in French itself: ‘J’avais dû me refugier dans mon ‘côté’ anglais pour évoquer les pages sombres de l’histoire française’ (I had to take refuge in my English ‘side’ in order to evoke these dark pages of French history1) (Michaux 2013). The protagonist is thus a fictive personification of moral and historical distance, and her ‘quest’ is a narrativization of the ‘objective viewpoint’ de Rosnay sought for the novel’s representation of the wartime fate of the Jews of Paris, about which the reader learns at the same pace as Julia does. Thus de Rosnay’s linguistic and narrative decisions, and the details of Julia’s life, are united in the novel’s exploration of the French response to the events of July 1942. Although Julia’s biography is not a direct equivalent for the author’s, who has frequently asserted in interviews that she is not Julia, the ‘quest’ in each case is identical, even if the outcome is journalistic for the former, fictive for de Rosnay. Julia’s initial ignorance, her reading, locating out-of-print books, visits to memorial sites and interviews with historians and witnesses are the same as those undertaken by de Rosnay in order to create the fictional character, as the preface to the French version makes clear, such that the novel’s énoncé (statement) coalesces with its énonciation (enunciation). However, de Rosnay’s declaration for the priority of ‘objective’ Englishness over the ‘sensitive’ and partial nature of a French viewpoint in relation to wartime events is rendered less clear by the appearance of the different editions of Sarah’s Key. The French version of the novel, in a translation by Agnès Michaux overseen by de Rosnay herself, appeared in 2006 (Michaux 2006), nine months before the English original (de Rosnay 2007). In effect, two separate editions appeared almost at the same time. The priority of the English version is asserted, however, not only by de Rosnay’s comments but also by

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

51

the French edition’s acknowledgement of the ‘titre original’ on the copyright page (Michaux 2006: iv). The film version (Gilles Paquet-Brenner 2010) equally registers a complex crossover of national influences, as a French production, yet one starring Kristin Scott-Thomas, the British actor well known for her AngloFrench roles, as the anglophone American protagonist Julia. In the novel, such a blurring of an apparently clear fictional and national agenda is echoed by its structure. Julia’s outsider view is not the only narrative perspective that we encounter in Sarah’s Key. Her first-person account is, for half of the novel’s extent, interleaved with that of an omniscient third-person narrator relating Sarah’s wartime experiences in Paris, imprisonment in the Vel d’Hiver and her escape from the transit camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. In its interleaved form, de Rosnay’s text adopts that of such fictional but eyewitness-based accounts as Georges Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood (Bellos 1975), reproducing in the French version even the distinction between different narrative voices by means of typeface (Sobranet 2013: 135). As is the case with the representation of Perec’s imaginary camp world of W, italics are used in the French version for Sarah’s narrative, while Julia’s appears in roman type, as is the case for Perec’s fictional narrator’s childhood account. In English, the typographical distinction is made on what seems to be temporal rather than generic ground, by using a more ornate and archaic font for Sarah’s story than for Julia’s. Thus the reader gains a privileged access to Sarah’s life, one not shared by Julia. We learn that the child, after fleeing from Beaune-laRolande and being sheltered by an old French couple living nearby, returns to her parents’ apartment, now occupied by the Tézacs, and discovers there the body of her brother, who has starved to death in the cupboard that was supposed to shelter him. This horrifying event prompts a change in the novel’s narration, since it is the last episode of Sarah’s life of which we read, and for the first time the events of one of her instalments are shared by someone in the present. Since the discovery of Michel’s body was witnessed by Julia’s father-in-law Edouard Tézac as a young boy, it is as if this part of Sarah’s narrative was relayed to Julia as his account of a traumatic flashback. The third-person narrator’s description of the child’s recognition of atrocious death – she ‘screamed for her mother, for her father, she screamed for Michel’ – is followed by Edouard, in the subsequent section as reported by Julia, echoing the same phrasing: ‘I can still hear her scream … I cannot forget it. Ever’ (de Rosnay 2007: 160–1). In French too, an effort has been made to ensure that the same wording is used in both accounts by repeating the word for ‘to scream’, ‘hurler’, although less obviously so: the

52

Translating Holocaust Lives

narrator reports that, ‘[e]lle appela dans un hurlement de désespoir, sa mère, son père. Michel’, while Edouard recounts, ‘[j]e l’entends encore hurler … Je ne pourrais jamais oublier. Jamais’ (She called out in a scream of despair for her mother and her father. For Michel … I can still hear her scream … I will never forget. Ever) (Michaux 2006: 233–4). From this moment onwards, it is as if Sarah’s scream has been heard across the gap between the two temporal zones of narration, and her own viewpoint can no longer be accessed. Andrew Sobranet convincingly argues that Sarah’s Key offers an inappropriate epistemological, and even romantic, closure to this distressing Holocaust story (Sobranet 2013: 139), in Julia’s naming of her baby and forging a bond with Sarah’s son William Rainsferd in New York. However, Sarah herself remains opaque. Although the reader learns about Sarah’s life before its shattering by her brother’s death, the trauma’s aftermath, including her flight to the United States, marriage and suicide, is not available to representation. The different titles given to the French and English versions of de Rosnay’s novel reveal varying expectations from their respective implied readers. Both function in multiple ways. The French title, Elle s’appelait Sarah (She Was Called Sarah), emphasizes the importance of claiming individual identity in the face of threatened obliteration. It does so in its appearing to cite the refrain ‘elle s’appelait Sarah’ from the 1983 song Comme toi (Like You), an echo instantly perceptible in France, where its author Jean-Jacques Goldman is the most popular singersongwriter after Johnny Hallyday. Goldman, whose parents were pre-war Jewish refugees and whose Polish-born father was later decorated for his role in the French resistance, addresses a song to his eight-year-old daughter about another child of the same age, from another time and place which is not identified but is clearly Nazi-occupied Europe. This musical address seems to have inspired some of the central conceits of de Rosnay’s novel. Goldman’s singer claims of the other child, ‘[e]lle avait tes yeux clairs’ (she had the same bright eyes as you), an apparently small detail that reappears in the novel’s emphasis on Sarah’s ‘turquoise’ eyes, signifying her non-Jewish looks as well as her eyewitness status. The title’s third-person, past-tense phrasing in both song and novel – ‘she was called Sarah’, as it is in French – takes for granted Sarah’s absence, and the child’s name is initially withheld in song and novel alike. A contrast between the protagonist’s daughter in contemporary France and a child in jeopardy in the  past also characterizes both. At the novel’s opening, Julia’s daughter Zoë is just a year older than Sarah was in 1942. In the song, Goldman’s Sarah is, it is implied, living in Poland, the homeland of the parents of de Rosnay’s Sarah, since the singer claims of her and her school-friend Jérémie that, ‘[i]ls se marieraient un jour  peut-

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

53

être à Varsovie’ (they will maybe get married one day  in Warsaw). However, this was not to be, since ‘d’autres gens en avaient décidé autrement’ (other people had decided otherwise). The singer in Goldman’s song tells his daughter in conclusion that Sarah ‘n’est pas née comme toi, //Ici et maintenant’ (she was not born like you, //Here and now). In de Rosnay’s novel, the pathos of such a comparison between Holocaust victim and beloved daughter exists alongside the irony that the fictive Sarah was not protected by being born ‘ici’ (here), in France.  From the moment the reader encounters the novel’s bitter epigraph from Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, the role of the French state in the fate of the Jews is the novel’s central narrative concern. Némirovsky’s denunciation of France was itself written in 1942: ‘Mon Dieu! Que me fait ce pays! Puisqu’il me rejette, considérons-le froidement, regardons-le perdre son honneur et sa vie’ (Michaux 2006: vii), and in English: ‘My God! What is the country doing to me? Because it has rejected me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch it lose its honour and its life’ (de Rosnay 2007). As readers of the novel, we are invited to expect an equally ‘cold’ consideration of national betrayal. The novel’s English title, Sarah’s Key, by contrast, seems to emphasize diegetic mystery over historical irony. In relation to the plot, the key represents Sarah’s fidelity to her brother, and, after her return to unlock his hiding place, the ambivalence of adherence to the past. For Sarah and the reader at the same moment, the key discloses the undisguised horror of a child’s death, yet unlocking the past becomes a personal and ethical quest for Julia and ends with her seeming to lay it to rest. As Jacqueline Feather puts it, in a review of the film, in this story memory is shown to be ‘unconsciously locked behind silence, yet, conversely, haunting consciousness with images of deep and distressing trauma’ (Feather 2012: 138). The novel too juxtaposes suppressed memory with the graphic imagery of children’s suffering, evident not only in the account of Michel’s body but also in the fate of a nameless child at Beaune-la-Rolande and of Rachel, Sarah’s companion in escaping the camp, who is taken away to what we assume is her death by the Gestapo. On the other hand, although Julia uncovers the wartime experiences that eventually made Sarah take her own life, the ‘truth’ she pieces together about the Tézacs is a reassuring one. They were not the ‘collabos’ (Michaux 2006: 130), ‘collaboratorationists’ in the English version (de Rosnay 2007: 85), that Bertrand sneeringly accuses Julia of suspecting, but bystanders who never forgot what they had witnessed. It is in this sense that the apparently different emphases of the novel’s title in French and English, and the separate identity each text acquires, tend towards a similar notion of uncovering and redeeming the past. This is realized in what Sobranet refers

54

Translating Holocaust Lives

to as its [the film’s] ‘artificially tidy’ (Sobranet 2013: 139) conclusion, an effect revealed particularly clearly by one of the French translation’s alterations of the English. Julia’s father-in-law Edouard belatedly uncovers the generosity of his father in paying towards Sarah’s upkeep while she lived with her foster parents after the war, by reading a file which had been ‘locked away in the safe’: as Julia puts it, ‘[h]ere was his father’s redemption at long last’ (de Rosnay 2007: 170, my italics). In French, this act of unlocking offers a more general absolution, not limited to Edouard alone: ‘La redemption tant attendue venait d’arriver’ (The long-expected redemption had just taken place) (Michaux 2006: 247). In Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007), French utterance is for the most part rendered in English. In Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006), the reverse is sometimes true, but equally the French phrases that do appear in Sarah’s Key – in particular the phraseology of anti-Jewish legislation (de Rosnay 2007: 253), and negative verdicts on Julia herself (de Rosnay 2007: 266) – are merged seamlessly back into the narration of the French version. In each case, the presence of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the ‘image of language’ (Bakhtin 1981: 49), by means of which different national languages are present without being cited, parallels the representation of Sarah’s Polish-born parents. The emphasis on Sarah’s ‘perfect’ French, that ‘of a native’ (de Rosnay 2007: 12), by contrast to her parents’ ‘different native tongue’ (de Rosnay 2007: 1), which is only belatedly identified as Polish, has its counterpart in the present, where it is Zoë whose fluency is thus described: ‘Zoë was French, born in France … But luckily, her English was perfect’ (de Rosnay 2007: 17). By such means the details of the past uncannily reappear in the present, both historically and personally. Yet the linguistic truths of the past have been superseded: now it is ‘perfect English’, not French, which is both her mother’s tongue and her ‘maternal’ language, which it is ‘lucky’ that Zoë possesses. Julia’s ‘outsider’ viewpoint on French history is represented in the novel through her marriage to her French husband Bertrand, by virtue of which she has a symbolically ‘dual nationality’, as she explains to a friend (de Rosnay 2007: 61). This duality, which takes the form of conflict rather than coexistence, is expressed in both social and linguistic terms. Each text finds its own bilingual manner of conveying this. In Sarah’s Key, Bertrand describes his plans for renovating his grandparents’ flat so that his own family can move in: ‘We need to bring the kitchen closer. Otherwise Miss Jarmond here wouldn’t find it “practical”. He said the word in English, looking at me with a naughty wink and drawing little quotation marks with his fingers in the air’ (de Rosnay 2007: 16). In French, a translation of the

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

55

contested word has to be provided, since nothing else is rendered in English, and here Bertrand says: ‘“Il faut rapprocher la cuisine sinon Miss Jarmond ne trouvera pas ça practical”. Il avait dit pratique en anglais, en me jetant un coup d’oeil racaille et en dessinant les guillemets en l’air avec ses doigts’ (Michaux 2006: 30). Buried in this moment of rivalry, here established as a binary of French artistry versus American functionalism, is the fact that Bertrand’s renovation destroys, but also brings to light, the wartime hiding place of Michel Starzinsky. Likewise, the use of Julia’s maiden name, by which she continues to be known, on her husband’s part in a novel about reclaiming one’s self-designation, makes Bertrand’s teasing into a foreshadowing of her repudiation of their ‘intercultural’ (Sobranet: 128) marriage. Indeed, the subsumption of Sarah Starzinsky’s name by that of her foster parents and then her husband constitutes a significant plot device: William insists that his mother was Sarah Dufaure from Orléans, never having heard of Sarah Starzinsky of Paris, while Julia discovers that ‘Mrs Richard J. Rainsferd’ (de Rosnay 2007: 217) is a different woman. In each case, a French attempt at ignoring an American or Polish name seems to symbolize the other efforts at forgetting and denial that Julia encounters. The second time during this episode of the renovation that Bertrand mockingly uses an English word, which again appears in a translated form in Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006), it is, following Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007), not glossed. Bertrand’s parodic version of his wife’s viewpoint appears thus in English: ‘I like to be in America, everything’s clean in America’ (de Rosnay 2007: 17), and in the French version: ‘J’aime l’Amérique, tout est clean en Amérique’ (Michaux 2006: 32). While these instances look similar, the italics in the former stand for Bertrand’s emphasis and his use of an English word amid what we know to be a French utterance, yet in the latter they indicate the actual presence of a foreign term. These small instances draw attention to the text’s questioning of the value accorded to social and linguistic migrancy at different historical periods, and generate a different Julia in each case: in Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007), although we are sometimes reminded when dialogue occurs in French, Julia’s voice is in English throughout, while it appears that her chosen form of self-expression is francophone in Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006). This effect redoubles the difference between the English and the French versions of Julia’s avowal of linguistic homesickness when she considers returning to the United States: I missed the casualness, the freedom, the space, the easiness, the language, the simplicity of being able to say ‘you’ to each and every person, not the

56

Translating Holocaust Lives complicated vous and tu I had never perfectly mastered and which still threw me. (de Rosnay 2007: 176)

In French, we are more fully aware of Julia’s wish not to have to decide whether to use the informal you, tu or the formal vous, since she has to articulate this difference: Tant de choses me manquaient – la simplicité, la liberté, l’espace, le naturel, la langue, la facilité à dire tu à tout le monde. Je n’avais jamais maîtrisé la différence entre vous et tu et cela continuait de me déconcerter. (Michaux 2006: 254) (Back translation: I missed so many things – the simplicity, the freedom, the space, the casualness, the language, the simplicity of being able to say ‘tu’ to everyone. I had never mastered the difference between ‘vous’ and ‘tu’, and it still disconcerted me.)

Once more, the notion of translation is at issue in the very utterance which is itself hard to translate. Indeed, the distinction in second-person address to which Julia takes exception has to appear in Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006), since the informal tu must be used where the English simply has ‘you’. And it is hard not to hear in this list of American attributes which Julia values an implicit reference to the wartime betrayal of republican values, particularly in the inclusion of ‘la liberté’ in French. The clash of cultures that characterizes Julia and Bertrand’s marriage is embodied in the latter’s secret allegiance to his high school sweetheart, of whom we learn in English, ‘[a]nd then there was Amélie. Amélie and her Parisian sophistication’ (de Rosnay 2007: 54). In French, where the fact of infidelity trumps Julia’s cultural cringe, we are informed simply, ‘[e]t puis y eut Amélie’ (and then there was Amélie) (Michaux 2006: 85). Later in Elle s’appelait Sarah, the significance for Julia of Amélie’s unattainable Frenchness is itself conveyed in English: Amélie offers ‘l’image de la perfection made in Paris’ (Michaux 2006: 154), by contrast to Sarah’s Key, where she is ‘[t]he image of Parisian perfection’ (de Rosnay 2007: 102). The use of the English phrase in a French context neatly shows the significance of Amélie’s persona for an anglophone viewpoint, while glancing ironically at the title of the 1966 romantic comedy by Boris Sagal Made in Paris, a film centring on an American woman’s being inevitably drawn into a relationship with a French man when sent to work in the City of Light. For Julia, such inevitability has come at a price. Less easy to decipher is the complex use of English signifiers to convey Frenchness. After a conflict with Bertrand, Julia anticipates being teased by her boss Joshua over her tearful appearance and imagines his ‘sardonic’

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

57

remark in Sarah’s Key: ‘Well now, sugar plum, what’s the drama? Ze French husband again?’ (de Rosnay 2007: 114). Since the New Yorker Joshua is another expatriate, we read this as English dialogue within which a parodic French accent signifies the irrationality to be expected of such a spouse. In Elle s’appelait Sarah, not surprisingly, no equivalent can be found for such an effect, and we read instead: ‘Alors, ma douce, c’est quoi le drame du jour? The mari français, pour la énième fois?’ (So, my sweet, what’s the drama today? ‘The’ French husband, for the umpteenth time?) (Michaux 2006: 170). The intrusion here of English, into a French rendering of what is in any case an image of an English utterance, might remind us that Joshua is not French, but this moment seems to retain none of the English version’s overdetermined significance. The struggle to represent how one language appears in the terms of a different one reaches its apotheosis in Julia’s first encounter with the history that comes to ‘obsess’ her. When Joshua first outlines her commission to write about the sixtieth commemoration of ‘the Vel d’Hiv’, she thinks to herself, ‘[w]hat had he said? It sounded like “veldeef ”’ (de Rosnay 2007: 27). In Elle s’appelait Sarah, this appears as, ‘[q]u’est ce qu’il avait dit? J’avais entendu quelque chose comme “la véldive” (what had he said? I had heard something like ‘the véldive’) (Michaux 2006: 46). In each case, clarification follows. The chance to enlighten the reader through Joshua explaining to Julia what this remark means is prompted by the signifiers of translation: a crucial phrase is misheard by Julia as a single word, more obviously defamiliarized in its English version in order to imply the innocence and ignorance of distance from the events concerned. Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006) is generally characterized by a historical precision in contrast to the more poetically inclined Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007). This takes various forms, including the provision of specific detail in the French version. In English, it is the nameless ‘prime minister’ (de Rosnay 2007: 184) who delivers a commemorative speech at a gathering on the sixtieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv round-up, one who is identified in French by name as Jean-Pierre Raffarin (de Rosnay 2007: 265); he is credited as such on the English copyright page (de Rosnay 2007: iii) but not in the text. Raffarin’s own words are quoted in both versions, verbatim in French (quoted in Chemla 2014), reaffirming the novel’s focus on the historical complicity that is dramatized in personal form in Sarah’s story: ‘Oui, le premier acte de la Shoah c’est joué ici, avec la complicité de l’État français’ (Yes, the first act of the Shoah played out in this way, with the complicity of the French state) (Michaux 2006: 266). Indeed, so striking are Raffarin’s utterances that another phrase from the same speech

58

Translating Holocaust Lives

appears as part of the fiction itself. Julia explains to her equally uninformed British colleague Bamber that such camps as Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande were ‘les antichambers [sic] françaises d’Auschwitz’ (Michaux 2006: 95), that is, the ‘French antechambers of Auschwitz’, echoing, before he has uttered it in the time of the novel, the prime minister’s description of ‘les camps de transit’ as ‘antechambres de la mort’. The elements of the ‘French state’ to which Raffarin refers are identified in Sarah’s Key using its characteristic literary device of anaphoric repetition, as Julia phrases it: ‘French police, French railway, French bus system’ (de Rosnay 2007: 199), by contrast to the more detailed list of these institutions in Elle s’appelait Sarah: ‘La police française, la SNCF, les transports parisiens’ (Michaux 2006: 284). While the very familiarity of the SNCF acronym delivers its own shock to a French readership, it is the insistence on Frenchness itself which acts in this way for an English-speaking one. The fact of complicity is thus represented by different textual means in each case. In this way, a less historically informed anglophone reader is both assumed and constructed in Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007). In French, a perhaps surprising counterpart to historical precision is the occasional omission of clarificatory detail. By both means, the implied French reader is trusted to draw their own conclusions. Julia’s meeting with someone whom she believes to be the adult Sarah turns out to be Richard Rainsferd’s second wife, who is too young to be Sarah and possessed of ‘black’ rather than ‘turquoise’ eyes, and concludes with her verdict: ‘This was not Sarah Starzynski. That much I knew’ (de Rosnay 2007: 217). In French, this realization is condensed, implying greater trust in the reader and administering a greater shock: ‘Ce n’était pas Sarah Starzynski’ (Michaux 2006: 308), simply, ‘[t]hat was not Sarah Starzynski’. The same effect occurs when Julia and William meet in New York City in 2005, and he recalls Jacques Chirac, at the inauguration of Paris’s Shoah memorial, uttering the same phrase his mother used in a letter, urging individuals not to forget: ‘Zakhor, Al Tichkah. Remember. Never forget. In Hebrew’ (de Rosnay 2007: 288). In French, the exhortation is left to speak for itself, without the identification of which language this is: ‘Zakhor, Al Tichkah. Souviens-toi. N’oublie jamais’ (Zakhor. Al Tichkah. Remember. Never forget) (Michaux 2006: 396). As in the case of Raffarin’s speech, it seems in the world of the novel that Chirac is echoing one of its characters, rather than supplying their phrasing. Indeed, in the most recent French version, the phrase appears in the form of an extra epigraph presented in a handwritten reproduction and signed by Tatiana de Rosnay: this is now an address to the reader, and the boundary between text and paratext made indistinct.

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

59

The diffuseness of the English version is apparent in the presence of two particular literary devices in Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007). These are, first, anaphora, in its form as the repetition of the same words or sounds at the beginning of successive sentences, as it is used in the third-person sections about Sarah, where the listing function is crucial to her experience of multiple affronts; and a version of skaz, that is, a literary rendering of informal, oral utterance (Bakhtin 1984: 194), which appears in those sections narrated by Julia, since they are used to represent both her interior monologue and contemporary dialogue. There is no full equivalent for either in Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006). Anaphora is used to convey the intensification of emotion on the part of the novel’s characters. Sarah’s sense of injustice at the introduction of antiJewish legislation under the Vichy government is emphasized in this way, when she considers ‘all the things they were suddenly no longer allowed to do. Like playing in the park. Like riding a bicycle, going to the cinema, the theatre, the restaurant, the swimming pool. Like no longer being able to borrow books from the library’ (de Rosnay 2007: 25). In French, an equivalent is sought in the form of a series of incomplete clauses, although the repeated adverb ‘like’ in English, which gives the list a sense of having originated in oral utterance, is missing in the translated version: ‘Jouer dans le square. Faire de la bicyclette. Aller au cinéma. Au théâtre. Au restaurant. À la piscine. Emprunter des livres à la bibliothèque’. (Playing in the square. Riding a bicycle. Going to the cinema. To the theatre. To restaurants.) (Michaux 2006: 43). Sarah’s view of her mother’s suffering in the Vel d’Hiv is rendered similarly anaphorically in English, with an archaic inversion as well as repetition: ‘Gone was the happy, loving woman. Gone was the mother who used to sweep her into her arms’ (de Rosnay 2007: 66). In Elle s’appelait Sarah the repetition is less obtrusive: ‘La femme heureuse et aimant n’existait plus. La mère qui la berçait entre ses bras … avait disparu’ (The happy and loving woman no longer existed. The mother who had cradled her in her arms … had disappeared) (Michaux 2006: 102). In the place of the anaphoric effect, the French version of the section ends, ‘La fillette fut parcourue d’une horrible sensation. Sa mère était comme déjà morte’ (The young girl was overcome by a horrible feeling. It was as if her mother were already dead) (Michaux 2006: 103) in contrast to the blunter English conclusion: ‘The girl felt like her mother was already dead’ (de Rosnay 2007: 66). On another occasion, Sarah’s incomprehension is conveyed by an anaphoric litany of rhetorical questions about the harsh treatment of children by the French policemen in the camp: ‘Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings?’ (de Rosnay 2007: 79). In French,

60

Translating Holocaust Lives

only the questioning format remains: ‘Agissaient-ils sur ordre ou était-ce chez eux quelque chose de naturel? Étaient-ils des machines ou des êtres humains?’ (Did they act that way because of their orders or was it natural for them to do so? Were they machines or human beings?) (Michaux 2006: 122). The questions do not seem to emerge from each other, as they do in the anaphoric English version. Different textual effects in each case assume the role of conveying extreme psychic and physical states. In relation to its deployment of skaz, Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007) constructs its narrator’s national and epistemological distance from the events she explores in part by means of her use of American English in her own narrative and in reported speech, particularly Zoë’s. While some instances of this remain in Elle s’appelait Sarah, for instance Julia’s commentary on her use of the ‘old-fashioned Americanism’ (de Rosnay 2007: 6) ‘gee whiz’ (Michaux 2006: 17), it is in general a layer of signification that has not been reproduced in French. For instance, the very informality of Julia’s utterance in English about the location of the camp at Drancy conveys her shocked realization: ‘Over sixty trains had left from Drancy, situated smack in the heart of the French rail system, to Poland during the war’, and she uses the same register to convey the memorial curator’s estimate of the current inhabitants of the housing estate: ‘They didn’t know, and they didn’t care, according to him’ (de Rosnay 2007: 134–5). In French, by contrast to this demotic register of informal phrasing and contractions in English, Julia uses officialese about the trains: ‘Plus de soixante trains avaient quitté Drancy, nœud ferroviaire du rail français, pour la Pologne’ (More than sixty trains had left from Drancy, that junction of the French rail network, for Poland) (Michaux 2006: 1960), and a seamless formality about the present-day residents: ‘Ils ne savaient pas et selon lui, ne cherchaient pas à savoir’ (They did not know, and, according to him, they didn’t want to know) (Michaux 2006: 197). As well as the loss of such expressivity, a different nuance appears in other instances of efforts to translate Julia’s idiomatic phrasing. She notes of Jacques Chirac’s 1995 speech about the responsibility of the French government for the deportation of the Jews that the president ‘had certainly gone out on a limb’ (de Rosnay 2007: 43), implying that his speech was at odds with contemporary political thinking. In French, the sense conveyed is simpler in focusing on the nature rather than the implied response to his words: ‘Il avait été très explicite’ (He had been very explicit) (Michaux 2006: 70). Such differences have implications for the novel’s genre. The Author’s Note to Sarah’s Key, repeated in French in Elle s’appelait Sarah, clarifies the fact that the novel’s characters are ‘entirely fictitious’, although ‘several of the events are not’,

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

61

and that the novel ‘is not a historical work and has no intention of being one’ (de Rosnay 2007: vii). However, successive French editions, particularly those issued in the wake of the film’s release in 2010, include increasing amounts of paratextual material to bolster the historical credentials as well as acknowledging the popularity of the novel. It is as if the film both supports and undermines the text’s reality effect, and apparently contradictory new elements have been added. The ‘Livre de Poche’ edition, its cover featuring an image from the film, concludes with an interview with the author as well as a list of the books which, de Rosnay claims, in a repetition of the phrase from her preface, ‘m’ont le plus éclairée sur cette page sombre de l’histoire de France’ (shed the most light for me on this dark page of French history) (Michaux 2006: 403), of which the most significant is Annette Muller’s testimony La Petite Fille du Vel d’Hiv of 1991. Yet this paperback edition also features a section of colour stills from the film, captioned by quotations from the novel, which affirm the text’s historicizing impulse while also revealing it to be a reconstruction. For instance, we see two pages of photographs ostensibly of Sarah, a fictional character, which are not formally distinguished from a still in which Julia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) stands in front of a memorial montage of documentary images of deported children. The last plate sums up this divided impulse in showing de Rosnay with the child actor, ‘Mélusine Mayance, alias Sarah’, the latter wearing clothes on which is sewn a yellow star. This material testifies to the crossover genre to which de Rosnay’s novel belongs, particularly in its French version, where the film has a pedagogic function for a youthful audience. Such a crossover role is more obviously assumed by such texts as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) in the United Kingdom, which exists in different editions for adult and child readers, while Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007) is only marketed for the former. Indeed, while the novel’s diegetic concern lies in bringing to light the French state’s complicity in genocide, its being filtered through Julia reveals that its narrative interest is in the contemporary reception of complicity. In de Rosnay’s novel, such a response is profoundly personal. Julia’s subjective reaction to her discoveries, which she views in relation to one individual’s story and as ‘intimately linked to me’ (de Rosnay 2007: 84), as if Sarah ‘never left me … I felt as if I knew her’ (de Rosnay 2007: 278), makes her an indirect or ‘vicarious’ (Sobranet 2013: 133) witness who conforms more to Dominick LaCapra’s definition of a boundary-blurring identification than what he judges to be the more fitting response to Holocaust testimony, that of ‘empathic unsettlement’ (LaCapra 2001: 78). The fact of Sarah’s Key’s English language status makes this

62

Translating Holocaust Lives

effect even more pronounced, by emphasizing her outsider role. The novel’s structure itself enables such identification, since, once more like Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood (Bellos 1975), the apparently separate narratives from 1942 and 2002 hint at their impending crossover. This takes place factually, when the gaps in Sarah’s childlike perceptions are belatedly filled in by Julia’s researches, for instance when the latter hears an old woman’s memories of being prevented by the police at the Vel d’Hiv from giving bread and fruit to the imprisoned children (de Rosnay 2007: 68), a detail corroborated later in the narrative but earlier in time by Sarah (de Rosnay 2007: 79). Such interaction also occurs in more indirect terms. For example, the crosscutting between Sarah and Julia’s sections itself generates an ironic contrast between the end of one of Sarah’s, in which she sees her father cry ‘silent tears of helplessness and shame’ at the Vel d’Hiv (de Rosnay 2007: 19), and the resumption of Julia’s narrative, in which a different father–daughter interaction clashes with this one, as Bertrand repudiates Zoë’s defence of her mother: ‘Rude? Your mother adores it, chuckled Bertrand’ (de Rosnay 2007: 20). Not only is Julia’s husband adulterous, he is also associated with the wish to cover over the past in the form of advising against writing about the war, and urging his wife to abort a longed-for child. In French, the epithet Zoë uses here for her father, ‘lourd’ (Michaux 2006: 32), that is crude or gauche, suggests even more of a contrast than the English’s ‘rude’ with the noble suffering represented by Sarah’s father. Julia seems at times to be aware of the uncanny overlap between her own life and the wartime events about which she learns, for instance in noting that her abortion is scheduled for 16 July, the date of the Vel d’Hiv round-up, a coincidence that ensures she will not go through with it (de Rosnay 2007: 174); at other times, the redemptive function of her pregnancy is, rather, left to the reader to decipher, by the fact that her researches as well as her morning sickness prompt ‘nausea’ and ‘queasiness’ (de Rosnay 2007: 93). Such an overlap is the function of both her obsession and the self-consciousness about novelistic plotting on the part of the text itself, making apparent Julia’s role as a paradigmatic contemporary witness. In French, Julia insists on the urgency of tracking down William Rainsferd to her sister, since ‘c’est la chose la plus importante de ma vie, aujourd’hui. Avec le bébé’ (It’s the most important thing in my life now. As well as the baby) (Michaux 2006: 315), while the equalizing French conjunction ‘avec’, ‘as well as’, is replaced in English by a preposition which makes her preoccupation sound even more extreme: ‘It’s the most important thing in my life right now. Apart from the baby’ (de Rosnay 2007: 223). Julia’s insistence that she ‘carried within’ her Sarah’s ‘story, her suffering’ (de Rosnay 2007: 278) unites

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

63

the imagery of child-bearing with that of incorporative identification. Indeed, it is as if Julia becomes, rather fantastically, pregnant with Sarah’s story, as the shared phrasing suggests. After her decision not to go ahead with the abortion, Julia declares that, ‘[m]y baby was safe within me’ (de Rosnay 2007: 183), and later, after the child’s birth, of Sarah’s story and suffering, that ‘I carried them within me’ (de Rosnay 2007: 278). Elle s’appelait Sarah does not make this psychic connection so apparent, since the phrasing is different on each occasion. Julia’s relief at keeping her child, expressed as ‘[m]on bébé bien à l’abri en moi’ (my baby is well sheltered within me) (Michaux 2006: 264), sounds more like a redemption of Michel’s story of deathly ‘abri’ or shelter, while her account in French of incorporative identification’s link with pregnancy is made without an echo of the earlier episode: ‘Son histoire, sa souffrance, je les portais en moi’ (I carry her story and her suffering inside me) (Michaux 2006: 384). However, it is the story’s ending in French which brings this imagery to its logical conclusion. Julia’s baby daughter is made to seem like a revenant, in the sense that the delayed revelation of her name both to William and to the reader answers back, in its present tense mode, to the novel’s elegiac past tense title: ‘“Elle s’appelle Sarah”, dis-je doucement’ (‘She’s called Sarah’, I said quietly) (Michaux 2006: 401). In English, the extra-diegetic echo of the novel’s title is absent, and we learn simply, “[h]er name is Sarah”, I said quietly’ (de Rosnay 2007: 292). As the novelist Lois Leveen argues, the novel implies that ‘once we find the key we can unlock all of history’ (2012, n.p.). Yet it is not clear, in the novel’s setting of the 2002 anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv round-up, that the events of French complicity were really as lost to memory as Julia’s story implies, despite her own lack of knowledge, as suggested by such studies as Peter Carrier’s analysis of the Vel d’Hiv monument, established over a decade earlier in 1989 (Carrier 2005: 49–98), and Joan Wolf ’s argument that it is not ‘facing up to’ the Vichy past that is at issue in contemporary France, but its integration into a national narrative (Wolf 2004: 192). Within the novel’s diegesis, and despite its theme of secrecy and silence on the part of bystanders and survivors, most of the witnesses Julia encounters are surprisingly ready to offer complete recitals of their experiences. This is the case even for those who are ashamed of their behaviour, and also for the deceased, whose letters conveniently resurface, as shown by the example of correspondence from Sarah’s foster mother Geneviève (de Rosnay 2007: 195). Other instances include that of a 95-year-old woman living near to the site of the Vel d’Hiv, who claims, ‘I remember. I remember everything’ (de Rosnay 2007: 67); an equally old man at Beaune-la-Rolande

64

Translating Holocaust Lives

tells Julia about the ‘Jewish camp’ (the adjective is omitted in French, implying a reader more familiar with this history, Michaux 2006: 211) despite ‘avoiding [her] eyes’ while doing so (de Rosnay 2007: 144). Bertrand’s grandmother relates to Zoë the story of Sarah’s wartime return to the Marais apartment to find Michel, despite being afflicted in the present with Alzheimer’s (de Rosnay 2007: 267), as if historical atrocity can always be retrieved even in the presence of a memoryrelated disease. In this way, the exigencies of the plot overtake the psychology of traumatic or Holocaust-related recall, or indeed plausible characterization. Most strikingly of all in these terms, Sarah’s own voice is recovered, in the form of some papers hidden by William’s father which belatedly come to light. It is unusual, even among Holocaust fiction of the twenty-first century, to find such an expression of first-person survivor trauma in a novel. In Sarah’s Key, this takes the form of a free-verse apostrophe to her dead brother Michel, in which Sarah’s hidden identity and bereavement are expressed: ‘No one here knows about the key, about you … About who I really am’ (de Rosnay 2007: 259, italics in original). However, this moment of recovering Sarah’s voice does not represent quite the instance of fictive daring that it seems, since the prose-poem has been inspired by that in a documentary source: one of the testimonies listed in the French edition, Annette Muller’s La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv (2012). Indeed, de Rosnay’s reliance on Muller’s prefatory poem offers a portal into a significant source of inspiration for her novel, one which the author has credited paratextually and in personal correspondence (Michaux 2013, de Rosnay 2015), but, despite some instances of direct quotation, not in an explicit acknowledgement in a preface or on the copyright page. Muller’s testimony recounts experiences which appear in repeated or amended form in de Rosnay’s novel, not only for the sake of authenticating the fiction, as do the quotations from Raffarin’s speeches, but also as traces of the source of inspiration itself. Like the fictional Sarah, Annette Muller, the French-born daughter of Polish parents, was nearly ten in 1942, with a younger brother, Michel, whom she used to shut in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. On the occasion of ‘le grand rafle’ on 16 July, just as in de Rosnay’s novel, French-speaking men wearing ‘des imperméables beiges’ (Muller 2012: 63; the phrase ‘beige raincoat’ appears in de Rosnay 2007: 3, and in French in  Michaux 2006: 13), rather than the expected uniformed Germans, came to arrest the Mullers, although Manek, the father of the family, was in hiding and could not be found. The following day, as in de Rosnay’s novel, a traitorous concierge  looted the Mullers’ vacated apartment. The Muller family were sent from the Vel d’Hiver to Beaune-laRolande, whence Annette’s mother Rachel was deported to Auschwitz and killed.

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

65

At this point the narratives diverge, since the fictional Sarah escapes, while in the testimony Annette recounts being sent to Drancy, where, in a detail transposed in the novel back in time to Beaune, people outside the camp give the parentless children fruit and bread. The complex and layered nature of Muller’s account is evident in relation to the details discarded by de Rosnay in the construction of her fictional Sarah. Annette had three brothers, rather than one, and all four siblings survived the war, hidden in Catholic institutions as arranged by Manek Muller, who also survived. In Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007), Sarah’s father emerges from hiding on the day of the ‘rafle’ to join his family and shares his wife’s fate of death in the camps. In Muller’s testimony, Annette’s act of shutting Michel in the cupboard is unrelated to the round-up, and, in contrast to Sarah’s act of love which goes awry, is motivated by sibling rivalry, as she puts it: ‘J’espérais qu’ainsi caché on l’oublierait’ (I hoped that, hidden away like that, everyone would forget about him) (Muller 2012: 17). In  this way the origins of the ‘melodramatic narrative choices’ which characterize  de Rosnay’s novel, in Sobranet’s phrase (Sobranet 2013: 135), are evident. In Muller’s text  it is not Annette’s little brother who is  the subject of the testimony’s opening apostrophe, but Henri, the first child to die at Beaune-la-Rolande. Henri was a two-year-old boy ‘aux joues roses, aux boucles brunes’,  that is ‘with pink cheeks and brown curls’, whose mother was driven mad with grief by his death (Muller 2012: 12). In de Rosnay’s novel, in a reprise of this event, Sarah kisses the key to Michel’s hiding place while she is in the Vel d’Hiv,  as if touching his ‘plump little cheeks, his curly hair’ (de Rosnay 2007: 55). This is a fantasy described with a telling extra detail in Elle s’appelait Sarah, where Sarah recalls ‘ses petites joues rebondies, ses boucles blondes’ (Michaux 2006: 87; back translation: ‘his plump little cheeks, his blond curls’, my italics). Not only is Muller’s original text recalled in the French phrasing  of the description of Michel, but also the substitution  of ‘blondes’ (blond) for Muller’s ‘brunes’ (brown), emphasizing  both the boy’s innocence and his ‘Aryan’ appearance, makes his fate in the novel seem all the more ironic. By means of the amalgamation and streamlining of the lineaments of Muller’s testimony, so that the tragedies affect all of Sarah’s family, while she is a guiltridden camp escapee, Sarah’s Key is more archetypal, even gothic, than the testimony upon which it relies. As I have argued, the details of phrasing and tone which distinguish Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay 2007) from Elle s’appelait Sarah (Michaux 2006) have consequences that are further reaching in terms of genre and in the construction of an implied reader than the often small and subtle nature of the individual instances might suggest. De Rosnay’s novel’s most paradigmatic reader is one who mirrors Julia

66

Translating Holocaust Lives

Jarmond in not knowing the details of the Vel d’Hiv round-up, and therefore one for whom the implications of complicity on the part of the French state are gradually and horrifyingly revealed. Such a paradigmatically unknowing reader has a different identity in each case. For Sarah’s Key, such an implied reader is non-French, while for Elle s’appelait Sarah it is a youthful one. As well as this, de Rosnay’s incorporation of details from Annette Muller’s testimony La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv is not simply an instance of historical intertextuality, to be expected in a Holocaust-based novel, but one that has significant implications for the novel’s plot and its translation. Since the new, complete edition of Muller’s text was not published until 2009 and de Rosnay’s novel appeared in 2007, the version of the testimony that influenced the novel is an earlier, much briefer text (Muller 1991), which excluded the author’s account of her wartime experiences in hiding, and then in an orphanage for two years after the war. Muller is quoted in the preface to the new edition declaring that, ‘[j]e voulais juste qu’on parle des enfants … car on n’en parlait jamais’ (I only wish that people would talk about the children … because no one ever talks about them) (Muller 2012: 5), an utterance which could equally have come from Julia. The longer present edition of the testimony, reissued to commemorate the round-up’s seventieth anniversary in 2012, has made good the silence of the 1990s. Thus the focus of Sarah’s Key on silence and suppression is more typical of the earlier era represented by the first edition of Muller’s testimony. As a counterpart to this, temporal displacement is a linguistic one. Despite the author’s insistence on the priority of her novel’s English edition, its reliance on a French intertext, to which Elle s’appelait Sarah harks back in its verbatim quotations as if bypassing the English version, reveals that the heart of the story is a French one.

Note 1 Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981), ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Witnessing Complicity in English and French

67

Bellos, D. (trans.) (1984), Georges Perec: W or the Memory of Childhood, London: Harvill. Boyne, J. (2006), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, London: David Fickling. Carrier, P. (2005), Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Culture in Germany and France since 1989, Oxford: Berghahn. Chemla, V. (2014), ‘Entre compassion pour les Juifs raflés et condamnation de l’antisémitisme contemporain’. http://www.veroniquechemla.info/2012/07/entrecompassion-pour-les-juifs-rafles.html (accessed 17 April 2015). Feather, J. (2012), ‘Sarah’s Key’, Psychological Perspectives 55(1): 137–8. LaCapra, D. (2001), Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leveen, L. (2012) ‘Sarah’s Key, Mary’s Secrets, and the Truth that’s Stranger than Fiction’, The Prosen People. http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/ post/Sarah%27s_Key,_Mary%27s_Secrets,_and_Truth_That%27s_Stranger_Than_ Fiction/ (accessed 17 April 2015). Michaux, A. (trans.) (2006), T. de Rosnay: Elle s’appelait Sarah, Paris: Livre de Poche. Michaux, A. (trans.) (2012), T. de Rosnay: Elle s’appelait Sarah, Paris: Éditions Heloïse d’Ormesson, Kindle edition, unnumbered pages. Muller, A. (1991), La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv, Paris: Denoel. Muller, A. (2012), La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv, Paris: Livre de Poche. Paquet-Brenner, G. (2010), Sarah’s Key, film version, Hugo Productions, France. de Rosnay, T. (2007), Sarah’s Key, London: John Murray. de Rosnay, T. (2015), Personal communication, 1 April. Silverstein, M. (2011), interview, Women and Hollywood. http://blogs.indiewire.com/ womenandhollywood/sarahs_key_author_tatiana_de_rosnay_answers_questions_ as_the_film_opens_tod (accessed 18 April 2015). Sobranet, A. (2013), ‘Elle s’appelait Sarah and the Limits of Postwar Witnessing and Testimony’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 6(2): 127–40. Wolf, J.B. (2004), Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Response to: Sue Vice, Witnessing Complicity in English and French: Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Elle s’appelait Sarah’ Michaela Wolf

While in France, Great Britain, the United States and many other countries fiction writing on the Holocaust has become an increasingly fertile ground on which to account for and review the historical events, in Germany and Austria the relevant literary production has only reluctantly gained momentum, mostly due to the countries’ direct involvement in the Holocaust and the subsequent rather hesitant process of accounting for the past, also encompassing moral problems connected to the countries’ ‘perpetrator role’. Against this background, the English-French translation of Sarah’s Key, at first sight, seems to be symbolically part of an inner ideological transfer (Great Britain and France belonging both to the Allied Forces), with no substantial change of addressee to be expected, while a translation into German would entail a strong ideological shift; yet, as Sue Vice argues, the English original and the French translation have ‘their own textual identity’. Vice’s article also clearly uncovers the manipulative potential of translation: the original as well as the translation of Sarah’s Key construct their own readership by delivering shifts from more individually to more politically driven writing or translating solutions. I would like to explore this potential, especially in the continuum of ‘cultural translation’ (Conway 2012) and translation in a more traditional sense. Vice’s paper unravels the specificities of the novel and its translation by focusing on the aspects which reveal French complicity during the Occupation; I will connect the different pieces of this argumentative chain with the help of a translation concept which should particularly serve as a link to connect the various aspects raised and thus enhance the insights from the analysis which will more strongly disclose translation’s manipulative potentiality. The manipulative potentiality of translation can be seen above all in the reciprocal shifts between the various narrator accounts: the narratives construct

70

Translating Holocaust Lives

each other through shifts between the first- and third-person accounts (i.e. respectively, Julia’s ‘outsider view’, interwoven with the omnipresent third - person narrator who relates Sarah’s wartime sufferings), oscillating between various stories, including Sarah, Julia and Edouard Tézac’s. Additionally, the shifts between the various figures, and especially between the author de Rosnay and the protagonist author Julia, suggest that a translation perspective on these shifts would detect the interlacements between the various narrative strands and enhance the reader’s understanding of the implications of these intertwining strands as narrative techniques or procedures, thus shifting the focus onto the procedural character both of the (Holocaust) plot and the narrative account (to represent the Holocaust). A case in point of this specific feature is the translation of the book’s title: the French title Elle s’appelait Sarah is taken from the 1983 popular song Comme toi (Like You), which refers to a child in Nazioccupied Europe. This linkage is translated into the novel’s narrative, thus enriching its intricate layers of personal experience and ubiquitous attempt to represent the Holocaust’s terror. De Rosnay’s concern to distinguish between the different figures’ stories is additionally reflected on a typographical level, when in the English version a more ornate font is used for Sarah’s story than for Julia’s, while the French translation uses respectively italics and roman type. This conspicuous typographical distinction evokes a gap between the stories investigated, while suggesting that, in a dichotomous sense, this gap is being filled through a translatorly move. The author’s obvious attempt to translate between past and present is another characteristic feature of the novel, staged in numerous examples. One of the most striking instances is Sarah’s scream when she discovers her little brother’s body in the hideout, a scream which clearly reaches across the temporal zones of the narration and ultimately serves as a translational device to mediate between the two main accounts; thus, the scream opens up a translation space which enables the narration to be loaded with new meaning. Similar examples refer to the translation between Julia’s individual life and war time events (the date of the planned abortion is the date of the Vel d’Hiv round-up), or to writing back Sarah’s story by ‘translating’ her diary-testimony into the present, thus recovering her voice. Two more features which necessitate a translation activity to foreground their full potential are multilingualism and intertextuality, both pervasive literary devices in the novel. The first is performed primarily through dual nationality, and this helps Julia to translate herself into the historical events, gradually permeating Sarah’s figure; also, Bakhtin’s ‘image of language’ (1981:

Response

71

49) (different national languages are present without being cited) serves as a trope to denote the continuous translational work performed between various cultures, such as Sarah’s Polish-born parents and the French culture, or Sarah’s ‘perfect’ French, counteracted by Zoë’s ‘perfect’ English. Intertextuality, on the other hand, constitutes the very basis of the novel: apart from a series of intertextual references throughout the text, Annette Muller’s testimony La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv (1991) is not only the main source of inspiration for de Rosnay’s novel, but also for some of the translation choices in the French version, as recalled by Vice. Generally, the French translation gives the historical events a more dramatic turn (particularly those referring to France’s complicity in the war), not least by drawing on more detailed descriptions and factual information. Thus, the author’s intertextual choices – mostly all referring to the events of Vel d’Hiv – remarkably add to the text’s address: numerous examples testify to the French version’s explicit political address, thus underscoring the novel’s historical intention. In 2010 the plot was brought to the stage, in 2011 to the screen; an analysis of these manifold translation procedures would be additionally revealing for the story’s change of address and the subsequent reenforcement or subversion of the novel’s (allegedly) historical concern. To sum up, a translation-studies-oriented view of Vice’s text would more strongly untangle the various layers of meaning inherent in the (original and translated) novel’s narratives and simultaneously disclose the manipulative force of translation within the intricate pattern of temporal and spatial zones which make up the book. Furthermore, a ‘translational eye’ would reveal the book’s interpenetrative nature: the elaborate technique of incessant reciprocal translation on different levels implies that despite the ostensibly diverging political context (France still under Nazi occupation, England part of the Allied Forces), the two versions strikingly interact and constantly construct each other anew.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Conway, K. (2012), ‘A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Cultural Translation’, Translation Studies 5(3): 264–79.

4

A Textual and Paratextual Analysis of an  Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation Marion Winters

Introduction Over the last three decades, there has been a growing academic interest in the text genre of life writing,1 for instance in sociology (e.g. Fuchs-Heinritz 2005; Miller 2005) and in cultural and literary studies (e.g. Marcus 1994). This academic discussion focuses on issues of identity, the notion of life writing as a genre (cf. Life Writing 2:2, 2005) and the links between facts and fiction (e.g. Marcus 1994; Olney 1998). Yet the fact that autobiographies are frequently translated texts and that some of the most famous autobiographies, from Rousseau to Anne Frank (see Chapter 5), gained their international reputation through translation seems to have attracted little attention until recently. Some single case studies have been published on the translation of different autobiographies (e.g. Beaven 2007, 2000; Howard 2006; Kahf 2000; O’Sullivan 2006) and attempts have been made to theorize the topic as a whole (e.g. Schulte and Teuscher 1993), but in the field of life writing, translation has not yet been recognized as a defining factor. In Translation Studies, it is widely accepted that translators have their own voice (Hermans 1996), style (Boase-Beier 2006; Winters 2009, 2010) and even their own political agenda (cf. Brownlie 2009). Consequently, translations read differently than their originals. An autobiography is embedded in the culture in which it was created and influenced by contemporary and local sociopolitical and historical factors. In translation, this embedding is uprooted and recreated in view of the target culture and readership. The study in this chapter explores how a person’s life is retold in a new language and reception environment and what sort and amount of recontextualization has taken place. The analysis focuses on narrative shifts and is divided into two sections, the paratextual and the textual analysis.

74

Translating Holocaust Lives

This study is based on Edith Foster’s book Reunion in Vienna (1990) and its translation into German by Ines Rieder. Foster’s work was originally written in English but first published in German in 1989 as Maturatreffen. 50 Jahre danach by Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik (Rieder 1989). Ariadne Press published the book in English a year later, with the title Reunion in Vienna (Foster 1990), and another revised German edition, titled Über die Jahre. Ein Klassentreffen in Wien, was published in 2005 by Milena Verlag (Rieder 2005). The genre of the book is a hybrid form between memoir and autobiography. An autobiography is defined by Lejeune (1989: 4) as ‘[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his [sic] own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’. The subject matter, that is the story of someone’s life, distinguishes it from memoirs which often comprise a short(er) period of time (Smith and Watson 2010: 3) and have a greater focus on the others in a narrated story than on the self. The temporal frame of Foster’s book spans the period from 1900 to 1987. However, the focus of the book is on the author’s class reunion, which takes place over a few days in 1983, and much space is given to the stories of others in the book, albeit they are related to the author’s own story.

Narratives Baker (2006) draws on Somers and Gibson (1994: 57–8) who reframed narrativity as a social concept and maintain that ‘it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities’. Based on this approach, Baker (2006: 169) defines narrative as follows: Narrative is the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world. Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves and other people about the world(s) in which we live. These stories are constructed – not discovered – by us in the course of making sense of reality, and they guide our behaviour and our interaction with others.

Drawing on Somers and Gibson (1994), Baker (2006) distinguishes the following types of narrative: Ontological/personal narratives ‘Personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our own personal history. They are interpersonal and social in nature but they remain focused on the self and its immediate world.

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

75

These narratives of the self are dependent on and in turn feed into the wider narratives in which they are embedded’. (Baker 2006: 169–70) Public narratives ‘Stories elaborated by and circulating among social and institutional formations larger than the individual, such as the family, religious or educational institution, the media, and the nation’. (Baker 2006: 170) Meta-narratives ‘… generally speaking a narrative is required to have considerable temporal and geographical spread, as well as a sense of inevitability or inescapability, to qualify as a meta-narrative’. (Baker 2006: 168)

Harding (2012) has revised Baker’s (2006) typology of narratives. She emphasizes the distinction between the narrative of an individual (personal narrative) and a group (shared or collective narrative). The shared or collective narratives are further subdivided on a continuum from ‘particular’ to ‘general’. Harding (2012: 292) adds the category of local narrative at the ‘particular’ end of the continuum. She understands local narratives as referring to specific events and being locally and temporally ‘limited’. Furthermore, she distinguishes societal narratives among public narratives. These are shared narratives that exist in society but are not very visible in public. In instances in which the personal narrative of the autobiographical I, that is the narrator or the producer of the story (Smith and Watson 2010: 71), refers to the real world, personal narratives potentially intersect with shared narratives. This relationship between personal and shared narratives shows certain particularities in translation. The translation process involves other agents than the process of original writing, among others the translator and another publisher. These agents interpret the personal narrative and thus construct it for themselves and transfer it, influenced by their own personal agenda and narrative location, and may be influenced by a different set of shared narratives that exists in the target culture. Thus the translation process influences the presentation of narratives and consequently the presentation of the autobiographical I. The personal narrative of the autobiographical I is informed by the public narratives of the source culture. In a translation, the embedding of the personal narrative in the source culture’s public narratives is uprooted through the transfer to another culture where a different set of public narratives may exist. Thus the question is to what extent do the public narratives of the source culture give way to the public narratives of the target culture in a translation? The situation becomes yet more complex when the source text author is an emigrant. Her personal narrative is then still informed by local and possibly public narratives of the country from which she emigrated, in addition to the influence of the

76

Translating Holocaust Lives

public narratives of the country to which she moved. Moreover, in the case of retrospective narrative, such as in autobiographies and memoirs, the translated personal narrative is also influenced by public narratives in the target culture at the time of translating. It is likely that these public narratives are different from those that influenced the writer’s original experience. A further aspect regarding the interaction of personal and public narratives is the extent to which the public narrative of the target culture not only overshadows or modifies the public narrative of the source culture but also to what degree it overshadows the personal narrative of the autobiographical I in translation. Thus, it is of interest to investigate the extent to which the narrative of the autobiographical I is left undisturbed by the target culture’s public narrative in translation. In other words, how far does it potentially resist the target culture’s public narrative and does it present a personal counter-narrative to the dominant public narrative of the target culture?

Paratextual analysis of narratives The packaging of a book frames and contextualizes its narrative. It promotes the book in a particular way and thus has the potential to influence the (potential) reader, the public and consequently the reception of the book. The packaging consists of so-called paratexts, that is texts beside the main text (Genette 1997). Considering Edith Foster’s book, the paratextual2 apparatus varies considerably between the three editions and is illustrated in Table 4.1. Table 4.1 Paratexts of Reunion in Vienna and its two translations.

Before  main  text

Reunion in Vienna  (Foster 1990)

Maturatreffen (Rieder 1989)

Über die Jahre  (Rieder 2005)

Front cover

Front cover

Front cover

Table of contents

Table of contents

Dedication

Dedication

Dedication Author’s note Preface After  main  text

Afterword by Heinrich von Weizsäcker

Afterword by Frigga Haug Glossary

Back cover

Author’s note

Author’s note

Back cover

Back cover

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

77

Front and back covers The English front cover is designed in a way which appears explicitly political. The colours are red and black with a white font for the title Reunion in Vienna and the author’s name. The red carnation represents a symbol of socialism and the red at the bottom evokes the image of blood. The photograph of a class reunion reinforces the title. The reader is invited to interpret it as the photograph of the author’s class reunion. This reference to a real-life event indicates the genre of non-fiction. The first German edition entitled Maturatreffen (Matura3-Class Reunion) uses the Fraktur font for the word Matura. Fraktur has been a German font since the sixteenth century and was the most used print font until the twentieth century. At the beginning of the Nazi regime, the Fraktur font experienced a boost in popularity. However, the Nazis eventually banned it in 1941 (Schopp 2002). On the one hand, contemporary use of the Fraktur font can evoke nationalist or even Nazi connotations. For example, neo-Nazis make extensive use of it. On the other hand, Fraktur font can be found in everyday use that is politically not charged. Possibly the use of the Fraktur font on the front cover could be considered to refer exactly to that controversy and to combine these competing societal narratives. In any case, the Fraktur font links back to the past when it was in popular use, specified in time by the subtitle 50 Jahre danach (50 Years Later). The subtitle appears in smaller neutral block letters in pink. Thus the use

Figure 4.1 Front covers Maturatreffen, Reunion in Vienna and Über die Jahre Front cover image of Reunion in Vienna used with permission from Ariadne Press, and of Über die Jahre and Maturatreffen with permission from Milena Verlag.

78

Translating Holocaust Lives

of Fraktur font in the title together with the subtitle in block letters establishes the temporal frame as between then and now, that is from Matura in 1933 to the time of the class reunion in 1983. The framing is ambiguous as to its political narrative. It is either the narrative of a harmless class reunion or of a politically charged act of remembering events from fifty years ago. The publisher’s name appears at the bottom of the front page. Given that it is a politically left-wing publisher, the framing is likely to be seen as tending towards the latter political ideology. The second German edition uses an old photograph in which an unspecified person walks along a deserted street, away from the camera. The title Über die Jahre (Over the Years) appears in old handwriting which, together with the photograph, transposes the reader into the past. However, the established narrative is not political but rather nostalgic and no narrative of personal memories is established. Therefore, the reader could well expect the book to be a novel. The subtitle Ein Klassentreffen in Wien (Class Reunion in Vienna) is a translation of the English title and while the location remains the same – namely Vienna – this is expressed more neutrally in the second German edition without the specific Austrian word Matura. Thus, between the first and the second German edition, the spatial frame was enlarged to include German speakers outside of Austria in its potential readership. This frame is further reinforced by a glossary of Austrian terms which may be unfamiliar to non-Austrian speakers of German. These appear at the end of the second German edition. Through the front cover alone, different narratives are being established. The English edition creates a personal and very political narrative. The first German edition creates a political narrative, albeit less explicitly, but no personal narrative is established. The second German edition creates no personal or political narrative but a rather unspecific frame of a class reunion in Vienna. The English back cover consists of three quotations from reviews. However, these are from German sources which the English publisher used in translation. These quotations provide the genre indication of self-life writing. They grant the book non-fiction status by stating that it helps in ‘understanding recent history’ and confirm its authenticity by pointing out that it ‘rings true’ for Ruth Beckermann, the reviewer.4 Thus the autobiographical-personal and historicalpolitical narratives established on the front cover are developed into a consistent frame for the book. The back cover of the first German publication is the mirror image of the front cover with respect to colours, layout and title. A genre indication is given

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

79

by the information provided, indicating that the book was published in the series of biographical texts about cultural and contemporary history. Moreover a short and rather unspecific blurb is provided. While it raises the readers’ curiosity, it is not explicitly political. It could in fact refer to any class reunion and thus weakens the political narrative created by the front cover. The narrative of the back cover of the second German publication is quite different from that of its front cover. It includes the following blurb: Es ist Frühling im Jahrzehnt von Reagan, Thatcher und Kohl. Der Himmel ist dennoch blau. Irgendwie bin ich alt geworden. Irgendwie war ich bereit, nach Wien zurückzukehren, um an diesem möglicherweise absurden Zusammentreffen von Sechzigjährigen teilzunehmen. Wer wird da sein? Die Juden werden da sein. Die Nazis werden da sein. Die Opportunisten und die Feiglinge werden da sein. Diejenigen, die anständig waren und die um des Überlebens willen schweigen mussten, werden da sein. (Rieder 2005)

This blurb is the second paragraph of the main text and reads in English as follows: It is springtime in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher and Kohl. The sky is nevertheless blue. Somehow I have become old. Somehow I have found myself willing to return for this potentially absurd gathering of sexagenarians. Who will be there? The Jews will be there. The Nazis will be there. The opportunists and cowards will be there. Those who had been decent and had to keep silent for their survival’s sake will be there. (Foster 1990: 3)

This back cover of the second German edition is in stark contrast with the non-political front cover. It provides the wider context of the class reunion and explicitly mentions its controversial and political potential. It is further politicized by the advertisement of an afterword by Frigga Haug, publisher, author, professor of sociology and well known, in particular for her research methods on memory-work which gained her an international reputation. She  positions herself politically as a socialist feminist. Thus the personal and political narratives of the rather unknown author, presented through the blurb and the accompanying photograph with the date and place of her birth and death, are value-enhanced by the support of a renowned academic and politically active public figure.

80

Translating Holocaust Lives

The dominant narrative of the English and the first German editions is political. The second German edition shows a strong shift of narratives from completely non-political and unspecific on the front cover to personal and political narratives that compete for dominance on the back cover.

Author’s note and preface The English version (Foster 1990) contains a partial author’s note consisting of the last paragraph of the German author’s note and it appears before the author’s preface. This preface only appears in the English version. In this preface, Foster provides the wider political context for her book and positions herself as a socialist and ‘Austro-Marxist’. The political frame is thus continued with this preface. Competing political public narratives of the ‘traditionalists’, ‘nationalists’ and ‘socialists’, as they are categorized by Foster, are presented and Foster positions herself as a socialist, thus defining her personal political narrative and embedding it in the wider political narratives of that time. The first German edition (Rieder 1989) contains an author’s note. This appears at the very end of the book, without a heading. In the first paragraph it includes personal information about the author, including her political views, professional career and family situation. The second paragraph addresses her strategy of treating names and identities in her book. The second German edition (Rieder 2005) includes the same author’s note as the first German edition but is laid out in such a way that there is greater emphasis on Foster’s personal narrative. This second edition was published after Foster had died and the author’s note is illustrated with the same picture of her that appears on the back cover. The first three words ‘Ich, Edith Fink’5 (I, Edith Fink) are printed in bold next to the photo. The second paragraph of the author’s note (the part that also appeared in the English version) appears on the next page with no heading or explanation. The form of narration is changed to third person narration and additional information is provided, including when and where the first German edition was published and relating the fact that the author had died in May 2002 in California. These differences in authorial paratexts, in particular between the English version on the one hand and the German editions on the other, lead to a different framing of the book. The author has a stronger and more political presence in the English version, with an author’s note and a preface both preceding the main text, and the preface maintains the explicitly political frame

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

81

established through the book covers. The German editions, on the other hand, do not include an author’s preface and place the author’s note after the main text which weakens the political frame and diminishes the author’s visibility. While the two German editions include the same translated author’s note, Foster’s personal narrative is emphasized in the second German edition through the different layout.

Afterwords The English version includes an afterword by Heinrich von Weizsäcker and the second German edition includes one by Frigga Haug. The first German edition does not have an afterword. Again, the afterwords reframe the English and German versions differently. The political frame which is established with the paratextual apparatus is not maintained with the afterword in the English edition. The author of the English afterword, Heinrich von Weizsäcker, is a professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. He was a personal friend of the author and despite his politically loaded name, at least in the Germanspeaking world, because of his uncle, former German president Richard von Weizsäcker, he does not create a political but a personal narrative in his afterword. When an afterword is specifically written for a revised edition, it constitutes an explicit space for reframing a book. The writer of the afterword of the second German edition, Frigga Haug, is well known in Germany and Austria, and, as mentioned earlier, the afterword is advertised on the back cover as well as on the title page inside the book. Haug changes the temporal frame of the book. Her afterword begins with the words ‘60 JAHRE SPÄTER’ (60 years later), a reference to the subtitle of the first German edition ‘50 Jahre danach’ (50 years later), thus linking the second edition with the first, and locating this second edition in the present. Haug analyses the German and Austrian public narratives of 2005, the year of publication, and embeds Foster’s personal narrative in these public narratives. She alters the temporal frames of Foster’s narrative by not relating it to fascism of sixty years ago but to the present day and its dangers for the future of current public narratives of neo-liberal capitalism. Thus she emphasizes the political dimension of the narratives: weil der neoliberale Kapitalismus die Weichen stellt, dass es wieder sein könnte. Der jämmerliche Zustand der Ökonomie, soweit man darunter das Schicksal

82

Translating Holocaust Lives der stets zahlreicher werdenden Armen versteht, die Belohnung, die aufs Mitmachen und Nachobenkommen steht, die wachsende soziale Unruhe, Terror und staatlicher Gegenterror, die kriegerische USA als Weltmacht – sie alle nötigen uns, die Veränderungen im Alltag aufs Äußerste wachsam wahrzunehmen. (Haug 2005: 200) because neo-liberal capitalism sets the course for the possibility of it happening again. The miserable state of the economy, as long as we understand this as the fate of the constantly increasing number of poor people, the reward for joining in and striving to the top, the increasing social unrest, terror and state counter-terror, the belligerent USA as world power – this all compels us to notice the changes in everyday life with the utmost alertness. (my translation)

The analysis of Foster’s memories in relation to public narratives and their relevance to present times and the future by an expert on memory-work not only alters the temporal frame of the book and emphasizes its political narrative, but it also provides the personal narrative of the author with added value. Haug supports Foster’s personal narrative. This personal narrative exposes the dominant German and Austrian narrative of acceptance of guilt, self-critical reflection, remembrance and so on – in other words, the whole discourse of coming to terms with the past – as not being followed through in everyday life. She achieves this by showing her classmates’ local narratives of wanting to repress the past and not wanting to remember, which seem to reflect some tacit societal narrative of ‘pulling the blanket of forgetting’6 over the Nazi past (Haug 2005:199). By discussing these issues in the afterword, Haug relates the personal narratives of the autobiographical I and the local counter-narratives of some of her classmates to the current German and Austrian public narratives and to their implications for the future.

Textual analysis of narratives This initial textual analysis explores whether the narrative shifts in the paratextual framing are also present in the translated text.7 The second German edition Über die Jahre (Rieder 2005) is not a retranslation but just a revised edition. Revisions comprise corrections of typographical and grammatical mistakes, the new German spelling was adopted, and colloquialisms and grammar-related occurrences of Austrian dialect8 were replaced by standard German. These revisions are in line with the

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

83

enlarged spatial frame of the book cover including the German-speaking target readership beyond Austria. Since there are no other differences in style and none in content between the two German versions, the following comparison refers to the English original and both German editions.9 The most striking differences between the English and German versions are the omission and addition of whole chapters or chapter sections. While the overall length of the English and German versions is approximately the same, the English version contains a 2,930-word10 subsection of Chapter III entitled ‘Decoding’ (Foster 1990: 64–75) that was omitted in the German versions. On the other hand, the German versions include an additional section entitled ‘1900–1934’ in Chapter I (Rieder 1989: 14–17; Rieder 2005: 16–21; 1,013 words) and an additional Chapter VII entitled ‘Flüchtlinge’ (Refugees) (Rieder 1989: 121–9; Rieder 2005: 160–71; 3,126 words) that do not appear in the English version. The additional section in the German versions in Chapter I is about the autobiographical I’s background. The focus of this section is the political and non-religious family background and the embedding of the autobiographical I’s personal political narrative in the wider workers’ movement and Social Democratic Party in Austria at the time. This section emphasizes the historicalpolitical frame of the book. The additional Chapter VII in the German versions describes the autobiographical I’s emigration, first from Austria to Sweden, then, when she deemed life in Sweden not to be safe anymore, from Sweden to Mexico and finally from there to Australia. Emigration and refugee narratives are the focus of this chapter. Furthermore, an account of the European situation at the time of the Second World War is given, which means there is an emphasis on the historical-political frame. In the section ‘Decoding’, which was omitted in the German versions, the autobiographical I leafs through the jubilee magazine that was compiled for the class reunion and ‘decodes’ former classmates’ personal narratives based on her own personal political narrative. These are embedded in public narratives of emigration, enumerating places around the world to which they have emigrated: London, Wien, Gablitz, Berkeley, Dinkelscherben, Miami, Yorkshire, Wien, Montreal, Wien, Sitka, Wien, Altmünster, Oldenburg, Wien, Wien, Wien, Wien … (Foster 1990: 64). Moving on from a ‘directory of those still living’ (Foster 1990: 64) to a page entitled ‘In memoriam of our dead colleagues’ (Foster 1990: 65) the autobiographical I comments as follows:

84

Translating Holocaust Lives A Dance of Death in chronological order. It takes a Viennese to unravel this Viennese entanglement of disguise, evasion, suppressed sighs, suppressed truth. (Foster 1990: 65)

She connects her former classmates’ personal narratives to the societal narrative of the Viennese which she claims is one of ‘disguise, evasion, suppressed sighs, suppressed truth’ (Foster 1990: 65). She highlights the unpopular narrative that Nazis got away with their deeds unpunished and were able to advance in their careers after the end of the war. This narrative exists in Austrian and German societies but is rather avoided and replaced by public narratives of denazification. The omission of this section which focuses on this suppressed societal narrative contributes to a different framing of the German version. In terms of lexis used in this section, the frequency of some Nazi-related terms is striking. All five instances of the term ‘Mischling’11 appear in the section ‘Decoding’. Fifty per cent of the instances of the term ‘concentration camp’ (3 out of 6 instances) occur in this section and fifteen per cent (15 out of 98 instances) of the term ‘Nazi(s)’. Figures 4.2–4.412 present the instances of these terms in context which illustrates how the section’s omission diminishes the intensity of the autobiographical I’s narrative about Nazis and the Nazi time in the German version.

I was not permitted as

‘Mischling

II’ to work in the agriculture of ‘Großdeutschland’ and therefore I emigrated to Holland, where I became an assistant at the College of Agriculture.

Mischling

means half-breed, hybrid; in Nazi terminology a mongrel of tainted blood, due to Jewish grandparents, and therefore innately vile.

A

Mischling

cannot work on German soil with pick and shovel since his contact would defile the ground and what grows on it.

Therefore he emigrated to Holland which soon was overrun by the German forces. As a

‘Mischling

II’ I was nevertheless called up to serve in the German army but without the possibility of advancing higher than private first class.

More decoding: in 1942 he Mischling was called up for military service, where he as

could become cannon fodder but not an officer.

Figure 4.2 Concordance of the term ‘Mischling’ in the section ‘Decoding’

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

85

Three disappeared in

concentration

camps.

The SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth and the Gestapo set fire to all synagogues, attacked Jewish dwellings and shops, Jewish orphanages, hospitals and old peoples’ homes and carted off Jews to

concentration

camps.

They knew about, or themselves took part in the events after the Anschluß: first the political activists were hunted, caught and sent to

concentration

camps: socialists, communists, members of the Catholic-fascistic Schuschnigg government.

I decode: They disappeared in war-torn Europe, probably in

concentration

camps.

When many of us trembled in fear of

concentration

camps?

Campo de Concentración in Spain was not a

concentration

camp as the term is understood in the Nazicontrolled world.

Figure 4.3 Concordance of the term ‘concentration camp’ in the section ‘Decoding’

Why were even the Austrians after him, the Austrians who so quickly rescinded as much

anti-Nazi

legislation as they dared?

You really had damn bad luck that you were caught in the net of justice, such an unimportant little

Nazi

as you were, just like nearly everybody else.

I still can see her with her heavy blond braids, standing together with Irmgard Stolz and Eva Danzer, the three fierce

Nazi

maidens, chatting, disdaining us others.

That simple sentence decodes into: ‘In 1933–1934 I had to study in Vienna, but by winter 1934 it was at last possible for me to study biology and anthropology in true

Nazi

spirit in the capital of Nazi Germany.

‘In 1933–1934 I had to study in Vienna, but by winter 1934 it was at last possible for me to study biology and anthropology in true Nazi spirit in the capital of

Nazi

Germany

Mischling means half-breed, hybrid; in

Nazi

terminology a mongrel of tainted blood, due to Jewish grandparents and therefore innately vile.

86

Translating Holocaust Lives

The fellow shamelessly and Nazi tauntingly lets us know that in his medical profession up to 1945 he had followed the

code, committing sins against humanity, which clearly in his own mind are no sins at all.

He lets us understand that his medical experience during the

Nazi

regime assured him a living standard far beyond the average.

It is the arrogant statement of an utterly unrepentant

Nazi.

Campo de Concentración in Spain was not a concentration camp as the term is understood in the

Nazicontrolled

world.

The past travail and terror of us who now came from Oslo, Sitka, New York are equated, I suspect, with the terror of war and collapse which they as

Nazis

had brought on themselves.

Good old Ernstl attempts to imply irony and distance from all that war play as if he’d never rooted and hooted for its success with his fellow

Nazis.

The

Nazis

improved the system by adding torture.

Paris fell to the

Nazis

in May of the same year. Each of us tells, withholds, communicates, often by what is not said or how it is said.

And he does not use the word Kriegsdienst, but Wehrdienst, beloved by

Nazis

for its mythological resonance.

Figure 4.4 Concordance of the term ‘Nazi(s)’ in the section ‘Decoding’

The analysis of the term ‘Nazi(s)’ and its omissions in translation throughout the English text (nine further instances) supports the shifts in narratives mentioned above, illustrated in Examples 1 and 2. Example 1: Annelise had been in Europe in 1958 and had met with a few former schoolmates in Vienna. I was planning a trip for 1959. ‘You ought to see them’, she said. She had been honestly pleased to meet Therese who, with her husband Heribert, had remained outspoken Catholics through the war, risking imprisonment. But Therese was living in Altmünster not far from Salzburg, no need even to go to Vienna to see her. I asked Annelise, had she actually liked the others? The

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

87

ones who had been Nazis? And the ones who had kept silent? She said, ‘Well …’ ‘Well, what?’ ‘Well … I was so aware of the guilt, the evasiveness, especially the refusal to admit any kind of involvement with past horrors. So I didn’t find it possible to like them. Except for Ernstl. No one can resist Ernstl’. (Foster 1990, §103, my emphasis) 1958 war Annelise in Europa gewesen und hatte in Wien frühere Schulkollegen getroffen. Ich hatte für 1959 eine Reise geplant. Sie sagte mir: ‘Du mußt sie sehen’. Sie hatte sich wirklich gefreut, Therese wiederzutreffen, die sich während all der furchtbaren Jahre zusammen mit ihrem Mann, beide gläubige Katholiken, niemals hatte unterkriegen lassen. Therese lebte jetzt in Altmünster. ‘Und was die anderen betrifft, na ja …’ ‘Naja, und?’ wollte ich wissen. ‘Sie mißfielen mir. Außer Ernstl. Niemand kann dem Ernstl widerstehen’. (Rieder 1989, §103, my emphasis) Back translation: … ‘I did not like them. …

In the English version of Example 1, the autobiographical I explicitly asked her former class mate Annelise whether ‘she actually liked the others’, ‘who had been Nazis’ and ‘who kept silent’. These questions are omitted in German. The detailed answer referring to their ‘guilt’, ‘evasiveness’ and ‘refusal to admit any kind of involvement with past horrors’ is also omitted. Thus, the societal narrative of not talking about the Nazi past in the English version is omitted in the German. Example 2 does not show a shift in the type of narrative but a shift in the narrative’s intensity. Example 2: Oswald Finster says, ‘Yes, Edith, you always involved yourself fully, but never without questioning your actions. Intellect and integrity were your trademark’. I laugh it off, ‘I and my enthusiasm!’ ‘I am not talking about enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not to be trusted. It can become dangerous. Very dangerous. You understand?’ Meaningfully he looks at me. He is referring to the Nazi enthusiasm of our youth. He is breaking the unspoken law of letting sleeping dogs snore! Is he hinting at a willingness to talk about the past? About his past? … His and the Viennese past? ... About what he knew, felt, thought then during the Nazi era, about what he now, here, today feels and thinks about remembered horror? Careful, Edith! Stick to the Viennese ceremonial of innuendos, allusions, adumbrations. Quietly I say, ‘Yes I do know’. (Foster 1990, §554, my emphasis)

88

Translating Holocaust Lives Oswald Finster sagt: ‘Ja, Edith, du hast immer an allem voll teilgenommen, aber niemals blind, immer abwägend. Intellekt und Integrität waren deine Kennzeichen’. Ich bin etwas verlegen. ‘Ich und mein Enthusiasmus!’ ‘Ich spreche nicht von Enthusiasmus. Auf Enthusiasmus ist kein Verlaß. Er kann sehr gefährlich sein. Sehr gefährlich. Verstehst du?’ Er schaut mich bedeutungsvoll an. Na so was! Höre ich recht? Er bezieht sich auf das verbotene Thema! Er bricht das ungesprochene Gesetz, daß man alte Geschichten nicht aufrühren soll. Ruhig sage ich: ‘Ja, ich verstehe’. (Rieder 1989, §554, my emphasis) Back translation: … Really! Do I hear right? He refers to the forbidden subject. …

In Example 2, both instances of the term ‘Nazi’ are omitted in German. In the English version the ‘Nazi enthusiasm’ of the generation of the author and her classmates is explicitly mentioned (bold print). Subsequently, the ‘unspoken law of letting sleeping dogs snore’ mentioned in the previous sentence is explained (italicized). In the German translation the ‘Nazi enthusiasm’ is implicitly referred to as part of the ‘forbidden subject’ and the lengthy explanation is omitted. Thus, the public narrative of coming to terms with the past, which is presented as unpopular, even forbidden, among Viennese and possibly the wider population, is much stronger in the English version than in the German. These instances of the term ‘Nazi(s)’ have been analysed on the micro level, interpreting their occurrences in their immediate contexts. However, if such instances are distributed across the full text, the interpretation of their effect on the micro level can be extended to the macro level, that is the wider picture of the whole novel.

Conclusion Foster’s book is not framed as emigrant literature. Instead, political and personal frames are established. Frames vary considerably between the three different versions. At first sight, taking into account the front cover only, the English original establishes the strongest political frame, while that of the first German edition is more moderate and the second German edition is framed as completely non-political. When taking the full paratextual apparatus into account, this imbalance levels out and a balance between the personal and the political frame can be observed in all three versions. However, there is a

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

89

shift in the authorial presence between the English original and the German translations. The authorial presence is strongest in the English version. Through omission and repositioning to the back of the author’s preface and note respectively, the immediate visibility of the author is diminished in the German editions. In the second German edition, the personal narrative of the autobiographical I is not suppressed but compensated for by the additional space given to it on the back cover, through the different layout for the author’s note in the back of the book and the inclusion of an illustration. However, the political aspect of the personal narrative of the autobiographical I that was created in the English version is reframed less strongly in the German translation. Overall, again, the personal narrative is not replaced by a public or other type of shared narrative in the paratexts of the translation. While the original establishes a stronger political  than personal narrative and a strong authorial presence, the translations  maintain both the personal and political narratives of the autobiographical I. However, the author’s  presence is decreased in the translations and thus the political emphasis of the personal narrative of the autobiographical I. In the second German edition, the paratexts link directly to the main text. The text that serves as a blurb on the back cover of Über die Jahre (Rieder 2005) is the second paragraph of the main text. The effect is that the personal and political frame established in the paratexts is maintained. The initial textual analysis sheds further light on narrative shifts. The added section and chapter in the German versions both emphasize the historicalpolitical frame. The presumably editorial decision to include these sections in the German version might be influenced by the Austrian and German reception environment shaped by existing public narratives about the Nazi time. The added chapter ‘Flüchtlinge’ (Refugees) also presents a focus on the typical emigration narrative from an Austrian and German perspective, depicting emigration as loss of one’s home. Since this chapter is omitted from the English version, the original presents a different emigration narrative which is more an immigration narrative. The autobiographical I states: I became a citizen of the US. For the first time in my adult life, at age sixty, I was neither a subject of an autocratic state nor a barely tolerated alien, but a citizen with all the rights and protection a citizen can expect. I feel at home in Berkeley as I never have felt in any place during my whole long life. (Foster 1990: 40)

Thus the positive aspect of emigrating from Austria, establishing a good life and feeling at home as an immigrant in America, is the dominant emigration

90

Translating Holocaust Lives

narrative of the English version. The shift in emigration narratives reflects the different set of public narratives of emigration existing in the American and Austrian-German cultures, respectively. The dominant narrative in the section Decoding is the societal narrative of not wanting to talk about the Nazi past. This narrative is weakened in the German versions through omission of this section. The initial analysis of omitted instances of the term ‘Nazi(s)’ throughout the text revealed a further weakening of this narrative. In the second German edition, the reduced presence of this narrative in the main text is compensated to some extent by Haug’s afterword. Haug contrasts Foster’s personal narrative of wanting to come to terms with the past with her former classmates’ societal narrative of wanting to forget and relates these to the German and Austrian public narratives. She supports Foster’s personal narrative and emphasizes its importance for German and Austrian societies. These different narrative shifts taken together reveal that a considerable amount of recontextualization of the translation has taken place, influenced by the different public narratives in source and target culture as well as competing personal and collective narratives in the target culture. This recontextualization, on paratextual and textual level, was carried out by a number of different agents, usually at least a publisher, editor and translator. Apart from probable commercial motivations of the former, each of these agents have their own personal (political) narrative, embedded in the target culture’s public narratives, based on which they reconstruct the source text’s narratives in the translation and construct their own reality. Given the political embedding of emigrant autobiographies like Foster’s book and the authenticity demand on autobiographical writing, these shifts in narrative and constructed reality are of particular consequence. For a better understanding of the political dimensions of Foster’s book, and I would argue of any translated literature with a political context, readers need to be aware that they are presented with a reconstructed and recontextualized reality that is different from that of the original.

Notes 1 Life writing comprises self-referential forms of life writing as well as those that represent others (e.g. biographies). In contrast, self life writing is a form of selfreferential life writing, including autobiographies, memoirs, testimonies and so on (cf. Smith and Watson 2010).

Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation

91

2 Genette (1997) distinguishes paratexts that are part of the book (peritexts) and that are not part of the book (epitexts). This study refers to the former. 3 Matura is the Austrian word for the secondary education certificate that qualifies for access to a university, perhaps similar to the English A-levels. 4 The quotation could not be found on her website but since quotes on book covers are usually by well-known people and she is the only person with that name who could be found, she is probably the well-known Jewish Austrian film maker Ruth Beckermann. 5 Fink is the author’s original last name. Foster is her married name. 6 ‘… die Decke des Vergessens über alles ziehen’ (Haug 2005: 199). 7 This analysis has been carried out using corpus methodologies. The texts are held in electronic format, allowing frequency analyses and concordancing with relevant software tools (Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1996–2014), Tetrapla (Woolls 2008–2015)). I would like to thank David Woolls for developing Tetrapla earlier this year. References in examples refer to the paragraph numbering in the aligned versions. 8 For example, Onkeln’ replaced with the standard German language plural ‘Onkel’. 9 Quotations always refer to the first German edition, for consistency purposes. 10 Section lengths refer to global statistics provided by Wordsmith Tools. 11 ‘Mischling’ is a derogative Nazi term referring to people with two Jewish grandparents. 12 Concordances were created with Tetrapla (Woolls 2015).

References Baker, M. (2006), Translation and Conflict. A Narrative Account, London and New York: Routledge. Beaven, T. (2007), ‘A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as Intercultural Narratives’, Language and Intercultural Communication 7(3): 188–202. Boase-Beier, J. (2006), Stylistic Approaches to Translation, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Brierley, J. (2000), ‘The Elusive I’, Meta 45(1): 105–12. Brownlie, S. (2009), ‘Descriptive vs. Committed Approaches’, in M. Baker and G. Saldanha (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2nd edn), London and New York: Routledge, pp. 77–81. Foster, E. (1990), Reunion in Vienna, Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. Fuchs-Heinritz, W. (2005), Biographische Forschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Genette, G. (1987/97), Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

92

Translating Holocaust Lives

Harding, S. (2012), ‘How Do I Apply Narrative Theory? Socio-Narrative Theory in Translation Studies’, Target 24(2): 286–309. Haug, F. (2005), ‘So viele Jahre danach …’, in I. Rieder (ed.) (2005), Über die Jahre. Ein Klassentreffen in Wien (revised new edn), Vienna: Milena Verlag, pp. 196–200. Hermans, T. (1996), ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’, Target 8(1): 23–48. Howard, R. (2006), ‘Translating Hybridity in the Peruvian Andes’, in R.J. Granqvist (ed.), Writing Back in/and Translation, Frankfurt etc.: Lang, 39–53. Kahf, M. (2000), ‘Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment’, in A. Amireh and L. Suhair Majaj (eds), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, New York and London: Garland Publishing, pp. 148–72. Lejeune, P. (1989), On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, ed. P.J.Eakin, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marcus, L. (1994), Auto/biographical Discourses. Theory, Criticism, Practice, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. McNeill, L. (ed.) (2005), Life Writing 2:2 (Special Issue on Genres and Life Writing). Miller, R. (2005), Biographical Research Methods, vol. 4, London: Sage. O’Sullivan, C. (2006), ‘Retranslating Ireland’, in T. Hermans (ed.), Translating Others, vol. 2, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 380–91. Olney, J. (1998), Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rieder, I. (trans.) (1989), E. Foster: Maturatreffen. 50 Jahre danach, Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik. Rieder, I. (trans.) (2005), E. Foster: Über die Jahre. Ein Klassentreffen in Wien (revised new edn), Vienna: Milena Verlag. Schopp, J.F. (2002), ‘Antiqua und Fraktur’. http://www.uta.fi/~trjusc/antqfrak.htm (accessed 21 November 2015). Schulte, H. and Teuscher, G. (eds) (1993), The Art of Literary Translation, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Scott, M. (1996–2014), Wordsmith Tools, version 6.0, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, S. and Watson, J. (2010), Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2nd edn), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Somers, M.R. and Gibson, G.D. (1994), ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 37–99. Winters, M. (2009), ‘Modal Particles Explained. How Modal Particles Creep into Translations and Reveal Translators’ Styles’, Target 21(1): 74–97. Winters, M. (2010), ‘From Modal Particles to Point of View: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Translator Attitude’, TIS 5(2): 163–85. Woolls, D. (2008–2015), Tetrapla, CFL Software Limited.

Response to: Marion Winters, a Textual and Paratextual Analysis of an Emigrant Autobiography and Its Translation Kirsten Malmkjær

Whenever translations are read or submitted to critical scrutiny, it is important to remember that translators have their own lives, with all that goes with that in terms of life histories, memories, personalities and preferences. Languages, cultures, norms, conventions and much besides differ across population groups, so translators have choices to make at almost every stage of reading a text and making its translation. What a reader may then make of the translation is as hard to determine as it is to control the perlocutionary act of an utterance (Austin 1962: Ch IX); but, in concrete terms, translators’ responses to their choices make up a translated text. In Translation Studies, this fact has given rise to discussion of the notion of loyalty (Nord 1988, 1991a, 1991b). Loyalty may be to authors, readerships, texts or to all of these, and definitions of ‘translation’ and ‘equivalence’ and related concepts, embracing varying levels of relativity and prioritizing source text or target text, or writer or reader, or relationships between all or some of these, have been generated (consider e.g. Catford 1965; Toury 1980; Vinay and Darbelnet 1958). Yet, when all is said and done, the difficult issue of perlocution remains. Is the type of situation addressed in Winters’ article, the translation of a ‘life’, especially a life as written by the person whose life it is, a special case? The ‘natural’ reaction may be to claim that, in such a case, the translator should be especially loyal to both writer and text; yet the term for what may be the closest genre to the ‘life’, namely the memoir, hints at potential difficulties. Memoir is French for ‘memory’, and the genre tends to be described in terms that suggest a factual account; yet memories often fail us, and the memoir, like any narration of the factual, tends to be partial, dwelling on what is perceived by the narrator as of significance and interest in the life of the person and to the projected readership, a point Winters makes in discussing the difference between memoir and

94

Translating Holocaust Lives

autobiography. In addition, authors of some of the most well-known examples of the genre, including Anne Frank (see de Vooght, Chapter 5), are known to have been more or less careful to protect the identities of some of the characters that populate their stories (see e.g. Garfield 2008). And then, speaking simplistically and ignoring the greyness that shadows so many of our theoretical distinctions, there is the difficulty that whereas in fiction the world is made by the fiction, in faction – writing about facts in some measure as if they were fictions – there is a world out there beyond the writing that presents itself as being about aspects of that world. So what if the translator knows that some of what the writer narrates is in fact not factual? An error of memory, a slip of the pen or deliberate deceit? Should or may the translator ‘correct’ according to his or her understanding of the facts? Should or may the translator provide a note to the effect that the writer is misled or is misleading? A new set of loyalties may be considered here; for example to people about whom and events about which the writer may make claims. In the social context of the time of writing, movements of people from one cultural context to another are much in the public eye, both broadly, in social and national media reportage and discussion, and more narrowly, in discussions among individuals. Each national press reports influxes and exoduses, each community understands the reports in their own ways and deals with the related realities according to their own means, abilities and inclinations. As is well known, news reportage that draws on prior reportage in another language may tend more towards version than translation (see Schäffner 2012); yet the translation-related characteristics mentioned earlier are worth bearing in mind when consuming tales of social admixture. Examining translations and comparing them with source texts, and especially examining different translations or versions of one source text, often, as here, with the added benefit of comparison with source texts, shows up aspects of each more clearly, in relief against the other, related texts. In Winters’ study we see clearly how the public narratives of source and target culture vary, and how they impact upon the personal narrative of the autobiographical first-person narrator in different ways in original and translated texts. The general reading public probably perform this sort of comparison very rarely, if ever; after all, most people probably read translations because they do not have access to the language of the text’s origin. But what translational comparison can suggest to us is the value of reading different reports of the same event, and that is something we can all do.

Response

95

The texts under discussion in Winters’ article exemplify the fluid nature of the translation concept – each language version of the text she discusses contains parts that are absent from the other – and each reflects a different stance towards a past political movement, German National Socialism (Nazism), and a different interaction between public and personal understanding of events. Can we find ways to alert the general public to the fluidity and partiality of factual and semi-factual reporting and, especially, reportage that depends on prior text in other languages?

References Austin, J.L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Catford, J.C. (1965), A Linguistic Theory of Translation, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Garfield, S. (2008), ‘Simon Garfield Uncovers the Story of Anne’s Lost Love’, The Guardian, 24 February 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/24/news. features (accessed 13 December 2015). Nord, C. (1988), Textanalyse und Übersetzen: theoretische Grundlagen, Methode und didaktische Anwendung einer übersetzungsrelevanten Textanalyse, Heidelberg: Gross. Nord, C.(1991a), trans. C. Nord and P. Sparrow, Text Analysis in Translation. Theory, Method, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Nord, C. (1991b), ‘Scopos, Loyalty, and Translational Convention’, Target 3(1): 91–109. Schäffner, C. (2012), ‘Rethinking Transediting’, META 57(4): 866–83. Toury, G. (1980), In Search of a Theory of Translation, Tel Aviv : The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Vinay, J.-P. and Darbelnet, J. (1958), Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais, Paris: Les éditions Didier.

5

In the Shadow of the Diary: Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation Marian de Vooght

The success of the diary of Anne Frank and its appeal to universal values In the 1959 TV documentary Het wonder van Anne Frank (The Miracle of Anne Frank), directed by Jan Vrijman, people from around the world were invited to talk about the impact that the translation of Het Achterhuis – the diary of Anne Frank (1947) – into their respective languages had had on their lives and how it came to represent issues that affected them personally. In the film we see a young African American doctor with his children, who stresses the value of tolerance and equality; a Japanese woman in traditional dress, who lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, expresses how she could relate to Anne Frank and found a sense of hope in the diary; a young German talks about the value of respect and an Italian who had lost his father, a fighter pilot, in the war, mentions shared suffering; a young Swedish woman talks about how she has not experienced anything like the war but is eager to learn of the suffering caused by it; finally, a Spanish immigrant living in the Netherlands recounts how he found solace in Anne’s ‘zuiver menselijke stem’ (purely human voice)1 (Vrijman 1959), after years of solitude and bitterness, without clarifying what were the causes or specifics of his fate. With this small selection of people that is cleverly representative of a whole spectrum of countries – former allies, former enemies and neutral nations – the director lifts the veil through the voice-over on what is the ‘miracle’ of Anne Frank: her diary’s positive appeal and the fact that, by 1959, this ‘kinderstem’ (child’s voice) (Vrijman 1959) had already been translated into twenty-five languages had sold four million copies worldwide and had been adapted as a Broadway play and Hollywood film.

98

Translating Holocaust Lives

Vrijman’s documentary – which he later dismissed as ‘een jeugdzonde’ (a youthful indiscretion) (Barnouw 2012: 114) – reveals the dependence of Dutch thinking about the significance of Anne Frank on an image that had been created in the United States of America. More than the original texts of her diary  – which were in the initial publication in any case an incomplete selection – it is, I would argue, the adaptations that follow its translation into English by Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday (1952) which directed focus onto values that did not necessarily help the people of the Netherlands in facing the problems that affected them as a result of the Holocaust. Indeed, Vrijman’s film shows that by 1959 Anne Frank had already come to represent the universal values of freedom, equality, liberation and hope. The only term in the film that evokes the persecution people had suffered is ‘het concentratiekamp’ (the concentration camp) from which Otto Frank, who is briefly interviewed, ‘was [uit] teruggekomen’ (had come back), without the viewers learning which specific camp this was, or how he suffered (Vrijman 1959). There is no mention of Jews themselves or other particular groups as victims of the Holocaust. Viewers do not hear from victims what the experience of a concentration camp had done to them. The overwhelming success of The Diary of a Young Girl – the English translation of Het Achterhuis by Mooyaart-Doubleday (1952) – and The Diary of Anne Frank (the 1955 American play by Goodrich and Hackett) caused Anne Frank to become the icon of the Holocaust around the world. Even though the German and French translations of the diary, both from 1950 (Caren and Lombard 1950; Schütz 1950), came first, it was Mooyaart-Doubleday’s English translation, on the basis of which the play would be created, that had such crucial impact. Especially because the play ‘returned’ through translation, too: first of all to the Netherlands in the version by Antoinette Westerling (1956); translations into German (see Schnorr 1956) and other European languages (e.g. into Swedish; see Eriksson and Eriksson 1956) followed very soon as well (Barnouw 2012: 64). Dutch reviews of Het Achterhuis from the time before it had been translated into English, and before the making of the American play had been announced in 1953, discuss the astounding quality of Frank’s writing. For example, at the time of its first publication in 1947, one reviewer notes the writer’s remarkable intelligence and sense of humour as well as acknowledging the desire she had to publish a novel (Anonymous [A. Bgl.] 1947: 3). Another commentator remarks on ‘het wel zeer scherp waarnemend en analytisch vermogen van de jeugdige schrijfster’ (the indeed very astutely observational and analytical ability of the young writer) (Anonymous 1947: 3). The aspect of Anne Frank’s writing

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

99

talent mostly disappears from newspaper articles from 1953 onwards, which then invariably refer to the play or the fate of the actual building with the secret annex, and no longer to the diary. The reviewer for the Limburgsch Dagblad, for example, gives all the credit to the actors but especially director Karl Guttman for the success of the play: ‘Hij heeft alles zo zuiver op elkaar afgesteld, zo zuiver zijn types gekozen, zo volmaakt dat oneindig sfeervolle décor doen vervaardigen, dat deze grote ontroering ontstond’ (He fine-tuned everything so brilliantly, chose his characters with such precision, had this set with its incredible atmosphere made in such a perfect way that these big emotions were triggered) (Anonymous [J. G.] 1956: 2). Anne Frank’s diary is mentioned as something that figures in the play, but not as the source of, for example, descriptions of the characters or the annex. Het Achterhuis was a relative success in the Netherlands and was reprinted five times in the years after its first publication; however, by 1950 the reissues had come to a halt, to be continued in much larger numbers only after the first performances of The Diary in New York in 1955 (Vanderwal Taylor 1997: 5). It could be argued that these changes in reports on the work are symptomatic of a shift of attention from Anne Frank’s writing style and form to the universal values that she came to symbolize internationally. In part, it is likely to have been just this intense focus on what were assumed to be universal and readily translatable values that served to hinder the Dutch reception of individual poetic voices that revealed the trauma of the Holocaust in the first decades after the war. It is also remarkable, as I demonstrate in section 3, that many Dutch Holocaust novels by survivors – which after all Anne Frank was not – only received significant critical attention in the Netherlands once their work had been ‘proven’ to be valuable by the fact that it had been translated into multiple languages. The people of the Netherlands experienced feelings of despair, shock and guilt and had great difficulty coming to terms with the reality that three quarters of the Dutch Jewish population and many others had perished in the Holocaust according to Jacques Presser, originally writing in 1965 (Presser 1985: 505–19). Analysing the way in which Dutch audiences reacted to the successes of Dutch Holocaust literature in translation helps reveal some of the processes that worked against any greater interest in the details of suffering, especially of those victims who survived. The most forgotten voices of the Holocaust in the Dutch context, I would argue, are those represented in poetry. Only a handful of Holocaust poems have been translated from the Dutch so far and published in dispersed outlets, a number too small to draw attention at home. Dutch Holocaust poetry has not been anthologized or studied as a

100

Translating Holocaust Lives

category in the Netherlands. It is possible that more individual Dutch voices that reveal the trauma of survival were to some extent eclipsed by the success of the diary of Anne Frank, especially since the latter came about through translation. In the 1950s, several memoirs appeared by writers who had experienced the concentration camps, like Abel Herzberg’s (1950) Tweestromenland (Between Two Streams; see Santcross 1997) and J. B. Charles’ (1953) Volg het spoor terug (Return on the Tracks), chronicling his time in the Dutch resistance. Jacques Presser’s (1957) De nacht der Girondijnen (The Night of the Girondists) is a novella in which the protagonist, a Jewish teacher, selects people for transport from transit camp Westerbork to Auschwitz until he realizes he will inevitably share their fate. Remarkably, it was translated into German, Danish and English within two years; the title of the first English translation is Breaking Point (Mussey 1958). Later in the chapter I discuss more early works of Dutch Holocaust fiction, by Clara Asscher-Pinkhof and Marga Minco, and how translation played a role in drawing attention to these books. Significantly, Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters, written in Amsterdam and while she was imprisoned in Westerbork, were not published in the Netherlands until the 1980s, as publishers assumed there would not be sufficient interest (see Hillesum 1981, 1982).

Translation opening the door to melodrama One of the effects of the adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary into a play was that, after its success, Het Achterhuis was translated into many more languages than the initial major European ones. By now, it has appeared in seventy-one languages, including the original. All the Dutch and translated versions combined have sold over thirty million copies, which puts it in a high category of bestselling books (see Anne Frank Foundation, n.d.). In many target cultures, translations of the diary have served political and ideological purposes far removed from the source situation. A striking example is the case of the relatively recent Korean translation of 2004, which North Korean government officials have encouraged the public to read as an allegory of US terror with Hitler as an image for former president George W. Bush and Jews as North Koreans, who are ostracized from international relations (Wilson 2013: 29). But the diary also served less extreme purposes in other target cultures. In Japan, for example, the text was initially used to channel guilt and the need for catharsis, feelings that were also present in the early reception of the German translation (Barnouw 2012). However, besides these understandable emotional reactions after the war, Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

101

also became a symbol for younger generations in Japan who wanted to break free from tradition and taboos, for example, because she openly wrote about the changes in her body as a teenager; as an unusual extension, ‘Anne day’ became a Japanese term for menstruation (Barnouw 2012: 120). Venuti (1998: 124–57) discusses aspects of texts that have become bestsellers through translation. He argues that for highly successful translated books their changeable and adaptable function is more crucial than their original form. The possible use of a work’s content for a variety of cultures is a more important factor in determining whether it can become an international bestseller than is its particular, idiosyncratic style. So, rather than the exact words and structure, carefully chosen by its author, a work’s adaptability and openness for interpretation help determine its potential success. Referring to insights from Bourdieu and others, Venuti further writes about the possibilities of appealing to broad and diverse audiences: ‘Bestsellers blur the distinction between art and life by sharing a specific discourse: although cast into various genres … they favor melodramatic realism that solicits the reader’s vicarious participation’ (1998: 126). The paradox of ‘melodramatic realism’ suggests that a work is recognizable as emotionally ‘real’ for vast numbers of readers from hugely disparate backgrounds. The work that Anne Frank’s diary has become in certain contexts in translated and adapted versions could indeed be called melodramatic. One of the most important features that Goodrich and Hackett brought to their play was the highlighted, melodramatic ending in hope, based on a conscious selection of a sentence from Frank’s diary in which she expresses her belief in the universal goodness of people (Barnouw 2012: 62, 2014: n.p.). Another feature that contributed to the aspect of melodrama was a division of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters that is made much sharper in the play than in the diary. For example, dentist Dussel (Pfeffer in real life) is portrayed more negatively and one-dimensionally than Frank made him look in her diary; Barnouw (2012: 63) even reports that Pfeffer’s widow complained that the playwrights had made a psychopath out of him. The character of Mr van Daan, too, has more negative traits – he steals bread in the play, something that does not happen in Het Achterhuis. Otto Frank’s role gained more prominence, whereas the relationship between Anne and her mother was staged as even more problematic than what can be read from the diary (Barnouw 2012: 62–3). The good-bad divide adds to the melodrama and brings out the sense of hope that would eternalize Anne as a universally virtuous person and secure the play’s success. The endurance of Anne as a symbol may also have been made possible by the omission of the fact

102

Translating Holocaust Lives

of her death at the end of the play. Goodrich and Hackett’s choices, however, were adopted without question in the first translation for the Dutch theatre by Antoinette Westerling (1956). Although Westerling had consulted Het Achterhuis to get Anne’s tone right for the Dutch version of the play, she did not change anything about Goodrich and Hackett’s content, structure and framing (Koning 1956: 6). Westerling maintained the setup of the play as it begins as a flashback after Otto Frank, on his return from Auschwitz to Amsterdam, has been given Anne’s papers by Miep Gies. The ending, too, remained intact: again we see Otto, who briefly recounts what happened after the family was deported – without mentioning Anne’s death. Finally, the first Dutch version of the play is completed like the American one, with the audience hearing Anne’s voice stating her continued belief in people: ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart’, precisely rendered by Westerling as ‘[o]ndanks alles geloof ik nog steeds in het goede van de mens’ (see Barnouw 1995: n.p. and 2012: 62). The absence of gruesome ‘details’ like starvation, illness and death and the emphasis on hope is in line with the early image, in the vein of Vrijman’s documentary, of Anne Frank in the Netherlands as an eternal child, not even a teenager – let alone a young woman. Like children, the Dutch audience of the first performance of Het Dagboek van Anne Frank on 27 November 1956 in the De La Mar Theater in Amsterdam had been requested via signs in the foyer not to applaud when the play was over and they obeyed, including Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard (van Gelder 1995: n.p.). The theatre company, Toneelgroep Theater, felt that the seriousness of the play’s topic required a respectful and quiet audience (van Gelder 1995: n.p.). Silence was deemed the appropriate reaction to the melodrama and it was assumed people had to be told. Individual reactions, possibly based on personal experience of the Holocaust or on active engagement with and thinking about the topic, were being subtly discouraged. The emphasis on the supposedly universal value of hope and the victory of Anne’s spirit may in effect have silenced the trauma that might be present in Dutch viewers of the play. The potential applicability of the play for worldwide fights against injustice and inequality had been, however, Otto Frank’s wish from the start and was taken on board in his first discussions with the Hollywood playwrights. This was the reason that, for example, the character Dussel was initially made less Jewish than he had been in real life, and did not say his prayers in the play (Barnouw 2012: 57). Most reviewers of performances of the play in Amsterdam were positive and proud that the story of a young girl in Holland had caught the attention of the world. However, Melkman (1957: 19) had already warned that the play

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

103

had become a piece of propaganda, a tourist attraction for the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular, that its hopefulness was highly inappropriate and that it did not teach audiences about the ultimate fate of the Jews. Most importantly, Melkman found that respect for the innocent victims had been violated: ‘Deze hele toneelvertolking is heiligschennis, heiligschennis jegens het kind Anne Frank, dat het immers allemaal in haar dagboekje opschreef en heiligschennis jegens allen die gemarteld werden tijdens de bezetting’ (This whole stage interpretation is sacrilege, sacrilege against the child Anne Frank, who after all wrote it all down in her little diary and sacrilege against all those who were tortured during the occupation) (Melkman 1957: 19). By using the diminutive ‘dagboekje’ (little diary), however, Melkman also revealed a somewhat patronizing view, shared by so many at that time, of Anne as a child, not as a writer. When the Dutch actor and grandson of a Holocaust victim Jeroen Krabbé decided in the early 1980s to direct a new series of performances of Het dagboek van Anne Frank, he felt it needed adjustment. Mies Bouhuys (1984) re-translated the play and suggested changes for the stage. The action is no longer presented as a flashback introduced by Otto Frank but brings the audience directly into the here-and-now of the secret annex. Bouhuys assumed that audiences by then had the knowledge to be able to situate the play as an episode in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. At the end of Bouhuys and Krabbé’s version, the stage is flooded in a blinding light, the actors step forward and spell out the fate of their character, making the facts of their deaths inescapable (van Gelder 1995: n.p.). Because of this explicitness, Liefhebber (1984: 4) praised the show stating the ‘geur van heiligheid’ (scent of holiness) had been removed from Anne Frank – which stands in contrast with Melkman’s outrage in 1957. Interestingly, when ten years later another director, Arda Brokman, led a season of performances as commemoration of the fifty-year anniversary of the end of the war, she used Bouhuys’ translation of the play but the older, explanatory opening scene which situated the action in the past was reintroduced (Oranje 1995: n.p.). This suggests that Holocaust education had not continued in the way Bouhuys had assumed in 1984, as audiences had to be informed again why Jews were hiding during the war. Oranje regrets the ‘soap’ element of the play that shows the bubbly personality of Anne but does not teach about the Holocaust, a view shared by Ockhuysen (1995: n.p.). From the mid-1980s, scholarship has appeared arguing that an ‘Americanization’ of Anne Frank has taken place (see Cole 1999: 23–46; Flanzbaum 1999: 1–4; Langer 1996: 157–77; Mintz 2001: 17–21, among others).

104

Translating Holocaust Lives

Instead of being a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, Anne Frank became representative of various fights for human rights, including those of Black Americans (Cole 1999: 33). However, elements that American playwright Wendy Kesselman changed in her re-adaptation of the Goodrich and Hackett play (see Goodrich and Hackett 2000) seem to have been partly based on earlier adjustments by Bouhuys. Francine Prose (2009), without mentioning Bouhuys, investigated and summarized the changes made by Kesselman. Prose reports that when Kesselman, astonishingly, learned ‘that only a small percentage of Dutch Jews survived’, it was a ‘revelation’ that changed, for her, the ‘popularly held notion that the entire Dutch population was either hiding Jews or working for the Resistance’ (Prose 2009: 220). The success of the story of Anne Frank, in various American and translated forms, had apparently not got across that a large majority of the Jewish population had indeed been killed in the Holocaust. The most important changes Kesselman was then motivated to make were the addition of direct quotations from Frank’s diary, and of the information, given by Otto Frank, about the fate of all who lived in the secret annex – all of them not part of that small percentage of survivors. Ben-Zvi (2009: 228) notes that Kesselman belongs to a new generation of Jewish female playwrights ‘who often make their Jewishness and social concerns manifest in their plays’. By adding more Jewish elements to The Diary of Anne Frank – even Dussel has become Orthodox – Kesselman somewhat diminished the universal applications of the play. Francine Prose also suggests that Kesselman’s version reveals more of the nature of the crimes against the play’s characters: ‘Kesselman’s adaptation makes it difficult for the audience to remain in doubt about what happened to Anne’ (Prose 2009: 221). All in all, the changes made over the years by Bouhuys and Kesselman made the play less melodramatic, reflecting the growing need of audiences to know details about victims of the Holocaust.

The effect of the diary’s success on the reception of Dutch survivors’ novels The two most important elements in the reception and adaptations of Het Achterhuis – the lack of description of what happened to Jews in the concentration camps, and the emphasis on hope – have had an influence on how early Dutch novels of the Holocaust were received in translation and back in the Netherlands. Assumptions of what people wanted and needed to read about the topic can be traced in forewords to translations, publishers’ comments and

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

105

expressions of writers’ low expectations of success. In several cases, only once a novel was successful in translation, writers – and critics – felt that the way they presented the theme was indeed what people wanted to read. A year before Anne Frank’s diary was first published in the Netherlands, Clara Asscher-Pinkhof ’s 1946 novel Sterrekinderen (Star Children) came out. AsscherPinkhof, a school teacher, had already been writing children’s books before the war. Teaching Jewish children in Amsterdam when they were no longer allowed to attend school in the early 1940s, she began writing fragments about their experience and, as if from their perspective, showing how daily life was no longer the same (Vice discusses the narrative strategy of Star Children; see Vice 2007: 30–4). The first two parts of the book – ‘Star City’ and ‘Star House’ – which Asscher-Pinkhof wrote between 1941 and 1943, comprise sketches recording the growing oppression and exclusion of Jews from public life and how they were forcibly assembled in the Amsterdam Jewish Theatre before deportation. The last two sections are impressions from life in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork (‘Star Desert’) and finally internment in Bergen-Belsen (‘Star Hell’). Throughout the book we learn of small details of suffering and loss, hope, despair and death. The book ends somewhat positively with the selection of 250 people from Bergen-Belsen for transport to Palestine, as an exchange for German prisoners of war. In reality, Asscher-Pinkhof had been among those 250 and survived, whereas two of her six children, her father and five brothers had all perished. Sterrekinderen was hardly noticed when it first appeared, and it seemed that the Dutch public was not ready for it in the first years after the war. If it had not been for the tremendous success of the German translation in 1961, it would probably have been entirely forgotten. The first edition of the translation, Sternkinder by Wilhelm Niemeyer (1961), had an impactful foreword by Erich Kästner, who wrote that this book was ‘so wichtig, so erschütternd und so schrecklich wie das Tagebuch der Anne Frank’ (as important, deeply moving and terrible as the Diary of Anne Frank) (Kästner 1961: 10). The Eichmann trial of 1960, Anne Frank’s already mythical status and Kästner’s own reputation together framed Sternkinder in West Germany as a book that should be taken into account and learned from. It won the German Jugendbuch Preis (Youth Book Prize) in 1962. The realization, however, that in West Germany the book was recommended for children from twelve years old was cause for concern back in the Netherlands. For example, one reviewer wrote: ‘Was de uitgeefster net iets te ver gegaan in haar ijver, ook de jeugd te laten weten wat er is gebeurd?’ (Did the publisher go just a little bit too far in her efforts to inform young people as well about what happened?) (Anonymous 1962: 9). More than fifteen years after the war, it was

106

Translating Holocaust Lives

judged that details of suffering in the Holocaust were unsuitable for Dutch youth to learn about. If Dutch publisher Leopolds had followed the same marketing and educational strategy as its German counterpart, Sterrekinderen would perhaps not have almost disappeared from public cultural consciousness in the Netherlands. Besides Kästner’s foreword, German publisher Dressler’s edition has explanatory peritexts with information about the author, about Amsterdam in the war and the nature of Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, given before each ‘Star’ section – all lacking in the Dutch version. Also, importantly, an excerpt from the Jugenbuch Preis jury’s report, which mentions ‘eine […] Botschaft von Hoffnung und Versöhnung’ (a message of hope and forgiveness) (Niemeyer 1961: n.p.), brings the German Sternkinder closer to the central interpretation of the diary of Anne Frank.2 Yoshiyasu Kumakura, the Japanese translator of both Het Achterhuis and Sterrekinderen, arguing that a sense of forgiveness was extremely important for his audience, gave a similar interpretation of the latter: ‘het [is] een soort episch gedicht […], waarin geen spoor van haat of verwensing te bekennen valt’ (it is a kind of epic poem, without any trace of hatred or curse) (Kumakura 1972: 31). The renowned Dutch Jewish writer Marga Minco, all of whose work since the 1950s is themed around the burden of survival after the Holocaust, almost felt she had to apologize towards her audience for the topic of her work. Minco was the only one of her family, as a twenty-year old, who saw a chance to go into hiding in 1942; she lost her parents, sister and brother who died in the concentration camps of Sobibor and Auschwitz, and in Warsaw, respectively (Schoonheim 2009: n.p.). Her first novella, Het bittere kruid (Bitter Herbs) was published in 1957, the year following the premiere of the Goodrich and Hackett play in the Netherlands. After that, Minco kept producing fiction in which protagonists suffer, inwardly, from the trauma of the Holocaust, for example, Een leeg huis (An Empty House) in 1966, De val (The Fall) in 1983 and Nagelaten dagen (The Days Left Behind) in 1997 (see Nederlands Letterenfonds). Het bittere kruid narrates a series of events hinging on the moment that a teenaged Jewish girl escapes through a garden gate while her family is rounded up in a razzia and deported. Minco’s need, like Asscher-Pinkhof ’s, to re-work her experience into fiction, shows in the fact that already during the war she wrote some of the episodes of Bitter Herbs (Brokken 1980: 175). Minco found herself time and again having to explain why she kept writing about ‘de oorlog’ (the war) – the general term in itself an indication of the relative taboo of speaking or writing in depth about details of the persecution. For example, in the 1950s ‘wilde niemand iets over de oorlog en de bezetting weten, en er nog minder over lezen’

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

107

(nobody wanted to know about the war and the occupation, and even less to read about it) (Minco 1994: 8) and ‘Niemand schreef toen over de oorlog, geen mens praatte erover. De mensen die uit de kampen kwamen, kregen nog een schop na in dit land’ (nobody at that time was writing about the war, nobody talked about it. People who returned from the camps received another blow in this country) (Meijer 2003: 289). Minco, who writes in a concise style, has also, paradoxically, often been considered not sufficiently weighty. However, she felt she had to avoid ‘melodrama’ (Brokken 1980: 176). To argue to her Dutch critics that her work is worthy of her theme, Minco repeatedly referred to the fact that it had been translated into numerous languages as proof of its quality, and even, in 1991, ‘dat er binnenkort een Penguin-editie van verschijnt, en dat dit succes niets te maken heeft met de omstandigheid dat het zo’n lekker dun boekje is!’ (a Penguin edition is coming out soon, and that this has nothing to do with the circumstance that it’s such a nice thin little book) (Meijer 2003: 289). Dick van Galen Last once casually wrote that ‘[i]n the Netherlands, interest in the victims essentially begins only in the 1980s’ (2003: 890). This insight is shared by Vanderwal Taylor (1997: 1–22), who argued that the worst feelings of guilt and shame of the generation who had lived through the war had diminished by then. Van Galen Last claimed that the appearance of Jona Oberski’s (1977) novella Kinderjaren was timely in that sense, as it is narrated from the perspective of a very young child experiencing life in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. Thus, the reader gets a close insight into the horrors of concentration camps as felt by a victim. Nuclear physicist Oberski is the son of refugees who came from Germany to the Netherlands in the 1930s. Both of his parents perished: his father died in Bergen-Belsen and his mother died of exhaustion shortly after she was liberated. However, even by the time that Oberski published his book, foreign mediation had been necessary to alert Dutch audiences to the importance of his work, as it only got taken seriously in the Netherlands after critics abroad had praised its translations, especially the English version by Ralph Manheim (1983). Alan Sillitoe’s reaction – included in the 1984 paperback edition  – was ‘This is not the book of the year, it’s the book of this damned century’ (Manheim 1984: n.p.). Only by the mid-1980s, after its international success, did Kinderjaren receive serious attention in the Dutch media. One reviewer, for example, was astonished to note that 200,000 copies had already been sold abroad and that another 100,000 would appear for the first paperback edition in the United States (Anonymous 1984: 4). No less than seven years after the first publication of Kinderjaren, and only due to its success in translation, Oberski

108

Translating Holocaust Lives

finally got an interview on Dutch TV (Anonymous 1984: 4). It had taken efforts by Judith Herzberg, a Dutch poet and daughter of concentration camp survivor Abel Herzberg, and Ruth Liepman, a renowned international literary agent who herself had been a German-Jewish refugee in the Netherlands during the war, to recognize the significance of Oberski’s story and get his book translated into sixteen languages (Beek n.d.).

Anne Frank, education and the invisibility of Dutch Holocaust poetry In spite of the overwhelming fame of The Diary of Anne Frank around the globe and international successes of novels by Asscher-Pinkhof, Minco, Oberski and others, for decades after the war the Dutch government did not have a plan to educate young people about the Holocaust, or a programme to include these texts in the curriculum. Boersema and Schimmel (2008) conducted surveys of Dutch teenagers’ knowledge about the Holocaust, interviewed teachers and analysed textbooks. They found that, up to 2007, Dutch secondary school students still knew very little about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. It took indeed until 2006 for the Dutch Ministry of Education to make the Holocaust a required part of the history curriculum in schools. In that year, Anne Frank became one of the ‘fifty windows’ on Dutch history, a proposal by the Committee on the Development of the Dutch Canon, accepted by the Ministry of Education, as to what should be offered to children in primary and secondary education (up to the age of eighteen) in terms of core knowledge about the Holocaust and points for further discussion (Commissie Ontwikkeling Nederlandse Canon 2006: 86–7).3 Literally, Anne Frank’s photograph is a ‘window’ on the Committee’s entoen.nu (‘and then.now’) website that can be opened by double-clicking, and figuratively the programme for Holocaust education rests on her image (Stichting entoen.nu 2007: n.p.). The window’s list of recommended additional reading has many regularly updated items that give further background information about Anne Frank. For example, the Dutch translations of Carol Ann Lee’s (2000) and Melissa Müller’s (1998) biographies of Anne Frank (de Bruijn 2009 and Meijerink 2000), Barnouw and van der Stroom’s (2003) book Wie verraadde Anne Frank? (Who betrayed Anne Frank?) and Mirjam Pressler’s ‘Groeten en liefs aan allen’: Het verhaal van de familie van Anne Frank (Lukkenaar 2010) – a book that appeared first in German (Pressler 2009) and was translated into English

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

109

by Damian Searls in 2011 as Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family. The list also contains memoirs of people who survived the Holocaust, such as Levie de Lange’s (1964) Het verhaal van mijn leven (The Story of my Life) and Coen Rood’s (2011) Onze dagen: Herinneringen aan de Jodenvervolging (Our days: Memories of the Persecution of the Jews). Several items on the list are fictional accounts, for example, two books – both translated from English – written from the perspective of Peter van Pels, who shared life with Anne Frank in the secret annex (Dogar 2011; Feldman 2005, de Hoog 2005, Warmerdam 2011). Very few items feature in the category of literature. There is Oberski’s Kinderjaren, but no books by Minco or Asscher-Pinkhof. As teachers and other educators, or indeed anybody, can send suggestions to further supplement the list, it is telling of the collective frame of mind in the Netherlands that there is only one item of poetry on it: the recent work by Guus Luijters (2011), Sterrenlied (Song of Stars). Older poetic voices that have given unique forms to the personal trauma and feelings of hopelessness after the Holocaust are absent from the educational site, whereas they could be valuable to teenagers and young adults learning about the long-lasting effects of suffering in individual people. The value of Sterrenlied is that it focuses deeply on what went on in the mind of one of the thousands of ‘other’ Dutch children who perished. It is a book-length poem in sections about a girl called Sientje Abram. The poem fictionalizes the life of Sientje, who lived from 1931 to 1942; she was one of the 351 children from a single street, the Rapenburgstraat in Amsterdam, who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. Sterrenlied came to Luijters while he was doing research to collect all the 18,000 names of Dutch Jewish, Roma and Sinti children who were killed in the Holocaust. These names are now published in In Memoriam (Luijters 2012). Significantly, according to van Nieuwkerk (2011), Luijters’ motivation was ‘dat je eigenlijk maar over een kind iets weet, Anne Frank’ (that you really only know something about one child, Anne Frank). Luijters stresses that Sterrenlied is about ‘een gewoon joods kind’ (an ordinary Jewish child), as opposed to Anne Frank, who never was ordinary (van Nieuwkerk 2011). It can be assumed that the idea of ordinariness and normality is meant to get across to readers that the Holocaust happened to any kind of people – just people down the street, as Luijters wanted to show. The title establishes a link with Clara Assher-Pinkhof ’s Sterrekinderen (1946) from before the publication of Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis (1947). Sterrenlied is a two-part ‘song’, alternating between the present-day voice of the narrator, looking for traces but finding

110

Translating Holocaust Lives

absences, and the voice from the past, of Sientje herself living her daily life. For example, we read in the narrator’s voice: Nog sluip ik langs de muren leg mijzelf de tekens uit die zij achterlieten het witte cijfer aan de deur (Luijters 2011: 32) I still sneak along the walls tell myself about the signs they left behind the white number on the wall

And Sientje’s voice: We zitten binnen en we wachten mijn koffertje gepakt ik heb mijn naam er op geschreven en de stad (Luijters 2011: 56) We sit inside and we wait my little suitcase packed I wrote my name on it and the city

With the link to Luijters, still via Anne Frank, in the new Holocaust education programme, the line of focus on children is continued and everyday life highlighted. Other poetry has appeared in the new millennium written by the children and grandchildren of victims, for example, the collection Matses en monsters (Matzos and Monsters) by Chawwa Wijnberg (2001), whose father was executed as a member of the Dutch Jewish resistance in 1942, and Tastzin (Sense of Touch) by Lucas Hirsch (2009), which is dedicated to his grandmother who died in Auschwitz. However, most Dutch poetry by the first generation of Holocaust survivors has sunk into oblivion. In the mid-1990s, after fifty years of freedom, a number of anthologies came out in the Netherlands with poems and stories of the war. None of these, however, focussed specifically on victims of the Holocaust. For example, Die dag in mei vergeet ik niet (I’ll Never Forget That Day in May) (Warren and Molegraaf 1995) consists for the largest part of resistance poetry, reactions to the occupation written during the war and poems celebrating liberation. There is a section squeezed in about the persecution of the Jews. However, most poems in Die dag in mei do not make the reader feel the suffering experienced by individuals through the Holocaust. As one reviewer noted, we are mostly ‘gedistantieerde

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

111

teksten van plichtmatige terugkijkers’ (distanced texts by dutiful retrospectors), who reduced the experience of the war to anecdotes and ‘herdenkingsrethoriek’ (remembrance rhetoric) (Combat 1995: 74). Combat regrets that in Dutch there is no equivalent of Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs or Ingeborg Bachmann and mentions only one person whose work is worth reading: Ida Gerhardt, one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated poets. Gerhardt was not Jewish, but had been accused of being ‘verjoodst’ (jewified) by members of the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist party who collaborated with the Nazis (Bonte 1997: 229– 30). She protested against the occupation and openly declared she could not exist without her Jewish friends and their contributions to Dutch culture, for which she lost her job as a teacher. Her poem ‘Het carillon’ (The carillon) from 1941 is collected in Warren and Molegraaf ’s anthology (1995: 51); it mixes the emotions of patriotic love and the desire to resist the enemy with a desperate sense of defeat – but it is not a Holocaust poem. In the decades after the war, Gerhardt’s focus shifted and more of her poems expressed feelings of guilt for not having done enough for the Jewish population. Her poem ‘De teruggewezen gave’ (The Rejected Gift, first published in 1966) is one of the very few from her extensive oeuvre that have been translated into English. In it, the poetic ‘I’ intends to lay flowers by a statue of Anne Frank but it comes to life and refuses them. Turning Tides (van de Kamp 1994), a bilingual anthology of Dutch and Flemish poetry, contains two versions of De teruggewezen gave. In what follows, I take the last four or five lines of these translations as examples of the difficulty of preventing Anne Frank from standing in the way of reading the narrator’s meaning. The final lines of Gerhardt’s poem are (Gerhardt 1988: 382): Niets stoorde dit ontijdelijk samenzijn. Tot hoorbaar werd haar woordenloos vermaan, zij, een Joods kind dat weet van eeuwen heeft: ‘Gij waart daarbij. Ook nu zij niet meer leeft.’

A literal translation of these lines would read: Nothing disturbed this un-temporary encounter. Until her wordless warning became audible, she, a Jewish child with sad awareness of centuries: ‘You were there. Also now she is no longer alive.’

Ruth Hooley uses an extra line for her version of the poem, adding not entirely correct information about the location of the statue, which was made in 1959 by Peter d’Hondt to remember Anne Frank’s thirtieth birthday and placed on Janskerkhof square in Utrecht, not Amsterdam:

112

Translating Holocaust Lives

’ Till the silent rebuke of this innocent girl With all of her people’s history to bear Came across loud and clear: ‘You were there. For Anne Frank in Janskerkhof in Amsterdam As much life now as she lived through then.’ (Hooley 1994: 199)

Perhaps Hooley’s desire to connect with her audience through what is well known, namely that Anne Frank was a Jewish girl hiding in Amsterdam, made her produce this version. Van de Kamp, in his translation below, keeps much closer to the original text and attempts to maintain its ambiguity. However, particularly problematic is the word ‘ontijdelijk’ (not part of time) – a meaning left out altogether in Hooley’s version – coined by Gerhardt. It combines ‘ontij’ (dark time), ‘ontijdig’ (untimely) and ‘tijdelijk’ (temporary), invoking association with meanings like ‘ungodly hours’, ‘inappropriate time’, ‘un-temporary’ and ‘lasting horror’. Nothing disturbed this timeless meeting. Until her wordless reproach became audible, she, a Jewish child that knows of ages: ‘You were there too. Even now that she lives no more.’ (van de Kamp 1994: 199)

These two versions demonstrate the difficulty of translating ambiguity. BoaseBeier (2011) argues that ambiguity is especially important in Holocaust poetry: ‘ambiguity is used to express both the unfathomable and unspeakable nature of the historical events and also to reflect the ambiguous state of mind of perpetrators and bystanders’ (2011: 156). By leaving out ambiguity in translations, readers of the target language have less chance to become cognitively involved and learn about the mindset of the narrator (2011: 85–8). Similarly, by leaving out poetry from Holocaust education, young people miss out on the chance to think about what it means to use ambiguous words for the expression of trauma. Very few poems in Die dag in mei are written by Jews who suffered in the Holocaust. There are two poems by Maurits Mok, who went into hiding but whose parents, sister and many friends died in concentration camps; and one poem by Saul van Messel, pseudonym of Jaap Meijer, who survived BergenBelsen. Significantly, Combat calls Mok and van Messel somewhat disrespectfully members of ‘het koor der treurenden’ (the lamenting choir) (Combat 1995: 75), who cannot stop mourning the dead. Indeed until the end of their lives, they kept writing sorrowful lines of loss and death. Two of the three poems by these surviving victims chosen for the anthology, moreover, focus on the collective rather than the personal trauma. Van Messel’s poem is ‘gieten / gedenksteen’

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

113

(gieten/monument, Warren en Molegraaf 1995: 72), taken from his collection Syndroom (Syndrom, 1971: 46). It is a sarcastic comment on the inadequacy of collective remembrance in Gieten, a town in the province of Drenthe not far from Westerbork. Mok’s poem 4 mei (May 4th) also shows the futility of official, collective remembrance, as this is always only momentary: ‘een trompet stuurt denkers en herdachten / in het vergeten terug’ (a trumpet sends rememberers and those remembered / back to forgetting, in Warren and Molegraaf 1995: 59; also in Mok 1972: 6). The thoughtful moment on Remembrance Day is brief and abruptly ended by the ceremonial trumpet. The Dutch Remembrance Day is Dodenherdenking on the 4th of May, to which Mok refers by both ‘denkers’ (thinkers) and ‘herdachten’ (the ones being thought of and remembered, Mok 1972: 6), implying that before the trumpet sounds, the ones remembered are alive again in the minds of the thinkers. Mok’s poetry shows the lifelong psychological burden of living with the dead of the Holocaust. In it, time and again, words feature that are etymologically and semantically related to denken (to think) to detail the mental trauma of the poet. Not a single poem from Mok’s twenty-five post-war volumes, most of which contain work that came forth from the poet’s Holocaust trauma, has been translated; but also, no anthology with a selection of the best of his Holocaust poems has appeared in the Netherlands. The same is true for van Messel’s poetry. The work of Dutch poets who experienced persecution is also not represented as a category in literary histories, textbooks or current collections. A poet who does not feature at all in Warren and Molegraaf ’s anthology (1995) is E. Hoornik. The likely reason is that Hoornik was not Jewish, but a socialist and political dissenter. His most well-known poem is the sonnet Pogrom, which he wrote in 1936. However, Hoornik’s personal trauma from after the war is much less dwelled upon. As a journalist for Het Algemeen Dagblad, a newspaper that was assimilated during the war, Hoornik would not adjust the content of his reports and lost his job. He was betrayed and discovered as a member of the Resistance and sent to the concentration camp in Vught, in the south of the Netherlands, and later to Dachau. As a survivor, he carried the trauma with him until his death in 1970 (Berg 2010: n.p.). The horror of having seen so much anguish and death and the feelings of guilt for not having died himself characterized Hoornik’s poetry after the war. Remarkably, when he died Hoornik was honoured by James Holmes and Ludwig Kunz, who published English and German versions of his poems in the Dutch literary journal De Gids. A gay American poet and translator living in the Netherlands since 1949, Holmes sympathized with homosexual and other victims of Nazi oppression (Polet and

114

Translating Holocaust Lives

Polet 1988: 163–7). Holmes is often regarded as the founder of Translation Studies. He emphasized both the development of translation theory and the documentation of translation practice paying attention to the products as well as the processes and functions of translations in different cultures (Holmes 1972, 1994; Holmes et al. 1978). In addition, together with Hoornik and Hans van Marle, Holmes founded and edited the journal Delta: A Review of Arts, Life and Thought in the Netherlands, which ran from 1958 to 1973 (van den Broeck 1994: 2). Ludwig Kunz was a German Jewish editor and literary agent who went into hiding in the Dutch province of Limburg and survived the war (Ligtvoet and Schaap 2010: n.p.). One of Hoornik’s poems translated by Holmes (1970: 243) in cooperation with his partner Hans van Marle is ‘De hond’. The hound All it does forgive the hound; its master’s gone, beneath the ground. If it bites and growls and claws, now you know what is the cause. It wants to be beneath the ground with its master. I am that hound.

Hoornik’s poem, in which the narrator identifies himself in the last line as a trauma victim – ‘Ik ben die hond’ (Hoornik 1960: 3) – seems, when taken together with the earlier image of the dog’s master, to invoke Paul Celan’s (1985) line from ‘Todesfuge’: ‘der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’, ‘death is a master from Germany’ in Hamburger’s translation (Hamburger 2007: 70). Read together with the three-part poem chosen by Kunz, ‘De nabestaande’ (The Survivor or The One Left Behind – ‘Der Hinterlassene’ in Kunz’ version, 1970: 202), it becomes even clearer that the dog, or hound, is the Holocaust survivor who feels his or her crime is not having died. Part III of ‘De nabestaande’ (Hoornik 1960: 7) reads: Ik ben de nabestaande, de ongestorven dode, de hond die naar de maan huilt.

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

115

Ik kruip onder de tafel, mijn kop tussen mijn poten, mijn bek een bek vol bloed.

This might be translated as: I am the survivor, the dead one who didn’t die, the dog howling at the moon I crawl under the table my head between my paws my mouth a mouth full of blood.

In a very literal sense, ‘nabestaande’ means ‘after-exister’, someone who exists after, which points at the problem of being alive after having experienced the Holocaust, others who did die. The narrator in many of Hoornik’s poems is presented as both victim and perpetrator. His poems are semantically ambiguous and reveal the traumatized mind of a Holocaust survivor. Impactful as the editing and translating work by Kunz and Holmes may seem, the German and English translations of Hoornik’s Holocaust poems never became available in book form – they only appeared in the journal De Gids – in or outside of the Netherlands. These and the other poems discussed in this section highlight the despair of being a survivor, an emotion that is tragically absent from Het Achterhuis. Thus it can be argued that the overwhelming presence of the diary of Anne Frank in the canon of Holocaust knowledge in the Netherlands and indeed the world overshadows the experience of survivors.

Conclusion Translation has played an important role in making Anne Frank the icon of the Holocaust around the world. The American adaptation of the English translation of Het Achterhuis into the play The Diary of Anne Frank emphasized features that hugely varied audiences could relate to. Even if it can be made applicable to many different contexts, the play’s message of hope, innocence and belief in the goodness of people is an unambiguous, melodramatic one. The universalized values that were projected in the adaptation The Diary of Anne Frank and its Dutch translation obscured the desolation of Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands. I have argued that the success of The Diary of Anne Frank helped

116

Translating Holocaust Lives

to create a collective mindset that failed to sufficiently acknowledge voices that have expressed survivors trauma in individual, poetic ways. The translation of the play into Dutch happened at a time when the people of the Netherlands had not really begun processing the Holocaust. A decade after the war the country had been rebuilt, but post-Holocaust trauma and the feelings of guilt that so many people in Dutch society carried within them had not been dealt with. Authors of Holocaust novels initially faced a great reluctance from publishers to bring out their work and Dutch reviewers were invariably surprised when these works were successful in translation. Poetry by those who survived or who lost friends in the Holocaust has hardly been translated. This poetry also does not feature in the recent government programme for Holocaust education in the Netherlands. Valuable poetry drawing attention to the Holocaust has been written in the new millennium, such as that by Luijters, Hirsch and Wijnberg; however, poetry that reveals the first-generation trauma seems to have disappeared from view. Thus, readers – young or older – do not gain knowledge of what it really means to have been in the Holocaust and to have survived. Translation of this poetry could possibly bring it ‘back’ to the attention of Dutch readers in the future. In the meantime, Anne Frank has been reclaimed as a Dutch original in an entirely new play by Durlacher and de Winter (2014). A new theatre was built especially to house Anne in Amsterdam. During performances translation can be instant in seven languages, if you book a tablet with the ‘multilingual translation system’ (Theater Amsterdam n.d.). The story of Anne Frank continues to be communicated successfully and on a large scale. However, Dutch poetry by survivors of the Holocaust, and poems by their family and friends, has sunk into oblivion. New editions, anthologies and translations are needed that could enable present-day readers to engage with their suffering, too.

Notes 1 Translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Mirjam Pressler, who translated the definitive German edition of the Diary of Anne Frank in 1991 (see Pressler 1991), also re-translated Sternkinder in 2011 – and included sentences left out in Niemeyer’s translation – to commemorate the fifty years that had passed since its first German appearance. In addition to an afterword, Pressler provides some explanatory footnotes in the text. In the author information on the first page, the publisher establishes firmly that this is ‘the earliest document in

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

117

young people’s literature about the fate of Jewish children during National Socialism’ (‘das früheste Dokument der Jugendliteratur über das Schicksal jüdischer Kinder während des Nationalsozialismus’, see Pressler 2011, n.p.). 3 In contrast, West Germany had an official re-education programme devised by the former Allies, which started as early as 1945 and involved, for example, reorientation of teachers and introduction of new textbooks with anti-totalitarian content. Learning about the Holocaust was required from the start (see Grimm 2011).

References Anne Frank Foundation (n.d.), Anne Frank Guide. www.annefrankguide.net/en-us/ bronnenbank.asp (accessed 21 January 2015). Anonymous (1947), ‘Het Dagboek van een Joods Meisje’, De locomotief 96, nr 23, 27 September 1947, 3. Anonymous [A. Bgl.] (1947), ‘“Het Achterhuis” Verrassend rijp dagboek van jong meisje’, De tijd 103, nr 33632, 4 October 1947, 3. Anonymous [J. G.] (1956), ‘Dagboek van Anne Frank: Theaters meesterproef ’, Limburghs dagblad 89, nr 291, 10 December 1956, 2. Anonymous (1962), ‘Clara Asscher-Pinkhof met vakantie hier’, Het vrije volk, 23 August 1962, 9. Anonymous (1984), ‘De wereldwijde vlucht van een klein boekje van Jona Oberski’, Leeuwarder Courant, 26 October 1984, 4. Asscher-Pinkhof, C. (1946), Sterrekinderen, Den Haag: H. P. Leopolds Uitgeverij. Barnouw, D. (1995), ‘Dagboek van Anne Frank op toneel: een Amerikaanse geschiedenis’, De Volkskrant, 19 January 1995. www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-archief/ dagboek-van-anne-frank-op-toneel-een-amerikaanse-geschiedenis~a409908/ (accessed 06 May 2015). Barnouw, D. (2012), Het fenomeen Anne Frank, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Barnouw, D. (2014), ‘Hoe Anne op toneel steeds meer Anne werd’, NRC Handelsblad, 15 January 2014. www.nrc.nl/handelsblad/van/2014/mei/15/hoe-anne-op-toneelsteeds-meer-anne-werd-1376824 (accessed 06 May 2015). Barnouw, D. and van der Stroom, G. (2003), Wie verraadde Anne Frank?, Amsterdam: Boom. Beek, M. (n.d.), ‘Jona Oberski’. http://www.schrijversinfo.nl/oberskijona.html (accessed 26 January 2015). Ben-Zvi, L. (2009), ‘Generational Shifts in American Jewish Theatre’, in E. Nahshon (ed.), Jewish Theatre: A Global View, Leiden: Brill, pp. 215–40. Berg, E., van den (2010), ‘Honderdste geboortedag Eduard Hoornik: Dichter overleefde concentratiekamp Dachau’, NPO Geschiedenis 9 March 2010, www.npogeschiedenis.

118

Translating Holocaust Lives

nl/nieuws/2010/maart/Honderdste-geboortedag-Eduard-Hoornik.html (accessed 27 March 2015). Boase-Beier, J. (2011), A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, London: Bloomsbury. Boersema, J. and Schimmel, N. (2008), ‘Challenging Dutch Holocaust Education: Towards a Curriculum based on Moral Choices and Empathetic Capacity’, Ethics and Education 3(1): 57–74. Bonte, R. (1997), ‘De Tweede Wereldoorlog in de poëzie van Ida Gerhardt “Eén tussen de naamloos velen”’, Literatuur 14: 226–34. Bouhuys, M. (trans.) (1984), F. Goodrich and A. Hackett, Het dagboek van Anne Frank: toneelspel in 2 bedrijven 10 taferelen naar Het Achterhuis van Anne Frank. Text not published. Broeck, R., van den (1994), ‘Introduction’, in J.S. Holmes (ed.), Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 1–5. Brokken, J. (1980), ‘Schrijven vervormt je herinnering’, in J. Brokken (ed.), Schrijven, Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, pp. 173–82. de Bruijn, M. (trans.) (2009), C. A. Lee: Anne Frank 1929–1945: Het leven van een jong meisje: De definitieve biografie, Amsterdam: Balans. Caren, T. and Lombard, S. (trans.) (1950), A. Frank, Le Journal d’Anne Frank, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Celan, P. (1985), Gedichte in Zwei Bänden, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Charles, J.B. (1953), Volg het spoor terug, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Cole, T. (1999), Selling the Holocaust. From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, New York: Routledge. Combat, K. (1995), ‘Wat moeten we aan met zulke belegen “bevrijdingspoëzie”?’, Tsjip/ Letteren 5: 72–6. Commissie Ontwikkeling Nederlandse Canon (2006), entoen.nu – de canon van Nederland, deel B, The Hague: Ministerie van OCW. Dogar, S. (2011), Annexed, London: Andersen Press Limited. Durlacher, J. and de Winter, L. (2014), Anne. De theatertekst, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Eriksson, G. and Eriksson, L.-I. (1956), Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Anne Franks dagbok: pjäs i två akter. Unpublished text, see Svenskt Övarsättarlexikon www.inarchive.com/page/2010-04-29/ (accessed 4 December 2015) and http://libris. kb.se/bib/17516924 (accessed 17 December 2015). Feldman, E. (2005), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Flanzbaum, H. (ed.) (1999), The Americanization of the Holocaust, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Frank, A. (1947), Het Achterhuis, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact.

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

119

van Galen Last, D. (2003), ‘Jona Oberski’, in S.L. Kremer (ed.), Holocaust Literature: Volume II, Lerner to Zychlinski, an Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 889–90. van Gelder, H. (1995), ‘Herschreven Anne Frank ontdaan van al te veel heiligheid’, NRC Handelsblad, 25 January 1995. http://vorige.nrc.nl/achtergrond/article2104193.ece (accessed 6 May 2015). Gerhardt, I. (1988) ‘De teruggewezen gave’, in I. Gerhardt (ed.), Verzamelde gedichten, Amsterdam: Athenaeum – Polak and Van Gennep, pp. 382. Goodrich, F. and Hackett, A. (2000), The Diary of Anne Frank, based upon The Diary of a Young Girl, newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman. New York: Dramatists Play Series, Inc. Grimm, S. (2011), ‘Germany’s post-1945 and post-1989 education systems’, in World Bank, World Development Report 2011. Background Case Note 62036, http:// documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2010/03/14276269/germanys-post-1945post-1989-education-systems (accessed 17 December 2015). Hamburger, M. (trans.) (2007), P. Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, New York: Anvil Press. Herzberg, A. (1950), Tweestromenland, Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus. Hillesum, E. (1981), Het verstoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum 1941–1943, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans. Hillesum, E. (1982), Het denkende hart van de barak, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans. Holmes, J. (trans.) (1970), E. Hoornik:‘The hound’, De Gids 133: 243. Holmes, J. (1972), ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, in Holmes (1988), Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, pp.67–80. Holmes, J. (1994), Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, ed. R. van den Broeck. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Holmes, J.S., Lambert, J. and van den Broeck, R. (1978), New Perspectives in Literary Studies: Literature and Translation, Leuven: Academic Publishing Company. de Hoog, C. (trans.) (2005), E. Feldman: In de schaduw van het Achterhuis, Amsterdam: Sijthoff. Hooley, R. (trans.) (1994), I. Gerhardt, ‘The Rejected Gift’, in P. van de Kamp (ed.), Turning Tides: Modern Dutch and Flemish Verse in English Versions by Irish Poets, Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, Inc., p. 199. Hoornik, E. (1960), ‘De nabestaande’, De Gids 123: 7. Hoornik, E. (1960), ‘De hond’, De Gids 123: 9. Hirsch, L. (2009), Tastzin, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers. van de Kamp, P. (ed.) (1994), Turning Tides: Modern Dutch and Flemish Verse in English Versions by Irish Poets, Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, Inc. van de Kamp, P. (trans.) (1994), I. Gerhardt, ‘The rejected gift’, in P. van de Kamp (ed.) (1994), Turning Tides: Modern Dutch and Flemish Verse in English Versions by Irish Poets, Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, Inc., p.199.

120

Translating Holocaust Lives

Kästner, E. (1961), ‘Vorwort’, in W. Niemeyer (trans.), C. Asscher-Pinkhof, Sternkinder, Berlin: Cecile Dressler Verlag, 9–10. Koning, D. (1956), ‘Sobere en aangrijpende opvoering van “Het Dagboek van Anne Frank”’, De Nieuwsgier, 24 December 1956, 6. Kumakura, Y. (1972), ‘Japan en het Nederlandse boek’, Ons Erfdeel 15(4): 29–36. Kunz, Ludwig (trans.) (1970), E. Hoornik, ‘Der Hinterlassene’, De Gids 133: 202. de Lange, L. (1964), with Jaap Stigter, Het verhaal van mijn leven, Amsterdan: Van Oorschot. Langer, L. (1996), ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’ in L. Langer (ed.), Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (2nd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–77. Lee, C.A. (2000), Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, London: Penguin. Liefhebber, P., ‘Anne Frank nu ontdaan van geur van heiligheid’, De Telegraaf, 20 February 1984, 4. Ligtvoet, P. and Schaap, E. (2010), ‘Kunz (Ludwig)’, 12 December 2010, Joods Monument Zaanstreek. www.joodsmonumentzaanstreek.nl/pagina-801-Kunz-Ludwig.htm (accessed 27 March 2015). Luijters, G. (2011), Sterrenlied, Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam. Luijters, G. (2012), In Memoriam: De gedeporteerde en vermoorde Joodse, Roma en Sinti kinderen 1942–1945, Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam. Lukkenaar, P. (trans.) (2010), M. Pressler, ‘Groeten en liefs aan allen’: Het verhaal van de familie van Anne Frank, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Manheim, R. (trans.) (1984), J. Oberski, A Childhood, London: Hodder and Stoughton/ Coronet Books. Meijer, I. (2003), ‘Marga Minco’, in C. Palmen (ed.), De interviewer en de schrijver, Amsterdam: Prometheus, pp. 282–92. Meijerink, G. (trans.) (2000), M. Müller, Anne Frank: De biografie, Amsterdam: Ooiveaar. Melkman, J., ‘Anne Frank vindt niet overal gelijke vertolking’, Het vrije volk 27 September 1957, 19. Messel, S., van (1971), Syndroom. Joodse poëzie, ‘s Gravenhage and Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar. Minco, M. (1957), Het bittere kruid: Een kleine kroniek, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Minco, M. (1966), Een leeg huis, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Minco, M. (1983), De val, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Minco, M. (1997), Nagelaten dagen, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Minco, M. (1994), ‘Inleiding’, in B. Voeten (ed.), Neem je bed op en wandel. Brieven aan Bert Bakker senior 1954–1969, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, pp.7–9. Mintz, A. (2001), Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Mok, M. (1972), Met Job geleefd, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij.

Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation

121

Mooyaart-Doubleday, B. (trans.) (1952), A. Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Garden City : Doubleday. Müller, M. (1998), Das Mädchen Anne Frank: Die Biographie, München: Claassen. Mussey, B. (1958), Jacob/Jacques Presser, Breaking Point, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. Nederlands Letterenfonds (n.d.), ‘Marga Minco’. www.letterenfonds.nl/en/author/199/ marga-minco (accessed 28 March 2015). Niemeyer, W. (trans.) (1961), C. Asscher-Pinkhof: Sternkinder, Berlin: Cecile Dressler Verlag. Nieuwkerk, M. van (2011), De Wereld Draait Door, 23 February 2011. dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/69532 (accessed 28 March 2015). Oberski, J. (1977), Kinderjaren, Amsterdam: Ambo|Anthos. Oranje, H. (1995), ‘“Dagboek”: goed gemaakt Hollands taferelen-drama theater’, Trouw, 23 January 1995. www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/5009/Archief/article/ detail/2759825/1995/01/23/Dagboek-goed-gemaakt-Hollands-taferelen-dramatheater.dhtml (accessed 6 May 2015). Ockhuysen, R. (1995), ‘Energieke Anne van Cléo Dankert’, De Volkskrant, 23 January 1995. www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-archief/energieke-anne-van-cleodankert~a402531/ (accessed 6 May 2015). Polet, C. and Polet, S. (1988), ‘James Stratton Holmes’, in E.J. Brill (ed.), Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde 1987–1988, Leiden: Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, pp. 163–7. Presser, J. (1957), De nacht der Girondijnen, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Presser, J. (1985), Ondergang: De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940–1945, 2 vols, The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij. Pressler, M. (trans.) (1991) with Otto Frank, Anne Frank, Tagebuch, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Pressler, M. (2009), ‘Grüße und Küsse an alle’: Die Geschichte der Familie von Anne Frank, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Pressler, M. (trans.) (2011), C. Asscher-Pinkhof, Sternkinder, Berlin: Cecilie Dressler Verlag. Prose, F. (2009), Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Rood, C. (2011), Onze dagen: Herinneringen aan de Jodenvervolging, Amsterdam: Boom. Santcross, J. (trans.) (1997), A. Herzberg, Between two Streams: A Diary from BergenBelsen, London: I. B. Schoonheim, M. (2009), ‘Marga Minco’, in Jewish Women’s Archive, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/mincomarga (accessed 13 February 2015). Schnorr, R. (trans.) (1956), F. Goodrich and A. Hackett, Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.

122

Translating Holocaust Lives

Schütz, A. (trans.) (1950), A. Frank, Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag. Searls, Damian (trans.) (2011), M. Pressler, Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Stichting entoen.nu (2007), ‘Anne Frank 1929–1945, Jodenvervolging’, in Stichting entoen.nu, De Nederlandse Canon. www.entoen.nu/annefrank/vo-docent (accessed 25 March 2015). Theater Amsterdam (n.d.), ‘Anne’. www.theateramsterdam.nl/en/meertaligvertaalsysteem.html (accessed 29 March 2015). Vanderwal Taylor, J. (1997), A Family Occupation. Children of the War and the Memory of World War II in Dutch Literature of the 1980s, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Venuti, L. (1998), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, London: Routledge. Vice, S. (2007), Children Writing the Holocaust, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vrijman, J. (dir.) (1959), Het wonder van Anne Frank. www.npogeschiedenis.nl/speler. WO_AVRO_522212.html (accessed 26 March 2015). Warmerdam, A. (trans.) (2011), S. Dogar:, De jongen in het Achterhuis, Utrecht: De Fontein. Warren, H. and Molegraaf, M. (eds) (1995), Die dag in mei vergeet ik niet, Amsterdam: Ooievaar Pockethouse. Westerling, A. (trans.) (1956; 2004), F. Goodrich and A. Hackett: Het dagboek van Anne Frank: toneelspel in 2 bedrijven 10 taferelen naar Het Achterhuis van Anne Frank, Krommenie: Nederlandse Vereniging voor Amateurtheater. Wilson, K. (2013), ‘Anne Frank Abroad. The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature’, World Literature Today, May–June 2013, 28–33. Wijnberg, C. (2001), Matses en Monsters, Haarlem: In de Knipscheer.

Response to: Marian de Vooght, In the Shadow of the Diary: Anne Frank’s Fame and the Effects of Translation Theo Hermans

Part of Marian de Vooght’s chapter concerns a complex web of editions, translations and adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary. It is an intricate web that crosses languages and genres, creating various kinds of dependencies and folds back on itself more than once. Let’s rehearse the key data in brief. The starting point is Het achterhuis, the version of the diary as released by Otto Frank in 1947. Some passages omitted by Otto Frank were restored in the English translation by Barbara MooyaartDoubleday, which appeared as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple of successful American screenwriters, adapted this translation for the stage as The Diary of Anne Frank, which saw its première in New York in 1955 and was made into a film four years later. If The Diary of a Young Girl had been quite successful, the play The Diary of Anne Frank was even more so. Its German translation opened in seven cities simultaneously in 1956, shortly before a Dutch translation by Antoinette Westerling was staged in Amsterdam, its première attended by the Dutch Queen Juliana. These different versions established Anne Frank’s image both at home and abroad for a generation. In the Netherlands, the interpretation which had informed Hackett and Goodrich’s play and which had remained intact in Antoinette Westerling’s translation was contested in Mies Bouhuys’ 1984 Dutch version but largely restored by the same Mies Bouhuys for another production ten years later. In America, too, Hackett and Goodrich’s adaptation was readapted by Wendy Kesselman in 1997, giving more prominence to Anne Frank’s Jewishness and her sexuality. By that time the original diary had been published in an extensively annotated critical edition featuring all three successive versions of Anne’s manuscript entries; the English translation of the critical

124

Translating Holocaust Lives

edition (1989) retained Mooyaart-Doubleday’s rendering but added previously untranslated passages. A new English translation for the general public, by Susan Massotty, appeared in 1995. Another chapter was recently added by Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter, a married couple of successful Dutch novelists, whose grandiose play Anne premièred in Amsterdam in May 2014, in the presence of King WillemAlexander. The play, commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel and meant to replace Hackett and Goodrich for a contemporary audience, highlights Anne’s ambitions as a budding literary writer and includes a counterfactual post-war scene in which Anne meets her editor in Paris. Performances in Amsterdam are inclusive thanks to multilingual subtitling and dubbing made available to spectators on portable electronic devices; a German version was staged in Hamburg in August 2015. Some of the above versions are translations, others are adaptations, although the terminology varies. While no one will be rash enough to define the exact demarcation between translation and adaptation, the difference is fairly clear. Both involve a degree of resemblance with the original to which they refer, but they have different finalities. Because translations function as proxies, they circulate under the original author’s name and remain that author’s intellectual property. Adaptations foreground the adapter’s agenda and can thus afford to privilege difference over similarity. The Classical and Renaissance idea of imitatio accommodated both concepts under one roof. It defined imitation as an ambitious but ambivalent undertaking that combined respect for a model with a determination to create something novel on the basis of the old. The new work should not be so like its model that the similarity would be immediately evident, but not so unlike that the intertextual link would cease to be operative. Translation in this conception was a lowly form of imitation, a linguistic rather than a literary practice that did not entitle the practitioner to claim ownership of the end product. It may well be due to the status of Anne Frank’s diary as an iconic testimony that the adaptations of it, whether in Dutch or in another language, never behave as other adaptations do. For instance, the French novelist Michel Tournier adapted Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1967 as Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (translated by Norman Denny as Friday or the Other Island, 1869), a book he subsequently reworked for young readers as Vendredi ou la vie sauvage in 1971. Both versions can be read independently of Defoe’s novel; broadly speaking, only the paratexts and plot structure of the French stories recall the original. By contrast, the adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary

Response

125

for the stage have continued to make explicit reference to the figure of Anne Frank and the wording of the diary, including changes in successive editions of it. The various stage versions, beginning with Hackett and Goodrich’s Diary of Anne Frank, represent a series of interpretations and quarrels about – or adjustments to – interpretations in the border zone between translation and adaptation. The  extent to which they respond to each other or to changing circumstances and knowledge of the Holocaust must remain uncertain. Mies Bouhuys’ 1984 version took issue with Hackett and Goodrich’s American play as much as with its 1956 Dutch translation; whether she made these changes in response to a recognition that in 1984 Dutch audiences were better able than in 1956 to appreciate the historical reality of the events surrounding the diary is hard to ascertain. In the 1994 version, the opening scene showing Anne’s father Otto Frank returning to Amsterdam to receive the diary was restored, but this does not necessarily suggest that by then audiences no longer knew why Jews went into hiding during the war. Copyright may have been another reason for reverting to the original form of the American play, and reputedly Hackett and Goodrich were difficult about it. The latest version, by Durlacher and De Winter, certainly does not take any historical foreknowledge for granted. This is paradoxical because the status of Anne Frank is now so huge that a new theatre has been built specially for this production, which must therefore be expected to run for years to come. Presumably Durlacher and De Winter’s play caters for the tourists who flock to the Anne Frank Museum in their millions and who, the play’s authors must have reckoned, know Anne Frank’s name but not her story. Durlacher and De Winter’s spoon-feeding of the audience seals the commodification of the diary, to the chagrin, again paradoxically, of the director of the Anne Frank Museum, who objected to the consumerism surrounding the lavish new play. Has the international success of Anne Frank’s diary hindered the reception of other local voices that spoke of the Holocaust? We will never know for certain, since the argument would have to be made ex negativo. Part of the diary’s appeal is that the reader knows of the tragedy that overcame its author after the entries come to an abrupt end, whereas their author herself did not. Some of the post-war Dutch novels that Marian de Vooght highlights use this asymmetrical knowledge as a conscious technique. Both Marga Minco in Bitter Herbs and Jona Oberski in Childhood share with their readers a knowledge about impending horrors which is denied to their protagonists, the little boy in Childhood and the young girl in Bitter Herbs (several years younger and hence more naïve than the author was at the time). The fact remains that these techniques, effective as they are, show a

126

Translating Holocaust Lives

degree of fictionalization and hence artificiality absent from Anne Frank’s diary, which has a directness and a freshness that bespeaks its authenticity. It is also true, however, that Minco, Oberski and, apparently, Clara Asscher-Pinkhoff (with whose case I am not familiar) gained in stature in the Netherlands after translations of their work into other languages had proved successful abroad. The phenomenon is well known and typical of so-called minor literatures. Sociologists of translation like Johan Heilbron (see, for example, 1999) and Pascale Casanova (for example 2004) have shown, for instance, how translation from a minor into a major language adds prestige to a work in its country of origin, due to the high visibility of the major language – and currently no language is more major than English. Often the exposure provided by a translation into a major language in turn gives rise to other translations, either from the original or via the major language. The phenomenon is not exclusive to Holocaust writing. The best-known Dutch example is probably Cees Nooteboom, whose reputation at home received a lift after his novels proved successful in English and then in German translation. None of this is likely to affect poetry, a niche interest in most modern literatures and with circuits and outlets of its own. It would be hard to find concrete evidence showing that Anne Frank’s international standing got in the way of poetic voices about the Holocaust being heard, either at home or abroad. The various poets that Marian de Vooght mentions – Maurits Mok, Saul van Messel, Ida Gerhardt, Guus Luijters, Ed Hoornik – may well have written poems that are worth translating. These poems may or may not have intrinsic merit – whatever that is – either as poems or as testimonies, but it is not intrinsic merit alone that triggers translation. There are plenty of other triggers, from the personal initiative of a mediator to a chance constellation of events. The only way to find out if there is an audience for a particular set of poems in translation is to produce translations and try to market them.

References Casanova, P. (2004), The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B.DeBevoise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heilbron, J. (1999), ‘Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System’, European Journal of Social Theory 2(4): 429–44.

6

Translating Cultures and Languages: Exile Writers between German and English Andrea Hammel

The fields of Postcolonial Studies and Global Literature have been fertile territory for the discussion of ‘in-between-ness’, developing the conceptualization of cultural hybridity, cultural cross-fertilization and the so-called third space. Homi K. Bhabha wrote in his influential work The Location of Culture that writers are able to create room for interferences between several cultures, that they are able to work in a ‘third space’, a space where cultural differences are not static but in a dynamic relationship with each other (Bhabha 1994: 4). Using these concepts for the study of literature by exiles from National Socialism has been controversial and has only slowly entered the mainstream of the discipline. Some argue that the situation of the refugees and exiles from National Socialism is unique and should not be investigated using concepts from Colonial or Postcolonial Studies. Other critics see the concept of hybridity as a loaded one, especially when dealing with aspects of German-Jewish culture. It has been argued that the notion of a hybrid implies inferiority in a similar way to that in which National Socialist policy refused to see Jewish citizens as full Germans (see Stephan 2005: 9–17). While aware of these debates, I am going to argue that the concept of ‘third space’ seems to fit the translating and mediating work being undertaken by exile writers. Sture Packalén used Bhabha’s concepts for his examination of the literature of Paul Celan, Erich Fried and Peter Weiss, arguing that the three manage to expose ‘otherness’, in this case Holocaust writing, at the centre of German post-war culture (see Packalén 2005). I will use Bhabha’s concepts to discuss how exile writers were able to create a third space through translation between Britain and German-speaking Central Europe, and between English and German. In 2005 Alan Rosen wrote that ‘English occupies a specifically marginal position in relation to the Holocaust. A language of neither victim nor perpetrator,

128

Translating Holocaust Lives

English appeared rarely in the main arenas of the Holocaust experience because English-speaking countries, although fighting on the side of the Allies, were not caught up in the matrix of ghettos, deportations and concentration camps’ (Rosen 2005: 7). What Rosen does not consider are the refugees and exiles from National Socialism, who, although most were not caught up in Rosen’s narrower definition of Holocaust experience, that is ghettos, deportations and concentration camps, had experienced marginalization and persecution in the same way as many others. A large number of these refugees fled to Englishspeaking countries. It is estimated that over 60,000 German-speaking refugees were living in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the Second World War (Grenville 2010: vi). Among them were many artists and writers who ‘formed the tip of the iceberg of a culturally and intellectually vibrant community’ (Grenville 2010: vi). As has been discussed before, many refugees and exiles did not and do not consider themselves to be Holocaust survivors and might themselves never have defined their writing as Holocaust writing; however, their lives and their creative endeavour were clearly strongly influenced by the Holocaust, and thus their work needs to be considered in a book such as this (see Hammel 2014). Here I will investigate the topic of translation within the work of two exile writers who settled in the United Kingdom, with the focus on both translating and cultural mediating activities. In Exile Studies we must be aware of the tension between the loss the exile writers clearly felt and the exile experience as a source of creativity. Without acknowledging the former, we are in danger of denying the consequences of National Socialism and the Holocaust, but without acknowledging the latter we remain stuck in a view of culture that involves a hierarchization of fatherland and mother tongue, meaning that works created in one’s country of origin and in one’s first language are somehow superior to works created in exile. This chapter will investigate exile literature and translation bearing in mind this tension. It will focus on the writers Hilde Spiel and Robert Neumann: both originally from Vienna, they both eventually changed their language of creative production from German to English, and they also had a number of their texts translated and worked as translators themselves. Studying these two examples allows a number of key questions concerning exile writers to be addressed: How did exile writers see the translation of their texts? What are the circumstances that led them to consider switching languages at some point? What value did they place on their work as translators or their position as cultural mediators and how did the refugee and exile experience influence their work after 1945?

Exile Writers between German and English

129

Most exile writers felt a sense of alarm when considering the fact that they had to live in a new country with a different language. Many established writers were at least partially worried about the loss of audience and the financial loss this would cause, as having to rely on a translator before their work was publishable clearly made the publication process more difficult and had an effect on the financial returns as well. Many writers in the early stages of their careers were worried that they might never get published under these difficult circumstances. Most exile writers also felt that they might be losing the tools of their trade if they were no longer surrounded by the German or Austrian culture and the German language. They felt that they might lose their mother tongue and that their whole professional as well as personal identity, which was so bound up with the German language and culture, was under threat. ‘Denn man muss die Sprache seiner Umgebung schreiben, alles andere wird tot’ (One has to write in the language of one’s surroundings, anything else will be a dead creation) argued the exile writer Ernst Bloch in an article entitled ‘Zerstörte Sprache – zerstörte Kultur’ (Destroyed Language – Destroyed Culture) first published in July 1939 (Bloch 1972).1 Many felt that it was imperative to preserve their mother tongue as a source for creative writing, as opposed to starting to use another language for their creative work. On a societal and communal level, many exile writers also believed that they had a duty to preserve an alternative version of the German and Austrian culture to that promulgated by National Socialism. Therefore, a significant number of exiled writers and artists claimed to represent ‘das Andere Deutschland’ (the Other Germany) (see Wehage 1985: 421–6). They did so by upholding the German language as well as German literary and artistic traditions, and by trying to build on an earlier cultural history that was now being rejected by National Socialist cultural policy. Many well-known writers insisted that they could not be creative in a language that was not German. The German playwright and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who lived outside Germany from 1933 onwards, held this view: ‘In einer fremden Sprache dichten, in einer fremden Sprache gestalten, kann man nicht’ (One cannot write, one cannot create in a foreign language) (Feuchtwanger 1943 quoted in Krohn et al. 2007: ix). Feuchtwanger was an established writer and on a tour of speaking engagements in the United States at the time of the National Socialists’ takeover in 1933. His 1925 novel Jud Süss (Feuchtwanger 1925) had been very successful and was translated into seventeen languages by 1931. This meant that publishers were willing to continue to arrange for his work to be translated after 1933 and his popularity with an English-speaking audience

130

Translating Holocaust Lives

afforded him a degree of financial security. He could thus continue to write in German and did not need to change his opinion that creative writing should take place only in one’s first language. Feuchtwanger also voiced a negative attitude towards the translation of his work: ‘Denn auch die beste Übersetzung bleibt ein Fremdes’ (Even the best translation will remain something alien) (quoted in Krohn et al. 2007: ix). Other less well known writers were in a different position: if they chose to continue to write in German they could only be published by exile publishing houses or maybe in Switzerland, otherwise they had to try to get their works translated. Like Feuchtwanger, the Austrian-born Robert Neumann was also on a professional engagement abroad in the early 1930s. Neumann had come to London in 1933, not as a refugee but, having received a commission from a London literary agent to write a biography of the arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff, to start research for the commissioned book. Neumann returned to Austria at the end of that year to see his wife and son, but in February  1934 he permanently settled in London. Interestingly, over the next two years he visited the Austrian countryside and Vienna several times until, in 1936, he was mistaken for a German communist and arrested. This experience stopped him from returning to Austria for visits, something that was to become impossible after the Anschluss and even more so after the outbreak of the Second World War. Neumann’s fame in the German-speaking world was based on his parodies; and his volume Mit fremden Federn (1927) had brought him overnight fame. Parody is, of course, a culturally specific genre and does not lend itself to easy translation. The aforementioned Zaharoff project was a complicated endeavour which only became a success after years of stops and starts, especially because the publishers feared litigation from the armaments industry. However, 35,000 copies had been sold by 1939, which did a lot to alleviate Neumann’s financial difficulties (Dove 1994: 162). When Neumann settled in the United Kingdom in 1934 he apparently spoke little English, but five of his earlier novels had already been translated from German into English and published by the small British publisher Peter Davies. Unfortunately, this did not mean that he was particularly well known in the United Kingdom. Richard Dove (2000: 64) attributes this lack of recognition to the fact that the small publishing house had not had the means to promote Neumann’s books and that his books were not translated by experienced translators. After settling in the United Kingdom Neumann continued to offer his already published German-language oeuvre to British publishers with limited success. Eventually Neumann’s novel Die Macht (1932) was translated

Exile Writers between German and English

131

by the writer Dorothy Richardson, but she usually translated from French into English and was also asked to condense the novel, shortening it by a third. The end result upset Neumann to such an extent that he demanded that the edition should be scrapped. Having had to leave the Austrian and German market behind, it quickly became obvious to Robert Neumann that his works had to be written for the translator, which means that he did not expect them to be published in German first. As Dove (2000: 64) points out: ‘The pattern of publication of his work up to 1939 exemplifies the rapid contraction of German-language publishing outside the Third Reich and the German author’s growing dependence on the Englishspeaking market.’ Neumann’s (1935) novel Struensee (English language title: The Queen’s Doctor) was such a work. He wrote it quickly in 1934 and in the end it was published first in German by the exile publishing house Querido in Amsterdam in 1935, but it was expected to reach a wider audience in the English translation. It is a historical novel, which was a popular genre among exile writers as it gave the writer the opportunity to criticize National Socialism and related fascist or dictatorial tendencies. In Struensee Neumann, for example, parodies the possibility of a benign ruler, here the Danish King who is not aware what his cruel civil servants are doing, in this case forcing the people to pay very high taxes. This can easily be read as a parallel to the relatively common view in Germany in the 1930s that Hitler did not know what the barbaric SS (Schutzstaffel) was doing. Additionally, historical novels were clearly popular with the European readership, including the British audience. Apparently Robert Neumann chose the subject matter on the advice of fellow exile writer Stefan Zweig who just had a significant success with his historical novel Marie Antoinette (Dove 2000: 67; Zweig 1932). Neumann’s novel focusses on the life of Johann-Friedrich Struensee, royal physician to Christian II of Denmark and his wife Matilda, youngest sister of the English King George III. Struensee was a follower of Rousseau and advocated political and educational reforms but fell out of favour at the Danish court and was executed in 1772. During the years 1935 and 1936, Neumann continued to try and place his previously published body of work with a number of British publishers. He had received numerous rejections, amongst others from the publishing houses Unwin and Victor Gollancz. However, Gollancz were prepared to accept the novel Struensee because of its historical plot, and arranged for its translation. As Neumann had not been happy with the translation of his other novels, it seems that he wanted to make sure that the translator for Struensee was of a

132

Translating Holocaust Lives

high calibre. He thus asked to receive parts of the translation for checking while it was being undertaken by the poet Edwin Muir. Edwin and Willa Muir were prominent translators from German into English (Muir 1968). Neumann and Muir corresponded about Struensee. Neumann was naturally keen for the book to appeal to an English-speaking audience and asked Muir to translate with this in mind. He wrote to Muir and asked him ‘to adapt certain passages to English speaking requirements rather than simply translate them’ (quoted in Dove 2000: 67). Clearly Neumann’s attitude to translation was rather simplistic; he seemed to assume that a straightforward transposition from one language to another was possible. The experienced translator Muir must have known that ‘simple’ translation is impossible; however, in a letter he pointed out that Neumann’s style posed specific challenges: ‘Neumann’s style is so idiosyncratic and strives for so much nuance that it needs a great deal of care’ (quoted in Dove 2000: 67). Victor Gollancz certainly liked the finished product and congratulated Muir on his translation. The translation of Struensee by Muir exemplifies the difficulties of translating across cultures and historical periods. Muir had to translate a text that Neumann imagined to be a suitable description of the Danish court in the eighteenth century from German into English. One example of a translation challenge is the mode of address: in the German version the Danish Queen Mathilda addresses Dr Struensee in the third-person singular: ‘Ich weiß, Er macht sich nichts daraus’ (I know it means nothing to him) (Neumann 1962: 84). This denotes a formal and also distant form of address of a social inferior. The translation into English by Edwin Muir reads less formally and appears less distant: ‘that all this means nothing to you’ (Muir 1936: 135). This is one example of one of Muir’s translation decisions that might have made the book easier to read. Translators played a vital role in the often very long process of getting a German novel accepted by a British publishing house. The opinion of an experienced translator like Edwin Muir was valued by British publishers, and he was frequently asked to read and assess German novels for British publishing houses. Muir writes in his autobiography: ‘I was summoned to London to discuss with a publisher a German novel about which he could not make up his mind: later on it became a best-seller’ (Muir 1968: 228). Clearly the willingness to publish and promote German literature in the United Kingdom changed during the 1930s. Left-leaning publishers were especially willing to publish German-language literature that advocated opposition to National Socialist and to nationalist tendencies in Germany in the early to mid-1930s. Muir writes in

Exile Writers between German and English

133

his autobiography of the time before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936: ‘We were still translating from the German, mainly from Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka’ (Muir 1968: 240). However, after the outbreak of the Second World War, even these left-leaning publishing houses ceased to commission translations from German. This brought financial difficulties upon Willa and Edwin Muir: ‘The war came at last, and our income from German translations stopped’ (Muir 1968: 247). Of course, this also made things even more difficult for the exiled writers. Willa and Edwin Muir also translated Neumann’s next novel Eine Frau hat geschrien (first published 1938 in Zurich) from German into English; the English-language version A Woman Screamed was published in the same year by Cassell in London. The novel had been offered to Victor Gollancz in the first place but he rejected it, stating that he found ‘these translations more and more difficult to handle’ (quoted in Dove 1994: 166). Richard Dove argues that this was an excuse and that Gollancz found the writer Robert Neumann difficult to handle (Dove 1994: 166). This might have been true in this individual case but it is also clear that the involvement of a translator in the publication process of a novel adds another layer of potential tension for the author and publisher. Exile writers’ attitude to the translation of their works varied considerably and it seems that the age when they emigrated, the stage of their career they had reached, and of course individual opinion influenced how open they were towards translation, the English language or even a language switch. Hilde Spiel was another Austrian-born writer who emigrated to the United Kingdom. Whereas Neumann, born in 1897, was considerably older than Spiel, and thus an established writer when he settled in the United Kingdom, the much younger Spiel, born in 1911, had only published one novel before she decided to leave Austria and move to the United Kingdom in 1936. Spiel and Neumann knew each other well. They had both frequented the Café Herrenhof in Vienna, which had been popular with established writers as well as those who were at the beginning of their literary career. Spiel showed Neumann the manuscript of a novella with the title ‘Begegnung im Trüben’ while still in Vienna. Although this novella was never published, Neumann encouraged her to write the novel Kati auf der Brücke, which consequently came out with Paul Zsolnay Verlag in 1933 on the recommendation of Neumann. Similar to Neumann, Spiel did not undertake a desperate flight to come to the United Kingdom, but a much more ordered move. She arrived after finishing her doctorate in Vienna, having followed her then fiancé, the German journalist Peter de Mendelssohn. Although Spiel was from a Jewish background, her parents had both converted to Catholicism and she had lived the life of

134

Translating Holocaust Lives

an intellectually curious young woman who enjoyed the company of different groups of people in the early to mid-1930s despite the political circumstances. In the first volume of her autobiography Spiel describes her generation, those who are in their early twenties between the National Socialists’ rise to power in Germany and the Anschluss of Austria, as an emotionally and politically confused and torn generation: ‘Junge Menschen wie ich, dauernd zwischen extremen Gefühlshaltungen schwankend, zutiefst zerissen, ausschweifend und introvertiert, hilflos den äußeren Mächten ausgeliefert, fröhlich verzweifelnd und von skeptischer Zuversicht, hochfliegenden ethischen Grundsätzen verpflichtet und im Alltag so verführbar, so schwach – nur auf dem unsicheren Boden der Zwanziger- und Dreißigerjahre sind sie denkbar’ (Young people like me, permanently oscillating between emotions, deeply torn, extroverted and introverted, exposed to outside powers permanently, happily despairing and full of sceptical hope, feeling a duty towards highflying ethical principles and easily led in everyday life – these people were only possible in the insecure situation of the 1920s and 1930s) (Spiel 1994: 127). Spiel continued her literary as well as her journalistic career in the United Kingdom. Before the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 she made her living by selling her writing in German to Austrian newspapers and magazines, while de Mendelssohn, whom she had married in 1936, initially worked as a foreign correspondent for German-language newspapers in London. However, the couple and especially de Mendelssohn realized that this income stream would not last. De Mendelssohn seems to have been one of the strongest advocates amongst German and Austrian writers in the United Kingdom of switching from German to English as the language for creative work (Dove 2000: 222). Besides Spiel’s work for Austrian newspapers, she earned her first money in the United Kingdom by placing short stories written in German, then translated by de Mendelssohn, in British newspapers: ‘Dann kommt ein kleiner Scheck für eine meiner Kurzgeschichten, die Peter ins Englische übersetzt hat und die der Daily Express druckt’ (A little cheque arrived for my short stories, which had been translated into English by Peter and which were published by the Daily Express) (Spiel 1994: 152). Spiel does not express any hesitation about her work being translated; the fact that the translator was her husband might have played a role in forming this attitude. Other reasons might have included Spiel’s relatively young age and the fact that she was not an established writer yet and that the couple led a financially precarious existence for many years (see Strickhausen 1996: 47–50). However, her open, cosmopolitan attitude certainly also played a role. In an interview conducted in the 1980s she talked about the

Exile Writers between German and English

135

older German-speaking refugees who were only interested in German literature and culture although they were now living in London: ‘Sie haben überhaupt nicht den Versuch gemacht, in die englische Literatur einzudringen, was ich schon als Kind in Österreich gemacht habe und in England erst recht’ (They did not try to immerse themselves in English literature, something which I had already done as a child in Austria and something which I was doing even more in England) (Krug 1986: 293). Her first novel published in the United Kingdom was Flute and Drums, written in German, translated by her husband with the help of a friend Eric Dancy, and published by Hutchinson in London in 1939. Very quickly, however, de Mendelssohn and Spiel decided to change from German to English as the language for creative and journalistic writing. They wanted to become English writers; in her autobiography, Spiel describes this process and names her husband as the driving force: ‘unser Eintritt in die englische Sprache, ins geschriebene Wort, schließlich in eine Gemeinschaft von Schriftstellern in diesem Lande. Peter ist hier viel weiter als ich’ (our entrance into the English language, into the written English word, eventually into the community of writers in this country. Peter has made further advances than me) (Spiel 1994: 154). De Mendelssohn is often considered to be one of the writers who was most open to switching from German to English for his creative work. He had had a very cosmopolitan upbringing; he was brought up in an international artists’ community and had attended the international ‘Freie Schule’ (Free School) where he had been taught English by Willa Muir – who later translated Neumann’s novels together with her husband (Dove 1995: 100). De Mendelssohn and Spiel’s decision in favour of a language switch was clearly based on many reasons, pragmatic ones such as finances and career advancement, but also ideological and social ones: Spiel and de Mendelssohn wanted to be part of a country that was democratic and took a stance against National Socialism and part of a community of writers that shared their attitude to social commitment and aesthetic debate. Although Spiel was willing to undertake the language switch from German to English, she did not always find it easy. The couple read a lot in English, but she described the process as hard and acknowledged that many writers considered it impossible: ‘Während die meisten Literaten im Exil nicht daran denken, ja gar nicht für möglich halten, ihre mehr oder weniger erreichte Meisterschaft im Deutschen zugunsten einer nur mühsam erlernbaren, zwangsläufig vereinfachten herabgeschraubten englischen Schreibweise aufzugeben, ist Peter fest zu diesem Tausch entschlossen und nötigt mich gleichfalls dazu’ (Whereas most writers in exile would not think of switching their more or less acquired mastery of German for a difficult to

136

Translating Holocaust Lives

learn and definitely simplified English writing style, Peter had made up his mind to follow through with this switch and forces me to do the same) (Spiel 1994: 155). At some stage she complained to Neumann about the difficulty of writing in English. She recounts his poignant answer in her autobiography: ‘Unsere Vorfahren hat man auf dem Scheiterhaufen verbrannt. Da wirst du noch lernen können, in einer anderen Sprache zu schreiben’ (They burnt our ancestors at the stake. I think you might manage to learn to write in another language) (Spiel 1994: 155). Both Spiel and de Mendelssohn were successful in their language switch and both seem to have been accepted within British literary circles during the war. Spiel also cites the opportunity to experience a British childhood by proxy after the birth of her daughter Christine in 1939 and her son Felix in 1944 in London as an advantage in the acculturation process. Spiel wrote her next novel after Flute and Drums in English: she mentions work on a further novel The Fruits of Prosperity for the first time on 7 January 1941 in her diary. The Fruits of Prosperity is set between 1873 and 1881 in Austria and examines the multiculturalism, including the experience of Jewish subjects, of the Habsburg Empire (see Hammel 1998). Spiel herself stated that she tried to examine the roots of Austrian anti-Semitism of the twentieth century and that the novel represents ‘die Suche nach den Wurzeln meiner eigenen Epoche, in der das Judenproblem einer so entsetzlichen Lösung entgegenging’ (the search for the roots of my own epoch in which the Jewish problem was moving towards a catastrophic solution) (quoted in Strickhausen 1996: 146). The novel, though written in English, was never published in the English version. Spiel was of the opinion that British publishers did not think that the Austrian topic would be of interest to the British readership (see Strickhausen 1996: 146–7). Consequently, Spiel herself translated extracts from the manuscript into German and they appeared in the exile publication Die Zeitung in London between 1941 and 1946. Forty years later, Die Früchte des Wohlstands was first published in German in book form in Munich in 1981. Here we can see an interesting interrelationship between original, translation and self-translation of a piece of exile writing which does not follow the sequence that is often imagined, that is that the exile writer writes a text in their first language and that this gets translated into the language of the exile country. The end of the Second World War constituted another shift for Spiel regarding her identity as a writer and citizen. From being an exile who had successfully integrated both linguistically and culturally in Britain, she became someone who might be able to return to her birth country. In her autobiography, Spiel writes about this process as a very painful development, which she describes as follows:

Exile Writers between German and English

137

‘Kingsley Martin erklärte: “Damit ist der Krieg nun aus.” Und zu uns: “Ihr werdet wohl jetzt in Euer Land zurückkehren?” Da wußten wir und gestanden’s uns doch nicht ein: neun Jahre der Einfügung in die englische Welt waren vergeblich gewesen’ (‘Kingsley Martin declared: “Now the war ist finished.” And addressing us, he said: “I suppose you will return to your country?” Thus we knew but did not want to admit it: nine years of acculturation into an English world had been futile’) (Spiel 1994: 206). This statement is based on a narrow definition of belonging and identity, which is not untypical for her generation and for an exiled writer. Her disappointment at not being recognized fully as an English-language author is understandable. Spiel was frustrated that she had not been able to write and publish more during the war. But there were many reasons for this, most of which had nothing to do with being an exile from Austria. Spiel had had two children (and a miscarriage) between 1939 and 1944 and she had experienced domestic life with a young family as restricting, calling her suburban domicile in Wimbledon ‘ein grünes Grab’ (a green grave) (Spiel 1992: 105). It is also clear that the end of the war opened up many insecurities and identity crises for exiles and refugees. However, the literary work of both Neumann and Spiel, especially with regard to translation and writing in German and English, points towards a ‘third space’, something the two writers did not recognize, but a concept that had become increasingly important by the end of the twentieth century. Bhabha defines the terms ‘cultural hybridity’ and the ‘third space’ for writers similar to our exile writers here: writers who managed to create a space for ‘interference’ in their work, a space where they can form their work and their identity outside geographical boundaries. Here I argue that Spiel and Neumann create similar spaces through their intercultural communication and their cultural and linguistic translation activities. Spiel was an intercultural communicator and her work cannot easily be subsumed into a national canon: after having worked in German for Austrian magazines and newspapers during the initial phase of her emigration (1936– 39), there was a period during and immediately after the war when she wrote in English and worked for English-language magazines such as The New Statesman. She then started contributing to German-language publications again in 1946. It is clear why she must have been a popular choice for the editors of these publications: untainted by National Socialism and in a position to understand the society and military of Great Britain as well as Austrian and German post-war society, she had become an intercultural communicator par excellence. Spiel’s channels of communication worked in both directions,

138

Translating Holocaust Lives

from German and Austrian to British culture and vice versa. Spiel herself was looking to belong to: ‘die Welt der deutschen Publizistik, der deutschen Literatur, des deutschen Theaters und der deutschen Musik, aus der je wieder heraus und zurück in die englische Kultur, Politik und Gesellschaft zu finden immer offenkundiger unmöglich war’ (the world of German publishing, of German literature, of German theatre and of German music, out of which the difficulty of finding one's way to go back into English culture, politics and society is becoming more and more obvious) (Spiel 1994: 255). While this is an understandable sentiment for an exile writer, we now recognize this as unachievable. Instead of bemoaning the impossible, Spiel can now be celebrated as an intercultural communicator and translator. Her immersion in British culture between 1936 and 1946, and then her return to Vienna, culminated in the aforementioned major article entitled ‘Vienna’ for The New Statesman, attempting to explain Viennese history, culture and society to the British readership. She then proceeded to publish seventy-three articles in German-language publications from 1946 to 1963 while still living in London, but visiting Austria increasingly frequently. The topics of these journalistic contributions varied, but most of them focus on literature and the arts; often they are review essays. Spiel was an accomplished Feuilletonistin writing review essays for German-language newspapers. As well as reports from various theatre and music festivals such as the Salzburger Festspiele and reviews of German writers such as Thomas Mann, a great number of articles focus on the English-language literary world and include contributions on Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. It is clear that Spiel was communicating her knowledge of British culture to an Austrian and German readership and that she was successful in doing so. Her assessment of her own work was always fairly critical. In her autobiography she describes being torn between Britain and Austria regarding her private as well as her professional commitments, and this is framed more negatively than is evident from her output. Spiel remained resident in the United Kingdom until 1963, when she moved to Austria where she lived until her death in 1990 with one interruption: she spent 1983 in London working as a foreign correspondent for the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. To undertake this task, at over seventy years of age, shows her expertise and commitment to translating from one culture to another. Spiel also worked as a translator from English into German: Strickhausen (1996: 444–7) lists forty-six translations by Hilde Spiel including poems by W.H. Auden and several plays by Tom Stoppard, which were consequently performed by the prominent Burgtheater in Vienna. This is a part of her work that has hardly been given any attention at all by researchers, but it was clearly a culturally important task, introducing an Austrian audience to an influential

Exile Writers between German and English

139

poet and an influential playwright, and thereby opening new perspectives up to them. Spiel was a writer and journalist, and the tension between journalism as a Brotberuf (day job) and writing fiction as her true ambition has been discussed (see Strickhausen 1989). However, her work as a translator is not mentioned at all in these discussions. I would argue for a reassessment of Spiel’s work to include all aspects of intercultural translation, including translation. I would also welcome a reassessment of Neumann’s work along the same lines: Neumann had more dealings with translations of his own work from German into English before he decided to also switch to English as a language for creative writing. In 1937 he wrote to his translator Muir: You are aware of the extremely difficult situation we exiles find ourselves. We have lost our German readership […] and our material and spiritual existence now depends on whether we can find an English public to compensate. In these special circumstances, translation is no longer just a literary task, but also a moral one, entailing a sense of responsibility and solidarity. (Letter Neumann to Muir, 1937, quoted in Dove 1994: 167)

Again this letter shows Neumann’s attitude to translation. Translation, of course, was never just a literary task, translations were always produced in varying context and under different political circumstances. But clearly the letter also shows that Neumann felt under increased pressure. A Woman Screamed was published in a British and an American edition but Neumann was disappointed by the low sales. Neumann’s next project, again written in German, but first published in English, was a book with an exile theme: By the Rivers of Babylon had ten individual stories of Jewish exile at the centre. This book finally established Neumann’s reputation in Britain: it received praise from H. G. Wells and was positively reviewed by The Sunday Times, The New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement and in November 1939 it became The Evening Standard’s Book of the Month (see Dove 1994: 169). A few months later, in May 1940, like so many fellow refugees from German and Austria, Neumann was interned. Like many others, he felt traumatized by the experience, and although he was released relatively quickly, the experience had a negative impact on his mental and physical health. Another consequence was that after his internment he found it more difficult to find employment. Neumann had not been able to live off the proceeds of his creative writing and he had worked for the film industry and the BBC, especially its German-language service. He thus decided to switch to English as the language of creative production and completed the novel Scenes in Passing after being released from internment. There were clearly financial pressures that pushed Neumann in the direction of a language switch, but there

140

Translating Holocaust Lives

were also ideological and psychological reasons. After having experienced internment and with the developments of the Second World War, Neumann did not want to write in the German language, the language of National Socialism and the enemy, any more. Neumann writes about a ‘zweite Virginität’ (second virginity) in relation to his language switch (Neumann 1968: 186). His critics, and Neumann himself, have been critical of his accomplishments in the English language. Neumann called the English of Scene in Passing a language ‘die Nicht-Engländer für Englisch hielten’ (that those who are not English consider English) (Neumann 1963: 157), and Richard Dove mentions several times in his assessment of Neumann’s work that the high linguistic quality of Scenes in Passing and subsequent novels might have been due to first-language proofreaders and editors (see Dove 1994; Wallace: 171–2). Neumann’s next novel The Inquest is seen as Neumann’s most accomplished and possibly most successful English-language novel. It was translated into several languages. It is set at an Austrian exile theatre in London and structured as a narrative of detection; the main character has to detect a story of emigration and exile. Dove argues that despite their many accomplishments, exile writers, including de Mendelssohn and Neumann, made no concession to ‘English taste’ – even when writing in English – and they were only able to offer ‘an exile’s view of England’ (Dove 1994: 113). There seems to be an outdated value judgement in these assessments. From the viewpoint of twenty-first century criticism, such judgement represents an unduly negative stance: for example, most literary critics today would not criticize a postcolonial writer for their specific view on British culture or for their lack of concession to a certain taste in literature. Similarly to Spiel, Neumann can also be seen as a successful intercultural communicator. After his earlier body of work, he wrote seven novels in English. But he did not restrict his activities after coming to Britain to the writing of fiction. He worked for the film industry and in 1943 he was appointed editor of the Hutchinson International Authors series, which was very successful. In 1946 he published Children of Vienna which was popular internationally and was translated into twenty-five languages, amongst them a translation into German which was undertaken by Franziska Becker who later became Neumann’s wife. There are parallels between this publication and Spiel’s article ‘Vienna’ as one of its aims is clearly to explain the situation – and the difficulties – of continental German and especially Austrian culture to a British and ultimately an international readership. Neumann lived in Britain until 1959 when he moved to Switzerland. Both Spiel and Neumann’s moves were connected with the breakdown of their marriages

Exile Writers between German and English

141

and with the beginning of new relationships. Thus we can see that the personal is intrinsically linked with the professional, and that changes in the writers’ definition of linguistic and cultural identity are complex. After Neumann’s move to Switzerland, he again wrote in German, arguing that one needed to be surrounded by a language if one wanted to be able to write in it. According to Dove (2000: 261), Neumann was conscious of his position as a writer of both German and English. He stated that he had often written two versions of the same work, a German-language and an English-language one. In the 1950s Neumann was re-introduced to a German readership through the publication of German translations of his English-language work, some of which were selftranslations. Although he had some success, he often expressed disappointment about his career as a novelist, and indeed many of his potential publications suffered some misfortune or other, such as the publishing house going into liquidation. However, Neumann was often at the heart of cultural and literary life in Germany and Austria under reconstruction; he was heavily involved with PEN Club (first in exile and then he became the honorary president of the re-established Austrian PEN in 1947). He was involved with cultural politics and was a cultural critic who furthered a discussion of the National Socialist past in Germany through his journalistic work. He contributed to Konkret, Die Zeit, Tribüne amongst others and occasionally for Stern and Spiegel magazines. He undertook some translation, mainly translation of his own work. He is listed in the Neue Deutsche Biographie as a writer and translator (see Heuer 1999). After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1974, Neumann committed suicide in 1975 (Heuer 1999). Both Neumann and Spiel and many of their critics focus on their work and life as being located in between the German and English languages and in between the two countries. Spiel speaks explicitly of leading a ‘Zwischenexistenz’ (Spiel 1994: 153). Often their ‘in-between-ness’ is assessed in a negative way, though, as a failure to belong. However, cultural theorists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century would argue that there is no static culture that you can belong to, that culture is an activity and a practice that you undertake and that all culture is representation. If someone writes a novel in English, he or she is an English writer. The work of exile writers should be assessed in relation to the discussion of ‘in-between-ness’, the conceptualization of cultural hybridity, cultural crossfertilization and the aforementioned ‘third space’. Bhabha wrote in The Location of Culture that writers are able to create room for interferences between several cultures, a process which defines this third space, a space where cultural differences are not static but in a dynamic relationship with each other (Bhabha 1994: 4).

142

Translating Holocaust Lives

Exile writers like Spiel and Neumann were not alive to see their own activities discussed in such terms. If they had been aware of such concepts, their own assessment of their activities and their work might have been more positive, and the same goes for the assessment of their life work by others. Whether one wants to define the occupation of exile writers as mediators (‘Mittler’, see Reiter 2006) or as translators is possibly less important than recognizing them for their activities. The invisibility of translation has been much discussed, but the whole work of exile writers can be seen to become invisible as it does not fit into the category of national literatures. Before 1945 both Spiel and Neumann had difficulties being recognized as British authors although they wrote in English, after 1945 their work did not fit in with the German-language canon either, and they struggled for recognition again. In 1990 shortly before her death, Hilde Spiel was honoured with the Goethe medal by the Goethe Institute for ‘Verdienste um die deutsche Sprache’ (Service to the German language). Although Spiel is said to have been pleased with the honour, writers such as herself and Neumann really deserve a much more international prize with a focus on translation and communication as recognition for their life’s work and for creatively occupying a space between languages and cultures.

Notes 1 Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

References Bhabha, H.K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bloch, E. (1972), ‘Zerstörte Sprache – zerstörte Kultur’, in E. Bloch (ed.), Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe. Politische Aufsätze 1934–1939, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 403– 27. Dove, R. (1994), ‘“Ein Experte des Überlebens”: Robert Neumann in British Exile 1933–45’ in Wallace I. (ed.), Aliens – Uneingebürgerte. German and Austrian Writers in Exile, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, vol. 37, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 159–73. Dove, R. (1995), ‘The Gift of Tongues; German-speaking Novelists Writing in English,’ in William A., Brinson C., Dove R., Malet M. and Taylor J. (eds), Between Two Languages: German-speaking Exiles in Great Britain 1933-45, Stuttgart: Verlag Hans Dieter Heinz.

Exile Writers between German and English

143

Dove, R. (2000), Journey of No Return: Five German-speaking Literary Exiles in Britain, 1933–1945, London: Libris. Feuchtwanger, L. (1925), Jud Süss, Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Grenville, A. (2010), Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain 1933–1970, Their Image in AJR Information, London: Valentine Mitchell. Hammel, A. (1998), ‘Hilde Spiel and the Possibility of a Multicultural Society: Die Früchte des Wohlstands and Mirko and Franka’, in A. Fiddler (ed.), ‘Other’ Austrians: Post-1945 Austrian Women’s Writing, Berne: Peter Lang, pp. 73–81. Hammel, A. (2014), ‘“Whose Text Is It Anyway?” Influences on a Refugee Memoir’, in P. Davies and A. Hammel (eds), New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah. Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 8, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Heuer, R. (1999), ‘Neumann, Robert’, in F. Menges (ed.), Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol.19, Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, pp. 159–60. Krohn, C., Rothermund, E., Winkler, L., Koepke, W. and Enderle Ristori, M. (eds) (2007), Übersetzung als transkultureller Prozess. Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, vol. 25, Munich: edition text+kritik. Krug, H. (1986), ‘Exil und Rückkehr. Hilde Spiel im Gespräch’, in Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Berlin (eds), Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933–1945, Berlin: Fröhlich and Kaufmann. Muir, E. (1968), An Autobiography, London: Methuen. Muir, E. (trans.) (1936), R. Neumann: The Queen’s Doctor, Norwood, MS: Kessinger Legacy Reprints. Muir, E. and Muir, W. (trans.) (1932), H. Broch: The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. Neumann, R. (1927), Mit fremden Federn. Parodien, Stuttgart: Engelhorn. Neumann, R. (1932), Die Macht, Berlin and Vienna: P. Zsolnay. Neumann, R. (1935), Struensee. Doktor, Diktator, Favorit und armer Sünder, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag. Neumann, R. (1938), Eine Frau hat geschrien ... Zürich: Humanitas-Verlag. Neumann, R. (1962), Der Favorit der Königin, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Neumann, R. (1963), Ein leichtes Leben. Bericht über mich selbst und andere Zeitgenossen, Vienna/Munich/Basle: Desch. Neumann, R. (1968), Vielleicht das Heitere, Munich: K. Desch. Packalén, S. (2005), ‘From the “Third Reich” to the “Third Space”: Paul Celan, Erich Fried, and Peter Weiss’, in A. Stephan (ed.), Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, New York: Peter Lang. Reiter, A. (2006), ‘Diaspora und Hybridität: der Exilant als Mittler’, Zwischenwelt 10: 36–51. Rosen, A. (2005), Sounds of Defiance. The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Spiel, H. (1933), Kati auf der Brücke, Berlin and Vienna: P. Zsolnay.

144

Translating Holocaust Lives

Spiel, H. (1939), Flute and Drums, London: Hutchinson. Spiel, H. (1981), Die Früchte des Wohlstands, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung. Spiel, H. (1992), Welche Welt ist meine Welt? Erinnerungen 1946–1989, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Spiel, H. (1994), Die hellen und die finsteren Zeiten. Erinnerungen 1911–1946, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Stephan, A. (ed.) (2005), Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, New York: Peter Lang. Strickhausen, W. (1989), ‘Im Zwiespalt zwischen Literatur und Publizistik. Deutungsversuch zum Gattungswechsel im Werk der Exilautorin Hilde Spiel’, in Koebner T., Köpke W., Krohn C.-D. and Schneider S. (eds), Publizistik im Exil. Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, vol. 7, Munich: edition text+kritik, pp. 166–83. Strickhausen, W. (1996), Die Erzählerin Hilde Spiel oder ‘Der weite Wurf in die Finsternis’, New York: Peter Lang. Wehage, F.-J. (1985), ‘Das Andere Deutschland 1933–1945’, Neophilologus 69(3): 421–36. Zweig, S. (1932), Marie Antoinette: Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters, Leipzig: Insel Verlag.

Response to: Andrea Hammel, Translating Cultures and Languages: Exile Writers between German and English Chantal Wright

Exile writing and Holocaust literature are both examples of groups of texts that cannot be contained within the sphere of a national literature, as indeed is the case with all translated literary texts. Such texts are transnational entities that exist within the ‘monolingual paradigm’ (Yildiz 2013). Their compositional complexity, compounded by the thematic sensitivity of Holocaust literature, raises questions of identity and audience that make them a conceptual challenge to a post-war publishing industry predominantly organized along national lines. The belief that literature can be successful only when unquestioningly bound to the national, both culturally and linguistically, haunted German exile writers such as Robert Neumann and Hilde Spiel as they took their first steps into the English language, and it prevented Lion Feuchtwanger from taking this step at all. The fear – experienced by publishers, translators and authors – that the translated self will somehow be lesser, derivative, that it will lack the full force of the original, that it is a compromise, is the same fear that has dogged translation throughout its long history. The anxiety raised by the uncertain status of translation means that we overwhelmingly indulge in the pretense of its non-existence. In the 1990s, Lawrence Venuti (1995; 1998) identified domestication – an erasure of the foreign origins of the translated text through a fluency of style in the target language – as the dominant historical and contemporary paradigm in AngloAmerican translation. Although the nature of Holocaust literature and of exile writing makes these ‘genres’ a priori resistant to absolute domestication in translation, it is interesting that the paratexts surrounding Holocaust literature in particular have tended not to feature much discussion of this literature’s translatedness, despite the fact that issues of language and translation are in fact central to literature of the Holocaust. Literature of the Holocaust explores whether and how language can be made to bear the weight of the singularity

146

Translating Holocaust Lives

of the Holocaust as an experience; a book such as Primo Levi’s Se Questo è un Uomo (If This is a Man) (1958) narrates the multilingual space of Auschwitz and explores the hierarchical tension that existed there between German and other languages. If the anxiety surrounding the transnational and the translational (both on the level of the self and the text) finds expression in denial, boldness is frequently rewarded by gain. Neumann and Spiel, who came to feel that German was not only inadequate to the demands of their new situation but also that it had become tainted by external events, stepped into English and although, as Hammel points out, the creative benefits of hybridity were under-theorized at the time, there is no doubt that this decision expanded and extended their writing careers and allowed for a continued creative existence. This extension of the individual writer’s creative life via self-translation parallels the poststructuralist recognition of textual translation as an enrichment, as an act which contributes to the ongoing literariness of a text. Exile writing deconstructs the notion that a text is unproblematically the product of one culture and language, and indeed of one writer, in a manner which broadens the understanding and treatment of source texts within Translation Studies. Neumann’s writing for the translator, Spiel’s writing of versions of a text in different languages, the involvement of multiple actors in producing a text written in the adopted language rather than the mother tongue, the separation of language and culture and the collapse of linguistic hierarchies that occurs in exophony (writing outside the mother tongue) destabilize the source text and privilege the translated, that is target, text. If the nature of exile writing strengthens certain conceptual avenues in Translation Studies by eroding tidy notions of ‘source’ and ‘author’, thus creating more space for the translator, this state of affairs co-exists, paradoxically enough, with a moral imperative for the translator, that of somehow bearing witness to the experience of exile represented by and in the exile writer’s text. ‘In these special circumstances’, Neumann wrote to his translator Edwin Muir, ‘translation is no longer just a literary task, but also a moral one, entailing a sense of responsibility and solidarity’ (Letter of 1937, quoted in Dove 1994:167). Exile writing would appear to demand something like fidelity, a notion challenged by Translation Studies as it implies the subjugation of the translator to the source text as well as his or her partial or complete invisibility. But does ‘a sense of responsibility and solidarity’ necessarily equate to subjugation and invisibility? The example of American translator Peter Filkins and the novels of Holocaust

Response

147

survivor and exile writer H.G. Adler may illustrate how the translator can negotiate the moral imperative to bear witness while maintaining a healthy sense of a translatorly self. Filkins is a highly visible translator. His translations of Adler’s novels The Journey (2008), Panorama (2012) and The Wall (2014) have become literary phenomena, leading to a remarkable growth in Adler scholarship and sparking translations into other languages. They have also contributed to the restitution of Adler’s work in the German-speaking world, where it struggled for a readership in the immediate post-war period. This visibility cannot simply be attributed to marketing strategy; Filkins has consciously taken on the responsibility of representing Adler – he is currently at work on the first English-language biography of the writer – acting as a kind of co-witness and actively trying to reverse the cultural amnesia surrounding Adler’s person and writings. Filkins prefaces the introduction to his first Adler translation, The Journey, with a citation from the English translation of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Filkins 2008: ix) in which Jacques Austerlitz expresses his regret that he had not managed to seek out Adler before the writer’s death in 1988 in order to talk to him about Theresienstadt (Bell 2001: 331). The inclusion of this citation suggests that the translator is cognizant of a moral imperative: to not allow further time to pass, to not look away from the horror of the Holocaust, to right the sin of Adler’s omission from the canon of Holocaust writing. Bearing witness, through translation, involves being faithful to Adler’s attempt to make language carry the weight of the singular traumatic event that is the Holocaust. Although this is not the place to discuss Filkins’ translation strategies in detail, it can be said that he displays a keen sensitivity to Adler’s modernist style and where possible even finds ways of exaggerating and extending particular features to accentuate Adler’s modernist poetic effects. Filkins’ translation of Adler’s texts demonstrates that concession to a moral imperative and a ‘faithful’ approach need not undermine the visibility and autonomous subjectivity of the translator. In witnessing to Adler’s importance through his commitment to translating these texts, Filkins has reaped significant rewards for himself as translator.

References Bell, A. (trans.) (2001), W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz, London: Penguin. Dove, R. (1994), ‘“Ein Experte des Überlebens”: Robert Neumann in British Exile 1933–45’, in I. Wallace (ed.), Aliens – Uneingebürgerte. German and Austrian Writers

148

Translating Holocaust Lives

in Exile, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, vol. 37, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 159–74. Filkins, P. (trans.) (2008), H.G Adler: The Journey, New York: Random House. Filkins, P. (trans.) (2012), H.G Adler: Panorama, New York: Random House. Filkins, P. (trans.) (2014), H.G. Adler: The Wall, New York: Random House. Levi, P. (1958), Se Questo è un Uomo, Torino: Einaudi. Venuti, L. (1995), The Translator’s Invisibility, New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998), The Scandals of Translation, New York: Routledge. Yildiz, Y. (2013), Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, New York: Fordham University Press.

7

Holocaust Poetry and Translation Jean Boase-Beier

The catastrophic programme of destruction that we know today as the Holocaust had at its heart a narrow and perverted notion of purity. In its origins, its orchestration and its effects, it constituted a massive and sustained, though often violently haphazard (see e.g. Evans 2008: 217–41), attack on multiracial, multicultural and multilingual existence, and therefore on individual human life per se (cf. Burleigh 2002: 124). As several Holocaust scholars have noted, the murderous purges of the Nazis involved victims from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (cf. Rosen 2005: 21–33). Citizens of various European countries were forced to flee and to take on new linguistic and cultural identities (cf. Gill 1988: 58); many found that, on their return home, borders had been changed and their home was in a different country (Gill 1988: 38). Others were imprisoned in concentration camps, where language, culture, nationality and communication played an enormous role in both life and death. A typical passage from a Holocaust memoir notes that, as the narrator, in a small group of women from the newly liberated Birkenau, ventured into Auschwitz main camp: ‘Voices came at us from all sides in German, French, Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch’ (Schloss 1988: 145). And after the liberation of the camps it was especially hard for Jewish prisoners to return home: most had no homes left to go to (Gill 1988: 38; Kolinsky 2004: 106). This led to longterm displacement. As Peter Davies has pointed out in a recent collection of articles that address the role of translation in Holocaust writing (Davies 2014: 161–6), this complex cultural and linguistic situation has increasingly led Holocaust scholars to the intuition that translation plays an important role in Holocaust writing, and yet there has generally been little detailed examination of its role. In considering Holocaust poetry, I would suggest that part of a more detailed examination involves bringing translation together with the question of literary creation

150

Translating Holocaust Lives

itself, because, without a clear sense of the origins of the poetry, it is difficult to know what has been translated or to consider how it has been translated, or indeed how it could in future be translated. There is valuable documentation of the role different languages played in those camps in which limited literary creation, albeit often on pain of death, was possible. For example, in André Verdet’s 1945 anthology of Buchenwald poetry (reissued as Verdet 1995), we learn that poets from Spain, Belgium, Poland, Germany and Russia contributed to the anthology, and that many others wrote poetry there that has been lost. Yet this anthology, just like the German version by Wulf Kirsten and Annette Seeman published in 2012 as Der gefesselte Wald (The Chained Forest) (Kirsten and Seeman 2012), leaves many questions about the translation unanswered. How was the poetry originally collected by Verdet? He mentions that the work of some Polish and German poets was translated into French, but did the other prisoners actually write in French? Or did Verdet’s original 1945 French edition provide translations into French of work he had collected in other languages? Semprun (1997: 176–7), describing the important role of literary creation in Buchenwald, also mentions the composing of the anthology, but he does not help answer these questions. I will refer here to such questions about the origins of Holocaust poetry collectively as the ‘first question’ since it is a question that needs exploration prior to any consideration of later translation into another language. Answers to this question might help provide insight into literary creation, communication, and life more generally, in those camps, such as Buchenwald, Flossenbürg or Hasag, where poetry by inmates has been collected. It is clear that such questions about the origins of the poetry are not simply questions about actual translation between particular languages. Translation is not merely something that happens after a work has been written, transferring it across a linguistic and cultural boundary so that it is available for readers of a new language. One of the issues I will explore in this chapter in addressing the first question is the extent to which the idea of translation is already written in to the poetry before it undergoes translation into another language. A second question then arises: how do the multilingual origins of the poetry, and both its thematizing and its stylistic representation of cross-linguistic communication and translation, affect the way the original poetry is read? Consideration of how it is read gives rise to a third question: if this poetry has translation at its heart, how can it be translated into other languages in a way that does justice to both its themes and its style? And a fourth question concerns our understanding of the poetry when it has undergone translation

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

151

into a target language: how can translated Holocaust poetry be read so that neither its multilingual origins nor the processes it has undergone to reach us in its target language are lost? In addressing the first question, we need to be aware that it was not only those writing in concentration camps, in enforced containment in the ghettos established by the Nazis in many European towns and cities, or on death marches, or, having survived these dreadful experiences, once they had reached safety, who wrote poetry that reflected such experiences. Other poets, often referred to as post-Holocaust poets (see Rowland 2005: 3), had no direct experience of the ‘concentrationary universe’ of the Holocaust (a term used by Rothberg 2000: 9, taken from Rousset 1946), but wrote, usually after the war years, poetry deeply affected by the experiences of others. Such poetry, just like that written by those with more direct experience, was written from a perspective that encompassed translation, communication, the need to bear witness in recounting events, experiences and feelings to others, the need to achieve cognitive effects on the minds of readers. Many of these poets, like those who had been freed from imprisonment, were living in another country and speaking a language different from their original one. Because the pre-war linguistic and cultural communities of many poets had been destroyed, the preservation of the lost culture, and, in the case of Yiddish, of the language itself (cf. Rosenfeld 1980: 115), was one of the reasons for writing poetry. For example, after the war, German-Romanian poet Rose Ausländer, from Czernowitz (in present-day Ukraine, then Romania), having survived the ghetto there, was living in New York. She had witnessed the end not only of the Jewish community in Czernowitz, but also of the city’s famous role as a centre of culture and learning, as the ‘Vienna of the East’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2011: 20–52). Fellow Czernowitz poet Paul Celan was living in Paris. Nelly Sachs, brought up in Berlin, had fled to Stockholm in 1940. Erich Fried, originally from Vienna, was living in London, and so on. These poets took on new cultural identities with the new language. Ausländer took American nationality and wrote poetry only in English for many years. Many of the poets had gone to countries with which they had previously had a particular linguistic affinity. Nelly Sachs, for example, had long admired Swedish writing, which was readily available in Germany in translation. She learned Swedish on arrival in Stockholm and translated Swedish Modernist poets such as Harry Martinson and Gunnar Ekelöf, whose work then had a profound influence on her own later poetry (see Fritsch-Vivié 1993: 86–9). Paul Celan went to live in Paris in part because he had studied in France immediately after leaving school (see Chalfen 1979: 76–85). Celan, like Sachs and Ausländer, was a translator. In many cases,

152

Translating Holocaust Lives

then, these linguistic and cultural influences were present to some degree even in their early poetry. And often the multilingual and multicultural sensibility of the poets arose in large part from their Jewish background. Ausländer, for example, absorbed both the influences of her Hasidic father’s religious and cultural teachings, and the German-Jewish philosophy of her teacher Constantin Brunner, as well as of the Austrian Viennese culture the family so admired (see Braun 2006: 12–25). It is thus important to recognize that much Holocaust poetry, including postHolocaust poetry, was written in or influenced by a Central and Eastern European context in which the idea of monolingualism would have been utterly foreign. Translation was an everyday fact of life and an integral part of what Ausländer referred to as the ‘viersprachig verbrüderte’ songs, that is songs conjoined in a four-tongued family tie (Ausländer 2012: 17) that made up the poetic background of early life in Czernowitz. And a similar mix of cultural traditions exerted its influence on many others, such as the Polish-Jewish Karmel sisters, whose poetry appears in an anthology of poems from the Hasag-Leipzig camp (Karay 2002; see also Karmel and Karmel 2007), or the Buchenwald poets in Verdet’s collection (Kirsten and Seeman 2012), or the Polish and Yiddish ghetto and camp poets translated and discussed by Aaron (1990). The poetry was also influenced by local poetic traditions: Celan’s poem Espenbaum (Aspen Tree), like several others, closely resembles the form of the Romanian folk-poem known as doină (see Felstiner 1995: 49) and several of the poets Aaron discusses, such as Władysław Szlengel, were influenced by the Polish Skamander movement of the 1920s, with its irony and colloquial idiom (see Aaron 1990: 21). The above considerations are not meant to suggest that the multilingual and multicultural origins of Holocaust poetry, including post-Holocaust poetry, are the only factors to be taken into account in characterizing and understanding the context in which the poetry was written. Several other factors are important. We must remember that Holocaust poetry was not only the work of Jewish poets. Though Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, and formed by far the largest category of victims (though considering any victims of Nazi policies as a ‘category’ should remind one uncomfortably of the perpetrators’ thinking as documented, for example by Gill 1988: 29), poetry was written also by those who were victimized for belonging to other religious groups, such as the established Christian churches (e.g. German poet Dietrich Bonhoeffer), or who had undesirable political affiliations (e.g. French Resistance poet Maurice Baufrère), or who were of Romani origin (e.g. Romani poet Papusza). Some poets (e.g. French poet André Sarcq) were victimized for being homosexual.

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

153

It should also not be forgotten that amongst the first victims of the Nazi government’s destructive policies were those who were physically or mentally disabled. The circumstances of most such victims – transported from hospital without warning to ‘euthanasia’ centres and killed upon arrival (see Evans 2010: 16–18)  – prevented their writing poetry. It is not known whether any poetry written by people in these circumstances has survived. When we consider the great variety of Nazi victims, it is striking that these various categories of European citizens appear to have nothing intrinsically in common: their common features existed entirely in the minds of the persecutors, who saw them as threats, in one way or another, to the ‘health and purity of the German race’ (Evans 2010: 15). It is therefore not surprising that their poetry reflects not only a variety of individual experience, such as life in the ghettos (e.g. Szlengel; see Aaron 1990), camps (e.g. Baufrère; see Kirsten and Seeman 2012), in exile (e.g. Sachs; see Sachs 1968) or in prison (e.g. Bonhoeffer), but also of linguistic, cultural and poetic background. When considering the second question, about how Holocaust poetry is read in its original language, by its original audience and also, therefore, by the translator, it is my contention that Holocaust poetry will almost always be read as having at its heart a multilingual sensibility. And this is not simply because it is poetry about, or inspired by, the sort of multilingual situation I have just mentioned. There are other, deeper, reasons, and they are closely connected to the nature of poetry itself as that which demands readerly engagement, which has cognitive effects in that it is ‘an incitement to … world-changing reflection’ (Jones 2012: 12). That is to say, Holocaust poetry is above all poetry that communicates, and that thematizes and poeticizes communication, while also making demands upon its readers to listen and actively to engage with the consequences of the experiences communicated. We see this especially clearly in the poetry from the camps, such as the Buchenwald anthology (Kirsten and Seeman 2012) or the poems from the Hasag-Leipzig camp (Karay 2002), or poetry written in ghettos such as that in Aaron’s study (1990). Such poetry often takes the form of an ‘episode’ (Miall 2007: 148). That is, it describes a specific event or situation in a way that leads to a sudden shift in the reader’s understanding (see Boase-Beier 2015: 28 for more discussion). These poets wrote partly as an act of resistance (Nader 2007: 4), but also in order to bear witness to a situation they could not be certain of surviving. According to Felman, bearing witness in poetry involves the use of poetic language which speaks ‘for other(s) and to others’ (Felman 1992: 3). Thus Lithuanian-Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever began,

154

Translating Holocaust Lives

from the time of the German occupation of Lithuania, to date and bury his poems (see Comans 2009: 35); he writes ‘I am … The guardian / Of the songs they left behind’ (Aaron 1990: 79). The poetry often takes communication as its theme (see for example many of the poems discussed by Nader 2007: 189), and in many cases the style of the poetry, with its gaps, questions, ambiguities and unfinished sentences (cf. also Boase-Beier 2015: 32–6), reflects the difficulties of communication, both because of the circumstances in which the poems were written, often at odd moments, on stolen scraps of paper, and because of the terrible and (particularly at the time) incomprehensible nature of the crimes being perpetrated. Felman describes such poetry as that which ‘speaks ahead of knowledge’ (1992: 21). An interesting issue arises here about the extent to which poetry written in camps and ghettos can be understood and read as testimony to the events of the Holocaust. It is certainly the view of many Holocaust survivors who wrote poetry that it can (see Aaron 1990: 5–9; Comans 2009: 35; Karay 2002: 4). This view has recently been discussed in detail by Rowland (2014), who contrasts Adorno’s often-quoted opinion, first published in 1951, that poetry after Auschwitz is ‘barbaric’ (Adorno 2003: 30) with the view that had been expressed by Dachau survivor Robert Antelme a few years earlier (see Antelme 2003: 34), and has often been put forward since by later scholars such as Felman (1992), quoted earlier, or Žižek (2008: 4), all of whom note the facility of poetry to avoid directness. In Rowland’s view, Holocaust poetry, like other poetry that has its origins in catastrophe caused by humans, is not only both testimony and poetry (see also Vice 2008: 8), but it is testimony exactly because it is poetic. I would go further than Rowland here and argue that not only is poetry indirect, changing and open to interpretation, and therefore particularly appropriate to offer testimony, but also that its nature as writing which specifically demands readerly engagement means it can enable the reader also to engage with the events that gave rise to it (see Boase-Beier 2015: 23–32). That is, Holocaust poetry is a form of communication which can hope to ‘effect change in existing conditions’ (Rich 2007: 38). One of the obvious ways in which it can do this is by shaking its reader out of ignorance or preconceived world views (cf. Iser 2004: 8). This is particularly the case for the translator, who must read with close attention to detail, and cannot fail to notice the extreme complexity of the language, both in terms of the gaps, fragmentation and ambiguities mentioned earlier, and also in terms of the multiple linguistic, cultural and poetic influences. Reading Holocaust poetry attentively involves seeing it not merely as poetry about the Holocaust

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

155

but also as poetry that re-enacts exactly the multicultural and multilingual way of life and thought the Nazis aimed to silence. In particular the translator, then, will need to construct a sense of its poetics, how its stylistic features allow inferences to be made about the choices the original poet made, and why, and what factors made up the context of its writing (cf. Boase-Beier 2015: 88). When addressing the third and main question of this chapter, about the translation of Holocaust poetry, it is important to be aware that, in the resolutely monolingual world that many academics and poetry readers in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States appear to inhabit (cf. Venuti 2013: 110), translated poetry is often not differentiated from poetry written in English, as reviews of and introductions to foreign poetry demonstrate (see for example Cynthia Ozick’s ‘Foreword’ to Gertrud Kolmar’s poetry; Smith 1975: ix). If translation is considered at all, it appears to be assumed that poetry arises in a particular, singular language and culture, and that it can therefore only be made available through translation to those of another language and culture partially and imperfectly. This assumption leads critics to speak of translation ‘loss’, to view translation as a necessary evil performed upon poetry that is by nature resistant (Langer 1995: 553; cf. also Davies 2014: 162). Such a view represents a serious misunderstanding of both poetry and translation, and especially of poetry that arises from a communicative situation that already incorporates the idea of translation to such a large extent. The gaps and fragmentation noted earlier and discussed by many scholars of Holocaust poetry (e.g. Rowland 2005: 12) are not merely examples of stylistic iconicity, the echoing of poetic theme in form (see Leech and Short 2007: 187–90). They are of course instances of such iconicity, reflecting the difficulty and uncertainty of life in the Holocaust, the suddenness of change and death (as in Dan Pagis’ famous ‘Written in Pencil in a Sealed Railway Car’ which ends mid-sentence; see Mitchell 1981: 23). But they also serve to enact the communicative impulse of the poetry in the demands they place upon the reader to put fragments together, to fill gaps, to complete sentences and to engage with indirectly expressed thoughts. If the vast variation in cultural and linguistic origin, in beliefs, experiences and interests, which informs Holocaust poetry, is to be fully realized in its translation, it is crucial that translators do not operate with too narrow a view of the poetry. Such a view might unintentionally be encouraged by existing anthologies (e.g. Schiff 1995; Weissbort 1991). Owing to the fact that the same poets (in particular Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan) have been translated and

156

Translating Holocaust Lives

interpreted by many different translators and critics, their poetry is well known. And in both these cases, the earlier poetry, which tends to describe life in the camps as reported to the poets, is the most translated: ‘O The Chimneys’ by Sachs and ‘Death Fugue’ by Celan. However, simply calling for a wider variety of poetry, by a larger number of poets, to be translated is not enough; we need to ask how such poetry has been and can be translated. In order to answer this question, it is, in my view, important to see the multilingual origins of the poetry not merely as a set of circumstances forming the context in which it was written and is read in its original language, but also as a situation intrinsically connected to the way the poetry is written: to its style. In order to explain this connection, it is helpful to use the notion of ‘mind-style’, originally introduced by Roger Fowler (1977) and developed by Elena Semino (2002) and many others. Mind-style, as Fowler defines it, is the particular way an ‘individual mental self ’ (1977: 103) is reflected in the style of a text. That is, the multilingual context of many of the Holocaust poets is poetically transformed in the poetry and manifests itself in a number of elements of style that are characteristic of the poetry, and are of as much importance to the translator, and, subsequently, the reader of the translation, as the typical Holocaust imagery such as ashes, smoke, darkness, night and snow. A multilingual existence, a situation in which cultures and religions did not merely live side-by-side in the community, but formed different aspects of the same individual, was exactly what inspired the greatest fear in the Nazis. It led them to invent and use images and metaphors of taint, illness and adulteration (see Rash 2006: 130–2). The point of their policies, as I suggested earlier, was to achieve ‘purity’. But purity is completely alien to poetry (and indeed to literature in general). It is no coincidence that the single-minded poetry the Nazis cultivated was barren, banal to the point of absurdity and was not in fact poetry (cf. Loewy 1966: 11). When Ausländer speaks of the ‘four-tongued family tie’ in her homeland, Bukowina, in the poem mentioned earlier (original in Ausländer 2012: 17), we can see that this is not merely a nostalgic description of a lost multilingual community because it is directly contrasted with the ‘time split in two’ that follows in the next line. This expression, that can be taken to refer to the time after the Nazi invasion of 1941, provides the reader with a link to her view, influenced by Brunner’s philosophy (see Brunner 1919: 283–300), that division is unnatural, and leads to evil. Another poem begins ‘As if there were / heaven / and earth’ (Vivis and Boase-Beier 2014: 27) and contrasts such thinking in

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

157

terms of division with a view that emphasizes connection, in which not only are heaven and earth not seen as separate, but neither is one person or culture separate from another. In such a view, the past is also not completely separate from the present, for, in Walter Benjamin’s words (as Zohn translates them) ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (Benjamin 1992: 247). Thus Ausländer argues for the present to take account of the past, and enacts this philosophy, as well as suggesting a traumatized mind (cf. Laub 1992: 68–9), in a mind-style rich in repetition, especially noticeable in poems that thematize time: ‘entzweiter Zeit’, in the poem just discussed (Ausländer 2012: 17), or ‘das Weißeste / Zeit’ (the whitest/time, Ausländer 2012: 304). For Ausländer’s translator, it is thus important not only to preserve the images of this lost multicultural existence, or of the retrospectively understood warning of the ravens that haunt the idyllic landscape, or of darkness, that appear in so many of the poems (e.g. ‘Kimpolung im Schnee’; ‘Bukowina I’; ‘Heimat III’; ‘Heimatstadt’ 2012: 21; 13; 46; 43). Equally important are stylistic features such as repetition, which will inform how the poem is understood and translated. And, though Holocaust poems do share many common stylistic features, such as the gaps and ambiguities mentioned above, each poet is of course different. Thus, for example, when translating Celan, the translator needs to take into account that his multilingual upbringing and his study of linguistics led to a fascination with the common origins of and connections between words in different languages. He famously collected pressed flowers and wrote beneath them their names in various languages (see e.g. Gellhaus 1997: 44–7). These names then often appear in the poems, and serve, in keeping with a long tradition among linguists of interest in plant names (see Krischke 2013 for a recent example), to illustrate the ways in which folk names may be reactivated in all their nuances of meaning. The plant name Wolfsbohne is not only the title of a poem by Celan and, in that poem, a vivid recollection of the speech-habits of his mother, who was murdered by the Nazis, but it is also contrasted in the poem with the German scientific name Lupine (lupin), which is of Latin origin, and which hides its wolf-like connotations in German, though not in English, where it recalls ‘lupine’, wolf-like. Thus a poetic meditation on a plant name is also a meditation both on trauma, where the mind sees the sinister in the everyday, and on the use of manipulated language, where euphemism can be used to hide murderous policy. In such poems, a decision on the translator’s part on the use of equivalents – Hamburger, for example, translates the name as ‘wolf ’s-bean’ (2007: 399) –

158

Translating Holocaust Lives

can have profound consequences for the representation both of a particular voice and of a particular mind-style. As we have seen, Holocaust poems vary greatly according to their origins, the circumstances of their writing, the language in which they were written, whether they were written during or after the Holocaust and whether their themes are the events themselves or the mind’s reliving of them. All these differences have consequences for how the poetry is translated. In the case of descriptive poems written (or composed) in a camp or ghetto, it is the immediacy of experience that is being conveyed, often in the form of an ‘episode’, as mentioned earlier. Thus Sutzkever’s Yiddish poem ‘Di Ershte Nakht in Ghetto’ (The First Night in the Ghetto) imagines speaking to the ‘grine gliverdijke gufim’, which Aaron (1990: 31) translates as ‘green, stiff corpses’. A reader of the original Yiddish will, like Aaron, understand ‘gliverdijk’ to mean ‘jelly-like’. As translator, Aaron still has to decide which is more important: the exactness of the adjective and its full range of connotations in the original language, or the particular connotations she considers most relevant to her target readers, or elements of poetic form, such as the monosyllable (‘stiff ’) the rhythm of the English poem appears to demand. Another translator might make different decisions, for example to keep the connotations or alliteration of the original. In Celan’s most famous poem, ‘Death Fugue’, there is uncertainty about whose voice we hear and therefore to whom the repeated words about death ‘da liegt man nicht eng’ (Celan 1952: 37) can be attributed. These words, which can be translated as ‘there you won’t lie so tight’ (Boase-Beier 2015: 78), could be those uttered ironically by a concentration camp guard, or they could be the thoughts attributed to the guard by the camp inmates (the ‘we’ of the first famous line ‘Black milk of morning we drink it at evening’; see Boase-Beier 2015: 78–81), or indeed the thoughts of the camp inmates themselves, who long for death. Whether the translator feels the attribution is clear, or is ambiguous and should be left for the reader to make, might determine whether words that could actually be said (as in my translation above) are used in the English version, or words that would be unlikely to be spoken and do not suggest irony, as in Michael Hamburger’s choice of ‘there one lies unconfined’ (2007: 71), which are more likely to be read as the represented thoughts of the prisoners. Holocaust poetry is not only, and, it could be argued, not mainly, poetry about direct or reported Holocaust experience (see Boase-Beier 2015). Clearly, the majority of Holocaust poetry could not have been written by those who managed to survive in the midst of things but who heard about the terrible events through the news, through the accounts of friends and family, and, after

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

159

the war, through the literary and critical works of others. So it is often poetry written at several removes. It is frequently characterized by trauma (cf. Gubar 2003: 8; LaCapra 1998: 8) caused by the loss of immediate family or close friends, the destruction of culture, language, birthplace and homeland. Such poetry typically represents a different mind-style: not that of the victim, or of the poet who enters the victim’s mind (as in Sachs’ ‘If I Only Knew’), but the mind-style of the traumatized survivor. What is often described as ‘The Poetics of Silence’ (the subtitle of Martin’s book on Nelly Sachs (Martin 2011; see also Boase-Beier 2011) embodies silences not only because of the widely discussed difficulties surrounding the representation of the catastrophe (see e.g. Rothberg 2000: 5–7) but also because it is not representing catastrophe itself so much as the mind’s ways of coming to terms with catastrophe; this is what I have called elsewhere the ‘post-Holocaust mind’ (Boase-Beier 2015: 22). It is reflected in a poetic mind-style in which gaps, silences, ambiguities, fragmentation, compression and indirectness in poetic style serve not only to reflect a mind struggling to encompass the consequences of the Holocaust but also serve, often through increasing compression (cf. Neumann 1968: 14–15), to pass on a particularly heavy burden of interpretation to the reader. As an example of a poem that expresses the post-Holocaust mind-style, let us consider Celan’s ‘Totenhemd’. Literally ‘death-shirt’, ‘Totenhemd’ is the German word for a shroud. The poem’s first two lines, with English gloss, are as follows (Celan 1952: 51): Was du aus Leichtem wobst, what you out-of light (yarn)wove trag ich dem Stein zu Ehren. wear I to-the stone to honour

Many of Celan’s poems directly address the recipient of the communication (cf. Felstiner 1995: 821). Sometimes this ‘you’ can be understood as God (see Felstiner 1995: 168). But it can often, as here, be assumed to be Celan’s murdered mother, especially as many of his earliest poems were addressed specifically to his mother (see Felstiner 1995: 10–11). So the translator is likely to assume that the mother wove him a garment, which the speaker now wears in honour of stone. Stone, in the Jewish thought which influenced all Celan’s writing, suggests the Temple altar and the Foundation Stone, the Even Ha-Shitiyyah at the centre of the world, where the dead will be resurrected. It also suggests the Jewish tradition of leaving a stone as a sign of remembrance after visiting a tombstone. Stone is also, as Tzur, ‘rock’, a sign of stability, origin, shelter in both Jewish and Christian

160

Translating Holocaust Lives

traditions. But the symbol of stone is itself ambiguous, suggesting, as an image of origin and therefore of God, both compassion and judgement (see Frankel and Teutsch 1995). In terms of imagery, then, the poem suggests that a handmade garment or cloth (and later in the poem the garment is said to offer comfort from nightmares) has become a symbol of remembrance and of an ambiguous refuge. The image of weaving can be seen as a reference to the making of texts (from Latin texere, to weave). But the language of the poem is also highly suggestive. ‘Leichtem’ (‘light yarn’, literally ‘something light’) suggests Leiche, a corpse, especially since the other word for corpse, Leichnam, literally means ‘death-shirt’, or ‘shroud’, as in the title. Thus the garment is not only an ambiguous comfort but even the word used to refer to its lightness conjures up death. The echoing of sinister thoughts in words and their etymology – rather than just in images – is a particular hallmark of Celan’s poetry, seen in ‘Wolfsbohne’ earlier, though it is also found in Ausländer’s, where ‘Nachtigall’ (nightingale) inevitably suggests Galle (bitterness) and Galgen (gallows) in a poem in which the poet laments the silencing of the nightingale (Ausländer 2012: 145; see also Boase-Beier 2015: 38). In this way the language of poetry can suggest to its original reader and to its translator a mind traumatized by loss, grief and guilt, in which words have other meanings that cannot be suppressed. In many Holocaust poems, especially those of Celan and Ausländer, the mind-style reflects a mind both traumatized and essentially multilingual, where the loss of languages is itself a source of trauma and the poetic interplay of languages reflects trauma. Celan not only uses snow as an image to suggest that which appears to cover the horrors of the camps and death marches (in which capacity it appears again and again in survivors’ memoirs, cf. Boase-Beier 2015: 115–16), but he uses the actual word ‘Schnee’, German for ‘snow’, to suggest its French counterpart neige, because neige is homonymous (though not homophonous) with German ‘Neige’, ‘decline’. Thus in lines such as ‘bei beider Neige: / ich ritt durch den Schnee’, the close proximity of ‘Neige’ to ‘Schnee’ leads the reader to ponder the meaning and provenance of ‘Neige’ and neige. Celan was almost certainly influenced by the etymology of French neige, which comes from Latin nix, and the latter’s near homonymity with German nichts, ‘nothing’, and complete homonymity with its colloquial form nix. He has here created a complex word-play in which snow appears to be linked to absence, but it is a word-play that only works in a multilingual context. Words are here not merely references to things in the world, but also to other similar words across language boundaries. Multilingual communication  – translation – is thus both thematized and reflected in the mind-style of such poems (cf. Boase-Beier 2015: 131–2).

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

161

Translation between different languages and between different stages of the same language (in order to make etymological links) is thus not something which happens only after a poem has been read in its original language and is to be communicated to a new audience. Translation lies at the heart of the original poems not only because the context of their creation was multilingual but also because the act of translation is given symbolic value: it suggests communication and interaction between communities. It also points to the important linguistic discoveries of the time Celan was writing, particularly those of the structuralist linguists whose work Celan studied, and who emphasized the way different languages express meaning. Such poems are written in defiance of modes of simplistic, degenerate thought that see purity in monolingual, monocultural society. To translate poems such as this into English not only requires an understanding of a mind-style which is multilingual and is traumatized by the destruction of diversity; its translator also needs to find ways to do justice to it in contemporary English, where cross-linguistic references are far less likely to be picked up than in the Central Europe of more than half a century ago. Understanding the mind-style of Holocaust poems is not just the responsibility of the translator, however. The fourth question I asked near the start of this chapter was about the possibility of reading translated Holocaust poetry in full awareness of its origins and the process of translation it has undergone. Here critics, scholars, editors and publishers also have a responsibility. If translation is an integral part of the poetry, it would seem perverse to discuss the translation of such poetry as though it resulted in something inadequate, a poem that was at best an approximation of the original poem, as in the view of Langer, quoted earlier (1995: 553). Besides considering how this poetry is read in its original version and how it is and can be translated, we must also think about how it might be discussed, critiqued and presented, so that the reader is not encouraged to take on such unconsidered views, which inevitably result in partial understanding. In a work which is mainly about fiction, Keith Oatley maintains that literary texts exert cognitive effects by causing us to enter the minds of others and to rethink our mental models for relationships and social structures (Oatley 2011: 100–1), and thus he echoes the conviction of Jones (2012: 12) and Rich (2007: 38), quoted earlier, that this is exactly what poetry does. For a translator who takes such a view seriously, the translation of Holocaust (including, and especially, post-Holocaust) poetry will need to encourage the reader of the translation also to go through processes of rethinking in response to the poems. This is clearly not

162

Translating Holocaust Lives

achievable if translation is understood simply as an inadequate procedure which might, with luck, capture some of the original poem. But reading translated poetry is also not just about ‘entering psychologically into these unique events’ (Schiff 1995: xvi), or hearing testimony to the fate of the victims, or hearing silenced voices speaking. Though it is all these things, it is also, and crucially, to receive a communication by the translator, who has gone to the trouble of reading, analysing, interpreting and reworking the original material, thereby adding a new voice and perspective to the poetry. Because communication, as noted earlier, was such an important issue for almost all Holocaust poets, it makes sense to emphasize the act of translation as an act of communication, which will always include the translator’s concerns and attitude (cf. Hermans 1996: 286). This suggests that the presentation of translated Holocaust poetry should reflect these concerns in including discussion, in a preface or notes, about issues of translation. It suggests also that the vast and varied nature of the Holocaust, and of experiences of the Holocaust, by those involved and those who came later, cannot be understood at all if the only translations available are those of poets already famous, translated from languages we typically associate with the Holocaust (German, Polish, Hungarian). There is no denying the value of poetry anthologies such as those by Schiff (1995), or Kirsten and Seeman (2012), both mentioned earlier, as well as more specific collections such as Lévy’s anthology of Sephardic Holocaust poetry (Lévy 2000), or Heiser and Taberner’s book of translated poetry from Dachau (Heiser and Taberner 2014). In particular the latter, as its German editor hoped, ‘opens up the possibilities for deeper understanding’ (Heiser and Taberner 2014: 2), because of the varied nature of the poetry it contains: poems from several different languages were translated first into German, then into Italian and later into English for the 2014 English edition. And yet, even in this book, the question of translation – how it is done, what issues are taken into account, how we should read the translations – is not discussed. Though a few discussions of the translation of specific poets do exist, such as the very enlightening study by Felstiner (1995) or essays by Hamburger (2007), the general lack of emphasis on issues of translation suggests that we now need other anthologies, in which more space is given to such issues. It is also important to work against distorted or partial perceptions of Holocaust poetry, for example that it is about ashes, smoke and death, that it describes life in a concentration camp, that its writers were always Jewish.1 This narrow view of Holocaust poetry could be changed if there were new anthologies that included poetry by or about those who fell victim to the Nazis or were affected by the Holocaust for reasons less often

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

163

acknowledged: for example, because they were disabled, or because members of their family were disabled or because they were homosexual. Then, in the case of well-known poets such as Celan or Sachs, the poetry which offers descriptions of Holocaust situations – concentration camps, slave-labour camps, death camps, forced marches, ghettos – notwithstanding its highly important role as testimony, needs to be supplemented by more of the (often later) poetry, which examines the after-effects of grief and guilt in a society which had to come to terms with the Holocaust. Newer anthologies are needed that, rather than mixing translated with original English poetry, as Schiff ’s does, and thereby placing the emphasis on the poem only as a form of documentation or witness rather than as communication, instead focus on translated poetry, and on what it means to translate such poetry, and to read it in translation. This can be done by presenting contextualized translations that foreground the act of translation the poems have undergone. Simply presenting poems bilingually, as Lévy’s or Heiser and Taberner’s or Kirsten and Seeman’s anthologies do, and as many single-poet collections such as Hamburger’s Celan translations (Hamburger 2007) do, clearly draws attention to the fact that they have been translated. But this is not enough: more discussion of the issues facing translators, where the integration of the translator’s voice into the finished poem is fully acknowledged and examined, would help to shift attention away from the documentary nature of such poems, important though this undoubtedly is, and towards the consciously communicative acts that not only the original poems but also their translations embody.

Note 1 These were the views collected during informal and anecdotal questioning of visitors to an exhibition on translated Holocaust poetry held at the Forum, Norwich, 4–5 November 2013.

References Aaron, F.W. (1990), Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Adorno, T.W. (2003), Negative Dialektik; Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Gesammelte Schriften vol. 6), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

164

Translating Holocaust Lives

Antelme, R. (2003), ‘Poetry and the Testimony of the Camps’, in D. Dobbels (ed.), On Robert Antelme’s ‘The Human Race’: Essays and Commentary, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 31–7. Ausländer, R. (2012), Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Benjamin, W. (1992), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, London: Fontana, pp. 245–55. Boase-Beier, J. (2011), ‘Translating Celan’s Poetics of Silence’, Target 23(2): 165–77. Boase-Beier, J. (2015), Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust: Translation, Style and the Reader, London: Bloomsbury. Braun, H. (2006), ‘Ich bin fünftausend Jahre jung’: Rose Ausländer – zu ihrer Biographie, Stuttgart: Radius. Brunner, C. (1919), Der Judenhass und die Juden, Berlin: Osterheld und Co. Burleigh, M. (2002), ‘The Legacy of Nazi Medicine in Context’, in F. Nicosia and J. Huener (eds), Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 112–27. Celan, P. (1952), Mohn und Gedächtnis, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Chalfen, I. (1979), Paul Celan: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. Comans, P. (trans.) (2007), Abraham Sutzkever: Geh über Wörter wie über ein Minenfeld Lyrik und Prosa, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Davies, P. (2014), ‘Introduction’, Translation and Literature 23(2): 161–9. Evans, R.J. (2008), The Third Reich at War, London: Penguin Books. Evans, S.K. (2010), Hitler’s Forgotten Victims: The Holocaust and the Disabled, Stroud: The History Press. Felman, S. (1992), ‘Education and Crisis, or The Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge, pp. 1–56. Felstiner, J. (1995), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fowler, R. (1977), Linguistics and the Novel, London: Methuen. Fritsch-Vivié, G. (1993), Nelly Sachs, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Frankel, E. and Teutsch, B.P. (1995), The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Gellhaus, A. (ed.) (1997), ‘Fremde Nähe’: Celan als Übersetzer, Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft. Gill, A. (1988), The Journey Back from Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, London: Grafton Books. Gubar, S. (2003), Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hamburger, M. (trans.) (2007), Poems of Paul Celan, London: Anvil. Heiser, D. and Taberner, S. (eds) (2014), My Shadow in Dachau: Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp, Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Holocaust Poetry and Translation

165

Hermans, T. (1996), ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’, Target 8(1): 23–48. Hirsch, M. and Spitzer, L. (2011), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Iser, W. (2004), ‘The Resurgence of the Aesthetic’, Comparative Critical Studies I(1–2): 1–15. Jones, T. (2012), Poetic Language: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Present, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Karay, F. (2002), Hasag-Leipzig Slave Labour Camp for Women: The Struggle for Survival Told by the Women and Their Poetry, trans. S. Kitai, London: Vallentine Mitchell. Karmel, H. and Karmel, I. (2007), A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond, trans. A.A. Galles and W. Niesłuchowski, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kirsten, W. and Seeman, A. (trans. and eds) (2012), Der gefesselte Wald: Gedichte aus Buchenwald, Göttingen: Wallstein. Kolinsky, E. (2004), After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945, London: Pimlico. Krischke, U. (2013), The Old English Complex Plant Names: A Linguistic Survey and a Catalogue, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. LaCapra, D. (1998), History and Memory after Auschwitz, London: Cornell University Press. Langer, L. (ed.) (1995), Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laub, D. (1992), ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in S. Felman and Laub, D. (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge, pp. 57–74. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (2nd edn), Harlow : Pearson. Lévy, I.J. (trans.) (2000), And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Loewy, E. (1966), Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich und seine Dichtung, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Martin, E. (2011), Nelly Sachs: The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation, Berlin: de Gruyter. Miall, D. (2007), Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies, New York: Peter Lang. Mitchell, S. (trans.) (1981), Dan Pagis: Points of Departure, Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Nader, A. (2007), Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Neumann, P. (1968), Zur Lyrik Paul Celans, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht. Oatley, K. (2011), Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, Chichester: WileyBlackwell.

166

Translating Holocaust Lives

Rash, F. (2006), The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rich, A. (2007), Poetry and Commitment, New York: W.W. Norton. Rosen, A. (2005), Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Rosenfeld, A. (1980), A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rothberg, M. (2000), Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rousset, D. (1946), L’Univers concentrationnaire, Paris: Pavois. Rowland, A. (2005), Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rowland, A. (2014), Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems, London: Routledge. Sachs, N. (1968), Das Buch der Nelly Sachs, ed. B. Holmqvist, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schiff, H. (ed.) (1995), Holocaust Poetry, New York: St Martin’s Press. Schloss, E. (1988), Eva’s Story, with E.J. Kent, London: Castle-Kent. Semino, E. (2002), ‘A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Mind Style in Narrative Fiction’, in E. Semino and J. Culpeper (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 95–122. Semprun, J. (1997), Literature or Life, trans. L. Coverdale, New York: Viking. Smith, H. (trans.) (1975), Gertrud Kolmar: Dark Soliloquy, New York: Continuum. Venuti, L. (2013), Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Verdet, A. (ed.) (1995), Anthologie des poèmes de Buchenwald, Paris: Editions Tirésias. Vice, S. (2008), ‘Holocaust Poetry and Testimony’, Critical Survey 20(2): 7–17. Vivis, A. and Boase-Beier, J. (trans.) (2014), Rose Ausländer: While I am Drawing Breath, Todmorden: Arc Publications. Weissbort, D. (ed.) (1991), The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Žižek, S. (2008), Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, London: Profile Books.

Response to: Jean Boase-Beier, Holocaust Poetry and Translation Francis R. Jones

Jean Boase-Beier’s contribution outlines how translators might engage with the multilingual communication that lies ‘at the heart’ of Holocaust poetry. This response discusses how far the issues she presents, though highlighted by exceptionally harsh conditions, might be relevant for translating other poetries. It also suggests other themes in poetry translation scholarship which might enrich insights into the translation of Holocaust poetry. As with Boase-Beier, these discussions are informed by my own poetry-translating experience. The Central European intellectual heritage that fell victim to the Nazis was not only multilingual but also deeply rooted in translation. The 1974 Collected Poems of Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944), for instance, contains his Hungarian translations of work by 66 Greek, Latin, English, French and German poets. Translating poetry that testifies to this heritage raises both intertextual and intercultural issues. For instance, the title of Radnóti’s poem À la recherche …, hand-written in a school notebook in a Nazi slave camp, can be retained unchanged for European readers, who can mentally add Proust’s du temps perdu – whereas a translator into Thai, say, might have to (over-)translate it to ‘in search of lost time’. Boase-Beier stresses the specific origins and reading of Holocaust poetry. With Radnóti’s notebook, these are crucial. Every educated Hungarian knows how this notebook, found in Radnóti’s overcoat pocket in a mass grave, identified his body. Translating the 1985 facsimile edition confronted me, as its translator, with a factor usually overlooked: how a source text’s physicality is part of the reading experience, and how this might be conveyed to readers of its translation. This was solved by adding the facsimile to the UK edition (Jones 2000). Boase-Beier highlights the Holocaust poets’ drive to preserve a culture of complex communication in a viciously simplistic world, and its implications for translation. And, indeed, this drive is not restricted to Holocaust poetry.

168

Translating Holocaust Lives

In 1992, Sarajevo, a city of multiple ethno-cultural heritages, was besieged by the Serbian-ethnonationalist forces of Radovan Karadžić, now recently convicted of genocide. Marko Vešović (himself of Serbian heritage) wrote how the smoke of his cigarette, snatched in the street between bombardments, reveals ‘Karadžićevu vaseljenu / u kojoj Logor je – Logos’ (Karadžić’s universe in which the Camp is – Logos). This interlingual wordplay, referencing St John’s En archē ēn o lógos, intellectually resists Karadžić’s monoethnic universe. For me, as its translator, it was crucial to retain this – by glossing ‘srpskim logorima’ earlier in the poem as ‘the logor, the Serbian camp’, then concluding with the trilingually resistant ‘Karadžić’s universe / whose Logos is the Logor’ (in Arsenijević 2011: 172–3). This raises the wider issue of how translators might tackle multilingually textured works. Monolingual solutions (‘Karadžić’s world / where the Word is the Camp’, say) are often easier to find, and more fluent. However, a fluent translating style can conceal messages embodied in a source poem’s dysfluencies (Venuti 1995: 24) – Ausländer, Radnóti and Vešović’s resistance to monoethnicity, for instance. And concealing multilingual texture, especially when translating into English, is particularly problematic because many translation readers will be monolinguals not otherwise aware of the cross-language, multi-ethnic relations underlying the source poem’s context. In communicating these and other relations, Boase-Beier advocates dialogue between translator and target reader via translation commentaries. Publishers agree, it seems: prose prefaces are rare in non-translated poetry collections, but translator’s introductions are common in translated collections. She also implies a role for commented bilingual editions. This is not without risk, however. In  one poetry publisher’s view, readers of target-language-only editions experience translations as poems in their own right, rather than comparing them, often invidiously, against originals on the facing page (P. Jay, personal communication). Indeed, any understanding of translated Holocaust poetry involves considering how it is read as target-language poetry. This implies considering not just the translated poem’s mind-style, but also its rhyme, rhythm and other sonic effects, its word choice, imagery and nuances. It also arguably implies grasping the nettle of translation quality. In Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’, for example, the vowel rhyme and colloquiality of Boase-Beier’s ‘there you won’t lie so tight’ is more poetically convincing for me as a reader than the strained formality of Hamburger’s ‘there one lies unconfined’ – reflecting the only legally tested criterion of translation quality that it should ‘serve its purpose’ (Hammond 1995: 234). Unfortunately, though quality criteria, and their relationship with translation commissioners’

Response

169

and target readers’ expectations, have been extensively discussed for nonliterary translation, this is an area where respectable poetry translation scholars fear to tread – but which is therefore all the more worth exploring. Examining the motivations and processes behind translators’ decisions could also enhance insights into translated Holocaust poetry. Poetry translators typically aim to write a ‘meta-poem’ – a convincing target-culture poem which reliably reports on another poem in terms of content and linguistic texture (Holmes 1988: 10, 50; cf. Jones 2011). As it is often hard to fulfil all these aims, translators have to compromise in different ways, though effectively recreating what they see as the source’s underlying poetic intent is a frequent fall-back position. Creative, that is novel but appropriate, solutions may be a tactic to achieve this (Jones 2011). Felstiner, for example, conveys the stonelike succinctness of Celan’s words in ‘Todesfuge’ (e.g. ‘Meister:’ ‘master/teacher/ expert/craftsman’) by gradually shifting the poem from English back to the original German: ‘this Death is a master from Deutschland […] this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland […] der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’ (Felstiner 1995: 31). Compromises and creative interventions can also reveal the translator’s interpretative voice and persona within the target poem: here, for instance, Felstiner speaks as a German-English translator, but also as an American poet and a Holocaust scholar. Boase-Beier, Hamburger and Felstiner’s ‘Todesfuge’ suggest a final insight from translation scholarship that can enrich the study of Holocaust poetry. Important poems and poets are often repeatedly re-translated. As no poem can have one perfect translation, new translations are better not – or not only – evaluated as improving or failing to improve on their forerunners. They should also be seen as adding to a collective reading of the source work that is more revealing than one version in isolation.

References Arsenijević, D. (2011), ‘Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in A. Mousley (ed.), Towards a New Literary Humanism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 166–80. Felstiner, J. (1995), Paul Celan – Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hammond, M. (1995), ‘A New Wind of Quality from Europe: Implications of the Court Case Cited by Holz-Mänttäri for the U.S. Translation Industry’, in M. Morris (ed.), Translation and the Law, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 233–45. Holmes, J.S. (1988), Translated!, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

170

Translating Holocaust Lives

Jones, F.R. (2011), Poetry Translating as Expert Action, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Radnóti, M. (1974), Összes versei és műfordításai [Complete poems and poetry translations], Budapest: Szépirodalmi kiadó. Radnóti, M. (1985), Bori notesz [Bor notebook] (5th edn), Budapest: Helikon. Jones, F.R. (trans.) (2000), M. Radnóti: Camp Notebook, Todmorden: Arc. Venuti, L. (1995), The Translator’s Invisibility, London: Routledge.

8

Voices from a Void: The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk

Introduction The scope of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust eludes and defies our comprehension. Yet as fellow humans we have an ethical obligation to remember, to learn, to prevent. Survivors’ stories provide invaluable testimonies of the inconceivable evil of the Nazi genocide, but still the stories of millions of victims will never be heard. Fiction can compensate for this void by giving a voice to the voiceless, presuming that literature of the Holocaust is written and translated on the basis of solemn ethical and aesthetic scrutiny. This challenging form of communication is further complicated when the intended reader is a child. A central dilemma of children’s literature is whether and how the child should be protected from or exposed to the horror of the Holocaust. But is it possible to reconcile hopeful Holocaust stories for children with the fact that over one million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust and none of the Jewish children deported from Norway survived? In this chapter, I examine how the Holocaust is represented in Norwegian narrative fiction for children and young adults, and offer a few suggestions as to what this representation might mean for the translation of these works, such as questions of allegiance to history or story, author or audience, and the role of voice and silence. Firstly, I present some historical facts about the Norwegian Holocaust, including remarks on the situation of the Jews in Denmark, to illustrate the different Scandinavian responses to the Nazi persecutions of the Jewish people. Then I introduce some perspectives based on witness literature and trauma theory, though it should be remembered that these perspectives were initially related to Holocaust texts for adults. I then go on to discuss Holocaust and children’s literature in general, before examining award-winning

172

Translating Holocaust Lives

children’s literature of the Holocaust written by three Norwegian authors from different post-war periods: Miriam by Aimée Sommerfelt (1950, 1960), the Emil Alm-trilogy by Tor Fretheim (1992, 1994, 1996) and Nærmere høst (Almost Autumn) by Marianne Kaurin (2012).

The Norwegian Holocaust The term ‘Holocaust’ often refers to the state-financed, industrialized mass murder of the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps – a mass murder euphemized by the Nazis as ‘[t]he final solution to the Jewish question’ (Bruland 2008: 7; Hilberg 2003: 421, first edition published in 1961). However, although the Jews were the primary targets, Holocaust victims also include political opponents of the Nazis, prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and disabled people (Lothe 2013: 23) – and many of the Holocaust’s victims were killed at the Eastern Front, under the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. It was the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews that resulted in the Holocaust, but the genocide was implemented with local assistance all over Europe. ‘The Holocaust didn’t happen somewhere else, it happened here, in our midst’ (Michelet 2014: 10, my translation) proclaims the journalist and author Marte Michelet in her award-winning book Den største forbrytelsen. Ofre og gjerningsmenn i det norske Holocaust (The Ultimate Crime. Victims and Perpetrators in the Norwegian Holocaust). The cultural memory of the Second World War in Norway has been dominated by a pervasive tradition of heroic stories of Norwegian resistance against the Nazi occupiers. A recent example is Kampen om tungtvannet (The Heavy Water War) (2015), an immensely popular TV series about the Allied sabotage action against the Nazi-controlled heavy water plant at Rjukan, a small Norwegian mountain town. Despite the persistent focus on the Norwegian heroes, during the last decades a growing consciousness has emerged of the devastating implications of the Holocaust, including an awareness of the Norwegian participation in the persecution of the Jews (Bruland 2008: 31; Emberland and Kott 2012: 21). As late as 2012, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg apologized on behalf of the Norwegian state for the arrests and deportations of the Jews. In his apology, Stoltenberg emphasized that it happened on Norwegian ground and with Norwegian participation. The Jews in Norway were persecuted on the initiative of the German occupiers, but the Jewish minority was categorized and marked, arrested and deported predominantly by Norwegian bureaucrats, police and

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

173

taxi drivers (Bruland 2008: 12–13, 20–21). The Norwegian Holocaust is in large part the history of the destinies of the 772 deported Jews from Norway, out of a Jewish population of approximately 2,100 persons (Bruland 2008: 7), of whom only thirty-four men survived (Bruland 2008: 35; Emberland and Kott 2012: 362; Lothe 2013: 11). Denmark and Norway appear in a very different light as regards Nazi persecution and local participation. Both countries were occupied by Germany from April  1940 to May  1945. Sweden was neutral, but admitted Danish and Norwegian refugees. While over one third of the Jews in Norway (Bruland 2008: 35) were deported in the autumn of 1942 and the spring of 1943, in Denmark almost 8,000 Jews managed to escape to Sweden in the autumn of 1943 (Bak 2010: 34). Four hundred and seventy-two Jews were arrested and deported from Denmark by the German police and Danish soldiers on leave from the Eastern front. Most of the Jews from Denmark were allowed to remain in the transit camp Theresienstadt and were not sent to extermination camps like Auschwitz. Historian Raul Hilberg describes the Danish response as ‘extraordinary’, with ‘an uncooperative Danish administration and a local population unanimous in its resolve to save its Jews’ (Hilberg 2003: 591). While the survival rate among the deported Danish Jews was nearly 90 per cent (Fracapane 2011), fewer than 5 per cent of the deported Jews from Norway survived the Holocaust. None of the Norwegian survivors were children or women (Lothe 2013: 7). The Norwegian Holocaust is reflected in education, research and memorial activities, particularly at The Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, The Falstad Centre, The Archive Foundation, The North Sea Traffic Museum and The Jewish Museums of Oslo and Trondheim (IHRA [n.d.]). In the Norwegian education system, however, Holocaust Studies is not a specified part of the curriculum. Furthermore, the Norwegian Holocaust constitutes only a marginal and voluntary part of teacher education in Norway (Kristensen 2009: 6). Considering the importance of recognizing and confronting this neglected part of our history, there are some obvious challenges if we want future generations to be able to reflect upon and learn from history. According to author Ida Jackson, the Second World War is at present reduced to popular culture: ‘While the two generations before me have done their best to repress the war, my generation has the very same war as favourite entertainment’ (Jackson 2014: 188, my translation). In commemorating the Holocaust, literature and its translations seem pertinent devices, offering the reader a ‘moral-intellectual experience’ (Lothe and Hawthorn 2013: 5). Children’s literature of the Holocaust, combining historical knowledge with fictional life stories, as we shall see in the Norwegian

174

Translating Holocaust Lives

novels I will discuss, presents stories of perspectives and experiences we must not be allowed to forget. And, if the different stories are to be included in a ‘global memory’ of the Holocaust (Lothe et al. 2012: 16), accessible to people of all ages throughout the world, translation is indispensable.

Witness literature and trauma theory Over one million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust (Bak 2010: 43; Lothe 2013: 20). Because none of the Jewish children or women deported from Norway survived, their death left a void in the stories from the Holocaust (Lothe 2013: 11). This illustrates a core problem in witness literature, a genre which includes eyewitnesses’ accounts and survivors’ stories, but also fictional representations of historical atrocities like the Holocaust (Lothe et  al. 2012: 10). A main concern of witness literature is the ethical obligation to tell about atrocities to try to prevent similar events – but at the same time, the true witnesses of the Holocaust are silenced, as they are dead or too traumatized to speak. In their ‘theory of testimony’ (Felman and Laub 1992: xvii), literary scholar Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub describe the Holocaust as ‘an event eliminating its own witness’ (Felman and Laub 1992: xvii), proposing that literature may be the only witness to the Holocaust as ‘the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated’ (Felman and Laub 1992: xviii). The  philosopher Giorgio Agamben has also been preoccupied with the paradoxical nature of witnessing – the imperative and yet impossibility to speak of extreme cruelty – a phenomenon he has called ‘Levi’s paradox’ (HellerRoazen 2002: 82) after the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Another survivor, Elie Wiesel, emphasizes: ‘to listen to a witness is to become a witness’ (in an interview with Hjeltnes 2014, my translation) – even if the ones who are left to witness have not experienced the Holocaust trauma from the inside. A traumatized person has experienced or witnessed an event of actual or threatened death or serious injury, according to definitions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Eitinger et al. 1995: 96, Nordanger et al. 2006: 1292). Trauma involves an event that is not perceived as it occurs, but rather pursues the victim through involuntary repetitions, generally manifested as nightmares, according to literary scholar Cathy Caruth. She claims that ‘the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life’ (Caruth 1996: 62).

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

175

In addition to trauma’s unconscious and inaccessible nature, the traumatic experience involves a psychic pain that can prevent the victim from talking about the experience. Yet it is essential for the victim to tell his or her story (‘constructing a narrative’; Felman and Laub 1992: 69; ‘narrative reintegration remains vital’; Bal 1999: xi) to stop the traumatic repetitions. The victim’s testimony is dependent on a listener, and because it is impossible to tell the whole story, the listener has to be especially attentive to what is not said. This form of silence, gap or absence is a particularly important quality of the testimony (Felman and Laub 1992: 65; Heller-Roazen 2002: 33; Suleiman 2004: 380), which is also a particular challenge for translation. How can the translator transfer or preserve this essential quality that evades representation? This dominant concept of trauma, often attributed to Caruth, has been questioned in recent years. The critique addresses particularly the generalized notion of trauma as unspeakable and unrepresentable (Alford 2013: 2; Leys 2000: 304; Luckhurst 2008: 5). In this chapter, however, I find the tension and the negotiation between speech and silence a productive point of departure for the discussion of the Holocaust trauma in children’s literature.

The Holocaust and children’s literature I will read the Norwegian children’s novels by Sommerfelt, Fretheim and Kaurin in the light of perspectives from witness literature and trauma theory in order to examine the challenges of language in the face of the inconceivable evil of the Holocaust. The representation of the Holocaust is even more complex as the novels under consideration are written for and in the name of children. Children’s literature has rarely been discussed as witness literature, even though several important works on the Holocaust in children’s literature have been written, by, among others, literary scholars Hamida Bosmajian (2002), Adrienne Kertzer (2002) and Lydia Kokkola (2003). Two articles by literary scholars Kenneth Kidd (2005) and Anna K. Skyggebjerg (2011) include theoretical discussions of children’s literature as trauma and witness literature. While Kidd is concerned with ‘[h]ow, when, and why to speak the unspeakable, especially to and for and in the name of children?’ (Kidd 2005: 142), Skyggebjerg emphasizes that ‘[t] he purpose of witness literature is, among other things, to contribute to new generations’ knowledge of both historical and potential abuse’ (Skyggebjerg 2011: 255–6, my translation). Both scholars discuss how trauma and witness literature for children challenges traditional conceptions of childhood and literature.

176

Translating Holocaust Lives

Traditionally, books for children have reflected a strong demand to protect the young readers’ presumed innocence and faith in the future. Even if dystopian trends have been demonstrated in the last decades, children’s literature today still seems ‘utopian by nature’ (Nikolajeva 2010: 73). In a sense, children’s literature about the Holocaust ‘breaks a strict taboo: that children are not to be frightened’ (Kokkola 2003: 11) and thereby challenges ‘the masterplot of childhood innocence’ (Kidd 2005: 140). Kidd rhetorically asks if Holocaust texts for children represent a shift in perspective from protecting to exposing young readers to evil (Kidd 2005: 120). However, the majority of Holocaust stories for children and young adults are characterized by hope and heroism (Kertzer 2002: 34; Kokkola 2003: 27; Tribunella 2010: 18), and from this perspective protection is still essential in children’s literature. Literary scholar Eric L. Tribunella reconciles the two perspectives by arguing that Holocaust literature for children is a form of ‘inoculation’ (Tribunella 2010: 104), combining protection and exposure. The presumed effect of this strategy is a child capable of mastering trauma within the safe framework of the narrative, enhancing the young reader’s maturation into a responsible citizen. As a Holocaust scholar and the child of an Auschwitz survivor, Kertzer proposes that ‘ultimately all literature about the Holocaust may be a form of children’s literature, trying to describe events with a very limited vocabulary’ (Kertzer 2002: 39). Even if I do not agree with a definition of children’s literature as constituted by a very limited vocabulary, Kertzer also addresses the problem of speaking the unspeakable. Silence is one possible response to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Employed as a key feature in Holocaust stories, silence needs to make the readers of both source and target texts (Boase-Beier 2011: 7) aware of its presence, as ‘framed silences’ (Kokkola 2003: 25), if it is to be meaningful. Whereas Kertzer questions the existence of a lesson in Holocaust stories, other scholars have assigned the Nazi genocide a pedagogical potential: ‘For teachers and students in the humanities, the Holocaust has become a limit case, a prime site for testing aesthetic and ethical theories about mediation and representability’ (Hirsch and Kacandes 2004: 3). For the translator it might pose a challenge to express and recreate the meaning and literariness of a story based on a historical atrocity like the Holocaust and at the same time be expected to protect a young target audience. Historical accuracy is an important ethical aspect of Holocaust stories and their translations, for a young as well as an older audience. There seems to be a widespread consensus on this demand, above all to avoid trivialization and denial (Kokkola 2003: 2–3; Maguire 2012: 57; Suleiman 2012: 102–3). However,

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

177

historical accuracy may come into conflict with hopeful stories and ‘sparing the child’ (Bosmajian 2002). The Holocaust was designed to be ‘[a]n event without a witness’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 75). No Norwegian child survived to tell about it. How, then, does Norwegian literature represent the Holocaust for children and in the name of children?

Norwegian children’s literature of the Holocaust The Second World War has been a recurrent topic in Norwegian children’s literature ever since the war. Literary scholar Kari Skjønsberg estimated that seventy Norwegian titles of narrative fiction about the war were published for children and young adults between 1945 and 1995 (Skjønsberg 1996: 27). Extending the period of publication to 2014, and with the help of research librarian Anne Kristin Lande at The National Library, I have found thirteen titles of children’s fiction by Norwegian authors in which the Holocaust is a main theme. Among these books there are two titles presenting the Holocaust to younger children, Over grensen (Across the Border) by Maja Lunde (2012) and Flukten (The Escape) by Tor Edvin Dahl (2014), recommended, respectively, from the age of eight and nine by the publishers. This represents a new phenomenon regarding the age of the reader of Norwegian Holocaust stories, as the remaining titles are published for a youth audience (thirteen years and older). This seems to reflect the pressure on ‘the masterplot of childhood innocence’ (Kidd 2005: 140), even if the Holocaust is presented in the form of an adventure story with a young hero and a happy ending. In the following sections, I discuss three literary universes where the young protagonists are affected by the impact of the Holocaust. Central to the discussion are questions of speech and silence. Besides being award-winning, the novels under consideration represent different post-war periods, which I will argue implicate differences in literary and childhood conceptions. I present the novels chronologically, even though the first and last texts have more in common. The  first case (in the section ‘Miriam by Aimée Sommerfelt’) consists of two editions of Aimée Sommerfelt’s novel Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960). Secondly, in ‘The Emil Alm-trilogy by Tor Fretheim’, I focus on Tor Fretheim’s trilogy, with the novels Krigen, freden og sommerfuglene (The War, the Peace and the Butterflies) (Fretheim 1992), Langsom trio (Slow Trio) (Fretheim 1994)  and Havmannen, kjøpmannen og Dr. Freud (The Merman, the Merchant, and Dr. Freud) (Fretheim 1996). Finally, in ‘Almost Autumn by Marianne Kaurin’, Marianne Kaurin’s novel Nærmere høst (Almost Autumn) (Kaurin 2012) is discussed.

178

Translating Holocaust Lives

Miriam by Aimée Sommerfelt Since her debut in 1934 with the children’s book Stopp tyven! (Stop the Thief!), Aimée Sommerfelt (1892–1975) wrote books for children and young adults over a period of four decades. She is one of the internationally best known Norwegian writers for children, and her most successful novel, Veien til Agra (The Road to Agra) (Sommerfelt 1959), has been translated into twenty-nine languages (Birkeland et  al. 2005: 242). In this story from India, Sommerfelt combined touching depictions of competent children with hardships in the Third World. Sommerfelt wrote female young adults’ novels and historical novels, but above all she is remembered for explicit messages of global tolerance and understanding. During the Second World War, she published Lisbeth (Sommerfelt 1941), a historical novel apparently of the Swedish-Norwegian War (1807–1808), but in fact containing a hidden critique of the Nazis (Birkeland et al. 2005: 240; Skjønsberg 1995: 126). Sommerfelt had first-hand experience of the war, being part of a family that was active in the resistance. The Nazi occupation was the subject of two more of her books, Ung front (Young Front) (Sommerfelt 1945) and Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960). The second edition of Miriam was translated into English (Iversen 1963, 1965, 1973) and into Hungarian (Lajos 1967). Two further Norwegian editions of Miriam were published in 1969 and 1978, both based on the second edition of 1960. Here I will focus on the two first editions of Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960) because the Norwegian Holocaust is a main theme in this story. This is not the case in Ung Front (Young Front) (Sommerfelt 1945), where the destiny of the Norwegian Jews is only one of several aspects, also involving the resistance perspective and the boy volunteering for and dying at the Eastern Front. In the preface of Young Front (Sommerfelt 1945) it is stated that no events are invented, only the characters. Although it is a common claim that these stories are historically correct, the death of the Jewish girl Ruth during deportation on the ship Donau in the book (Sommerfelt 1945: 268) did not happen in reality (Bruland 2008: 47). Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960) is a story about the sixteen-year-old Jewish girl Miriam Frænkel living in Oslo with her family, consisting of Papa, her little brother Ole Jacob and her older sister Agda, who is engaged to Georg. Even though the Nazi authorities force the Frænkels to leave their home, Miriam nevertheless becomes friends with Hanne, the new residents´ daughter. Miriam’s boyfriend Bård (Rolf in the English version), a young resistance fighter, helps Miriam, Ole Jakob and Papa to escape just before the arrests of the Norwegian

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

179

Jews begin. During the final stage of the escape, near the Swedish border, the Nazis capture Papa. Agda, Georg and Papa are deported to a concentration camp. In the first edition of the book Papa survives (Sommerfelt 1950: 132), while in the second edition he meets the same fate as Agda, Georg and the majority of the deported Norwegian Jews (Sommerfelt 1960: 108, 126). Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950) was Sommerfelt’s breakthrough as a writer, and the book won ‘a ministry award, a large audience and a long life’ (Birkeland et  al. 2005: 241, my translation). Whereas the characters in Young Front (Sommerfelt 1945) were young adults around the age of 20, the dominant voice and the implied readers are younger in Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960). The narrator makes explicit judgements against anti-Semitism, prejudice and racial discrimination, as in this example: ‘For it is a strange thing in this world that if anyone stands out a little, whether it is because of his accent, or race or religion, he is tormented by all the others who resemble one another’ (Iversen 1963: 54). The didactic narrator presenting a clear moral is less frequent in today’s children’s literature. Nevertheless, it is Miriam’s experiences from 1942 until the end of the Second World War that dominate the story. While the moral of the story is explicitly formulated, the horrors of the Holocaust are left implied. Indeed, in both editions of Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960) the main young Jewish characters, Miriam and her little brother, survive by escaping to Sweden. There are no depictions of the arrests, the deportation or the horrors of life in the camp, only hints of the Holocaust from the omniscient narrator: ‘A week later she [Agda] was arrested, and with hundreds of others was sent on the long trek, which so many had to journey, and from which so few returned’ (Iversen 1963: 128). In the 1950 edition Papa survives the Holocaust. He returns from Germany skinny, old, silent. When he eventually starts telling about his experience, Miriam cannot bear to listen to the horrible story. There is thus no listener to Papa’s story, which concurs with the need to protect the young reader from knowing too much of the cruel reality of the Holocaust. In the 1960 edition Papa does not survive the Holocaust – he shares the destiny of Agda, Georg and millions of real Jewish victims. This change of ending is seen as a less protective and a more realistic representation of the Holocaust for young readers (Birkeland et al. 2005: 242; Skjønsberg 1996: 22), which may also be the reason why this version was translated (Iversen 1963, 1973; Lajos 1967). At the end of both editions the young protagonist in Miriam survives, and there is hope for the future, expressed most prominently in the love between Miriam and Bård. Despite the post-war exposure of the massive Jewish loss in the

180

Translating Holocaust Lives

Nazi genocide, to Miriam’s disappointment and despair anti-Semitic attitudes still survive in Norwegian society. The explicit moral message of Sommerfelt’s novel emphasizes the need to fight racism every day.

The Emil Alm-trilogy by Tor Fretheim Since his debut in 1982 with the children’s book Markus kjenner ikke Supermann (Markus doesn´t know Superman), Tor Fretheim (1946–) has written about twenty books, mostly for a young audience. Besides being an author, Fretheim is a journalist and a translator. He has written extensively about child abuse and domestic violence in the national newspaper Aftenposten (Gatland 2009). These are also recurrent themes in his literary work. Other frequent themes are male emotional life and gender identity. The focus in this chapter, the Emil Almtrilogy, consists of the novels Krigen, freden og sommerfuglene (The War, the Peace and the Butterflies) (Fretheim 1992), Langsom trio (Slow Trio) (Fretheim 1994) and Havmannen, kjøpmannen og Dr. Freud (The Merman, the Merchant and Dr. Freud) (Fretheim 1996). The trilogy is central to Fretheim’s work, and it has been translated into German (Kapoun 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997, 1998), but not into English. The first book of the trilogy is also translated into Danish (Christensen 1995). In addition to several Norwegian literary awards, the trilogy’s first two books are on the honours list of the Österreichischer Kinderund Jugendbuchpreis (Kapoun 1994, 1995b). A main theme in the trilogy is the problematic relationship between father and son (Birkeland et al. 2005: 384). Born shortly after the war, Tor Fretheim belongs to a large post-war generation. Like Emil, his protagonist, the author had a father who returned from a Nazi concentration camp. Both the fictional and the real father were non-Jewish survivors. Among the nearly 5500 non-Jewish prisoners deported from Norway to Nazi-Germany, 88 per cent survived (Strøm 1974: 60). The first book of the trilogy is ‘a novel about the war, built on memories’ (Kverndokken 1997: 108, my translation), written during the Gulf War (Kverndokken 1997: 112). With the horrors of war as a point of departure, Fretheim’s story of Emil Alm combines autobiographical elements with a historical setting in post-war Oslo and retrospective glimpses of the Holocaust. Like Sommerfelt, Fretheim emphasizes the importance of authenticity in this kind of story (Kverndokken 1997: 108). Fretheim’s trilogy is a coming-of-age story, depicting in a poetic-realistic manner Emil Alm’s childhood and adolescence, from his birth in 1943 until he goes to sea in 1958. It is also a psychological portrait of a Holocaust survivor

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

181

through the eyes of his son. Emil is conceived during the war, and the war continues to affect Emil, Elise and Erik Alm long after the liberation. The family relationships are dominated by distance and rejection, caused by the father’s Holocaust trauma. Instead, Emil seeks comfort and company with children and adults in his neighbourhood, who also carry stories of neglect: Laila, the girl next door accused of being a prostitute and sent away to an orphanage; Randi, Laila’s mother who is desperate for a drink and a man; Arnold Klemmt, the dying man rejected by his family and society for his sexuality; Hauke, the manipulative son of a convicted Norwegian Nazi – and the young outcast who calls himself Dr Freud, an illegitimate child of a German soldier and a Norwegian woman. In  these friendships, although not perfect or even uplifting, Emil gains a foothold outside his dysfunctional family. Unlike Sommerfelt and Kaurin, whose narratives unfold during the Holocaust, Fretheim’s story revolves around the repercussions of the Holocaust and the impact on the second-generation survivors. Literary scholar Marianne Hirsch calls the second-generation memory of the Holocaust ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 1999: 8, 2012: 3), a concept describing ‘the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’ (Hirsch 1999: 8). By projection and not as a first-hand experience, Erik Alm’s traumatic memories of the Holocaust have been of profound significance to Emil during the boy’s formative years. Gradually the son starts showing some of the same traumatic symptoms as his father, like the nightmares and the screams, repeating his father’s stories, hiding his hands in his pockets. Although Erik is hospitalized and absent in the last two books of the trilogy, his influence on Emil is decisive. ‘Survivor syndrome’ is prevalent in American novels that alternate between a post-Holocaust setting and recollections of the concentration camp universe (Kremer 2013: 139). ‘The KZ-syndrome’ (Eitinger et al. 1995: 67; Strøm 1974: 45) is a related concept, developed on the basis of common symptoms among Holocaust survivors, later included and revised in the diagnostic successor ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) (Eitinger et al. 1995: 95). In Fretheim’s trilogy, the descriptions of Erik’s traumatic symptoms are characteristic for the survivor syndrome, ranging from involuntary and intrusive memories, withdrawal and repression, aggression and distrust, to feelings of guilt and dysfunctional relationships. Although a common trait for post-Holocaust stories written for an adult audience, the theme of traumatic memory, postmemory and survivor syndrome expands the horizon of children’s literature by focusing on the parent’s trauma and its devastating impacts on the child, particularly as the story ends with Erik’s suicide.

182

Translating Holocaust Lives

For Levi and Agamben ‘the grey zone’ indicates the Nazis’ attempts to confuse good and evil, to impose the burden of guilt on the victims (HellerRoazen 2002: 21; Rosenthal 1989: 37). The Sonderkommando signifies ‘the extreme figure of the grey zone’ (Heller-Roazen 2002: 24), as the work done by this special unit of prisoners involved carrying out the extermination and disposal of people in the gas chambers and crematoria. The portrait of Erik Alm displays the human being’s complete deterioration after being subjected to and implicated in this killing process as one of the ‘crematorium ravens’ (Rosenthal 1989: 38). At the centre of his Holocaust trauma is the memory of the extermination of the Jewish children Sara and Abel. The young victims’ innocence and tragic deaths are emphasized, increasing Erik’s feeling of guilt and despair. Incessantly he tries to convey the story of Sara and Abel, but as Elise rejects Erik’s story and Emil is unable to grasp it, they fail to bear witness to his testimony. ‘Why doesn´t anyone understand?’ (Fretheim 1992: 94, my translation) Erik asks, and yet he keeps trying, in an abrupt and fragmented manner, to tell them about his Holocaust experience. This reflects society’s reluctance to listen to the survivors’ stories. Moreover, the grey zone represents an ambiguity that is demanding to relate to, both for the characters in the story and for young and inexperienced readers. The story of Sara and Abel illustrates how difficult it is to represent the horror of the Holocaust to those who were not present. The form of the story resembles a fable, a fairy tale or a children’s story, which supports Kertzer’s (2002: 39) notion of the inability of language to contain the Holocaust other than in a restricted form. The story of the Jewish children also has similarities with specific texts like Hansel and Gretel, the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm and the short story ‘Sunnanäeng’ by Astrid Lindgren (1959). Dominant themes in both stories are neglected children and absent parents. The children’s names also suggest a connection with the ancestors of the world religions Christianity, Judaism and Islam – and with themes like omnipotence, obedience and sacrifice. However, the religious connotations do not point to a divine purpose of revenge or condemnation, as I read the story, but rather to the joint burden of mankind in the face of the intrinsic horror of the Holocaust. The story can also be read as a tale of the expulsion from Paradise, caused by the fall of man and with the pure and innocent children as the ultimate victims, pointing to the Apocalypse. As explanatory myths and symbols, these intertextual references of fairy tales and religious texts constitute keys to tentative interpretations of the inconceivable evil of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

183

For Erik there is no redemption for humanity after the Holocaust. The  apocalyptic theme in the story of Sara and Abel becomes his personal destruction. Paradoxically, even if Erik is obsessed with the tragic destiny of Sara and Abel, he is not able to overcome the huge distance to his own son. In  contrast, the local merchant is of great importance to Emil, both as the young boy’s employer and even more as Erik’s fellow prisoner. They were arrested and deported together, placed in the same barrack and the same bunk – and they both survived the Holocaust. The merchant becomes a witness on behalf of Emil’s father, the true witness, who is too traumatized to speak of his experiences in a way that outsiders of the Holocaust are able to hear. The testimony given by the merchant includes descriptions of a ‘Muselman’ (HellerRoazen 2002: 41), deprived of his humanity, a living corpse: ‘He was among the miserable ones. Erik could not, would not return to the world’ (Fretheim 1996: 156, my translation). Apparently, the merchant is less traumatized than Erik, but through Emil’s presence and questions, the repressed camp universe comes to life. Emil appears as a painful reminder of the Holocaust, and the merchant feels compelled to dismiss the  young boy from the work in his shop. The merchant’s testimony has nevertheless been decisive for Emil’s understanding of his father and of the Holocaust, bringing relief and some kind of conclusion to Emil’s troubling postmemory.

Almost Autumn by Marianne Kaurin In 2012 Marianne Kaurin (b. 1974) made her literary debut with the novel Nærmere høst (Almost Autumn) (Kaurin 2012). For the debut, Kaurin received both a ministry award and the U-prisen (U-prize), awarded by a jury of young people. Two editions of the book have been published (Kaurin 2012 and 2013). The publishing house Turbine has purchased the right to publish Almost Autumn in Denmark. Besides being a writer, Kaurin is a publishing editor and a former high school teacher. Born almost thirty years after the war, the author has no personal experience of the Second World War . However, Kaurin grew up with lots of stories from the war, often told by her grandmother. Besides the grandmother’s own experiences from being a midwife during the war, she also passed on her husband’s stories. Kaurin’s grandfather, Einar Eidissen, was an engineer on the ship Madrono when he was captured on 4 July 1942. He was imprisoned in the Japanese concentration camp Omori until the end of the war (Ottosen 2005: 324, first edition published in 1996). For three years Eidissen

184

Translating Holocaust Lives

was untraceable before he eventually returned home. His camp memories were traumatic; he never spoke of them, and he suffered from nightmares, according to his granddaughter (Kaurin 2015). The idea behind Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012) is inspired by two very different stories from the Second World War (Kaurin 2015). Like many pupils in Norwegian schools in the 1980s, Kaurin read a Norwegian survivor’s testimony, Herman Sachnowitz’s Det angår også deg (It is of your concern too) (Sachnowitz 1976). The story made a great impression on her as a young girl, and when reading the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005) a few years ago, Kaurin realized that she wanted to write a novel about the Norwegian Holocaust. She has high regard for the ethical sincerity of the subject, and she wanted to avoid speculations and overly dramatic depictions. Her story has nevertheless caused some controversy because of certain sections resembling Sachnowitz’s story. Without taking a stand on the accusations of plagiarism, I note that Kaurin responds and relates her story to a large corpus of Holocaust texts. As Kaurin wanted her story to be historically correct, she did a lot of research by reading newspapers, survivors’ testimonies and historical presentations of the time (Kaurin 2015). Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012) contains many of the central historical features of the Norwegian Holocaust, like the anti-Semitic registration, legislation and attacks on shops and homes, in addition to the arrests and deportations. Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012) is the story of the Sterns, a Jewish family living in Oslo during the Second World War. At the centre of the story is sixteenyear-old Ilse, who escapes the arrests and deportations of the Norwegian Jews because she is on a trip with her boyfriend Hermann. Her mother, father and two sisters are deported from Norway on the ship Donau. Arriving in Auschwitz, the mother and her daughters are sent directly to the gas chamber, while Ilse’s father is assigned miserable living and working conditions. With the help of Hermann and his contacts in the Resistance, Ilse escapes to Sweden where she remains until the end of the war. Both Sommerfelt and Kaurin write stories of young female protagonists surviving the Holocaust. The Norwegian Jewish girls Miriam Frænkel and Ilse Stern, both just turned 16, survive with the help of their brave boyfriends in the Resistance. With the exception of Miriam’s little brother, their families are deported and exterminated in Nazi concentration camps (Kaurin 2012; Sommerfelt 1960). In spite of the girls’ inconceivable loss, both books end with hope for the future, personified by the devoted boyfriends. I would argue that the two main differences between Sommerfelt and Kaurin’s novels suggest a change of view regarding children’s literature, which also may

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

185

affect the way they are translated. These differences include the narrator and the representation of the Holocaust. In Kaurin’s novel there is no didactic narrator declaring in plain words the intention of the text. With the exception of Ilse’s mother and little sister Miriam, who is six years old, the voices of most of the characters are represented: Ilse, her boyfriend Hermann, her sister Sonja, who is 18, her father Isak and their neighbour Odd. The story evolves through these perspectives, which includes the survivor, the Resistance member, the taxi driver and the arrested, deported and murdered Jews. By including the voice of a taxi driver, Odd, the national narrative of the heroic Norwegian war effort is challenged. By acknowledging the often neglected perspective of the Norwegian participation in the Holocaust, the story is a part of the recent renegotiating of Norwegian history – even though Odd joins the resistance in the end. In both stories the protagonists survive and the endings are hopeful, but, whereas Sommerfelt is silent about the arrest, the deportation and the extermination, Kaurin presents the reader with dignified descriptions of the reality of the Holocaust, including the Norwegian participation by police and taxi drivers. Kaurin claims that it would be unethical if Ilse’s sisters, Sonja and Miriam, should miraculously survive when the historical facts state all too clearly that neither Norwegian Jewish children nor women survived the  Holocaust (Kaurin 2015). The description of the death of the sisters, told from Sonja’s  anxious perspective, is kept in a moderate tone: ‘several are shouting. Screaming out  loud. Sonja is standing still. The mouth closed. Miriam’s head against the belly. The soft hair. Still dark. Complete darkness. And impossible to breathe’ (Kaurin 2012: 202, my translation). Even though it is not explicitly stated that they are killed, the novel proposes to witness on behalf of the dead children and women, from beyond the threshold of the gas chamber (cf. Felman and Laub 1992: 282). Nature is a leitmotif in Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012), as the title also suggests. Descriptions of nature are closely connected to the Holocaust theme, mirroring both the characters’ psychological states of mind and the spirit of the age. Besides placing the stories in a specific environment, nature has had nationand character-building purposes in Norwegian children’s literature (Ørjasæter 2010: 51). Closeness to a rough and shifting nature has presumably made the Norwegians robust, adventurous and heroic, like the polar explorers Nansen and Amundsen. This mythical interpretation of a Norwegian psyche largely determined by nature is in Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012) replaced by nature descriptions as tentative analogies for the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust. Nature reveals the true nature of the anti-Semitic climate, foreshadowing a

186

Translating Holocaust Lives

Jewish catastrophe beyond anticipation. The title and the story’s first words, ‘[t] he summer is over’ (Kaurin 2012: 5, my translation), combined with depictions of soil and decomposition on the first page, represent an early prophecy of the destinies of the Norwegian Jews, a persecution that started precisely in the autumn of 1942. Nature also represents the ambiguous cycle of life and death, but the Holocaust course of nature is anything but inevitable, even if the Nazi rhetoric argued otherwise. To represent the anthropogenic Nazi genocide by symbols of nature may seem paradoxical, but this also illustrates the slippery status of language. When ‘ordinary words do not seem fit tools for the task’ (Kokkola 2003: 2) of representing the horrors of the Holocaust, substitutional and symbolic modes of expression may be our last resort, in narration as in translation.

The Holocaust – limit case and global memory The Holocaust represents a definite break with the demand for innocence and happiness in children’s literature. In the Norwegian context, no child survived the Holocaust, sharing the destiny of over a million Jewish children in Europe (Bak 2010: 43; Lothe 2013: 20). As a ‘limit case’ of representation (Hirsch and Kacandes 2004: 3), the Holocaust is both an ethical and aesthetic challenge, concerning both writers and translators. The Holocaust may not be a suitable subject for children or even possible to communicate adequately at all, and these conceptions might affect both how and why children’s literature about the Holocaust is written and translated. Probably the most famous work about the Holocaust in which we hear of events through the voice of a child is The Diary of Anne Frank. The book, first published in Dutch in 1947 and translated into over seventy languages (Anne Frank Guide [n.d.]), including Norwegian (Hagerup  1952), is the most read testimony about the Holocaust in Europe and United States (Lassen 2011: 10). I think the book’s popularity worldwide reflects how the story implies the Holocaust, and thereby satisfies an adult’s need to maintain the innocence of the child. Kertzer argues that The Diary of Anne Frank is ‘a kind of fairy tale for children and others who are not able or willing to confront the full horror described in adult Holocaust texts, a border text that signals the difference between childhood and adulthood’ (Kertzer 2002: 124). In this context, it would be interesting to know more about how the extensive translations of the diary relate to concepts of children, innocence and atrocities – and how this

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

187

affects the voice and perspective of Anne in the translations. Given the distance in time and life experience between the author and the translator, as well as the implied reader, differences in ideas and knowledge are inevitable and likely to influence the translations. These differences between the source and target contexts are relevant aspects to translations of the Norwegian novels of the Holocaust as well. The atrocities of the Holocaust are confronted on different levels in the novels written by Aimée Sommerfelt, Tor Fretheim and Marianne Kaurin. The novels share an ethical commitment to conveying the horrors of the Holocaust to young readers, articulated by the narrator (Sommerfelt), by the characters (Fretheim) or implied by the story’s set of values (Kaurin). The authors also share an explicit commitment to be historically accurate in the descriptions of the incidents, even if their characters are fictional. Potential translations would have to consider the ethical, ideological, historical, linguistic and stylistic commitments to the source and the target texts – and what to choose if they came into conflict. While the deaths of children during the Holocaust are absent in Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960), the utterly meaningless deaths of Sara and Abel are central in the Holocaust trauma in Fretheim’s trilogy. In Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012), the destinies of the children deported to Auschwitz are not concealed, but presented in a quiet and gentle tone of voice. As an important trait of the novel, the tone of voice requires careful consideration in case of translation. As I understand it, translations render visible the great importance of poetic effects in conveying the unspeakable nature of the Holocaust (BoaseBeier 2011: 156). The story of Emil Alm has a focus on the repercussions of the Holocaust, while the protagonists in Miriam (Sommerfelt 1950, 1960) and Almost Autumn (Kaurin 2012) have to deal with the Holocaust as it evolves. By luck and with the help of the resistance Miriam and Ilse manage to escape to Sweden. Most of their families, however, did not survive the Holocaust. Sommerfelt and Kaurin present a Jewish perspective, while the Holocaust in Fretheim’s trilogy is revealed retrospectively and through a chain of non-Jewish witnesses. Translations may be affected by whether or not the Jewish perspective dominates the story, among other things regarding ideas of ‘[w]ho owns Auschwitz?’, a question posed by the survivor Imre Kertész (MacKay 2001) to address what he sees as precast explanations and Holocaust conformism. Still, the translator will be a kind of witness for the witness, speaking on behalf of the author, but never as a transparent medium for a neutral transmission of meaning.

188

Translating Holocaust Lives

Through diverse approaches to the Holocaust and the implied reader, Sommerfelt, Fretheim and Kaurin present quite different challenges to potential translators. Kaurin expresses the darkest reality of the Holocaust, leaving the moral message to be extracted by the reader based on the different perspectives offered in the story. Sommerfelt has the opposite strategy as she implies the Holocaust while the story’s moral is stated explicitly. Maybe it is more precise to say that Sommerfelt omits the deportation and the extermination camp altogether. This is a different approach from that of Fretheim, who has a lot of gaps and pauses in his narrative, which nevertheless appear as framed silences. These gaps combined with Erik’s constant repetitions of the story of Sara and Abel and the reluctant listeners illustrate the impossibility of testifying as a true witness. The only way Erik is able to tell about the Holocaust is through the simple form of a fairy tale, even if the merchant, the witness who did not drown (Fretheim 1996: 182; Rosenthal 1989), elaborates Erik’s story. A particularly significant problem in translating testimonies, fictional or not, is the translator’s awareness and representation of the gaps and silences. How to translate this distinctive and yet contradictory mark of the testimony? How to recognize the gap without offering closure? If language is inadequate as it reduces the complexity of the Holocaust, it can also be regarded as ethically problematic to use a figurative language that obscures the referent (Kokkola 2003: 20). An imaginative language creates its own reality, creates new meanings and makes the language conspicuous (Rosen 2013: 3). Literary language is never transparent or neutral, if language ever is. Kaurin uses figurative language in an attempt to describe the indescribable, but the same kind of language, the Nazi euphemisms, was used to cover up, render harmless and legitimize their ‘final solution’ (Heller-Roazen 2002: 32). In the case of the translation of Holocaust stories, I think it further emphasizes the challenges of language and representation. As an interpretative and creative act, translation of a Holocaust story needs ethical awareness to guide the process. The novels I have discussed all share a literariness characterized by a poetic use of language, and at the same time the novels more or less explicitly promote ethical reflections on the Holocaust, its causes and impacts. It could be argued that literature should be seen as not having a clear function or aim (Boase-Beier 2011: 61), and in this sense, Holocaust writing and translation have to comply with a more complex set of expectations. For example, the translation of poetic style and its subtle and complex effects, which enhance reader engagement (Boase-Beier 2011: 43), might come into conflict with historical unambiguousness and a need for reassurance on part of the reader. Furthermore, as a blend of languages and

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

189

contexts, ‘literary translation multiplies the voices of the text’ (Boase-Beier 2011: 57), adding to an already complicated enterprise of Holocaust representation. The inefficacy of language and the disruption of meaning as well as fragmented narration, chronological displacements and multiple perspectives are demanding literary issues and features that presume competent readers. Especially Fretheim and Kaurin show faith in their readers’ ability to reflect upon and take part in the renegotiation of Holocaust memory and meaning. Reflection is a distinctive mark often ascribed to the child in Scandinavian children’s literature (Goga 2013: 252), and this dominant idea of the competent and headstrong child might be a problem if these works are translated into languages of target cultures that do not share these ideas. The translator’s dilemma of preserving foreignness and the specificity of the source text and culture versus a literary recreation to fit the needs and expectations of the target culture is not exclusively reserved for Holocaust translation. In case of the novels discussed earlier, I would argue that translations meet both the needs of source and target culture by recognizing the Norwegian part of the Holocaust: ‘Every country’s particular Holocaust stories are important in putting together the pieces of the picture of how the exterminations of the Jews could become such an extensive and horrendously effective joint venture for large parts of Europe’ (Michelet 2014: 10, my translation). To acknowledge these national stories – across nations – as crucial parts of the bigger genocidal picture and possibly offering perspectives on today’s racism and extremism (Jackson 2014: 251), translations are most necessary. If literature can influence how readers ‘think, believe and act in the real world’ (Kokkola 2003: 11), we need a diversity of texts and translations representing the Holocaust to children and adults. As the novels give voice to the voiceless, the translations make possible a global audience of listeners. I believe Norwegian children’s literature can add significant perspectives to the global memory of the Holocaust.

References Alford, C.F. (2013), Trauma and Forgiveness. Consequences and Communities, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Anne Frank Guide [n.d.] Publication in Many Languages. http://www.annefrankguide. net/en-us/bronnenbank.asp?aid=26362 (accessed 16 August 2015). Bak, S.L. (2010), Ikke noget at tale om. Danske jøders krigsoplevelser 1943–1945, København: Dansk Jødisk Museum.

190

Translating Holocaust Lives

Bal, M. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover: University Press of New England, pp. vii– xvii. Birkeland, T, Risa, G. and Vold, K.B. (2005), Norsk barnelitteraturhistorie, Oslo: Samlaget. Boase-Beier, J. (2011), A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, London: Continuum. Bosmajian, H. (2002), Sparing the Child. Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust, New York: Routledge. Bruland, B. (2008), Det norske Holocaust. Forsøket på å tilintetgjøre de norske jødene, Oslo: HL-senteret. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Christensen, C. (trans.) (1995), Fretheim, T: Krigen, freden and sommerfuglene, København: Høst. Dahl, T.E. (2014), Flukten, Nesøya: Z-forlag. Eitinger, L., Vold, O. and Weisæth, L. (1995), Krigsskader og senvirkninger – krigspensjonering gjennom 50 år, Oslo: Rikstrygdeverket. Emberland, T. and Kott, M. (2012), Himmlers Norge, Oslo: Aschehoug. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Fracapane, S.G.T. (2011), Jødene i Danmark – flukt, redning og deportasjon, Oslo: HL-senteret. Senter for studier av Holocaust og livssynsminoriteter. (accessed 16 March 2015). Fretheim, T. (1992), Krigen, freden og sommerfuglene, Oslo: Gyldendal. Fretheim, T. (1994), Langsom trio, Oslo: Gyldendal. Fretheim, T. (1996), Havmannen, kjøpmannen og Dr. Freud, Oslo: Gyldendal. Gatland, J.O. (2009), ‘Tor Fretheim’, Norsk biografisk leksikon, Oslo: Foreningen Store Norske Leksikon. https://nbl.snl.no/Tor_Fretheim (accessed 12 September 2014). Goga, N. (2013), ‘Children and Childhood in Scandinavian Children’s Literature over the Last Fifty Years’, in G. Grilli (ed.), Bologna – Fifty Years of Children’s Books from Around the World, Bologna: Bononia University Press, pp. 235–52. Hagerup, I. (trans.) (1952), Frank, A: Anne Franks dagbok, Oslo: Dreyer. Heller-Roazen, D. (trans.) (2002), Agamben, G: Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, New York: Zone Books. Hilberg, R. (2003), The Destruction of the European Jews, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hirsch, M. (1999), ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover/London: University Press of New England, pp. 3–23. Hirsch, M. (2012), The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Colombia University Press.

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

191

Hirsch, M. and Kacandes, I. (eds) (2004), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Hjeltnes, G., ‘Å lytte til et vitne er å bli et vitne’, Aftenposten, 27 February 2014. www. aftenposten.no/kultur/--A-lytte-til-et-vitne-er-a-bli-et-vitne-7446095.html (accessed 15 June 2015). IHRA: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [n.d.] Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in Norway. https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/ member-countries/holocaust-education-remembrance-and-research-norway (accessed 12 June 2015). Iversen, P.S. (trans.) (1963), A. Sommerfelt: Miriam, New York: Criterion Books. Iversen, P.S. (trans.) (1965), A. Sommerfelt: Miriam, London: Abelard-Schuman. Iversen, P.S. (trans.) (1973), A. Sommerfelt: Miriam, London: Abelard-Schuman. Jackson, I. (2014), Morfar, Hitler og jeg, Oslo: Aschehoug. Kampen om tungtvannet [TV], NRK, 4 January 2015, 20:55 h. Kapoun, S. (trans.) (1994), T. Fretheim: Der Krieg, der Friede und die Schmetterlinge, Freiburg: Herder. Kapoun, S. (trans.) (1995a), T. Fretheim: Der Krieg, der Friede und die Schmetterlinge, Freiburg: Herder. Kapoun, S. (trans.) (1995b), T. Fretheim: Die Unmöglichkeiten des Emil Alm: Langsames Trio für Sohn, Mutter und Vater, München: Kerle. Kapoun, S. (trans.) (1997), T. Fretheim: Der Krieg, der Friede und die Schmetterlinge, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Kapoun, S. (trans.) (1998), T. Fretheim: Der Meermann, der Kaufmann und Dr. Freud, Freiburg: Kerle. Kaurin, M. (2012), Nærmere høst, Oslo: Aschehoug. Kaurin, M. (2013), Nærmere høst, Oslo: Aschehoug. Kaurin, M. (2015), Unpublished interview by author, Oslo, 26 March 2015. Kertzer, A. (2002), My Mother’s Voice. Children, Literature, and the Holocaust, Ontario: Broadview Press. Kidd, K. (2005), ‘“A” is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the Children’s Literature of Atrocity’, Children’s Literature 33: 120–49. Kokkola, L. (2003), Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature, New York and London: Routledge. Kremer, S.L. (2013), ‘The Holocaust in English-Language Literatures’, in A. Rosen (ed.), Literature of the Holocaust, Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, pp. 131–49. Kristensen, E. (2009), Det norske Holocaust – et tema i allmennlærerutdanningen? Om lærerstudenters kunnskap og historiebevissthet, Oslo: Høgskolen i Oslo, avdeling for lærerutdanning og internasjonale studier. Kverndokken, K. (1997), ‘Et møte med Tor Fretheim og hans forfatterskap’, in K. Kverndokken and G.H. Folkestad (eds), Tre forfatterportretter. Samtaler med Torill Eide, Tor Fretheim og Kjersti Scheen, Oslo: Gyldendal Tiden, pp. 75–134. Lajos, K. (trans.) (1967), A. Sommerfelt: Miriam, Budapest: Móra Könyvkiadó.

192

Translating Holocaust Lives

Lassen, M. (2011), At skrive Holocaust. En introduktion til vidnesbyrdlitteraturen, København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag. Leys, R. (2000), Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lindgren, A. (1959), Sunnanäng, Stockholm: Rabén and Sjögren. Lothe, J. (ed.) (2013), Kvinnelige tidsvitner. Fortellinger fra Holocaust, Oslo: Gyldendal. Lothe, J. and Hawthorn, J. (2013), Narrative Ethics, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lothe, J., Suleiman, S. R. and Phelan, J. (eds) (2012), ‘Introduction’, After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, pp. 1–19. Luckhurst, R. (2008), The Trauma Question, London and New York: Routledge. Lunde, M. (2012), Over grensen, Oslo: Gyldendal. MacKay, J. (trans.) (2001), I. Kertész:‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14(1): 267–72. Maguire, N. (2012), ‘What Bruno Knew: Childhood Innocence and Models of Morality in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006)’, in C. Ní Bhroin and P. Kennon (eds), What Do We Tell the Children? Critical Essays on Children’s Literature, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 56–73. Michelet, M. (2014), Den største forbrytelsen. Ofre og gjerningsmenn i det norske Holocaust, Oslo: Gyldendal. Nikolajeva, M. (2010), Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers, New York and London: Routledge. Nordanger, D., Mjaaland, T. and Lie, G.T. (2006), ‘PTSD og konfrontering av traumer i et kulturelt perspektiv’, Tidsskrift for Norsk Psykologforening 43(12): 1292–9. Ottosen, K. (2005), Ingen nåde: Historien om nordmenn i japansk fangenskap, Oslo: Aschehoug. Ørjasæter, K. (2010), ‘Barnelitteraturens bidrag til det nasjonale’, in K.B. Vold and P.O. Kaldestad (eds), Årboka. Litteratur for barn og unge 2010, Oslo: Samlaget, pp. 50–9 Rosen, A. (ed.) (2013), Literature of the Holocaust, Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, R. (trans.) (1989), P. Levi: The Drowned and the Saved, London: Abacus. Sachnowitz, H. and Jacoby, A. (1976), Det angår også deg, Oslo: Cappelen. Skjønsberg, K. (1995), ‘Okkupasjonstiden og norsk barnelitteratur’, in B. Birkeland, A. Kittang, S. Ugelvik Larsen and L. Longum (eds), Nazismen og norsk litteratur, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, pp. 114–31. Skjønsberg, K. (1996), ‘Krigen i Norge sett gjennom norske barne- og ungdomsbøker i 50 år’, in I.C. Spangen and I. Westerheim (eds), Barnelitteratur og kvinnesak – eller omvendt. Kari Skjønsberg 1926–1996, Oslo: Høgskolen i Oslo, pp. 18–34. Skyggebjerg, A.K. (2011), ‘Vidnesbyrdlitteratur for børn: skildringen af ekstreme barndomsoplevelser og overgreb i aktuelle danske børnebøger’, in B. Markussen, K.B. Nilsen and S. Slettan (eds), Navigasjoner i barne- og ungdomslitteraturen, Kristiansand: Portal, pp. 247–56.

The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature

193

Sommerfelt, A. (1941), Lisbeth, Oslo: Gyldendal. Sommerfelt, A. (1945), Ung Front, Oslo: Gyldendal. Sommerfelt, A. (1950), Miriam (1st edn), Oslo: Gyldendal. Sommerfelt, A. (1959), Veien til Agra, Oslo: Damm. Sommerfelt, A. (1960), Miriam (2nd edn), Oslo: Gyldendal. Sommerfelt, A. (1969), Miriam (3rd edn), Oslo: Gyldendal. Sommerfelt, A. (1978), Miriam (4th edn), Oslo: Gyldendal. Strøm, A. (1974), Krig og helse. Okkupasjonstidens virkninger i lys av etterkrigstidens erfaringer, Oslo: Aschehoug. Suleiman, S.R. (2004), ‘The 1.5 Generation: Georges Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood’, in M. Hirsch and I. Kacandes (eds), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 372–85. Suleiman, S.R. (2012), ‘Performing a Perpetrator as Witness. Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’, in J. Lothe, S.R. Suleiman and J. Phelan (eds), After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 99–119. Tribunella, E. (2010), Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature, Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press. Zusak, M. (2005), The Book Thief, Victoria: Picador.

Response to: Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk, Voices from a Void: The Holocaust in Norwegian Children’s Literature B.J. Epstein

In ‘Voices from a void: the Holocaust in Norwegian children’s literature’, Kjersti Lersbryggen Mørk explores how Norwegian literature for younger readers portrays the Holocaust and how this has changed over time. As she does this, she raises many fascinating and vital points with regard to the writing and translation of children’s literature about the Holocaust. Some of these issues are especially relevant to the Norwegian context, such as how nature is depicted and how it can be a metaphor for anti-Semitism, but it is important to analyse all of them from a general literary and Translation Studies perspective. For example, authors, publishers and translators need to consider how much detail should be included in portrayals of the Holocaust for children and to what extent this depends on a culture’s ideas of what a child is and how much a child can know; some even argue about whether such literature should be realism or fantasy (see for example Hunt 2009: 23–4), or whether it should exist at all (see Epstein 2013). We must also consider how culture-dependent our view of an event such as the Holocaust, and of the readers, can be, and how this influences translatorial choices. To state some of these points more specifically: What are the elements of style in trauma-based children’s literature and do these elements vary according to the source or target culture, or both? How are euphemisms and figurative language employed in such works and what does their translation tell us? What does it mean to translate literature of trauma or witness literature, especially for a young audience? By translating such texts, does the translator inevitably become a politically active witness, involved in ‘political, cultural and ideological confrontation’ (SalamaCarr 2007: 1), more so than with other kinds of literature? For the original writer, the translator’s stylistic and aesthetic choices are always ethical choices; there are no easy answers to the questions. As Davies notes, for Holocaust literature, a text may be ‘more than a text’ (2014: 205); I would argue that when it comes to witness literature, there is a multiplicity of reading

196

Translating Holocaust Lives

experiences, and therefore of translation issues and experiences, and this is increased even more when the readers in question are children, whose access to texts is controlled by adults (adult writers, editors, publishers, translators, parents, teachers, librarians and so on), as adults will likely view texts differently from children. As Mørk and other scholars (e.g. Kokkola 2003) have discussed, one of the key issues regarding Holocaust literature for children is the gap between historical fact (for example no Norwegian children survived the Holocaust) and the need for children’s literature to end in a happy or at least non-threatening way (which might mean not mentioning death, and which could also mean a work of fantasy where child characters are heroes who survive though children in reality did not).1 To write a realistic – and, some claim, ethical, although there can be ethical, non-realistic texts as well – text for children about the Norwegian experience of the Holocaust, then, inevitably means that the story must include death and other hard facts (e.g. Kokkola 2003: 3). Furthermore, different cultures and individuals will obviously see a given historical event, such as a war, in varying ways, and this will evolve as people become more removed in time from the situation; for example some Germans may see themselves as the victims. In her chapter, Mørk suggests that Norwegian children’s literature has changed in its portrayal of the Holocaust over time. She notes that the earlier texts offer a moral more blatantly and do not depict difficult topics, including deportations, concentration camps or death, in any detail. They are therefore quite protective of the child reader, while also apparently aiming to impart a lesson. Later works, on the contrary, have a little more description and are perhaps a bit more realistic. This relates to how adults writing or translating for children may be more protective or more conservative in their views of children and childhood at different times (see for example Epstein 2014). Mørk states that the more recent books may also be more ambiguous in their message, or at least in their way of offering a message; euphemism can be relied on, as can what she terms ‘implying’ and ‘silence’. As Boase-Beier discusses, early thinkers on translation felt that ambiguity was a fault that needed to be fixed by the translator (2006: 84), while current literary and Translation Studies scholars argue that in fact ambiguity challenges and engages the reader. Indeed, this is particularly relevant to Holocaust writing ‘with its unspoken words, unfinished sentences, gaps, spaces and silences’ (Boase-Beier 2006: 125). A translator may wish or need to leave gaps and silences so that multiple readings are possible and

Response

197

are all available at once (Boase-Beier 2006: 126). However, a translator may be translating into a target language that is part of a more protectionist culture, where children are not given access to historical facts in the same way, or perhaps where euphemisms are employed more freely, or even where the Holocaust is thought to have been different from how it is depicted in Norwegian literature, which would suggest that a translator must decide whether to follow the source text or the target culture (the question of whether to bring the audience to the text or the text to the readers is, of course, an age-old one in translation and literary studies generally (cf. Barthes 1990)). In the books Mørk analyses, language seems insufficient for representing the Holocaust, both for the characters themselves, in that they struggle with communication (due to guilt, ‘survivor syndrome’ and perhaps a lack of listeners), and for the authors, who rely on metaphor, euphemism and silence.2 This difficulty is intensified by the fact that the texts are for children, who adults may want to protect. How, then, are translators to find a way of translating from one language to another something that cannot be depicted in language, or at least that is not depicted in language in children’s literature? One can suggest that translators have a moral responsibility to take on this complex but vital task (see Hirsch and Kacandes 2004: 6–7 for the importance of teaching about the topic), and to find a way of making multiple meanings available in the target text. The Holocaust is hard to write about; indeed, one could argue it cannot, and yet it must be.

Notes 1 This is not only an issue for literature. See Cole (2000: xviii–xix) for a discussion of how a Holocaust survivor who offers witness accounts in classrooms feels pressured to change her testimony from the ‘sad’ truth: ‘They want me to turn us into heroes and create a heroic experience for the survivors … but the Holocaust was never a history of courage and resistance. It was a destruction by fire of innocent people, and it’s not right to make it something it never was.’ 2 One can note that the Nazis, too, depended on euphemisms as they carried out their ‘Final Solution’, and that euphemism with regard to this event is heavily laced with meaning.

198

Translating Holocaust Lives

References Barthes, R. (1990), S/Z, trans. R. Miller, Oxford: Blackwell. Boase-Beier, J. (2006), Stylistic Approaches to Translation, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Cole, T. (2000), Selling the Holocaust, New York: Routledge. Davies, P. (2014), ‘Translation and Holocaust Testimonies: A Matter for Holocaust Studies or Translation Studies?’, in J. Boase-Beier et al. (eds), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 204–18. Epstein, B.J. (2013), ‘Inflicting Trauma: The Ethics of Writing and Teaching the Holocaust for Children’, Holocaust Studies 19(1): 101–20. Epstein, B.J. (2014), ‘The Conservative Era: a Case Study of Historical Comparisons of Translations of Children’s Literature from English to Swedish’, in J. Boase-Beier et al. (eds), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 64–78. Hirsch, M. and Kacandes, I. (eds) (2004), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Hunt, P. (2009), ‘Instruction and Delight’, in J. Maybin and N.J. Watson (eds), Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 12–25. Kokkola, L. (2003), Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature, New York: Routledge. Salama-Carr, M. (ed.) (2007), Translating and Interpreting Conflict, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

9

Distant Stories, Belated Memories – Irène Némirovsky and Elisabeth Gille Angela Kershaw

Writing Holocaust lives involves significant spatial and temporal displacements. The experience of war entails the material movement of people, both troops and civilians, of which deportation is one particularly horrific example. It is well known that, for those who have experienced wartime displacements of various kinds, conveying their experience in writing can be both difficult and therapeutic. Coming to writing can be a protracted process, with the moment of writing coming long after the moment of experience. Readers of texts which convey the experiences of those displaced by war are also dispersed, both in time, given the ongoing interest in recovering wartime experiences, and in space, because the Holocaust is an event of international significance. In this chapter, I focus on three French texts which resulted from wartime displacements and which have circulated internationally through translation. Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française was written in 1941–42 when its author, an immigrant Russian Jewish French novelist, had been exiled from her home in Paris to the village of Issy L’Evêque in the Saône-et-Loire region as a result of the Nazi occupation of the northern and western parts of France. Although written contemporaneously with the events described, and to a certain extent experienced, by Némirovsky, the novel was not discovered and published until 2004, more than sixty years after the author’s death in Auschwitz (Némirovsky 2004). Némirovsky’s younger daughter Elisabeth Gille escaped deportation with her sister, Denise Epstein, and both survived the occupation. In 1992, Gille published a fictionalized autobiography of her mother entitled Le Mirador. This book tells the story of Némirovsky’s experiences in 1929 and 1942, and is intercalated with short reflections in which Gille recounts her own life (Gille 2000). After the tremendous international success of Suite française upon its translation into English by Sandra Smith in 2006 (Smith 2006), a translation of Le Mirador by

200

Translating Holocaust Lives

Marina Harss was published in New York in 2011 (Harss 2011). Elisabeth Gille died of cancer in 1996, shortly before the appearance of her novel Un paysage de cendres in which she recounted in fictionalized form her experiences as a hidden child during the occupation and as the orphan of two Holocaust victims (Gille 1996). The success of Suite française also prompted a new edition in 2008 of the American translation of this book which had first appeared in 1998 under the title Shadows of a Childhood, translated by Linda Coverdale (Coverdale 2008). These three texts are all belated in different ways – Némirovsky’s, because of the posthumous rediscovery and publication of Suite française, and Gille’s, because the author waited more than fifty years to commit her wartime experiences to writing. All three correspond to the genre of autobiographical fiction. In order to approach the related questions of the belatedness of these texts and their international circulation through translation, I want to engage in some detail with Mark Salber Phillips’s recent historiographical study On Historical Distance (Phillips 2013; see also Phillips et al 2013).1 Phillips’s book is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking reinvention of the concept of distance in historical writing. Phillips does not discuss translation, and this is precisely my point – I want to extend Phillips’s account of different types of historical distance to include translation. This implies no disparagement of Phillips, only a desire to engage productively with his rich and stimulating discussion.

Mediations Temporal distance is the traditional measure of value in the discipline of history. The delay separating the occurrence of the events and their historical analysis is deemed to be a guarantee of historical objectivity. As Phillips puts it, ‘[a]s commonly understood, historical distance refers to the growing clarity that comes with the passage of time’; good history is deemed to be neutral, impartial and detached (Phillips 2013: 1). This view of history has its own history, which Phillips dates to the Enlightenment (Phillips  2013: 2). Phillips questions the supposed objectivity of historical distance because he recognizes that history is a ‘product of present interests’ (Phillips 2013: 5). For Phillips, temporal distance is only one of many types of distancing – or mediation – that are always operative in historical discourse. Phillips focuses on four further types of distancing: form (the structures, conventions or generic norms of historical discourse); affect (the historian might offer a ‘cool appraisal’ or alternatively, give expression to ‘lively emotions’); summoning (the ideological assumptions and appellations of

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

201

historical writing); and understanding (the knowledge that is to be conveyed) (Phillips 2013: 6). These are interconnected: Affect and ideology, for example, are often closely entwined, whether what is at stake is the kind of persuasion that takes the form of warm encouragement or deliberate estrangement. Nor can we doubt the extent to which the bestreasoned descriptions are conditioned by affective states or ideological descriptions. Form, for its part, holds the whole business of representation in its hands, while understanding has a stake in everything belonging to historical thought and imagination. (Phillips 2013: 8)

Phillips summarizes his argument as follows: In common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made possible by the passage of time. Understood in this sense, distance has long been regarded as essential to modern historical practice, but these assumptions narrow the idea of distance and burden it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be reconceived in light of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as of the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. (Phillips 2013: 13–14)

I would like to suggest that translation is one of these ‘engagements’ or ‘distancepositions’ which ‘mediate our relations to the past’. Phillips is not insensitive to issues of language. Rather, it seems that because translation is not on the historian’s radar, certain potentially interesting and important questions cannot be articulated. For example, Phillips quotes Georg Simmel’s classic essay on The Stranger without reference to its original German title, Exkursus über den Fremden, which poses the question of whether we are talking about the stranger or the foreigner. Quoting Simmel in English, Phillips goes on to write: ‘For Simmel, the stranger brings into sharp relief the complex balance of alterity and acceptance found in every human relation’ (Phillips 2013: 11). Attention to translation would open up the possibility of discussing the complexities of linguistic alterity. Linguistic alterity does come explicitly into focus in Phillips’s discussion of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990) based on the diary of Martha Ballard from 1785–1813. Phillips notes that in Ulrich’s copious citations of diary excerpts, ‘the vagaries of eighteenth-century grammar and orthography are carefully preserved, estranging the language of the past just sufficiently to warrant the affective pleasures that come from discovering elements of familiarity in times unlike our own’ (Phillips 2013: 201, my emphasis). Here, Phillips’s analysis strains towards the inclusion of language as a mediating factor, but he does not go as far as to include it among his four

202

Translating Holocaust Lives

categories. Chapter 10, ‘Alternative Histories in the Public Realm: Familiarizing and Defamiliarizing the Past’, includes a fascinating discussion of the First Peoples Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatinau, Quebec (Phillips 2013: 211–18). Phillips tells us that the display panel that greets visitors is trilingual (English, French and Algonquin) and cites an extract that is about language: ‘The Creator put the Algonquin here to occupy this land. The Creator also gave the Algonquins a language to communicate with’ (Phillips 2013: 211–12). The images accompanying the text show that the museum captions are bilingual (though not trilingual – they are only in French and English (Phillips 2013: 220, Figures 10.5 and 10.6)) but even though the analysis is about ‘the complex process of identification and distancing’ implied by the presentation of the objects in the museum, there is no scope for analysis of the multilingual nature of the messages. This is not a criticism of Phillips himself, since his attention to language is welcome, but rather an observation on the discipline of history, to which Phillips’s analysis itself has led me: history as a discipline tends not to include translation as an explicit category of analysis; if it did, much that is of interest would come into view. Translation, of course, implies temporal distance since, by definition, it comes after the source text. But translation does not thereby offer the purported objectivity of temporal distance: rather, it threatens objectivity through the intervention of translatorial mediation. That is why translation presents a challenge to conventional history. The source text is no more free of mediation than ‘history’; translation is always the linguistic and discursive mediation of an already mediated discourse. Translational mediation comes in various guises. Few students of translation would now disagree that the selection (or neglect) of texts for translation is never neutral but reflects the present ideological concerns of either the exporting or receiving culture (or both). Few would disagree that the intervention of a translator results in interpretation based on subjective human choice between different possible meanings. As Theo Hermans has eloquently described, total equivalence is impossible except in cases of external validation where the target text completely replaces the source text and therefore no longer functions as a translation at all (Hermans 2007: 1–25). The translator’s voice is audible even in the most apparently mundane translation choices, and translations habitually call attention to themselves qua translations, for example, when metalinguistic references occur (Hermans 1996). From another perspective, as Jacques Derrida has argued, since no language is unitary and literature is not self-identical, the source text–target text relationship cannot be one of identity (e.g. Derrida 1998: 7–9; Derrida 1985: 188). It is in the nature of translation to function as an ambivalent mediator, because it takes place on the fuzzy

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

203

boundary between sameness and difference. Hermans describes the function of the translation system as ‘extending the communicative range of society across individual languages while simultaneously reminding society of the limitations of its linguistic – or more broadly, semiotic – media’ (Hermans 2007: 116). Similarly, Michael Cronin conceives of translation as a constant negotiation between sameness and difference, a ‘local project’ which aims to demonstrate national cultural difference and ‘a repudiation of the potential ethnocentric narrowness of that project’ insofar as it enacts the openness of cultures to other cultures by facilitating cross-national communication (Cronin 2003: 56, 73–5). Translation calls attention to the problem of linguistic mediation even as it performs it. Translation therefore presents a challenge not only for history, but also for autobiographical and testimonial writing, understood as the communication of first-hand experience. Testimony is the opposite of history insofar as temporal proximity is its traditional measure of value. Any acknowledgement of mediation in testimony, be it temporal or linguistic, is problematic. A time lag between the events witnessed and the testimony given arouses suspicion of the mediations of memory and retrospection. If testimony is translated, this compromises its perceived authenticity since we are no longer dealing with the witness’s own words. Holocaust memorial museums have circumvented these problems through the display of concrete objects or abstractions such as piles of shoes or lists of names. As Phillips remarks, ‘[s]cenes such as these carry with them a sense of immediacy – a presence so compelling that it seems not to involve mediation’ (Phillips 2013: 195). Shoes and names do not need to be translated, though of course their immediacy is only apparent, since they are always framed by modes of selection and presentation in a museum. Nonetheless, the function of this (fiction of) immediacy is to arouse affect, to create proximity or ‘sympathetic understanding’ between the reader or viewer in the present and the events of the past (Phillips 2013: 3). Holocaust writing of all genres – history, autobiography, testimony or fiction – tends to invoke the mediations of affect. This is not simply because the Holocaust is an emotive topic, but rather because of a historiographical trend since the late 1960s that privileges an engagement with people’s everyday experience of history rather than presenting great events and great deeds. Microhistory extended history’s social horizons and emphasized its ‘moral and political relevance’ (Phillips  2013: 168). Affect interacts with ideology in Holocaust history, as Phillips shows via the example of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), a study of Nazi perpetrators involved in the extermination of Jews outside of the concentration camp system (Phillips 2013: 203–5). The book is not ‘sentimental’ or ‘sensationalist’ in Phillips’s view, but it

204

Translating Holocaust Lives

does invoke affect in seeking to provoke ‘empathetic understanding’, and it is ideological insofar as it requires a ‘willing reader’ who is prepared to exercise at least a minimal degree of empathy towards perpetrators in order to understand, though obviously not condone, their situation. The historiographer may be alive to the mediations of affect and ideology, but, since they function to promote identification, the reader might not be fully aware of them. When the value of proximity, traditionally reserved for testimony, is transferred to history, the desire for a close connection with the authentic past can lead to the rejection – or denial – of mediation. This is an important reason why the fact of translation is generally occluded in Holocaust writing. This historiographical trend has resulted in a blurring of genre distinctions. Mainstream history has begun to trespass on what was once the preserve of popular history – the feelings and experiences, rather than only the facts, of the past (Phillips  2013: 189). Mainstream history can now legitimately seek to provide ‘a quality of intimacy that we generally look for in novels or memoirs’ (Phillips 2013: 191). History, according to the title of a recent French publication on the subject, has been ‘seized’ by literature (Le débat 2011). While literary scholars have long been interested in the historical novel, France in recent years has seen an abundance of contemporary novels on historical topics in general and the Second World War in particular, of which Laurent Binet’s HHhH and Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence are just two examples that were particularly successful in English translation (Binet 2009; Humbert 2009; Kershaw 2013; 2014; Taylor 2013; Wynne 2011). Cultural journalists and scholars alike have commented on this trend (Le Monde des livres 2011; Riglet 2010; Viart 2009). Within the contemporary debate on the relationship between history and literature, there appears to be a recognition of the important role fiction can play both in arousing affect and in transmitting knowledge of past events. I should like now to turn to my three examples, all of which combine the presentation of historical events with autobiographical experience and literary creativity in order to draw the reader into a close relationship with the events of the Nazi occupation of France and the implications of the deportation and murder of French Jews.

Texts According to Phillips, ‘[n]ovelists … have a natural attraction for historical reimagining, but their narratives in this genre, however engaging as fictions,

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

205

rarely hold closely enough to historical circumstances to trouble historians’ sense of what is plausible’ (Phillips  2013: 222). Autobiographical Holocaust fiction might be said to hold very closely to history, since the identity of the author provides an apparent guarantee of plausibility. The texts by Némirovsky and Gille work on the fuzzy boundaries between history, autobiography, testimony and fiction. What interests me is the ways in which these discourses on the past, which are already highly mediated, become further and differently mediated through translation. Translated Holocaust fictions are the product of multiple mediations and we cannot hope fully to understand them unless we first recognize that the source text is already multiply mediated. Focusing on the mediated nature of the source text explodes the conventional and essentialist objection that translation somehow compromises the ‘original’: in this approach, translation becomes one of many mediations affecting Holocaust writing. This takes us beyond the ‘am I really reading Anne Frank when I read her in translation?’ type of argument, since it recognizes that even if I can read her in the original Dutch, the idea that her book gives me direct access to her experience is a fiction. I should like to use Phillips’s various types of distancing – time, form, affect, understanding and summoning – to approach the interacting mediations at work in Némirovsky and Gille’s texts, adding in translation as a further type of distancing. I shall focus in particular detail on ideology and language, and I shall return at the end of the discussion to the question of time, conceived of as belatedness. Holocaust survivors have often waited a long time before telling their stories, and in this respect Elisabeth Gille is no exception. Victims’ or survivors’ stories have been rediscovered and published much later than their time of composition, as with Némirovsky’s Suite française. Some texts published promptly after the events have only been recognized and widely read much later, as with Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit and Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. One of the complexities of Holocaust writing stems from the deregulated temporal relationship between the relevant texts and the time of the events: the responsible student of Holocaust writing must cautiously situate each text in its own historical context, taking account of very wide divergences between times (and indeed places) of composition and reception of the relevant works. Gille’s texts offer an adult perspective on a child’s experience, which brings both psychological and historical factors into play. For example, both Le Mirador and Un paysage de cendres link the persecution of French Jews during the Second World War to the persecution of North Africans during the Algerian War in the 1960s (Gille 1996: 198–201, Gille 2000: 245). Since Némirovsky’s Suite française offers a

206

Translating Holocaust Lives

partial perspective on the occupation of France from within unfinished events, the reader’s knowledge of the outcome is radically different from the author’s, and this cannot fail to condition her response to the novel. All three works construct fictional narratives around real events, using all the attendant textual devices of the novel such as characterization, metaphor, imagery and a certain flexibility in relation to ‘the facts’. Since they are at least partly autobiographical, these texts purport to give the reader access to authentic personal experience, but this is of course an act of self-construction and self-presentation. Le Mirador is the most interesting of the three from the point of view of form, since the designation of the text on the title page as ‘mémoires rêvés’ (dreamed memories) and the inclusion of short paragraphs of autobiographical reflections presented in italics to distinguish them from the fictional (auto)biography of Némirovsky destabilize the reader’s expectations of genre and call attention to the text’s mediated nature. All three texts seek to arouse an affective response from the reader by depicting the private and the intimate in order to evoke empathy and encourage identification. The historical material presented in the texts is factual, and readers will learn, for example, about the exode and life in an occupied French village in 1940–41 (Suite française) or about the hiding of vulnerable children in occupied France and the return of the deportees to the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris after the liberation of the camps (Un paysage de cendres). These works therefore contribute to our understanding of the period, but such knowledge as we gain from them is mediated by the factors I have just outlined. The paratextual material which surrounds the fictional text of Suite française is an example of ideological summoning. I have discussed elsewhere the way in which both the annexes (extracts from Némirovsky’s diaries and related correspondence) and Myriam Anissimov’s preface to the French edition define the novel as a Holocaust text by underscoring its autobiographical aspect and recounting Némirovsky’s subsequent fate (Kershaw 2010a: 188–94, 2010b). This editorial strategy ensured that a novel about the occupation written in the 1940s could speak to concerns that were still live in the present. Anissimov evokes the complexity of Némirovsky’s relationship to Jewishness, describing her in terms of Jewish self-hatred and listing the various Jewish stereotypes which are to be found in her fiction (though not in Suite française) (Némirovsky 2004: 14). Denise Epstein’s epigraph locates the novel in relation to contemporary issues of tolerance and intolerance (Kershaw 2010a: 188–94; 2012; Némirovsky 2004: 10). The paratextual material draws Suite française into a debate about how we read a Russian immigrant Jew who made use of negative stereotypes in her fiction and collaborated with right-wing anti-Semitic publications

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

207

before falling victim to the sort of ideology those publications defended. The English translation attempted to neutralize this debate, probably because of the risk that in the British and American context, such comments could lead to oversimplified and unjustified accusations of anti-Semitism against Némirovsky (Kershaw 2010a: 32). The translated version of Anissimov’s preface appears in a less prominent position after the main text and the annexes, is relegated in importance through the title ‘Preface to the French edition’ and it is heavily edited. The English version omits any reference to the positive reception of the text by the notorious French anti-Semite Robert Brasillach (Némirovsky 2004: 11), though a brief reference to Némirovsky’s involvement with the right-wing journal Gringoire is maintained (Smith 2006: 399). Anissimov’s discussion of Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitic stereotypes is summarized in a single clause as ‘[Némirovsky’s] disdain for her mother’s wealthy Jewish milieu’ (Némirovsky 2004: 13–15; Smith 2006: 396), and Anissimov’s account of the very Jewish early story ‘L’Enfant génial’ is summarized in a single sentence (Némirovsky 2004: 17–18, 2006: 398). This did not, however, prevent the eruption of controversy over Némirovsky’s relationship to her Jewish identity on both sides of the Atlantic. Un paysage de cendres was published with little paratextual apparatus other than short summaries of the novel on the back cover and in the preface. Gille is described in the preface simply as ‘[la f]ille de l’écrivain Irène Némirovsky’ (‘the daughter of the writer Irène Némirovsky’), and her mother’s death in Auschwitz is not mentioned in the paratexts. By contrast, the 2008 edition of Shadows of a Childhood carries a red banner indicating that the novel is ‘by the daughter of Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite française’ and the back cover describes Némirovsky’s death at the hands of the Nazis. Gille’s novel is described as ‘a moving sequel to her mother’s masterpiece’ and the reader is told that Gille ‘chronicled her wartime experiences’ in her novel. The American reprint thus shifts the focus from the literary to the autobiographical. This is not entirely justified by the text, since Gille alters the facts significantly. For example, the fictional Léa Levy’s parents are deported from Bordeaux and via the Mérignac holding camp, whereas Némirovsky was deported from Issy-L’Evêque via Pithiviers and Gille’s father Michael Epstein via Creusot and Drancy. Gille also omits her sister Denise from the story. The shift to autobiography is motivated by the mediation of the text through Némirovsky’s life story because of the international success of Suite française, described on the back cover as ‘a publishing sensation’ on its publication in 2006, which is the date of the publication of Smith’s translation, not of Némirovsky’s original.

208

Translating Holocaust Lives

Le Mirador is a different case since the source text already contains stark criticism of Némirovsky’s attitude to Jewishness and of her choices under the occupation in both the text and the paratexts. This is an important aspect of the mediation of Némirovsky’s story through Gille’s adult perspective. Within the  text, Gille’s fictional Némirovsky repeatedly berates herself for her own lack of  foresight: had she not been aware of the rise of the far right between the wars? Had she  not read the newspapers? (Gille 2000: 283, 287). The latter passage is reprinted on  the back cover of the Stock edition. In an accompanying interview with René de Ceccatty dating from 1992 included after the main text, Gille describes her mother as ‘criminally blind’ in her decision not to flee France, criticizes her lack of sympathy for working class Jews, claims that she felt her Jewishness to be a burden and judges harshly her collaboration with Gringoire (Gille 2000: 417–20; Kershaw 2010a: 187). Gille’s attitude to her mother resonated with the American controversy over Némirovsky’s attitude to Jewishness, which, by the time Harss’s translation of Gille was published in 2011, had become a significant feature of the reception of Suite française. Reviewing the French version of Suite française for the American  Jewish publication The Forward in 2005, Stéphane Gerson had remarked that ‘One struggles  to explain … why the novel sidesteps the fate of Jews’ (Gerson 2005). When  the translation came out and Némirovsky’s earlier fiction also began to be  discussed, some American critics claimed that Suite française failed to give a complete picture of the occupation by not describing  the persecution of the Jews  under Vichy, and interpreted the  absence of Jewish characters as evidence of Némirovsky’s failure to depict her own situation as a foreign Jew in the occupied zone. This ‘omission’  was said to demonstrate ‘how little her particular situation seems to have influenced her story’, and to prove that ‘there is no sense of history’ in the novel (Kaplan 2006; Rothstein 2008; see  Corpet and Marwell 2008: 15 for a summary of the debate). Accordingly, on the back cover of The Mirador, Némirovsky is described as ‘a Jew who didn’t consider herself one and who  even contributed  to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew’. Different types of mediation are in play here: Gille’s retrospective and affective representation of her mother in the 1990s interacts with the publisher’s ideological mediation of the text in 2011 through the evocation of a contemporary issue. To illustrate translational mediation from a linguistic perspective, I would like to comment briefly on a passage from Un paysage de cendres (Gille 1996) in which one of the nuns hiding Léa first becomes aware of Auschwitz thanks to a photograph in a newspaper. Here is the passage and its translation by Linda Coverdale:

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

209

Une horrible photo s’y étalait, qui représentait des cadavres amoncelés, nus et décharnés. Elle le lissa du plat de la main et lut quelques phrases qui étaient présentées comme le témoignage d’un ‘rescapé:’ ‘Ils sont des milliers qui ont péri. A Auschwitz, des milliers ont été gazés et brûlés. Ah! Les bandits! Ma mère, ma femme, mon petit, vous les avez tous assassinés. J’ai entendu leur cri dans la chambre à gaz, un ultime et unique cri poussé par deux millions de personnes à la fois!’ (Coverdale 2008: 82) A horrible photograph appeared, showing piles of naked, skeletal corpses. She smoothed it out with the flat of her hand and read a few lines presented as the testimony of a ‘survivor:’ ‘Thousands perished. At Auschwitz, thousands were gassed and burned. Those murderers! My mother, my wife, my child – they killed them all. I heard them screaming in the gas chambers, one last scream let out by two thousand people in a single voice!’ (Gille 1998: 52–3)

We might pay attention to the significant differences here: ‘skeletal’ for ‘décharnés’ loses the reference to ‘flesh’ (chair being the linguistic root of ‘décharné’); ‘rescapé’ implies only that an immediate danger has been avoided, whereas ‘survivor’ suggests a longer-term living on; ‘bandits’ delegitimizes the Nazis more strongly than ‘murderers’; the killers are addressed directly in the French (‘vous’) and indirectly in the English (‘they’). Or we might focus instead on the fundamental incommensurability of any sentence written in French with its ‘equivalent’ in English. Translation figures the two opposite extremes of what is true about language: language difference is always in tension with the fact of communicability via the intervention of a bilingual human agent. When I read this text and its translation, I am and am not reading the same thing. This matters at the level of meaning: a rescapé is not a survivor (Gille did not write survivant). It matters because it changes the relationship between the producer and receiver of the text: when Gille cites the (fictional?) testimony of a survivor from a French newspaper, there is one degree of separation between the reader of Gille’s (French) text and the rescapé (I am reading Gille reading the witness) but when this is translated, there are two (I am reading Linda Coverdale reading Gille reading the witness). And it matters because a literary text is more than denotation: whether I value the fact of authorial linguistic choice or prefer to sever the text from its human author and understand it intertextually, when I read a translation, I am not reading the linguistic signs the author chose, and the signs I am reading relate differently to the web of literary-linguistic signification within which texts are embedded and from which they derive their comprehensibility. This may be particularly significant in autobiographical fiction which encourages the reader to maintain a strong link between author

210

Translating Holocaust Lives

and text. If I can only read the translation, I must accept my different (more distant) position in relation to the author and her material, and I must accept that my reading experience will be different, aesthetically, epistemologically and ideologically, from that of the reader of the source text. Three positions are open to such a reader: naïve ignorance (the fantasy of equivalence – I read without consciously thinking about translation), suspicion (the fear of mediation – I wonder if the translation is misleading me) and the acceptance – celebration, even – of the fact that translation necessarily both conveys existing meanings and generates new and different ones (I read the translation as an autonomous text and value the translator’s intervention positively). Readers of translations probably occupy all three of these positions at various points over the course of their reading experience of a given text. Translation makes a difference at various levels. At the highest level of generality, the selection of texts for translation is not neutral but is always a function of either the interests and concerns of the host culture or the export priorities of the source culture. There can be no doubt that the massive success of Suite française was a result of the twenty-first-century appetite for personalized Holocaust stories, and that the renewal of interest in Gille’s work in English translation was entirely dependent on the rediscovery of her mother’s works. At the level of an individual text, translation opens up the possibility for ideological intervention, for example, through paratexts. At the micro (linguistic) level, the translated text occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the source text in which sameness and difference are always in tension. Translation matters whether we are talking about a major, ideologically motivated change of meaning, or a series of minor syntactic or connotative alterations. Most texts contain examples of both these types of change, and therefore the knowledge gained from reading a translation, and the aesthetic experience of so doing, can never be identical with the knowledge and experience generated by the source text.

Reception Evidence of various types of distancing can be found in the reception of texts, since mediations both provoke and engage with readers’ responses. The relationship between mediation and reception is not a straightforwardly predictable one of cause and effect – paratextual changes, for example, can provoke unintended or surprising responses. In the United Kingdom and the United States, despite

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

211

the ideological neutralization of the paratexts, Suite française provoked overt accusations of anti-Semitism against Némirovsky, while in France, debate focused on French war guilt and the re-investigation of the complexities and ambiguities of the behaviour of France and the French under the occupation (Kershaw 2010b, 2012). In France, Suite française is primarily an occupation text, whereas in the United Kingdom and the United States, where this is not a meaningful category of reception, it became primarily a Holocaust text, and a controversial one. Shadows of a Childhood was first published in 1998 by a small, nonprofit US publisher. It was not reviewed in the United Kingdom and almost passed unnoticed in the United States. The New York Times reviewer universalized the book’s theme, summarizing it as ‘the refusal to forget or to cease struggling against indifference, denial, lies’ (Books in Brief 1998). By contrast, the 2008 reissue was picked up by The Jerusalem Post, where it was presented specifically as an autobiographical Holocaust text: ‘An author’s experiences in France during the Holocaust lend her fictional narrative a discomfiting authenticity’ (Ajayi 2008). Alice Kaplan’s review in The Nation reads Shadows of a Childhood alongside the newly published Everyman edition of four of Némirovsky’s early works and rehearses the question about whether or not Némirovsky was antiSemitic, an issue which, in Kaplan’s words, provoked no ‘finger-wagging’ in France but had American critics ‘gearing up for a fight’ (Kaplan 2008). The Mirador encouraged anachronistic readings of Némirovsky, allowing American critics to berate her for not having anticipated the danger she was in by citing the fictional Némirovsky’s self-criticism: ‘Hadn’t I read the newspapers?’ and ‘I wonder how I could have acted with such suicidal thoughtlessness and irresponsibility’ (Franklin 2011; Schillinger 2011). The Mirador reignited the earlier debate over the representation of Jews in David Golder (Krug 2011) and provided grist to the mill of critics who had already expressed their views: Franklin had described Némirovsky as ‘a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes’ (Franklin 2008). The reception of The Mirador demonstrates the interaction of different types of mediation: Gille’s retrospective, psychological relationship to her mother’s memory played into a reading of the text according to twenty-first-century American ideological parameters. Historians are clear that Holocaust victims such as Némirovsky could not have known the risks (e.g. Weinberg 1977), though of course it is inevitable that Gille should remember her mother from a psychological rather than a strictly historical perspective. Critics recognized, and were somewhat perturbed by, the formal complexity of The Mirador. The Telegraph critic described it as ‘a hybrid literary form,

212

Translating Holocaust Lives

somewhere between memoir and fiction’, and the Sunday Times found the form ‘unsettling’, wondering whether it was ‘disguised biography or disguised fiction? Or a strange amalgam of the two?’ (Shilling 2011; Rennison 2011). Yet a review in the Irish Times demonstrates that the lure of authenticity was nonetheless very strong. Eileen Battersby found that ‘finally, for the first time, the real Irène Némirovsky … emerges as a real person … and all thanks to her daughter, not to literary scholars and critics’ (Battersby 2012). The family connection, for this critic, gives better access to Némirovsky than academic analysis. Translation passes unnoticed in the reviews. Gille’s eloquence and ‘crystalline prose’ are highlighted without any reference to the intervention of Marina Harss (Battersby 2012; Shilling 2011). The praise of style without any reference to translation discursively supports the construction of the text in terms of authenticity and constitutes a denial of mediation which flies in the face of the text’s formal structures. Both Shadows of a Childhood and The Mirador are belated texts in the sense that Lynn Higgins gives this term. Belatedness, for Higgins, means that ‘texts and the events themselves are apprehended not simply as coming after but as being understood through and by means of previous ones’ (Higgins 1996: 211– 12). Higgins’ analysis shows how memories of the past resurface at a particular time, because it was not possible for them to be acknowledged before. She draws on Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit: ‘the reworking of early traumatic events that is made possible by later stages of psychic development’ (Higgins 1996: 210). Following the psychoanalytic model that views bringing the past to consciousness as therapeutic, Higgins suggests that ‘sense is progressively made of the past and its effect on the present’ (Higgins 1996: 210). The implication of Mark Salber Phillips’s argument about distancing is not that knowledge necessarily gets better, but just different, as it is viewed through different lenses. Gille allows us to understand Némirovsky differently, just as re-reading Gille’s work through the international success of Suite française sheds new light on her autobiographical fictions. Reading in translation in a changed national context provides yet another perspective. If French belatedness has a ‘particular character’ and ‘rhythm’ (Higgins 1996: 213) – what Henry Rousso called the Vichy syndrome (Rousso 1987) – this has implications for translation, since the development of post-war memory of the Holocaust has distinct national characteristics. As we have seen, Holocaust texts are received in translation according to very different ideological parameters in the United States and the United Kingdom, as compared with France; or, to put it in Phillips’s terms, the functions of distancing are nationally inflected.

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

213

Conclusions What are the implications of seeing translation as one example amongst many of distancing? Firstly, if as Translation Studies scholars we call for the discipline of History to pay attention to language, then we should also expect Translation Studies to pay attention to other types of distancing and to consider translation in relation to them. Secondly, scholars with an interest in language can and should rewrite history and literary history paying attention to the mediations of translation. This is one of the major contributions Translation Studies can make to Holocaust Studies. Thirdly, since translation can either be a sign of recognition of a text or a stimulus to it, scholars can intervene in debates about which texts should be translated, and consider how new or as yet untranslated texts should be translated. One obvious question is whether the mediations of translation should be highlighted or concealed in the target text. Of course, that opposition represents the extreme ends of a scale: in practice, translations will occupy various points between. It is unlikely – and undesirable – that any agreement will ever be reached on this question, and different translation and publishing strategies will be appropriate for different texts. Approaching translation as distancing will give a rich perspective on the texts of the past that can inform our understanding of events such as the Holocaust which are of international significance and present importance.

Note 1 I would like to thank John Snape for drawing my attention to these works.

References Ajayi, A. (2008), ‘Shadows of a Jewish Life’, Jerusalem Post, 12 September 2008, p. 26. Battersby, E. (2012), ‘Dignified and intelligent, eloquent and restrained’, Irish Times, Weekend, 7 January 2012, p. 11. Binet, L. (2009), HHhH, Paris: Grasset. Browning, C. (1992), Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper Perennial. Books in Brief (1998), ‘Fiction: Negation’s Child’, New York Times, 8 February 1998, p. 18. Corpet, O. and Marwell, D.G. (2008), Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite française, New York: Five Ties.

214

Translating Holocaust Lives

Coverdale, L. (trans.) (2008), E. Gille: Shadows of a Childhood. A Novel of War and Friendship, New York and London: The New Press, first published 1998. Cronin, M. (2003), Translation and Globalization, London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1985), ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. J.F. Graham, in ed. and with an introduction by J.F. Graham, Difference in Translation, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 165–205. Derrida, J. (1998), Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Menesh, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Franklin, R. (2011), ‘Elisabeth Gille’s Devastating Account of Her Mother, Irene Némirovsky’, The New Republic, 21 September 2011. http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/the-read/95174/irene-nemirovsky-elisabeth-gille-the-mirador-suite-francaise (accessed 04 December 2015). Franklin, R. (2008), ‘Scandale française’, The New Republic, 30 January 2008. https:// newrepublic.com/article/61151/scandale-francaise (accessed 13 January 2016) Gerson, S. (2005), ‘The Surprise Literary Sensation Sweeping France’, The Forward, 8 April 2005, p. 15. Gille, E. (1996), Un paysage de cendres, Paris: Seuil. Gille, E. (2000), Le Mirador, Paris: Stock. Harss, M. (trans.) (2011), E. Gille: The Mirador. Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter, New York: New York Review Books. Hermans, T. (1996), ‘The Translator’s Voice in the Translated Narrative’, Target 8(1): 23–48. Hermans, T. (2007), The Conference of the Tongues, Manchester: St. Jerome. Higgins, L.A. (1996), New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Humbert, F. (2009), L’Origine de la violence, Paris: Editions Le Passage. Kaplan, A. (2006), ‘Love in the Ruins’, The Nation, 29 May 2006. http://www.thenation. com/article/love-ruins (accessed 04 December 2015). Kaplan, A. (2008), ‘La zone grise’, The Nation, 21 April 2008. http://www.thenation.com/ article/la-zone-grise (accessed 04 December 2015). Kershaw, A. (2010a), Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Kershaw, A. (2010b), ‘Sociology of Literature, Sociology of Translation: The Reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in France and Britain’, Translation Studies 3(1): 1–16. Kershaw, A. (2012), ‘Fictions of Testimony: Irène Némirovsky and Suite française’, in M. Atack and C. Lloyd (eds), Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France: New Readings, Manchester: Manchester University Press, Durham Modern Language Series, pp. 128–37. Kershaw, A. (2013), ‘Suite française – un roman historique du 21ième siècle’, in M. Dambre (ed.), Mémoires occupées: fictions françaises et Seconde guerre mondiale, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 85–92.

Distant Stories, Belated Memories

215

Kershaw, A. (2014), ‘Complexity and Unpredictability in Cultural Flows: Two French Holocaust Novels in English Translation’, Translation Studies 7(1): 34–49. Krug, N. (2011), ‘Faux Memoir Remembers Némirovsky’, Washington Post, Style, 31 August 2011, p. 4. Le débat (2011), No. 165, May–August, L’Histoire saisie par la fiction, Paris: Gallimard. Le Monde des livres (2011), ‘La littérature n’a plus peur de parler fort’, 19 August 2011. Némirovsky, I. (2004), Suite française, Paris: Denoël. Phillips, M.S. (2013), On Historical Distance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Phillips, M.S., Caine, B. and Thomas, J.A. (eds) (2013), Rethinking Historical Distance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rennison, N. (2011), ‘All About Her Mother’, Sunday Times, Culture, 23 October 2011, p. 35. Riglet, M. (2010), ‘La fiction au grand vent de l’Histoire’, Lire, No 385, 1 May 2010, p. 40. Rothstein, E. (2008), ‘Ambivalence as Part of Author’s Legacy’, New York Times, Section C, 21 October 2008, p. 1. Rousso, H. (1987), Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours, Paris: Seuil. Shilling, J. (2011), ‘The Mirador: review’, The Telegraph, Seven, 6 November 2011, p. 28. Schillinger, L. (2011), ‘What Will They Think?’, New York Times, 2 October 2011, p. 12. Smith, S. (trans.) (2006), I. Némirovsky: Suite française, London: Chatto and Windus. Taylor, S. (trans.) (2013), L. Binet: HHhH, London: Vintage. Viart, D. (2009), ‘Nouveaux modèles de représentation de l’Histoire en littérature contemporaine’, Ecritures contemporaines 10, Nouvelles écritures littéraires de l’Histoire, pp. 11–39. Weinberg, D.H. (1977), A Community on Trial. The Jews of Paris in the 1930s, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Wynne, F. (trans.) (2011), F. Humbert: The Origin of Violence, London: Serpent’s Tail.

Response to: Angela Kershaw, Distant Stories, Belated Memories – Irène Némirovsky and Elisabeth Gille Gabriela Saldanha

In ‘Distant Stories, Belated Memories’, Kershaw takes three texts that ‘work on the fuzzy boundaries between history, autobiography, testimony and fiction’ and examines the multiple mediations they have undergone in translation, considered in relation to four types of distancing operative in historical discourse according to Phillips (2013). A comprehensive analysis of historical representation, claims Phillips, needs to take into account four dimensions of distance that shape our experience of historical time: form, affect, summoning and understanding. Awareness of these aspects of distance will help us challenge the long-standing presumption that historical distance offers a privileged, more detached and presumably more objective view (Philips 2011: 12). Following Cheung (2012), we could see Kershaw’s argument as a ‘pushinghands’ response to Philips’s epistemological challenge. ‘Pushing-hands’ (tuishou) is a term borrowed from Chinese to designate a non-violent martial art practice that teaches the body not to react to force with force but to yield to force in order to neutralize it and redirect it (Cheung 2012: 161). As an intellectual approach, the philosophy of pushing-hands offers an alternative to dichotomous modes of thinking (Cheung 2012: 162). Kershaw reacts to Phillips’ claim not by contradicting or supplanting it by a more inclusive claim, but by redirecting it through dialogic engagement. On the one hand, Kershaw adds strength to Philips’ argument by expanding the dimensions of distance; on the other, Kershaw reduces the pressure on Philips’ four dimensions of distance to account for the whole process of mediation. In the present response, Kershaw’s work and her rewriting of other authors’ work will have been mediated once more. As Translation Studies scholars, we are likely to see these mediations as layers of interpretation that filter possible meanings attached to the work on which they are based. In other words, for translation scholars, the argument that ‘distancing is mediation’ put forward

218

Translating Holocaust Lives

by Philips (2013), and echoed in Kershaw, is not new. What is surprising is the expectation, which Philips seems to attribute to history as a discipline (Philips 2011), of a more objective perspective created by temporal distance. My own text comes after – chronologically and spatially – the discussion set out by Kershaw, and therefore constitutes a distancing step from that discussion. As its author, I wonder whether the response could be expected to present a more objective perspective on the argument presented in Kershaw’s article because of the temporal distance and a certain detachment from the topic. This is a question I can only leave readers to ponder, focusing instead on why historical distance has been traditionally considered to be a neutral mediator and translation a subjective interference. Could it be because historical distance is conceived of as a process of nature (time passing) and translation as a human process? As Philips argues, historical distancing is not simply time passing. History is narrated and therefore constitutes a mediated response to the past. This seems to be widely accepted in Translation Studies literature that engages with history as a discipline. According to O’Sullivan (2012: 132), contemporary historiography acknowledges the selectivity of history and the notion of history as narrative, and stresses ‘microhistory’ approaches that seek to produce ‘thick’ descriptions of non-hegemonic social actors. Kershaw’s article does precisely this: it shows how, through the process of translation, existing texts are selectively appropriated for purposes other than those assigned to the source text and exposes the role played by social actors, including translators, thus showing how layers of mediation are added to an already heavily mediated representation of Holocaust lives. Kershaw, in her analysis, shows how the re-narration of Holocaust lives through translation adds yet another level of specificity to the events, challenging history to take into account that extra level of detail. As Rundle (2012: 235) suggests, Translation Studies research has not always focused on ‘specificities’. Descriptive translation studies have attempted to understand translation as a natural phenomenon rather than a human activity, therefore focusing on norms derived from generalizations. The different epistemologies attributed to either Translation Studies or (traditional) History by scholars such as Rundle and Philips are a result of generalizations and abstractions that have been challenged by other scholars – as can be seen in responses to Rundle’s position paper in the same volume – that do not need rehearsing here. I will take for granted, as Cheung (2012) does, that the assumption that the passing of time leads to objectivity contradicts epistemological and ontological developments in the humanities.

Response

219

In Cheung’s (2012: 156) words, ‘[i]t is widely admitted today that knowledge in the humanities is not disinterested or impersonal but situated’. While Cheung and Phillips’s visions are not contradictory, it is interesting that Phillips, speaking as a historian, seems to feel the need to argue a point that Cheung, speaking as a Translation Studies theoretician, takes for granted: ‘If knowledge is mediated’, claims Cheung (2012: 156), in an argument that resonates with that made by Kershaw, ‘this is all the more true of historical knowledge […] But most heavily mediated is knowledge gained in the domain of translation history’. To finish, I would like to go back to the question of the relationship between disciplines so as to pick up a point made by Rundle (2012) in relation to the accessibility of disciplinary discourses and their addressees. Rundle (2012: 253) argues that TS [Translation Studies] historians who choose to address other TS scholars and remain within the methodological frameworks of TS are actually addressing a research community that has little expertise on their historical subject, while potentially excluding those scholars who would have the background to appreciate the historical significance of this research.

While I am confident the significance of Kershaw’s research will not go unnoticed to Translation Studies scholars, it seems to me that it is historians who need a more urgent reminder of the distancing effects of translation. Is it Translation Studies historians who ‘choose’ to address other Translation Studies scholars, or are scholars in other fields deliberately shunning the methodological and conceptual issues that working with translated texts involves? How can we engage historians in a pushing-hands exercise together with Translation Studies scholars?

References Cheung, M. (2012), ‘The Mediated Nature of Knowledge and the Pushing-Hands Approach to Research on Translation History’, Translation Studies 5(2): 156–71. O’Sullivan, C. (2012), ‘Introduction: Rethinking Methods in Translation History’, Translation Studies 5(2): 131–8. Phillips, M.S. (2011), ‘Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory Theme Issue 50: 11–23. Phillips, M.S. (2013), On Historical Distance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rundle, C. (2012), ‘Translation as an Approach to History’, Translation Studies 5(2): 232–9.

10

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing: Leonora Carrington’s Down Below Jeannette Baxter

One of the challenges of discussing Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1988) as an example of Holocaust writing and its translation lies in the far from straightforward relationship that the author and text have with the Holocaust and translation. Down Below is a harrowing account of Carrington’s descent into madness following the double internment of Max Ernst during the Second World War: a German Surrealist and Carrington’s lover, Ernst was first incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien’ by the Vichy government in 1939, then as a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazis in 1940. Written in the form of five diary fragments, Down Below bears graphic witness to Carrington’s tensionridden flight across occupied France for Spain after Ernst’s arrest, and her deteriorating psychological condition, which manifested itself in paranoiainduced ‘political theories’. Down Below is at its most powerful and disquieting in those sections that recount Carrington’s internment in Santander psychiatric hospital in August 1940, an internment made at the joint behest of the British consul in Madrid, company officials at Imperial Chemicals working on behalf of Carrington’s family (her father was a principal shareholder in ICI) and the Spanish medical authorities. Declared ‘incurably insane’, Carrington was subjected to invasive medical treatments, including Cardiazol, an analeptic drug designed to shock her into lucidity, before being released in late December of the same year following a chance encounter with a cousin who worked in a nearby hospital. Even from this briefest of sketches, it is clear that Down Below is perhaps not what we might, on the face of it, want to call ‘Holocaust writing’: Carrington did not suffer persecution by the Nazis on the grounds of ethnic or racial difference; she did not experience the world of the concentration camps; and, most conspicuously, the events of the Holocaust barely enter the narrative in any

222

Translating Holocaust Lives

direct way. But all of this is valuable precisely for the ways in which Down Below calls for a renewed understanding of what Holocaust writing and its translation might look like. As I go on to argue, what makes Down Below such an important, if unusual, example of Holocaust writing is its complex and shifting relationship with its own translation history. Carrington initially wrote a short version of Down Below in English while living in New York in 1941–1942. Unable to find a publisher, Carrington’s story was lost during her relocation from New York to New Mexico towards the end of 1942. A year later, Carrington was encouraged to reconstruct her story by the Surrealist psychoanalyst Pierre Mabille. She agreed, talking it through, this time in French, with Mabille’s wife, Jeanne Megnen. After various wartime delays, Megnen went on to establish the first French version, En bas (Megnen 1973), three years after its dictation. In the meantime, Victor Llona translated Carrington’s story back into English for the bilingual New Yorkbased Surrealist journal VVV, which was edited by David Hare in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton. Llona’s English-language translation, entitled Down Below, was published with illustrations by Carrington in the fourth and final issue of VVV in February  1944 (1944: 79–86). Then, over forty years after its initial narration, Carrington’s story moved in new and striking directions. In collaboration with Marina Warner, and working from a combination of Llona’s 1944 English-language translation and Jean Megnen’s 1946 French dictation, Carrington published a revised English-language translation of Down Below, re-writing certain scenes, adding new information and recasting the ending in the form of a ‘Postscript’ (1988: 210–14). Carrington’s 1988 translation was published in the collection of short writings, The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, edited by Marina Warner (1988: 163–216). In order to understand the extent to which Down Below’s translation history shapes and energizes its relationship with Holocaust writing, it is necessary to focus on the two English-language translations of the text published by Carrington and Llona over four decades apart. A comparative analysis of this kind is essential because it highlights the particular importance of self-translation as a creative and critical strategy that allows Carrington to (re)present the intricate and troubling nature of her wartime experiences as they intersected with Nazism and the Holocaust. In this context, I discuss self-translation in two differentiated yet related ways. Firstly, I follow recent critical moves (Nikolaou 2006; Perteghella and Loffredo 2006; Wilson 2009) to consider self-translation metaphorically as the creative and self-reflexive act of narrating lived experience. As Rita Wilson notes in ‘The Writer’s Double: Translation, Writing and Autobiography’, the act of self-translating can be seen as a ‘manifestation of the essential human desire

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

223

for recognition; a vital urge to be heard and understood. The topic of ‘‘being my own translator’’ takes us beyond language into the realms of nostalgia, loss of identity, rootlessness, and invisibility’ (2009: 191). On a metaphorical level, selftranslation operates as a form of life-writing for Carrington, one that enables her to give voice to personal and historical traumas, and to interrogate disquieting connections between the two. In the case of Down Below, however, the issue of Carrington being her ‘own translator’ is not uncomplicated. An important question for any reader of Down Below (in all of its translations) to consider is: ‘Who is the author of the text before us?’ Even though the story translated by Llona in the 1944 version of Down Below is Carrington’s, as translator, Llona simultaneously becomes a co-author of her story (Perteghella and Loffredo 2006; Venuti 1995). This is important given that Down Below bears witness to a form of victimization that has become an increasing focus of Holocaust historiography, namely the experiences of those deemed insane (Klee et al. 1988; Müller-Hill 1998; Poore 2007). Although Carrington’s wartime incarceration in Franquist Spain differs significantly from the victimization of the insane by Hitler’s euthanasia programme, her narrative of madness is, I suggest, nevertheless born out of a complex interweaving of events connected to the Holocaust. Given the disempowering nature of these experiences, the relationship between her translations and Llona’s is caught up in complex questions of power and representation. This leads one to ask: what are the limits of metaphorical self-translation for Carrington if she is not, in the case of Llona’s Down Below, exclusively her ‘own translator’? And what might it mean for Carrington’s narrative of victimization to have Llona speaking simultaneously with her? As I go on to show, this line of questioning is valuable not only because it generates insights into a neglected area of Holocaust Translation Studies, namely translation of work by the insane, but also because it extends discussion of Carrington’s experiences of disempowerment beyond historical context to the very translation processes designed to give form to those experiences. The second way in which I discuss self-translation focuses on how Carrington’s 1988 translation revises and extends Llona’s 1944 translation. On the whole, self-translation is understood as an interlingual process, and, if we were to limit our understanding of self-translation to the narrating of lived experience, an interlingual approach would be a productive one to take with other-language versions of Down Below such as Megnen’s En Bas. However, my focus on intralingual translation, defined by Roman Jakobson as ‘rewording’ or ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language’

224

Translating Holocaust Lives

(1959: 233), is particularly useful because the making visible of intralingual translation processes opens up both English-language versions of Carrington’s story to fresh considerations of language choice, intention and meaning. One consequence of this is that self-translation emerges as a form of resistance for Carrington as she re-engages with the complex power dynamics that shape her story on both contextual and formal levels. This is not to suggest, though, that the revisionist nature of self-translation is straightforwardly liberating. On the contrary, Carrington also turns to self-translation in order to generate an alternative narrative of Holocaust guilt. Building on Jonathan Eburne’s (2008) historicist approach to Carrington’s life and work, I suggest that the intense disquiet pervading her story is not born solely from her traumatic experiences of incarceration, but also from her persistent tone of self-accusation, the impulse of which is double: Carrington’s guilt at not engaging in any form of direct political resistance to German fascism; and her complicity, albeit vicarious, with Holocaust atrocities through familial connections with the British chemical company, ICI, an international associate of IG Farben, the notorious German chemical industry conglomerate. As I argue below, Carrington never looks to intralingual self-translation as a way of potentially writing herself out of difficult historical experiences. Instead, she employs it as a way of generating a form of Surrealist literary historiography that insists on keeping her wartime experiences, as they intersected with Nazism and the Holocaust, alive and in process.

Complicity and critique: The possibilities and limits of self-translation A striking feature of Down Below is that it begins twice. The narrative opens on ‘Monday, August 23, 1943’ with an initial claim to precise recollection: ‘Exactly three years ago, I was interned in Dr Morales’ sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Dr Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul having pronounced me incurably insane’ (Carrington 1988: 163).1 Carrington’s deteriorating mental health is consistently understood to have been precipitated by the wartime internments of her lover, Max Ernst, and this connection manifests itself formally when the story starts all over again, just two paragraphs later: ‘I begin therefore with the moment when Max was taken away to a concentration camp for the second time’ (1988: 164). What jolts here is the word ‘second’, revealing as it does the fact that Ernst’s internment is a repeated trauma, an event already experienced albeit with

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

225

significant difference: in 1939, the German Surrealist was arrested as an ‘enemy alien’ by the Vichy government and detained in Camp des Milles (a former brick factory), near Aix-en-Provence, along with Hans Bellmer (Polizotti 2008: 431). In 1940, during the French Occupation, Ernst was arrested by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate artist’ and taken to a prison camp in Loriol before returning to Camp des Milles; his freedom was finally bought, some months later, by Peggy Guggenheim, whom he would go on to marry briefly (Polizotti 2008: 437–8). Carrington’s move to begin her story twice, and with a repeated event, is an early signal to the reader that this story is one in which fixed notions of origins, endings and beginnings are under erasure. Equally, the conspicuous gap in the story’s second beginning sets the tone for a narrative replete with ellipses and partial memories. At several points, for instance, Carrington’s first-person narration foregrounds its vulnerability: ‘What I am going to endeavour to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge’ (1988: 164); ‘I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us’ (1988: 175). Down Below has been variously classified by critics as an ‘essay’ (Gambrell 1997: 87) and ‘memoir’ (Eburne 2008: 218), yet selfconscious declarations such as these identify it more specifically as an experiment in Surrealist convulsive autobiography; that is, a form of Surrealist life-writing (and also life-painting) that employs strategies of invention and rewriting in order to rescue subjectivity and history from the limits of chronology, and to challenge totalizing versions of history in which truth and memory remain artificially intact. It is for these very reasons, of course, that Down Below has been consistently read by feminist critics (Hubert 1994; Suleiman 1990, Warner in, Carrington 1988) as a liberating rejoinder to one of André Breton’s own works of convulsive autobiography, Nadja (1928). Carrington’s unflinching account of chemically induced shock treatments – ‘I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body’ (Carrington 1988: 192) – not only gives the lie to Breton’s poetic reifications of female madness (Nadja closes with the line ‘beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’ (Howard 1999: 160), but her equivocal first-person narration refuses to be the fixed voice of authentic female experience that Breton claimed it was. Even though it is important and productive to read Down Below as a subversive intertextual response to (male) Surrealist simulations of female madness, this dedicated line of feminist analysis tends to underestimate the translation histories of Carrington’s story and, more specifically, the complex role that self-translation (both metaphorical and

226

Translating Holocaust Lives

literal) plays in shaping the kind of convulsive autobiographies that Carrington went on to produce. I use the plural term because Carrington has produced two English-language convulsive autobiographies called Down Below: Llona’s 1944 translation; and her own 1988 translation. And a striking feature of both is that they are collaborative, shaped in various ways and to differing degrees by subjectivities other than Carrington’s. As Perteghella and Loffredo observe, any reading of a work in translation must be alive to the presence of ‘translational subjectivity’, that is ‘the translator’s creative input in the process of “writing” a translation, and the creativity inscribed in the products generated by this subjectivity’ (2006: 2). In the case of Llona’s translation, at least three voices come together to inform each other: Llona, Carrington and Megnen, whose 1943 unpublished French dictation was translated back into English by Llona, and who are simultaneously ‘contributors, that is co-writers’ (Perteghella and Loffredo 2006: 8) of the text before us. Carrington’s revised 1988 translation is equally shaped by numerous voices: while Llona, and by extension Megnen, remain on some level as coauthors of the text with Carrington, Marina Warner’s collaborative role, the details of which are vague (1988: 215–16), must also be acknowledged, even if it is only to show awareness of the hand of the editor. Although an exploration into the various collaborating subjectivities present in Down Below would be fruitful, I must remain focused here on intralingual translation and the complex questions of power and representation that Llona and Carrington’s English-language translations generate. A noteworthy feature of Carrington’s 1988 text, for instance, is that, excepting the significant revisions I go on to discuss, it is for the most part exactly the same as Llona’s 1944 translation: minor differences include British (Llona) and American spelling (Carrington), and slight adjustments of syntax and punctuation. This suggests, at least on the level of the written text, that the process of co-authorship at work in Llona’s Down Below was one of reciprocity. The possibility even remains that Carrington may have regarded Llona’s translation subjectivity as yet another strategy for developing her own form of convulsive autobiography, namely one that challenges common sense distinctions between not just the author and narrator, but the author, narrator and translator. There is more to say, however, about the power dynamics at work in the visual portraits of Carrington included in the English-language translations. Victor Llona’s text concludes with a black-and-white photograph of Carrington and her mother (taken in 1935) with the caption: ‘Leonora Carrington the day of her presentation at court [of King George V]’ (1944: 86). As Gambrell observes, the

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

227

‘formal photographic portrait of a lovely, tidy and serene Leonora Carrington’ is troubling on many levels, and not least because of its depiction of her as an object of ‘female exchange’ caught up in ‘the peculiar initiation rite of the British aristocracy […] a daughter is being “presented” at court – offered up to a marriage market’ in anticipation of her being ‘given away’ by her father, to her husband, in marriage (1997: 86). Carrington’s representation of her father and the patriarchal power networks surrounding both of them is something I will return to. For now, it is worth noting how the photograph adds yet another translation layer to Llona’s text, functioning as it does as a form of ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation’ (Jakobson 1959: 233). An immediate effect of this is that it limits the potential of metaphorical self-translation for Carrington as her shifting subjectivities, which manifest themselves so conspicuously at the beginning of the story in equivocal first-person narration, are by its end translated into a fixed and gendered image. One way of teasing out the gender politics at work in this intersemiotic translational act is to consider the ways in which translational subjectivity is shaped by specific contexts of production. Llona’s translation of Down Below appeared in the final issue of VVV at a time when Surrealism was concerned with its intellectual and artistic significance during the War; many Surrealists had fled Fascist Europe, including Breton, who was in exile in New York. Subsequently, the fracturing, male-dominated Surrealist Group looked to its female artists for some form of stability: their work was presented in a particular way by the patriarchal artists, as ‘naïve, untutored self-revelation’. The women artists served an ‘institutional need’ (Gambrell 1997: 80). Even though Carrington presumably agreed to the inclusion of this particular photograph, its positioning at the end of the story is conspicuous because it works hard to clean up the text’s many ‘verbal images of degradation and vulnerability’ (Gambrell 1997: 83), even going as far as to suggest that Carrington’s tale of systematic abuse at Santander might just find a happy ending in the institution of marriage.2 In contrast, Carrington’s 1988 translation presents a different portrait of the writer-artist; namely, a black-and-white photograph of the exiled Surrealists (‘Artists in Exile’) taken in New York in 1942, featuring Ernst, Guggenheim, Breton and Carrington (amongst others). This photograph is the last of twenty black-and-white portraits of Carrington (and her work) taken at various stages in her life until 1942, and when considered together, these images form a visual autobiography that can also be read as something of a companion piece to Down Below. Although the photographs are not strictly part of Down Below, their paratextual significance, and the conspicuous positioning of ‘Artists in Exile’

228

Translating Holocaust Lives

alongside the title page of Carrington’s story, encourages connections between image and text. On one level, the photograph can be read as something of a parting shot by Carrington; she left New York for New Mexico later in the same year, freeing herself ‘from the orthodoxies of the Parisian circle’ (Gambrell 1997: 78) and its anxious after-life in America. On another level, this act of intersemiotic translation is a form of revisionist self-translation, which sets up an alternative context for reading Down Below by releasing Carrington’s story from a gender-political focus and situating it, instead, in relation to the specific historical and political contexts that produced her narrative of metaphorical self-translation in the first place: namely, her descent into madness due to her entanglement in a complex interweaving of events connected to the Holocaust. Indeed, the first few pages of Down Below (in both English-language translations) are suffused with urgent and agitated reflections on the violent political realities of wartime Europe, from Ernst’s incarceration by the Nazis to the German occupation of Belgium and France, and the mass displacement of people desperate to escape the forces of Fascism: ‘The Germans were approaching rapidly […] the refugees were piling up’ (Carrington 1988: 170). Carrington’s dread of German occupying forces is a striking feature of her account, and it is an admission that complicates Ernst’s victimization and his representation in the text. For Carrington’s friend, Catherine, Ernst’s German nationality associates him with Nazism and, by extension, Nazi policies of persecution, violence and discrimination, even though, as a ‘degenerate artist’, he also embodies the modernist aesthetic so despised by Hitler: For Catherine, the Germans meant rape. I was not afraid of that, I attached no importance to it. What caused panic to rise within me was the thought of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings. (Carrington 1988: 166)

As Eburne observes, Carrington is less troubled by threats of sexual violence than by the ‘thoughtless automatism she associates with the systematic reproduction of Nazi ideology’, and that she saw embodied in the soldiers that ‘took Ernst away’ (Eburne 2008: 222). Speaking towards the end of her life, Carrington admitted to an enduring fear of Nazism, insisting that, had she not escaped, the Nazis would have killed her because she was British and Ernst’s lover (van Raay et  al. 2010: 8). But Down Below goes much further than this epitextual confession as it dares to recognize the pervasive psychological forces of Nazism and its own vulnerability to these forces. What manifests itself at an early stage in Carrington’s narrative is an awareness of her own complicity with the violent events unfolding around her. Fleeing

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

229

occupied France for Madrid, Carrington is unsure whether she can believe her eyes: We had driven all night long. I would see before me, on the road, trucks with legs and arms dangling behind them, but being unsure of myself, I would shyly venture aloud: ‘There are trucks ahead of us’, just to find out what the answer would be. When they said: ‘The road is wide, we’ll manage to bypass them’, I felt reassured; but I did not know whether or not they saw what was carried in those trucks, greatly fearing to arouse their suspicions and becoming prey to shame, which paralysed me. The road was lined with rows of coffins, but I could find no pretext to draw their attention to that embarrassing subject. I was very frightened: it all stank of death. They obviously were people who had been killed by the Germans. I learned since then that there was a huge military cemetery in Perpignan. (1988: 167)

As an experiment in Surrealist convulsive autobiography, Down Below has no desire to reconstruct historical events in a neat, linear way. Such an approach to historiography would run the risk of flattening and fixing the complexities of lived experience (on both physical and psychological levels). Instead, Down Below offers variously oblique snapshots of historical experience that provoke the reader to engage imaginatively and critically with them. The passage above, for instance, bears reticent witness to the rounding-up and internment of the thousands of war refugees, enemy aliens and immigrants, both Jewish and nonJewish (Zuccotti 1998: 495) across occupied France in 1940. What is striking about this particular moment of uncertainty, then, is that Carrington is not all that uncertain about what she sees. Here, hallucination enters the texts as a means of deferring direct engagement with the horrific events taking place around her, a distancing tactic that also finds form in the conspicuous conditional formulation ‘I would’ (present also in Llona’s English-language translation (1944: 71)). Given the wartime composition and publication of Down Below, its equivocal nature can be understood as being both alive to the traumas (personal and collective) that produced it and sensitive to the complex responsibilities of bearing witness. We can hear this in Carrington’s clipped acknowledgement of her subsequent knowledge of how Nazi genocide would develop while she was safe in exile. Perpignan was not only home to a military ‘cemetery’. it, and the department of Pyrénées-Orientales of which Perpignan was the capital, housed numerous camps de concentration, including the infamous Camp de Rivesaltes from which Jews from the Free Zone were deported to Auschwitz. But Carrington’s hesitation cannot be neatly explained away in terms of the sensitivities of historical witnessing. For what also stands out in this passage

230

Translating Holocaust Lives

is Carrington’s tone and language of self-reproach: her oblique commentary and eventual silence may be born out of fear, trauma or an awareness of the limits of historical representation, but they simultaneously give voice to complex experiences of shame, guilt and embarrassment. As Eburne (2008: 215–19) points out, accusations of political quietism haunt Surrealism’s popular and critical legacies in post-war America and Europe. At the crux of these indictments was the belief that Surrealism’s anti-fascist politics never manifested themselves on the level of action. Instead, those that were able to fled fascist Europe, choosing self-imposed exile over political engagement with the Resistance. Eburne is quick to point out, however, that such assessments of Surrealist politics are far too narrow, focusing as they do on André Breton’s wartime activities while overlooking the political commitments of others, such as Claude Cahun and Robert Desnos, both of whom were engaged in Resistance activities on the occupied Channel Island of Jersey and Paris, respectively: Cahun narrowly escaped execution when Jersey was liberated; Desnos perished in Terezín. Even though Carrington’s incarceration in Santander mental asylum has tended to remove her from accusations of political quietism during the War, Down Below is riddled with expressions of self-examination and self-indictment. Very early on in the narrative, Carrington confesses utter detachment from the realities of Fascist ascendency across Europe: ‘Various events were taking place in the outside world: the collapse of Belgium, the entry of the Germans in France. All of this interested me very little and I had no fear whatsoever within me’ (Carrington 1988: 165). It is hard to know how to respond to this bald admission with its inflections of naivety, self-centredness, delusion and belief in the power of one’s own destiny. That Carrington makes no move whatsoever to soften this – or indeed any other – expression of detachment in her revised 1988 translation of Down Below is significant for two related reasons: first, it foregrounds the complexity of self-interrogation that Carrington is prepared to undertake; second, it shows how she does not draw on self-translation as a form of historical revisionism that will let her off the hook. Compare the following translations of events: I seriously set to analyse that vertigo: my body no longer obeyed the formulas established in my mind; the formulas of old, limited Reason; my will was no longer geared with my faculties of motion; since it no longer possessed any power, it was necessary first of all to liquidate the anguish by which I was paralysed. (Llona 1944: 71) I was trying to understand this vertigo of mine: that my body no longer obeyed the formulas established in my mind, the formulas of old, limited

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

231

Reason; that my will no longer meshed with my faculties of movement, and since my will no longer possessed any power, it was necessary first to liquidate my paralyzing anguish. (Carrington 1988: 168)

At this point, Carrington has just crossed the border to Andorra, finding temporary refuge in the ironically named Hôtel de France. Yet even a safe border crossing and procurement of provisional shelter bring no relief, only symptoms of vertigo. On one level, Carrington’s severe disorientation can be understood in the contexts of geopolitical exile. Wilson observes how self-translation is explicitly associated with migrant forms of life-writing that ‘reflect on what it means to be “translated” both geographically and textually’ (2009: 191). For Carrington, spatial translation across France, Andorra, Spain and beyond means repeated experiences of displacement, alienation, fear, anxiety and loss (of her lover, home, freedom and identity). On another level, though, the artist’s persistent dizziness speaks to a developing sense of guilt at not just her own flight from Nazi-occupied Europe, but also her complicity, through inaction, with Nazism’s hideous crimes. One cannot help but be struck by the historically loaded verb choice ‘liquidate’, which brings both English-language translations into an unsettling, and far more immediate, relationship with the horrific violence of the Holocaust. And, of course, this sense of immediacy is all the more pronounced in the 1988 translation of events as Carrington’s revisions deliberately undo any expression of emotional and psychological distance: switches in verb choice (the clinical ‘analyse’ is replaced with the more engaged ‘understand’); the insertion of personal pronouns; the trading of semi-colons for commas; and, most notably, the shift from the passive to the active voice work collectively to produce a far more immersive post-war account of wartime experience. In passages such as these, intralingual self-translation establishes itself all too clearly as an unsettling and powerful means for Carrington to implicate herself further in her disquieting story.

Convulsive self-translation: ‘Papa Carrington’, ICI and the Holocaust as industry Given the extent to which Carrington’s art and writings have been read through a biographical lens, it is all the more remarkable that one particular aspect of her life has not been thoroughly considered by critics; that is, her family connections with the British chemical company, ICI. During the interwar and wartime periods, ICI was one of a number of companies that were part of an international

232

Translating Holocaust Lives

cartel with IG Farben, the notorious German chemical industry conglomerate. Daniel Rosenberg puts this business relationship into revealing context when he notes: ‘Striking indeed is the 1935 project among Britain’s Imperial Chemicals, Deutsche Gold- und Silberscheideanstalt, London Fumigation C. Ltd, and others for “manufacture and sale of [the] fumigation product known as Zyklon’’’(1998: 105). Carrington’s father – referred to in Down Below as ‘Papa Carrington’ (the tone is dismissive, not affectionate) – was an extraordinarily wealthy textile manufacturer and principal shareholder in ICI before, during and after the War. And even though, as is well documented, Carrington was essentially exiled from her family for spectacularly refusing to conform to expectation, she was nevertheless dependent on her father’s wealth and business connections for safe passage out of Europe. Carrington revisits this complex intersection of personal and collective histories in the scene in which she is waiting for passage out of Madrid and first encounters Van Ghent, a Dutch Jew and employee of her father’s company, whose son also works for ICI. Notably, Van Ghent is represented with slight variation across the two English-language versions of Down Below: Llona’s 1944 translation presents him unequivocally as a ‘Nazi Agent’ (1944: 72), while Carrington’s revised translation is less certain, saying that he is ‘somehow connected with the Nazi government’ (1988: 171). Llona’s 1944 translation also comments on how Van Ghent’s passport was ‘infected’ (1944: 72) with the Swastika, while Carrington replaces the verb ‘infect’ with ‘infest’ (1988: 171). Why, following the German Occupation of Holland in May  1940, a Dutch Jewish national would have the Swastika stamped in his passport rather than a stamp marking out his Jewish identity, and why Van Ghent refuses Carrington’s gift of Ernst’s passport are important questions never addressed by the text. Neither are they explored in critical readings of Down Below, all of which read Van Ghent as a representation of a real historical figure whom Carrington encountered in Madrid in 1940. While I have no evidence to prove otherwise, Carrington’s convulsive autobiography invites anything but straight readings, and it is conceivable that Van Ghent might be a fantasy figure of sorts to whom Carrington attaches her revulsion at her father’s complicity with Nazism: ‘To me Van Ghent was my father, my enemy, and the enemy of mankind’ (1988:173). Consistent across both English-language translations, for instance, is the acknowledgement that complicity is, for Carrington and Van Ghent alike, an intricate matter of industrial and familial relations. Similarly, both verb choices – ‘infect’ and ‘infest’ – capture Carrington’s distaste at Van Ghent’s political allegiances, while also characterizing German fascism as a contagious

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

233

disease to which the author is not entirely immune. The specific rewording of ‘infected’ to ‘infested’ in the revised version of Down Below is not insignificant, however, and it also relates to the later equivocal presentation of Van Ghent’s associations with Nazism. For what is palpable in both English-language versions of Down Below, but accentuated in Carrington’s revised work of selftranslation, is the extent to  which Carrington is ensnared within a nefarious network of patriarchal  power and collusion focused around ICI, Van Ghent and the conspicuous absent  presence of ‘Papa Carrington’. Indeed, the intense disquiet that seeps through Carrington’s narrative comes from knowing that ICI’s collusions with German industry and Nazism will physically mobilize her (she  failed to cross the border to Spain twice, before agents working for her  father intervened), but also ethically and emotionally paralyse her: ‘My anguish jammed me completely’ (1988: 168). In and amongst moments of compromise, however, Carrington does manage to initiate small acts of resistance, starting with the gifting of her newly acquired travel papers to a complete stranger. For the readers of Llona’s 1944 translation, Carrington’s developing powers of resistance find their most powerful expression when, having been abducted by two Spanish officers, she draws on almost superhuman reserves of strength to fight off one of the men as he attempts to rape her. An encounter with Carrington’s 1988 translation, in contrast, tells a different story: ‘They [Requeté officers] threw me on to a bed, and after tearing off my clothes raped me one after the other’ (1988: 172). In ‘A Note on the Texts’, Warner states how the 1988 version of Carrington’s story was ‘reviewed and revised for factual accuracy by the author’ (Carrington 1988: 216). Bearing in mind the significance of this particular act of self-translation, Warner’s interjection is strikingly bald, and perhaps deliberately so in order to shut down any attempts to question which version of events is closest to the truth. But this is not to say that the 1944 English-language translation of Down Below is necessarily silenced by the reworked text; rather, Carrington’s story of resistance takes on renewed significance as it shifts into a productive dialogue with the revised version of itself. One effect of Carrington’s confession that the rape did take place is that the power of the patriarchal and political network that ensnares her is reasserted in the face of resistance. Coming on the back of Carrington’s attempts to divest herself of her possessions and travel papers, sexual violence strips her of agency and subjectivity as her body becomes the possession of strangers. At the same time, though, it is possible to read Carrington’s revised account of her rape as another form of resistance. Eburne notes how it was ‘precisely in

234

Translating Holocaust Lives

the shadow of Hitlerism’ that female Surrealist artists took up an ‘active’ role in the development of surrealist [political] thinking, from ‘Claude Cahun’s defense of surrealist poetics in her 1934 polemic Les Paris sont ouverts, to Leonora Carrington’s haunting tales of bodily transformation and bodily invasion in  the later 1930s’ (2008: 217). Although brief, stories such as ‘The House of Fear’  (first published as ‘La maison de la peur’ in 1938) and ‘The Oval Lady’ (first published  as ‘La dame ovale’ in 1939) are replete with acts of bodily torture, making  them important intertexts for Down Below. Furthermore, ‘The  Debutante’ (first published as ‘La Débutante’ in 1939), a horrible tale in  which a maid’s face is ripped off and worn (and eventually consumed) by the debutante’s pet hyena, is critically aware of its cultural and historical contexts of production, namely the politics of breeding and the preservation of bloodlines, a lived reality that connects Carrington’s aristocratic lifestyle (we might recall the black-and-white ‘Debutante’ portrait of Carrington) and the victims of National Socialist eugenicist policies in deeply uncomfortable ways (Gambrell 1997: 75– 6).3 Eburne is right to suggest, therefore, that if we are to properly understand the historical dimensions of Carrington’s writings, it is necessary to move beyond  reading them as straightforward feminist allegories  of escape. We need, instead, to read them in ways that engage with Carrington’s anti-fascist politics before, during and after the Second World War (Eburne 2008: 219). In this context, Carrington’s post-war confession that she was raped can be read as an anti-fascist gesture of sorts, and its textual effect is convulsive. For Carrington’s startling revisionist intervention triggers ‘a destabilizing set of associations that accelerates self-reflexivity, [and] fosters a sense of plurality and ambiguity’ (Wilson 2009: 189) not just narratively but meta-narratively. That is to say that the first-person narrators of Carrington’s 1988 translation, which already exist in an intricate relationship with various translational subjectivities, enter into complex creative and (self-)critical relationships with the Leonora Carrington of 1944 and of 1988, who appears as (co-)author and narrating subject across the changing versions of her story. And all of this is vital to the resisting energies of Carrington’s convulsive autobiography because, within the Surrealist anti-fascist imagination, ‘subjectivity was a formation to be scrutinized rather than defended against the evil of fascism; the bodily threat fascism posed was its imposition of an integrity and consistency that tended to equate smooth bodies with ideologically regulated subjects’ (Eburne 2008: 232). With a shocking example of bodily invasion told through an intrusive act of intralingual self-translation, Carrington destabilizes the narrating, authorial and translational subjectivities present in her story still further.

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

235

Carrington’s resistance to German fascism takes on a particularly disturbing tone in the context of her incarceration in Santander psychiatric hospital. Carrington’s internment is partly a response to her continued acts of resistance (she destroys a vast quantity of newspapers believing them to be Nazi propaganda propagated by Van Ghent), and partly a response to her attempts to liberate Madrid with dissident ‘political theories’ – namely that ‘World War was being waged hypnotically by a group of people – Hitler and Co. – who were represented in Spain by Van Ghent’ (1988: 173). Although Eburne’s reading of Down Below does not clarify whether Van Ghent actually existed or not, it is alive to the complexity of his representation, suggesting that ‘as the focus of her persecution fantasy, Van Ghent provides a delusional ‘solution’ to the problem of Madrid’s illness’ (Eburne 2008: 223). What falls out of this and other readings, though, is any comment on the anti-Semitism present in Carrington’s characterization of Van Ghent as a Fascist puppet-master; he ‘turned the people into zombies and scattered anguish like pieces of poisoned candy in order to make slaves of all […] people […] seemed to be made of wood’ (1988:172). Although I do not believe that Carrington’s story is intentionally anti-Semitic (her writings and paintings, such as ‘The Nazi Doctor’ (1970) repeatedly critique Nazism), this textual tension is never explained away but left to resonate and trouble the reader. A related tension that the text does go on to explore, however, is Carrington’s fear that she will fall victim to Van Ghent’s ‘nefarious powers’ (1988: 171) and, by extension, the larger psychological forces of Fascism. On her forced admission to Santander psychiatric hospital (following an anti-fascist outburst), Carrington is anaesthetized with Luminal and handed over ‘like a cadaver’ (1988: 175) by her family and the British authorities to the psychiatric care of Dr Morales. Upon first awakening to consciousness, Carrington is in intense pain yet immobilized by leather straps binding her hands and feet. Disorientated and confused, she attempts to identify her unfamiliar surroundings, asking ‘Was it a hospital or a concentration camp?’ (Carrington 1988: 78). This is one of the very few direct historical references that Down Below makes to the Holocaust, and its effect is deeply unsettling. What are we supposed to do with this conspicuous interrogative? In my view, it would be far too simplistic to read this question as one motivated by comparison: at no stage in her story (in any of its translations) does Carrington come close to equating her experiences of victimization with those suffered by the victims of the concentration camps. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that Carrington’s troubling question is not merely rhetorical: it is directed at the German nurse, Frau

236

Translating Holocaust Lives

Asegurado, whom Carrington goes on to describe as ‘passive, unmoved’ (1988: 188) and the ‘most motionless of women’ (1988: 203). The patient’s question is therefore motivated, I think, by a critical interest in the psychological make up of those medical professionals who are complicit in forms of systematic abuse. Certainly, the language to which Carrington consistently turns in her portrayal of Frau Asegurado would not be out of place in any of Theodor Adorno’s postwar, post-Holocaust writings on reified consciousness and the psychological dynamics of Nazism. The industrialized mass slaughter of the Holocaust may have been engineered by ‘a few Nazi monsters’, Adorno writes, but it was enabled by ‘[p]eople who blindly slot themselves into the collective [who] already make themselves something like inert material, extinguish themselves as self-determined being. With this comes the willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass’ (2005: 198). For Carrington, Frau Asegurado’s impassiveness is a symptom of the ‘hypnotic’ and ‘somnambulistic’ powers of Nazism, which have turned the citizens of Europe and the world into a ‘congealed’ mass (1988: 186). And the true horror of all of this for the immobile patient – artificial abscesses have also been induced in Carrington’s legs – is that she now embodies the automatism she always feared in herself and others (Eburne 2008: 224). Consequently, Carrington’s narrative of incarceration becomes a much more pointed and uncompromising narrative of self-punishment. Bound, naked and left to lie in her own excrement, urine and sweat, Carrington interprets her bodily degradation as retribution for her ‘lack of intelligence and [her] submissiveness’ (1988: 183) throughout the war. Moreover, she accepts the intrusive medical treatments inflicted on her by Dr Morales and Frau Asegurado as ‘purifying tortures’ (Carrington 1988: 195), which might just deliver her from her guilt-ridden anguish: I thought that I, a Celtic and Saxon Aryan, was undergoing my sufferings to avenge the Jews for the persecutions they were being subjected to. (1988: 195)

Eburne is correct to suggest that Down Below is important because it looks ‘beyond the politics of immediate action and contributes to a body of war-era writing and art that strove to articulate new forms of commitment’ (2008: 218) in order to raise ‘questions of responsibility, agency and historical causality’ (2008: 219). But that does not make the act of reading Down Below any less difficult. Considering the revisions that Carrington’s 1988 translation makes to Llona’s 1944 translation, it is notable that these (and other) passages of self-accusation repeat without alteration. Across both English-language versions of the story, Carrington insists on interpreting her incarceration at Santander as punishment

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

237

for her wartime complicity: that is, complicity through political inaction; and complicity for liaising, albeit against her will, with the coercive network of ICI and the absence-presence of Papa Carrington. At no point does Carrington turn to intralingual self-translation as a way of defusing her tension-ridden experiences of the Holocaust or of keeping them at a safe critical distance.

‘Postscript 1987’: Self-translation, again It is surprising that the ‘Postscript’ to Down Below, dated 1987, has failed to catch the attention of critics. Admittedly, this final translational act is brief (it is barely four pages) and elliptical. However, it is precisely for these reasons that it remains so significant. Carrington returns to, and picks up, her story in equivocal fashion, providing the sketchiest of accounts of life after incarceration: release from the ‘madhouse’ after a chance encounter with a cousin who was a doctor at the ‘ordinary hospital’ in Santander; travel to Madrid and Lisbon under the continuing care of Frau Asegurado and ICI; family plans to incarcerate her again in South Africa; a seedy offer of freedom for sex from the unnamed head of ICI in Madrid; eventual escape from her family and nurse Asegurado by slipping through a restaurant toilet window; sanctuary at the Mexican Embassy in Lisbon and a marriage of convenience with the emigré, Renato Leduc; another chance encounter, this time with Ernst and his millionaire lover Peggy Guggenheim, who enabled so many artists to escape fascist Europe; safe passage to New York for Carrington and Leduc (paid for by themselves, although Guggenheim offered); and a final move to Mexico city where Carrington would live, marry the photojournalist and Hungarian Jew Enrico Weisz, and work for the next seven decades. ‘That was the story’ (1988: 214), Carrington concludes bluntly. But just as Down Below begins conspicuously on two occasions, so Carrington’s 1988 translation ends twice. Having brought her tale to a brusque end, Carrington starts again, albeit for just two more paragraphs. What is striking about these closing words is the way in which they engage, once more, with questions of complicity, guilt and responsibility. Revealing how her mother eventually visited Mexico on her own in 1946 to visit her new-born grandson, Carrington notes: ‘But we never talked about this time. It’s the sort of thing English people of that generation didn’t discuss’ (1988: 214). Arguably, the shifting processes of narrating, writing and (self-)translating Down Below across four decades go some way to countering this dominant strain of post-

238

Translating Holocaust Lives

war quietude, a cultural and historical silence which is by no means restricted to one nation. And even if Down Below falters at the limits of representation and resistance, it nevertheless mobilizes historical discussion more generally, and allows Carrington, more specifically, to self-direct extremely unsettling questions of agency and complicity during the Second World War and the Holocaust through acts of metaphorical and literal self-translation. Furthermore, we can see, and hear, how Carrington refuses to employ ‘Postscript 1987’ as an opportunity for elucidating her story’s troubling textures or for stabilizing its recurring tensions. A striking, yet uncomfortable aspect of the final stage in this version of Down Below, for instance, is the continued presence of ICI as a facilitator for Carrington’s escape from fascist Europe: ‘It is sort of tricky to talk about this period, because Imperial Chemicals were really up to all kinds of things’ (1988: 211). The reader’s discomfort is compounded by Carrington’s own discomfort with the historical reality of collusion. Albeit against her will (and she was still only twenty-six at the time), Carrington’s ongoing involvement with ICI continues to haunt her more than four decades later. Given the temporal distance between the narrated events and the final stage in (self-)translating these events, detailed knowledge of complicit industrial relations between international companies and the Nazi Regime has been well established and widely documented. Carrington’s evasive language (‘sort of ’, ‘tricky’, ‘all kinds of things’) does not articulate a lack of historical information or understanding, then; it gives voice to enduring feelings of guilt at, and accountability for, her involvement in such hideous wartime collaborations. That Carrington’s final translation of her story closes with a brief address to anger is perhaps unsurprising, then. Reflecting on her parents’ conspicuous absenteeism during the time of, and release from, her incarceration in Santander, she says: ‘What is terrible is that one’s anger is stifled. I never really got angry. I felt I didn’t have the time. I was tormented by the idea that I had to paint, and when I was away from Max and first with Renato, I painted immediately’. And then, Carrington releases with alarming frankness the final, stand-alone sentence: ‘I never saw my father again’ (1988: 214). If, for Carrington, art and literature are vital forms for expressing complex feelings of torment and anger at herself and her father, it is little wonder that she would go on to (self-) translate her story across the page, and canvas (‘Down Below’, 1941) over and over again. It is also little wonder that, in the case of the texts Down Below, Carrington would look specifically to Surrealist convulsive autobiography as an appropriate literary form, one flexible enough to accommodate her strategies of self-translation and to therefore keep alive

Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing

239

the tension-ridden Holocaust stories that shape and energize it. Of course, ‘Postscript 1987’, which is actually a transcript of a conversation that took place between Carrington and Warner in New York in 1987, is another chapter in Carrington’s 1988 convulsive autobiography. It is also a striking example of the continued importance of self-translation in the (re)construction of Carrington’s experiences. A compulsive means of self-re-presentation, self-translation never offers a way out of history for Carrington. Rather, it operates as a vital creative and critical strategy that keeps her ensnared at the heart of a tortured tale of remembrance and responsibility. It is for these reasons, that Carrington’s 1988 English-language translation of Down Below makes such a valuable, and necessarily disquieting, addition to an increasingly differentiated catalogue of Holocaust lives.

Notes 1 All translations are referenced by translator. Unless otherwise stated, all bracketed references to Down Below refer to Carrington’s 1988 English-language translation published in 1988. 2 For a detailed reading of Llona’s translation Down Below, Surrealism and gender politics, see Gambrell (1997: 74–98). 3 I follow Gambrell’s point that Carrington’s writings offer clear challenges to ‘the norms underwriting British aristocratic culture during the years leading up to the World War’. For a discussion of the sanguine politics of the debutante season in relation to 1930s’ politics, see Ogden (1994). See also Angela Lambert’s discussion of how, in late 1930s newspapers, adverts for debutante balls were often juxtaposed with job-seeking notices posted by Jews seeking emigration opportunities from Germany and Austria. Lambert (1989). Ogden and Lambert are cited in Gambrell (1997: 75–6).

References Adorno, T.W. (2005), ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. H.W.Pickford, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 191–204. Carrington, L. (1988), ‘Down Below’, in M. Warner (ed.), The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, New York: E. P Dutton, pp. 163–216. Eburne, J.P. (2008), Surrealism and the Art of Crime, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

240

Translating Holocaust Lives

Gambrell, A. (1997), Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, R. (1999), Nadja, London: Penguin. Hubert, R.R. (1994), Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Jakobson, R. (1959), ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in R. Bower (ed.), On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 232–9. Klee, E. Dressen, W. and Riess, V. (eds) (1988), ‘Schöne Zeiten’: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag. Lambert, A. (1989), 1939: The Last Season of Peace, London: Bloomsbury. Llona, V. (trans.) (1944), L. Carrington: Down Below, in VVV, 4. New York: 70–86. Megnen, J. (trans.) (1973), En Bas, Paris: Eric Losfeld. Müller-Hill, B. (1998), ‘Human Genetics and the Mass Murder of Jews, Gypsies and Others’, in M. Berenbaum and A.J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 103–14. Nikolaou, P. (2006) ‘Notes on Translating the Self ’, in M. Perteghella and E. Loffredo (eds), Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies, London: Continuum, pp. 19–32. Ogden, C. (1994), Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, Boston: Little Brown. Perteghella, M. and Loffredo, E. (eds) (2006), Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies, London: Continuum. Polizotti, M. (2008), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Boston: Black Widow Press. Poore, C. (2007), Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. van Raay, S. Moorhead, J. and Arcq, T. (2010), Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, Lund: Humphries. Rosenberg, D. (1998), ‘The Holocaust and Business as Usual: Congressional Source Materials’, in R. Hauptmann and S.H. Motin (eds), The Holocaust: Memories, Research, Reference, New York: Haworth Press, pp. 99–111. Suleiman, S.R. (1990), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Venuti, L. (1995), The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London and New York: Routledge. Wilson, R. (2009), ‘The Writer’s Double: Translation, Writing and Autobiography’, Romance Studies 27(3): 186–98. Zuccotti, S. (1998), ‘Surviving the Holocaust: The Situation in France’, in M. Berenbaum and A.J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Response to: Jeannette Baxter, Self-Translation and Holocaust Writing: Leonora Carrington’s Down Below Cecilia Rossi

Jeanette Baxter’s chapter on Leonora Carrington’s Down Below opens by addressing the challenges the text poses for a reading that aims to see it as a relevant text in a book that focuses on ‘Translating Holocaust lives’. Its unconventionality as a piece of Holocaust writing, as well as its hybrid nature, however, opens up a fruitful terrain for a renewed discussion of the relationship between life and literature, language and writing and the often blurred distinction between translation and other forms of writing, namely re-writing, life-writing and self-translation. Down Below is a text that defies easy genre classifications, in that it was written in English (Carrington’s mother tongue), then lost, then re-written in French via a complex process of oral account transcribed in French and then translated into English and published with illustrations by Carrington herself in 1944, a final product which underwent the process of ‘intersemiotic translation’, to use Jakobson’s term, or transmutation of the written account (twice re-written) into a visual medium (Jakobson 1959: 233). But the text ‘continued’, and its extensive revision and re-writing a few decades later culminated in its 1988 publication in English. Prompted by the very genesis of this text, its trajectory, translation and transmutation, I will now attempt to address very central questions in connection with the nature of translation, understood here as ‘interlingual’ or translation proper, following Jakobson (1959: 233), and its relationship with other forms of writing. It is not unusual to come across statements which affirm that ‘all writing is translation’. Willis Barnstone, for example, acknowledges the comforting effect such generalizing statements may have, but also highlights the risk of the notion ‘falling into mere conceptual wordplay’ (1993: 23). However, he admits that ‘each instant of speech, writing, reading, and translation involves a multitude of transformations and transportations, a multitude of receptions, shapings, and carryings over’ (Barnstone 1993: 23). When we turn to look at the creative

242

Translating Holocaust Lives

process both the original writer and the translator engage in, we are met with the same degree of complexity, that is, with a process that entails a series of translational acts. This has, simply put, to do with the nature of language and the need we have, as human beings, to articulate complex thoughts and experiences. ‘When we learn to speak,’ says Octavio Paz (Paz 1992: 152), ‘we are learning to translate’. Paz goes on to say that ‘the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows.’ In Jakobson’s terms, Paz is describing an act of intralingual translation, or rewording (Jakobson 1959: 233). But in another sense, notwithstanding Jakobson’s definition of translation, for whom the  starting point was always the verbal sign (1959: 233), there is an act of ‘carrying over’, of transportation, as we seek words to express images (visual or other) that form in our mind. This act of translation is a passage from the preverbal, the realm where the mind first forms images which have yet to find the words. Paz also believes that the creative processes writers and translators undertake are quite similar: ‘poetic translation […] is a procedure analogous with poetic creation, but it unfolds in the opposite direction’ (1992: 158). Paz is a writer to whom the translation scholar Susan Bassnett often returns. In her introduction to Translation Studies she states, following Paz, that ‘both original and translation are now viewed as equal products of the creativity of writer and translator’ (Bassnett 1988: 5). More recently, Bassnett’s focus has turned to self-translation: the term ‘self-translation’ is ‘problematic’, she says, ‘in several respects, but principally because it compels us to consider the problem of the existence of an original’ (Bassnett 2013: 15). Drawing on the work of writers who consider themselves bilingual and hence shift between languages, and whose practices include self-translation, she demonstrates that the ‘binary notion of originaltranslation appears simplistic and unhelpful’ (Bassnett 2013: 15). If this distinction is unhelpful, it is because the very status of ‘original’ writing has been called into question for decades now. In other words, writing always comes from other writing, as Borges’s narrator of ‘Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote’ demonstrated so eloquently (Borges 1998). Bassnett also acknowledges Borges’ contribution to the understanding that ‘creativity in writing practice [is] indissolubly linked to reading’. It would be useful here to turn to Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936– 1972), whose work systematically engaged in a modernist aesthetic of fragment, intertextual borrowing and citation (Mackintosh 2005), all modes of re-writing. In her groundbreaking prose poem Extracción de la piedra de locura (or ‘The

Response

243

Cure of Folly (Extracting the Stone of Madness)’), she offers what is, in my view, one of the clearest formulations of the question to which the complex relationship between life and self and the act of writing gives rise: ‘What does it mean to translate oneself into words?’ (Rossi 2010: 167). Apart from my initial remarks on writing as a translation from the pre-verbal, and writing as rewriting, the question Pizarnik poses here brings to the foreground what lies at the heart of any act of writing, in its relationship with the self that produces it: writing is an act of self-translation. Stating that all writing is self-translation is to acknowledge the particular role of language in the making (or re-making) of the self. ‘The creative self is, to a good extent, a translating self ’, asserts Paschalis Nikolaou (2008: 66) in the concluding remarks on a section which deals precisely with the ‘story-tell[ing]’ of the translation and life-writing processes embarked upon by Bassnett in her work on Alejandra Pizarnik (2002). Bassnett’s book is interesting because it demonstrates the close links between the acts of reading, writing, re-writing and also the direct links between life experiences and writing. Recent research on self-translation has shifted slightly to consider more specific practices of self-translation by bilingual writers. Rita Wilson’s ‘The Writer’s Double: Translation, Writing, and Autobiography’ (2009) links selftranslation with the more general question of the representation of self and also links the practices that bilingual writers engage in with a process which facilitates the generation of writing. Both these aspects of self-translation are relevant for the kind of new reading of Down Below proposed by Baxter in her chapter. Leonora Carrington was bilingual, a fact that allowed her to undertake the re-constructive process of her harrowing war experiences in French. Her oral account, first given in French, was then transcribed (in itself another form of translation) and then translated into English by Victor Llona (1944), not without first undergoing a process of intersemiotic translation, in that Carrington undertook the task of ‘translating’ some of her lived experience into the visual medium. The complexity of this textual process, its many layers and passages and, above all, the necessity of a temporal and spatial distance (namely four decades and a move to a different country and a different culture and language) in order to arrive at the 1988 version of Down Below speak to me of the complexity and difficulty of dealing with traumatic experiences. In the case of Carrington’s life, this is clearly foregrounded in Baxter’s chapter. The 1988 text is, more than anything, ‘the repetition of a process rather than the reproduction of a product’ as Wilson says (2009: 187). And this process is one that has translations, different

244

Translating Holocaust Lives

kinds of translations, taking place at its different constitutive stages. While Wilson refers to the Italian bilingual writer Francesca Duranti’s decision to ‘tell the story twice in two languages’ (2009: 192), I wonder if there is a choice in the re-telling, re-vising and versioning of writing, such as Holocaust writing, which plays such a central role in the individual’s process of coming to terms with the traumatic experience.

References Barnstone, W. (1993), The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory and Practice, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bassnett, S. (1988), Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge. Bassnett, S. (2013), ‘The Self-Translator as Rewriter’, in A. Cordingley (ed.), SelfTranslation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 13–25. Bassnett, S. and Pizarnik, A. (2002), Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations, Leeds: Peepal Tree. Borges, J.L. (1998) ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, trans. Anthony Bonner, in A. Kerrigan (ed.), Fictions, Paris, London and New York: Calder Publications, pp. 42–51. Jakobson, R. (1959), ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in R. Bower (ed.), On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 232–9. Mackintosh, F. (2005). http://www.princeton.edu/rbsc/fellowships/2005-06/mackin. html (accessed 10 December 2015). Nikolaou, P. (2008), ‘Turning Inward: Liaisons of Literary Translation and Life-Writing’, in P. Nikolaou and M. Kyritsi (eds), Translating Selves, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 53–70. Paz, O. (1992), ‘Translation, Literature and Letters’, trans. I. del Corral, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 152–62. Rossi, C. (2010), Selected Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik, Hove: Waterloo Press. Wilson, R. (2009), ‘The Writer’s Double: Translation, Writing and Autobiography’, Romance Studies 27(3): 186–98.

Index Aaron, F.W., 152–4, 158, 163 adaptation, ii, 4, 14, 98, 100, 104, 115, 123–5, 136 Adler, H.G., 13, 18, 147–8 Adorno, T. W., 11, 17, 154, 163, 236, 239 Agamben, G., 176, 182, 190 Alexander, Z., 4–5, 17, 26, 41, 124 Algerian war, 205 Anissimov, M., 206–7 Antelme, R., 5, 18, 32, 41–42, 154, 164 Anthropogenic, 186 anti-semitism, 108, 136, 179, 195, 207, 211, 235 Asscher-Pinkhof, C., 100, 105–6, 108–9, 117, 120–1, 126 Assmann, A., 47 Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), 2 Auschwitz, x, 11, 19, 49, 58, 64, 100, 102, 106, 110, 118, 146, 149, 154, 164–5, 173, 176, 184, 187, 190–2, 199, 207–9, 214, 229, 239 Ausländer, R., 151–2, 156–7, 160, 164, 166, 168 Austria, x, 2, 8, 69, 78, 81–5, 89–91, 129–31, 133–43, 147, 152, 239 autobiographical I, 75–6, 82–4, 87, 89 autobiographies, xi, 1, 8, 15, 73, 76, 90, 226 autobiography, 5, 7, 13, 73–4, 92–4, 132–6, 138, 143, 199, 203, 205, 207, 217, 222, 225–7, 229, 232, 234, 238–40, 243–4 Baker, M., xi, 74–5, 91 Bachmann, I., 3, 6, 17, 111, Bakhtin, M., 54, 59, 66, 70–1 Barnouw, D., 98, 100–2, 108, 117 Bassnett, S., v, ix, 5–6, 17, 45, 242–244 Battersby, E., 212–3 Baxter, J., vi, ix, 1, 7, 10, 221, 241, 243 Beckermann, R., 78, 91 Belgium, 150, 228, 230 Bellmer, H., 225

Benjamin, W., 4, 12–13, 16–17, 19–21, 26, 41–43, 157, 164, 166, 169–70 Bergen-Belsen, 105–7, 112, 121 Bhabha, H.K., 127, 137, 141 Binet, L., 204, 213, 215 Bloch, E., 129, 142 Boase-Beier, J., ii-vi, ix, 1, 4, 6–7, 10–12, 16, 18, 73, 91, 112, 118, 149, 153–6, 158–60, 164, 166–69, 176, 187–90, 196–8 Boder, D., 15, 20 Bodelschwing, F. von, 8 Bonhoeffer, D., 152–3 Bourdieu, P., 101 Borowski, T., ix, 5, 18 Bosmajian, H., 175, 177, 190 Bouhuys, M., 103–4, 118, 123, 125 Boyne, J., 61, 67, 192 Brasillach, R., 207 Breton, A., 222, 225, 227, 230, 240 Britain, 19, 42, 69, 127, 136–40, 142–3, 214, 232 Broch, H., 133, 143 Brokman, A., 103, Browning, C., 203, 213 Brunner, C., 152, 156, 164 Buber, M., 16, 18 Buchenwald, 150, 152–3, 165–6 Bukowina, 156–7 Cahun, C., 230, 234 Carrington, L., vi, 10, 18, 221–41, 243 Caruth, C., 174–5, 190 Catford, J., 93, 95 Celan, P., xiii, 13–4, 18, 111, 114, 118–9, 127, 143, 151–2, 155–61, 163–5, 168–9 Charles, J.B., 100, 118 Cheung, M., 217–9 children’s literature, vi, x, 1, 14, 171–3, 175–7, 179, 181, 184–6, 189–93, 195–98

246

Index

christianity, 182 concentration camp, vii, xii, 84–6, 98, 100, 104, 106–8, 112–13, 128, 149, 151, 158, 162–5, 172, 179–81, 183–4, 196, 203, 221, 224, 235 corpus methodologies, xi, 6, 91 Coverdale, L., 21, 166, 200, 208–9, 214 cultural mediation, 3, 5 Dachau, 113, 117, 154, 162, 164 Dahl, T.E., 177, 190 Danish, 100, 131–2, 173, 180 Darbelnet, J., 93, 95 Davies, P., iii-v, ix-x, 1, 4, 6, 8, 16–18, 23, 45–7, 143, 149, 155, 164, 195, 198 Deane-Cox, S., ii, 6–7, 17–18, 31–33, 42 de Lange, L., 109, 120 de Mendelssohn, P., 133–6, 140 de Rosnay, T., v, 9, 49–67, 69–71 de Winter, L., 116, 118, 124–5 defamiliarization, 11 degenerate artist, 221, 225, 228 d’Hondt, P., 111 Denmark, 131, 171, 173, 183 Desnos, R., 230 displaced person, 14 domestication, 145 Dove, R., 130–35, 139–43, 146–7 Durlacher, J., 116, 118, 124–5 Dutch, x, xiii, 98–100, 102–111, 113–16, 118–19, 122–6, 149, 186, 205, 232 Eburne, J., 224–5, 228, 230, 233–6, 239 Ehrenburg, I., 28 Eichmann Trial, 105 Ekelöf, G., 151 emigrant, v, xi, 1–2, 8, 13, 73, 75, 88, 90, 93 emigration, 83, 89–90, 137, 140, 239 Englishness, 50 Ernst, M., 221–2, 224–5, 227–8, 232, 237 equivalence, 5, 15, 23, 45, 93, 202, 210 ethic, v, 1, 4, 6, 11, 13–14, 16, 19–20, 23–7, 29–32, 34–42, 45–7, 50, 53, 118, 122, 134, 164, 171, 174, 176, 184–188, 192–3, 195–6, 198, 233 Epstein, B.J., vi, ix, 7, 195–6, 198 euthanasia, 153, 223 exile, vi, x, 2, 13, 127–31, 133, 135–48, 153, 199, 227, 229–32

Feather, J., 53, 67 Felman, S., 24, 31–2, 42, 153–4, 164–5, 174–5, 177, 185, 190 Felstiner, J., 4, 18, 152, 159, 162, 164, 169 Feuchtwanger, L., 129–30, 143, 145 fiction, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 15–16, 19–20, 50–1, 58, 61, 64–5, 67, 69, 73, 77–8, 94, 100, 106, 109, 126, 139–40, 161, 165–6, 171, 173–4, 177, 180, 187–8, 199–200, 203–9, 211–15, 217, 225, 244 fidelity, 5–6, 16, 23, 27, 34, 45, 53, 56, 146, 225 Filkins, P., 13, 146–8 Flemish, xiii, 111, 119 Flossenbürg, 150 Fowler, R., 156, 164 Foreignization 11 Foster, E., 13, 54–5, 63, 74, 76, 79–84, 87, 92 France, x, xiii, 9, 19, 30, 42, 49, 52–4, 61, 63, 67, 69, 71, 118, 123, 151, 199, 204, 206, 208, 211–12, 214, 221, 228–31, 240, 244 Franklin, R., 211, 214 Frenchness, 56, 58 Fretheim, T., 172, 175, 177, 180–3, 187–191 Frank, A., v, xiii, 2–3, 5, 14, 19, 21, 28, 42, 73, 94, 97–106, 108–12, 115–26, 186, 189–90, 205 Fried, E., 127, 143, 151 Gerhardt, I., xiii, 111–2, 118–9, 126 Germany, 8, 18, 67, 69, 81, 85, 105, 107, 114, 117, 119, 129, 131–2, 134, 141, 143, 150–1, 164–5, 173, 179–80, 239 ghetto, 128, 151–4, 158, 163 Gibson, G.D., 74, 92 Gies, M., 102 Gille, E., vi, 12, 199–200, 205, 207–12, 214, 217 Glowacka, D., 4, 13, 16–17, 19, 25, 42 Goldhagen, D. J., 29, 42 Goldman, J.-J., 52–3 Goodrich, F., xiii, 98, 101–2, 104, 106, 118–9, 121–5 Gollancz, V., 131–3 Grossman, V., 28 Guggenheim, P., 225, 227, 237 Guttman, K.., 99

Index Habermas, J., 46–7 Hackett, A., xiii, 98, 101–2, 104, 106, 118–9, 121–5 Hallyday, J., 52 Hamburger, M., xiii, 114, 119, 157–8, 162–4, 168–9 Hammel, A., iii-vi, ix-x, 1, 4, 7, 13, 19, 127–8, 136, 143, 145–6 Harss, M., 200, 208, 212, 214 Hasag-Leipzig camp, 152–3 Hassidic, 28 Hatim, B., 6, 19 Haug, F., 76, 79, 81–2, 90–2 Heiser, D., 162–4 Hermans, T., v, x, 4, 73, 92, 123, 162, 165, 202–3, 214 Herzberg, A., 100, 108, 119, 121 Higgins, L., 212, 214 Hilberg, R., 172–3, 190 Hillesum, E.,100, 119 Himmler, K., 9, 19 Himmler, H., 9 Hirsch, L., 110, 116, 119, Hirsch, M., 151, 165, 176, 181, 186, 190–1, 193, 197–8 Holmes, J., xiii, 45, 47, 113–5, 118–9, 121, 169 homosexual, 8, 113, 152, 163, 172 Hooley, R., 111–2, 119 Hoornik, E., xiii, 113–5, 117–20, 126 Hungarian, 8, 149, 162, 167, 178, 237 Humbert, F., 204, 214–5 immigrant, 89, 97, 199, 206, 229 immigration, 89 intertextuality, 19, 66, 70–1 invisibility, 21, 108, 142, 146, 148, 170, 223, 240 invisible, 37, 142 Iser, W., 5, 11, 19, 81–2, 154, 162–5, 183–4 Islam, 182 Jackson, I., 173, 189, 181 Japan, 97, 100–1, 106, 120, 183, 192 Jew(ish), 2, 4, 8–9, 19, 21, 28–30, 33, 42, 49–50, 52–54, 59–60, 64, 67, 79, 84–5, 91, 98–100, 102–6, 108–14, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127, 133, 136, 139, 143, 149, 151–2, 159, 162, 164–5, 169, 171–4, 178–80, 182, 184–7, 189–90, 199,

247

203–8, 211, 213, 215, 229, 232, 236–7, 239–40 Jones, F. R., vi, x, 6–7, 13, 19, 41–2, 167, 169–70 Jones, T., 153, 161, 165, Judaism, 182 Kästner, E., 105–6, 120 Kafka, F., 133 Karmel, H., 152, 165 Karmel, I., 152, 165 Kaurin, M., 172, 175, 177, 181, 183–9, 191 Kershaw, A., vi, x, 1, 4, 6–7, 12, 19, 34, 42, 199, 204, 206–8, 211, 214–5, 217–9 Kertzer, A., 175–6, 182, 186, 191 Kesselman, W., 104, 119, 123 Khurbn, 7 Kidd, K., 175–7, 191 Kindertransport, 2 Kirsten, W., v, x, 93, 150, 152–3, 162–3, 165 Klüger, R., 5, 14 Kokkola, L., 175–6, 186, 188–9, 191, 196, 198 Korean, 100 Krabbé, J., 103 Kuhiwczak, P.,4, 19 Kumakura, Y., 106, 120 Kunz, L., 113–5, 120 LaCapra, D., 24, 42, 61, 67, 159, 165 Langer, L., 8, 12, 19, 103, 120, 155, 161, 165 Laub, D., 24, 31–2, 42, 87, 157, 164–5, 174–5, 177, 185, 190 Lefevere, A., 5, 17 Lersbryggen Mørk, K., vi, x, 1, 9, 14, 171, 195 Leveen, L., 63, 67 Levi, P., 5, 14, 17, 19, 41, 146, 148, 174, 182, 192, 205 Lévy, I.J., 162–3, 165 Levinas, E., 16, 19, 24, 26, 42 Liefhebber, P., 103, 120 Liepman, R., 108 life writing, 73, 78, 90, 92, 223, 225, 231, 241, 243–4 Lindon, J., 28 Llona, V., 222–3, 226–7, 229–30, 232–3, 236, 239–40, 243 Loffredo, E., 10–11, 20, 222–3, 226, 240 loyalty, 14, 23, 26, 37, 45, 93, 95

248

Index

Luijters, G., xiii, 109–10, 116, 120, 126 Lunde, M., 177, 192 Mabille, P., 222, Malmkjær, K., v, x, 6, 12, 19, 93 Manheim, R., 107, 120 Martinson, H., 151 Mason, I., 6, 19 Massotty, S., 124 Megnen, J., 222–3, 226, 240 Melkman, J., 102–3, 120 memory, 3, 5, 9, 18, 20, 42, 47, 50–1, 53, 62–4, 67, 79, 82, 92–4, 120, 122, 165–6, 172, 174, 181–3, 186, 189–90, 193, 203, 211–12, 225 memories, vi, 30, 62, 78, 82, 93, 109, 180–1, 184, 199, 206, 212, 214, 217, 225, 240 Michaux, A., 50–65, 67 Michelet, M., 172, 189, 192 migrant, 8, 231 migration, 4, 18 Minco, M., 100, 106–9, 120–1, 125–6 mind-style, 16, 156–61, 168 Mok, M., xiii, 112–13, 120, 126 Mooyaart-Doubleday, B., 14, 19, 98, 121, 123–4 Müller, M., 108, 120–1 Muir, E.+W., 132–3, 135, 139, 143, 146 Muller, A., 61, 64–7, 71 multilingualism, 15–16, 20, 70, 143, 166 narratives, 9, 13, 18, 29, 31, 32, 40, 50–1, 53, 60–3, 65, 69–71, 73–84, 86–92, 94, 105, 140, 165–6, 171, 175–7, 181, 185, 188, 190, 192–3, 204, 206, 211, 214, 218, 221, 223–5, 228, 230, 233–4, 236 narrativity, 74 Némirovsky, I., vi, x, 12, 19, 42, 53, 199–200, 205–8, 211–15, 217 Netherlands, The, 2, 97–100, 102–111, 113–16, 123, 126 Neumann, R., 128, 130–3, 135–7, 139–43, 145–7, 159, 165 Niemeyer, W., 105–6, 116, 120–1 North Korea, 100 Norway, 14, 171–4, 180, 184, 191 Norwegian, vi, x, 9, 171–3, 175, 177–81, 184–7, 189, 195–7

Oatley, K., 11, 20, 161, 165 Oberski, J., 107–9, 117, 119–21, 125–6 Ockhuysen, R., 103, 121 Oranje, H., 103, 121 O’Sullivan, C., 73, 92, 218–9 Owings, A., 15, 20 Palestine, 105 paratext, v, viii, 35–6, 58, 61, 64, 73, 76, 80–2, 88–91, 93, 124, 145, 206–8, 210–11, 227 Perec, G., 51, 62, 67, 193 Perteghella, M., 10–11, 20, 222–3, 226, 240 Pilinszky, J., 8 poetry, ii, vi, ix, x, xi, xiii, 1, 3, 7–8, 10–11, 13–15, 18–20, 99, 108–13, 116, 126, 149–56, 158–70 Poland, 18, 30, 52, 60, 150, 213 Polish, 6, 15, 52, 54–5, 64, 71, 149–50, 152, 162–3 Porrajmos, 7 post-Holocaust, 16, 116, 151–2, 159, 161, 181, 236 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 174, 181 Presser, J., 99–100, 121 Pressler, M., 108, 116–7, 120–2 Prose, F., 104, 121 Proust, M., 167 Pym, A., 6, 20, 25–7, 42 Radnóti, M., 167–8, 170 eception, 1, 3–6, 14, 18–9, 34, 42, 61, 73, 76, 89, 92, 99–100, 104, 125, 205, 207–8, 210–11, 214, 241 refugee, x, 1–2, 4–5, 8, 52, 83, 89, 107–8, 127–8, 130, 135, 137, 139, 143–4, 173, 228–9 religion, 28, 45, 156, 179, 182 resistance, 52, 100, 104, 110, 113, 152–3, 165, 168, 172, 178, 184–5, 187, 197, 224, 230, 233, 235, 238 retranslation, ii, 33, 82 Rich, A., 154, 161, 166 Rieder, I., 74, 76, 79–80, 82–3, 87–9, 92 Rodway, S., 33, 42 Romani, 7–8, 152 Romania, 151 Romanian, 151–2 Rood, C., 109, 121

Index

249

Rosen, A., 7, 14–6, 20, 67, 127–8, 143, 149, 151, 166, 182, 188, 191–2, 232, 240 Rossi, C., vi, xi, 10, 241, 243–4 Rousso, H., 212,215 Rundle, C., 218–9 Russia, 150, Russian, 28, 199, 206

128, 147, 154, 159–60, 164–5, 169, 171, 173–4, 176, 180–2, 184–5, 187, 197, 205, 209 Sutzkever, A., 153, 158, 164 Sweden, 83, 173, 179, 184, 187 Swedish, x, 97–8, 151, 178–9, 198 Szlengel, W., 152–3

Sachnowitz, H., 184, 192, Sachs, N., 111, 151, 153, 155–6, 159, 163–6 Sagal, B., 56 Salber Phillips, M., 200, 212, Saldanha, G., vi, xi, 3, 6, 19–20, 91, 217 Schiff, H., 15, 20, 155, 162–3, 166 Schleiermacher, F., 10–11, 20 Schroth, S., 3–4, 21, 28, 42 Schütz, A., 28, 42, 98, 122, Searls, D., 109, 122 Sebald, W.G., ix, 21, 147 Seeman, A., 150, 152–3, 162–3, 165 self-translation, vi, 1, 10, 136, 146, 221–5, 227–8, 230–1, 233–4, 237–9, 241–4 Semino, E., 156, 166 Semprun, J., 13, 21, 150, 166 Shoah, ix, x, xi, 7, 17, 19, 42, 57–8, 143 Simmel, G., 201 Sinti, 109, 120, 172 Skamander movement, 152 Skjønsberg, K., 177–9, 192 Skyggebjerg, A.K., 175, 192 Sobibor, 106 Sobranet, A., 51–55, 61, 65, 67 Sonderkommando, 182 Somers, M.R., 74, 92 Soviet, 28, 172 Spain, 85–6, 150, 221, 223–4, 231, 233, 235 Spanish, 97, 133, 221, 233 Spiel, H., 128, 133–46 Steiner, G., 4, 21, 26, 42 Strickhausen, W., 134, 136, 138–9, 144 Sommerfelt. A., 172, 175, 177–81, 184–5, 187–8, 191, 193 style, xi, 14, 16, 18–21, 28, 33, 73, 83, 92, 99, 101, 107, 132, 136, 145, 147, 150, 154, 156, 159, 164–5, 168, 188, 195, 212, 215 stylistic, ix, xi, 6, 11, 12, 15, 18–20, 91, 150, 155, 157, 166, 187, 195, 198 Survivor, 3, 5–6, 14–15, 19–20, 28, 31–2, 35, 45, 63–4, 99, 104, 108, 110, 113–6,

Taberner, S., 162–4 Taylor, V., 99, 107, 122, 142, 204, 215 testimony, ix, 1, 4–5, 10, 15–18, 20–1, 23–33, 35–40, 42, 45–7, 61, 64–7, 70–1, 124, 154, 162–6, 174–5, 182–4, 186, 188, 190, 192–3, 197, 203–5, 209, 214, 217 testimonies, 3–6, 8, 18, 20, 25–30, 33–5, 37–41, 47, 64, 90, 126, 171, 184, 188, 198 Theresienstadt, Terezín, 147, 173, 230 Törne, V., von, 9, 21 Toury, G., 93, 95 translation shifts, 6 translation strategies, 26, 29, 31, 147 translator’s role, 27, 34, 39 translator’s voice, 31, 92, 163, 165, 202, 214 trauma, x, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 26–7, 32, 38–9, 42, 51–3, 64, 67, 99–100, 102, 106, 109, 112–6, 139, 147, 157, 159–61, 165–6, 171, 174–6, 181–4, 187, 189–93, 195, 198, 212, 223–4, 229–30, 243–4 Tribunella, E.L., 176, 193 Ukraine, 151 United States (of America), 49, 52, 55, 69, 92, 98, 107, 129, 155, 186, 210, 211–2 USSR, 30 van de Kamp, P., xiii, 111–2, 119 van der Stroom, G., 108, 117 van Galen Last, D., 107, 119 van Marle, H., 114 van Messel, S., pseudonym of Jaap Meijer, 112–3, 126 van Nieuwkerk, 109 van Pels, P., 109 Venuti, L., 11, 21, 101, 122, 145, 148, 155, 166, 168, 170, 223, 240 Verdet, A., 150, 152, 166 Vinay, J.-P., 93, 95 visible, 3–4, 10, 36–7, 41, 75, 147, 187, 234

250

Index

visibility, 8, 81, 89, 126, 147 voice, 4, 9, 14–6, 24, 26, 31, 33, 34, 38, 41, 55, 64, 70, 73, 92, 97, 102, 109–10, 158, 162, 163, 165, 169, 171, 179, 185–7, 189, 191–2, 202, 209, 214, 223, 225–6, 230–1, 238 voices, vi, 9, 14–5, 20, 23, 32, 41–2, 45, 51, 99–100, 109, 116, 125–6, 149, 162, 171, 185, 189, 195, 226 Vrijman, J., 97–8, 102, 122 Vice, S., v, xi, 1, 4, 7, 9, 21, 49, 69, 71, 105, 122, 154, 166 Warner, M., 18, 49, 222, 225–6, 233, 239 Weiss, P., 127, 143, 155, 166 Wells, H.G., 139 Westerbork, 100, 105–106, 113 Westerling, A., 98, 102, 122–3 Weizsäcker, H., von, 76, 81 Wiener Library, 5, 7 Wiesel, E., ix, 3, 5, 21, 28, 33, 42–3, 174, 205

Wiesel, M., 33, 43 Wijnberg, C., 110, 116, 122 Wilson, R., 100, 122, 222, 231, 234, 240, 243–4 Winters, M., iii-v, xi, 1, 6, 13, 21, 73, 92–5 witness, v, 3, 5–6, 8, 10–11, 14, 16–8, 20, 23, 25–7, 29–34, 37–39, 41–42, 46–47, 49–53, 61–3, 67, 69, 146–7, 151, 153, 163–6, 171–2, 174–5, 177, 182–3, 185, 187–8, 190, 193, 195, 197, 203, 209, 221, 223, 229 Wolf, J., 63, 67 Wolf, M., v, xii, 3, 6, 9, 21, 34, 43, 69 Wright, C., vi, xii, 13, 145 Yiddish, 28, 33, 149, 151–3, 158, 163 Žižek, J., 154, 166 Zusak, M., 184, 193 Zweig, S., 131, 144