Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.013 June 5, 1997 1) Mendele - Sholom Aleichem - Translation (Norman Zide) 2) Function of Mendele (Morris Feller) 3) Asheri and Fridhandler (Martha Krow-Lucal) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 23:18:39 -0500 (CDT) From: Norman Zide Subject: Mendele - Sholom Aleichem - Translation [In response to _Serebriani and Menakhem Mendl_, 7.011] Mechl Asheri may be right in thinking he's in the wrong pew. And his estimate (one in fifty) of those of us - I'm not one of them - in Mendele whose Yiddish is fluent and who are well-read in Yiddish literary history is probably not far off the mark. I am grateful for the remarks and examples of Sholom Aleichem's care in (in this case) lexical selection in one of the Ayzenban stories. Not that this surprises me. But the translation problem -here,calling an esroyg an esroyg - is a common and unavoidable one. How DO you translate a word (and a context) whose referent is unknown to those reading the translation. Do you simply call an esroyg an esroyg - without somewhere and somehow defining it (in a glossary ? footnote ? in 'the body of the text' ?) This seems possible sometimes in translations of poems where 'it really doesn't matter what the word means'. If Asheri is saying that one can't read Sholom Aleichem (or Pindar or Pushkin, etc) in anything but the original language, he's not the first or hundredth to say that. And as far as translation problems go (see, for instance, the recent comments on Golda Werman's Bergelson translations) that is only the tip of the esroyg. For those who don't need translations, problems of translation can be sidelined. A Fulbright scholar from India (excellent spoken and written English , a Ph.D.in English literature from a British university) was translating some American short stories into Hindi, and asked me what 'persimmon' meant. I gave her a persimmon. She said we have no persimmons - no word for persimmon - in India. Would 'mango' do ? Well, a mango is not a persimmon. But .. And the associations of 'esroyg' are more complicated than those for 'mango' or 'persimmon'. About 'Yiddish faddists' could he tell us more precisely what was meant. Mendele has taken up recently what Leo Rosten made of Yiddish, and - somewhere - Lenny Bruce and Yiddish (the 'Putz and Klutz School of Yiddishkeit'). There may even be a few Mendelniks who conflate Sholom Aleichem with Jackie Mason. What fads do you - does he - reprobate in us ? Norman (Neyekh) Zide 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 22:28:45 -1000 From: Morris Feller Subject: Function of Mendele I feel that I must respond to Michl Asheri's comments in Vol. 7.011. According to his definition, I guess I am one of those "Yiddish faddists" he refers to. Of course, we faddists must constitute by far the largest group on Mendele, and we are grateful for the posts of such as Louis Fridhandler, Zellig Bach, and the like. The hope is that by reading their posts we may rise above the level of faddist. An elitist list such as Michl Asheri wants would probably have only a handful of subscribers - hardly enough to maintain a list. During the several years that I have been on Mendele, I have introduced nearly a dozen others to the list. I told them that they would have access to information which could not be found in books or journals. In almost every case I was profoundly thanked for having introduced them to Mendele. As a matter of fact, I save each volume number on my hard disk, and I have also created an index composed of the tables of contents which head up the various issues. I hope that under the new "management" Mendele will continue to follow on the course which Noyekh Miller has so successfully set. Morrie Feller Phoenix 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 17:10:12 -0400 (EDT) From: Kromobile@aol.com Subject: Asheri and Fridhandler [In response to _Serebriani and Menakhem Mendl_, 7.011] Is yet another "either/or" really necessary: Mendele is *either* "to enlighten people whose only knowledge of Yiddish and consequently Yiddish writers is academic" (whatever that means) *or* for "Jews whose Yiddish is already there and who have read Sholom Aleichem mit di klayne pintelech"? It was my understanding that Mendele was for people interested in Yiddish and Yiddish culture, regardless of their principal language. Was that incorrect? Who is in the "wrong place" here? How offensive to be dismissed as a "faddist" because one does not read Yiddish well or speak Yiddish fluently. Who is Asheri to classify people in this way? Has he ever read any literature in translation? Perhaps not... But if so, is he not a "faddist"? Does he feel he should be prohibited absolutely from commenting on or thinking about the works of Kenzaburo Oe or Eca de Queiroz because he is unable to read them in the original? As far as Sholem Aleichem's careful construction of the Menakhem-Mendl letters: I am grateful to Louis Fridhandler for making information about the Serebriani article accessible. The thrust of the article is of course recognizable to any scholar of nineteenth-century European literature and history of criticism; there was a long-lived critical tendency to see writers who utilized colloquial language in their works as walking local-color tape recorders who dashed off their fiction effortlessly and unthinkingly, af eyn fus. (It was only in the 1960s, for example, that the great Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos [1843-1920] stopped being classified virtually exclusively in that fashion.) Sholem Aleichem is certainly in this way a typical nineteenth-century European writer famous for his colloquial artistry, treated typically by early twentieth-century critics, and now (finally, again typically) being looked at with a new eye and a new critical slant by another generation. It is not necessary to have read Sholem Aleichem in the original to know this. I agree that careful textual analysis (such as his point about the esrogim being infelicitously translated) is necessary for a good translation. But the fact that not all translations are as good as they might be does not mean (to me) that nothing should ever be translated. Perhaps Asheri believes that Sholem Aleichem's stories should only be accessible to those who "have read Sholom Aleichem mit di klayne pintelech." As a lover of Yiddish culture and a scholar, translator and teacher of Spanish literature (in the original and in translation), I could not disagree more. And such an arrogant, condescending attitude is unlikely to "enlighten" anyone about anything. Martha Krow-Lucal Sunnyvale ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.013