Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 164 February 4, 1992 1) By way of introduction (Noyekh Miller) 2) A glossary (Yude-Leyb Proger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 04 Feb 92 From: nmiller@trincc Subject: A glossary When Yude-Leyb Proger took temporary leave of us early last summer to visit Oxford, most of us expected that he would spend his time among the dreaming spires doing just that. A nekhtiker tog! One sees at last the error of projecting one's own slothful ways onto one's betters. At any rate, nos. 164 through 166 will contain a particu- larly useful and welcome contribution. I'll go further: it's a _wonderful_ contribution and Mendele is proud to present it. A riziger yasher koyekh aykh, Yude-Leyb, fun unz alle. Noyekh 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 04 Feb 92 16:31:11 IST From: RHLE302@HAIFAUVM.BITNET Subject: A glossary During the past summer I translated Mikhl Radzinski's _Di megile fun mayn lebn_. M.R. (1909-1989), from Semyatitsh near Bialystok (Y. Byalistok, virtual NEY territory?), dictated his memoirs to the journalist and critic Shimen Kants (1914-1990), born in Cracow (Y. Kroke, western Galicia = CY?) and lived in Warsaw (Y. Varshe) and elsewhere. Kants took dictation manually and later typed his notes. I worked from a typescript, encountering some confusing elements in terms of spelling and a few other matters -- it was hard to know whether certain forms and expressions originated with M.R. or with S.K. My approach to the translation is indicated in the following preface: A Word on the Translation and the Notes "Ideally a good translation does not read like a translation. Traces of the translated language may mar the idiomaticity of the finished work, but there are also cases when the translator might wish to keep some flavor of the original. To do so without offending the syntax or stylistic options of the target language is something of an art. Chaucer and others have shown that a sprinkling of untranslated words can flavor an entire text; a sampling of non-native syntax may have a similar effect. In the present translation, I am decidedly not interested in communicating the flavor of Yiddish syntax a la Leo Rosten, a strategy which mocks the speaker. I try to imitate the mood of the original in an informal English which is analagous in as many ways as possible to the author's Yiddish. However, I do not want the reader to forget that the original text is rooted in a mental climate different from his own. By giving key terms and names in romanized Yiddish in parentheses (which I use _only_ for this purpose) immediately following the translation gives some of the sense or feel of the world in which the text originated. It also enables the reader to judge and thus accept or reject the English rendition (which is sometimes very approximate). At the risk of cluttering the page, I romanize and gloss in the following fashion: beautiful character (_sheyne mides_); good deeds (_maysim toyvim_); the old home (_di alte heym_). When the original Yiddish expression is long I often place it in a footnote. Romanizations are given selectively, but most of them can also be found in the _Glossary_ at the end. I also give footnotes for matters that cannot be explained adequately in a gloss __ identifications of persons, organizations, places, events. Hopefully these may help the reader to enter the world of these memoirs more fully. Footnotes are also where I indicate puzzles, problems in the manuscript, and where I ask for help from others in matters I have not been able to explain." Working on this translation further convinced me of the necessity for a standard romanization of Yiddish, which is what SYR is. I give the _Glossary_ below. I would appreciate any corrections and improvements in either the transcription or the concise gloss. A part of this _Glossary_ is lifted out of my notes for _A Student's Dictionary of the Hebrew-Aramaic Component in Yiddish_. Many of the words are both transcribed and glossed in Uriel Weinreich's important dictionary, _Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary_, but no existing dictionary can help beginners with all the words they are likely to meet in a Yiddish text. Someday dictionaries like the _Glossary_ offered here will be on line like existing spelling-check programs and _Mendele_ authors will be able to transcribe Yiddish without any difficulties. Moreover, machine-translation will enable us to translate from English to Yiddish faster and better. This is known as futuristics, what we call in Yiddish _meshiekhs-tsaytn_. Yude-Leyb Proger (Continued on Vol 1.165 and 166) ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.164