Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.035 June 21, 1994 1) Satan in Goray (Seth Wolitz) 2) Yiddish and Bavarian (Adam Albright) 3) Yiddish/German and dialects (Harold M. Orbach) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Jun 20 18:23:08 1994 From: slwolitz@uts.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Satan in Goray K. Hellerstein appauds the translation of Satan in Goray while noting my own misgivings. She is correct. I too admire the swift flowing translation but the translator left out in almost every sentence one or two adjectives. He produced a wonderful text for American ears but this is exactly the problem. The Bashevis Singer texts are translated this way as well and so we think we have a translation from the Yiddish when we have an adaptation. Singer does not write in that swift Hemingwayesque style but rather he shapes and carves and caresses his beautifully arched sentences and especially those of his early works published in Poland. Satan in Goray is indeed one of his stylistic tour de forces and perhaps one of the finest pieces of stylistic performances in Yiddish literature. The translator did a valiant effort for his time but as I explained in my study of it some years ago, a lot was lost and it wasn't just nuance, it was rhythm, vocabulary and atmosphere and tone. It is probably his finest novella or novel and represents a writer in all his powers as a literary creator. The sacrifices Bashevis permitted, allowed and even encouraged for his name and fame in America will mar a special chapter in his biography on his esthetic integrity and in which many an American critic who never read him in the Yiddish pontificated. Ms. Hellerstein, who is one of our premiere poets of our generation and a master translator from the Yiddish is acting too reticent on this topic. Those of us who attended the London Conference on Bashevis were treated to papers dealing with the deletions and mistranslations which abound in the Bashevis canon in English. If I helped to open this fact, so much the better but it was generally agreed that Irving Saposnik, head of the Hillel Foundation at Madison today, who was the first in print to point out how many paragraphs and chapters were left out of Singer novels in translation and therefore falsifying their meaning in English! And not Singer alone! Our translators function like Yiddish stage managers who know best how to handle Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Hamlet, ibergezetst und farbesert! How much of Sholem Aleykhem, Rabon, Perets and Mendele have gone through the same treatment! At the moment, the best translations of our writers are in Russian, Polish and French! There is a good Italian Tevye and the Spanish rises at times to real folkloric sensibility. The German Bergelson from the twenties is not bad either but the nearest Bergelson in english that grazes the text is the unfinished effort of Neugroschl. Of course if you accept Singer's wishes and accept the last Englishing of his texts as the definitive edition then you are safe, but I do not. I see it as a self-serving ploy by a brilliant writer who saw the fate of Yiddish and chose to hop onto a living literature than remain a monument in the shade. And Khayim Grade was jealous as Cynthia Ozick fully understood for Grade called me up some years before he died and ordered me to translate him for he wanted an American audience too. When I told him I was translating at the time Bergelson, He screamed into the phone, "Bergelson is died. I am Grade, my texts are better. Translate me!" I felt his pain and his pathos and his pride. He wanted to live in English too! But Singer lives in english having shorn his peyes, let us not forget this point. Were Ms. Hellerstein to go back and lend her time and blessed skills of lyric translation to Satan in Goray we might yet taste a richer and more authentic text in english and truly savour the Bashevis as a Yiddish Singer. Seth Wolitz 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Jun 20 21:51:06 1994 From: aca1@cornell.edu Subject: Yiddish and Bavarian It is not with small amusement that I have been reading these recent postings on Bavarian and Yiddish. the week after I graduated from high school, I headed off to Germany as an exchange student, staying in the tiny mountain town of Siegsdorf (near Chiemsee, Salzburg, etc), wondering if my German would be adequate to get me through day-to-day life. Everything was fine until I stepped off the train in Traunstein, when suddenly NOBODY was speaking German and my stilted radio-german brought everything from smiles to my host-parents' faces to scowls from elderly neighbors. Finally on day three i got over those inhibitions i'd been brought up on ("never speak german to polish relatives, never speak yiddish to german ones") and switched over to yiddish-mode. voila! days four and five spent fine-tuning things, switching 'ned' for 'nit' and 'oa' for 'ey' and day six learning to say 'orchkatzlschwuoch' and 'pfiadi' and i was speaking bavarian like those 30-day cassette course radio offers! no funny vowel confusions like non-bavarians have, either ('oans, zwo, _droa_...') :) actually, i found that my knowledge of yiddish was always a point of interest to people, either because it made me sound less american ('he, da ami d'boarisch kann!') or from a genuine curiosity about jewish culture (which they had to learn about in religion class but often had very little real exposure to) in stark contrast to previous comments about germans not considering yiddish a real language, actually i found that they thought of me as a somewhat different breed of american -- one that spoke a cultural language and had an interest in heritage, contrary to their common conception of the bloede amis. and two side-notes: in the process, i also inadvertantly managed to teach my host family a good number of hebrew and slavic words... :) and being able to sound bavarian to the metropolitan muenchners came in handy too, frequently getting me out of scrapes with train officials and dianetics guys -- but that's another story :) aber genig shoyn, adam albright 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 21 09:19:13 1994 From: HLORBACH@KSUVM Subject: Yiddish/German and dialects The discussion about the relation of Yiddish to Germanic languages and dialects as well as Yiddish dialects leads me to a few observations and questions. About a year ago, a number of postings concerned Mike Meyers' Saturday Night Live "Coffee Talk" skit and various Yiddish expressions he used in his persona. Imagine my "shock" to hear him on Jay Leno's Tonight show about a month ago, when it was in New York, state that he was not Jewish, but a WASP from the Ontario hinterland who knew no Yiddish before he came to New York. I believe he credited Queens for his exposure. Now, my question to the linguists is: What kind of Yiddish does he speak? Is he a litvak, a galitsianer or what? Reruns should provide suitable empirical data. The various discussions of the relation of Yiddish to hochdeutsch, to plattdeutsch, to Bavarian... remind me of my first experience in Switzerland in 1963. Arriving in Zurich from Milan for an overnight stay before going on to Prague, I needed a hotel room. The efficient system at the old Railroad Station found me one and I needed a taxi to get me there. I hailed one and gave instructions to the driver, a man c.40-50. We got into a conversation, me with my tsebrokene Yiddish base for German which I had never studied but "picked up" from my mother-in- law and winging it. I found I had no trouble understanding him, nor public conversation on the street near my hotel, and noted that his rhythm reminded me of the sing-song of Norwegian Americans that I had become familiar with in grad school in Minneapolis. But what amazed me was his telling me -- in response to my apology for my poor German -- that I spoke a fine hochdeutsch! Later, in Warsaw, I spoke with a cousin in the same way, but she was well aware of my tsebrokene Yiddish. Yet on the street, with older Poles whom I came into contact with, and who spoke no English or French, the conversation was in "German" -- they having picked it up during the war. They never thought I was speaking mostly Yiddish, though any real German speaker would have known it. In 1988, in Berne (and Zermatt) I found local Schweizerdeutsch basically incomprehensible -- including that of a close friend I had known for 18 years. We always spoke English, but now he was introducing me to an audience before a lecture and I couldn't understand him at all! It was both the accent and the rhthym. Yet I had no trouble when he spoke in "German" in other places. And in Munich where I was a visiting professor (with my lectures in English) when students spoke German I had much difficulty following those with Bavarian dialects. And attending a musical that used Bavarian was impossible except for the one actor who had trained nationally and lost her local accent. Reading the Bavarian text was easier, but the sounds were far from anything I was used to. Thus, I am puzzled when some postings suggest that Yiddish shares sounds and other features with hochdeutsch while others point to its sharing with Bavarian and other dialects that are not hochdeutsch. Just where geographically speaking does hochdeutsch refer to? I understand that it refers to the "highlands" as opposed to the "lowlands" or "nederlands" but which "highlands?" Why did my Nurenberg/Berlin-dwelling mother-in- law refer to the language spoken at the local Swiss bakery near my old home in Manhattan, NY, years ago as "plattdeustch?" The owners were from German-speaking Switzerland. Harold L. Orbach ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.035 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu