Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.100 September 5, 1994 1) Introduction (Sorkeh Traister Moskovitz) 2) YIVO's Move to 57th Street (Zachary Baker) 3) Macaronic translation (Larry Rosenwald) 4) The Secret Life of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn (Eynekh Sapoznik) 5) Cagney's Yiddish (Eynekh Sapoznik) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 1994 15:47:28 +0800 (PST) From: hcedu012@huey.csun.edu Subject: Introduction Es freyt mir zeyer zich onshliessn in der internatzionaler chevra Mendele,liebhober foun Yiddish. Mein tateh alevasholem, is geven yorn lang a principal un lehrer in Arbeiter ring Shuln in springfield Mass. un in Los Angeles. Deriber nootz ich dem nomen Traister als mettle-nomen, l'koved zein ondek. I am a psychologist teaching at Cal. State U.,Northridge,(yes among earthquake ruins, in makeshift bungalows). I also have a clinical practice in which I specialize in helping Holocaust survivors. As an outgowth of my book on Child Survivors (Shocken,1983) I co-founded rap-groups for people who were children during the Holocaust and such groups have become an international movement. I write poetry and thanks to a wonderful workshop with Prof. Avram Nowerstern last December,sponsored by the National Yiddish Book Center, poems have begun to arrive in mame-loshn.. The struggle for primacy between Hebrew and Yiddish as seen through the eyes of Yiddish poets has begun to fascinate me and I have written a paper on it. Sorkeh Traister Moskovitz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Sep 94 19:54:18 PDT From: BM.YIB@RLG.Stanford.EDU Subject: YIVO's Move to 57th Street A mailing is going out this week, containing the following information: "YIVO Institute for Jewish Research will relocate temporarily to 555 West 57th Street (11th Avenue), 11th Floor, New York, NY 10019, as of September 12, 1994. Our phone numbers will remain the same: 212-535-6700; fax 212-734-1062. Please call ahead for our fall hours." Regarding that last sentence, I would like to make clear that the YIVO Library and Archives move will be continuing throughout the months of September and October, and that the reading room will most likely not reopen until the end of October or early November. When we are not monitoring the actual transfer of books and documents from one site to another, Library and Archives staff will still be working at the Fifth Avenue building. (Administrative and academic offices are moving on September 12th.) The reading rooms remain closed, however, and services to the public (telephone reference, interlibrary loans) will resume in November. Zachary Baker, YIVO Library 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 04 Sep 1994 13:21:09 -0500 (EST) From: LROSENWALD@WELLESLEY.EDU Subject: Macaronic translation Just a theoretical footnote to an interesting and rich practical discussion - as someone who writes about translation theory I think the issue of how to translate a multilingual text poses very acute theoretical problems as well as practical ones. The reason is that such a text puts into conflict two axioms of translation: 1)the translation is to render the entire source-language text into the target language. 2) the translation is to render into the target language the whole range of linguistic registers of the source-language text. The most acute case of this is when some phrase in the source-language text is already in the target language - as in many Yiddish stories set in New York, for example. My own preference is for producing a translation that's just as multilingual as the original (though it's hard to know how to do that in the last case adduced). I think Helen Lowe Porter, the English translator of Mann's _The Magic Mountain_, was right to leave the long French passages in French. Which reminds me - didn't Singer translate _The Magic Mountain_ into Yiddish? Does anyone know what he did with those passages? A gut yor, Larry Rosenwald 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 05 Sep 94 11:05:31 EDT From: Sapoznik@aol.com Subject: The Secret Life of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn Sorry to weigh in so late on the subject of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn (BMBS), but upon my return on-line, I noted too many errors in various reports on the song's history: The original Yiddish song was composed in 1933 by Sholem Secunda (music) and Jacobs Jacobs (lyrics) for the show "Men Ken Lebn Nor men Lost Nisht" (it's English title was "I Would If I Could") starring Aaron Lebedeff and Lucy Levine playing at Brooklyn's Rolland Theate . According to Secunda, Lebedeff kept making so many unauthorized changes to the song in performance that when the show closed early, Secunda was not unhappy. While the show ran, copies of the song were sold in the theater to audience members, but after the closing, Secunda and Jacobs agreed to the terms offered them for the song by the identical twin Jewish music publishers Jack and Joseph Kammen. BMBS was sold for the princely sum of $30 to be split between Secunda and Jacobs. BMBS surfaced again in 1935 when composer Sammy Cahn heard the song performed in Harlem by Johnny and George, two black singers who supposedly learned it from hotel mogulette Jennie Grossinger. The audience went wild. Cahn, who worked for Warner Brothers, rewrote the lyrics and without permission, offered the song to the newly formed Andrews Sisters for their premier Decca session (it was the flip side of "Nice Work If You Can Get It"). Only after recording and releasing the disc did Cahn arrange to purchase the rights to the song from the Kammens. It was Cahn, a non-Yiddish speaker who Germanized the title changing "sheyn" to "Schoen" (umlauts over the "o"). BMBS was an immediate hit and not only made the Andrews stars but was shortly featured in the (forgettable) 1938 Warner Brothers film "Love, Honor and Behave" and soon recorded by any number of other mainstream performers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman. Strangely, though he premiered it, prolific recording star Aaron Lebedeff never recorded the BMBS. The unanticipated mega-success of BMBS brought Secunda and Jacobs into court demanding a piece of the ever-expanding BMBS pie. Though some restitutions were made (like including their names on future editions of the sheet music and 78's) Secunda and Jacobs never received their fair share of the rich returns of BMBS. Eynekh Sapoznik 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 05 Sep 94 11:27:37 EDT From: Sapoznik@aol.com Subject: Cagney's Yiddish Vis-a-vis James Cagney's Yiddish the answer is a definate YES. In his autobiography "Cagney" the caption for the original Yiddish poster for the 1932 film "Taxi!" reads: "One of the few--perhaps the only Irish actor able to read this Jewish directed poster..." Cagney spoke Yiddish in several other films including " The Fighting 69th" (1940). He didn't grow up on the Lower East Side, but in Yorkville and insisted that the Yiddish he learned was from the streets--an excellent source considering his ever-contentious relationships with the heads of Warner Brothers (he claimed that the habit the Brothers had of speaking Yiddish between themselves during negotiations with non-comprehending non-Jewish actors/actresses failed miserably with him. Vu den? Eynekh Sapoznik ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.100 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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