Yiddish, Treasure from a Vanished World. The Impossibility to Translate Yiddish Or the Cultural Limits of Translation

Abstract

By welcoming the other in his language and thus opening the door to an unknown universe, the translation must take up the challenge of otherness which rests on the capacity, beyond words, to be received in a foreign culture. What happens, in this case, when the culture of the language in question is that of a world that one sought to annihilate in an unspeakable catastrophe? It is in the light of Yiddish that I will deploy the two axes of my reflection on what, beyond translation as a passage from one language and from one culture to another, can ultimately account for the impossibility of rendering the language of the other, of another world. In the case of Yiddish, it is important to consider the mental universe it represents, the Yiddishland and the yiddishkayt. It is to paint the portrait of this now disappeared world, which is not on any world map, that I will apply myself firstly. In a second step, it will be necessary to question the very impossibility of translating Yiddish. With Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “retranslates” his own texts from Yiddish into English, and makes this English translation the matrix of translations into other languages. What happens between the first Yiddish original and the second English original of Singer’s works? Why this need to correct the English versions of his Yiddish texts? These questions raise issues about what Yiddish and the universe it stages represent for Singer: a past world, impossible to render in any other language, the “other world” which has now disappeared? And with Elie Wiesel, whose mother tongue is Yiddish, but who chooses French as the “language of writing”. Wiesel’s “first” work, La nuit, will form the matrix of his novels, built like a fresco in which the works respond to each other, in a Midrashic “infinite reading”. However, at the start of those novels is a story written feverishly and published in Yiddish, … a di velt hot geshvign. This Yiddish text is a cry of revolt and a testimony that the French version will confine to silence, La nuit becoming the very expression of silence. Faced with the impossibility of translating Yiddish, of accounting for the world carried by Yiddish, Wiesel constructs a literary work that will tell a story strewn with clues of this destroyed culture. Could it be, in the last instance, the hidden treasure of Jewish tradition which, precisely out of loyalty to Judaism, cannot be translated? This world which belongs to the Jews and of which they are the only heirs, at the risk of this heritage being lost, for lack of transmission? This questioning could illustrate a reflection on the limits of translation in the light of its cultural and spiritual issues.