Translating Holocaust Literature

Peter Arnds (ed.) Translating Holocaust Literature With 7figures V&Runipress ® MIX Papier aus verantwor- tungsvollen Quellen ® www.fsc.org FSC C083411 Bibliographic informationpublishedbythe Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliotheklists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online:http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0501-5 ISBN 978-3-8470-0501-8 (e-book) ISBN 978-3-7370-0501-2 (V&ReLibrary) Yo ucan find alternativeeditionsofthis book and additionalmaterial on our website:www.v-r.de 2016, V&Runipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, 37079 Göttingen, Germany/www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No partofthisworkmay be reproduced or utilized in anyformorbyany means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,orany informationstorage andretrieval system, withoutprior written permissionfromthe publisher. Printed in Germany. Coverimage:Jerrilynn Romano /WalterKoransky Printed andbound by CPIbuchbuecher.deGmbH, Zum Alten Berg 24,96158 Birkach,Germany. Printed on aging-resistantpaper. Inhalt Introduction .................................. 7 Alan Turnbull The Dresden ArchiveProject. Acontemporaryartwork .......... 13 Tara Bergin Translating the Passion of Ravensbrück:Ted Hughes and Jµnos Pilinszky 23 Alana Fletcher Transforming Subjectivity: Se questo unuomo in Translation and Adaptation .................................. 33 Bettina Stumm CollaborativeTranslation:The Relational Dimensions of Translating Holocaust Trauma .............................. 45 Gatan PØgny interviews FranÅois Rastier Witnessing and Translating:Ulysses at Auschwitz ............. 63 Rita Horvµth “The MagicalProperties of Creative Sameness:The Role of Translation in Anne Michaels’s FugitivePieces”...................... 81 Stephanie Faye Munyard Berman and Beyond:The Trial of the Foreignand the Translation of Holocaust Literature ............................. 89 Anna Nunan Translating MonikaMaron’s Pawels Briefe as aPostmemorial Holocaust Text ......................................107 6 Inhalt Rosa MartaGómez Pato Poetry of Memoryand Trauma and their Translation ...........125 Bastian Reinert Translating Memory. Acts of TestimonyinResnais, Cayrol, and Celan ..139 Index .....................................153 Introduction In his testimonyabout his survivalinAuschwitz Primo Levi insisted that “la nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questaoffesa, la demolizione di un uomo -our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man” (Primo Levi, If This Is AMan Translated by StuartWoolf [London:Abacus, 1987] 32). If language, if anylanguage, lacks the words to express the experience of the concentration camps, howdoesone write the unspeakable?How can it then be translated?MartinHeidegger’s discussion in his Parmenides lectures from 1942/43oftranslation (Übersetzung,with the stress on the second syllable) as an actofÜbersetzen (with the stress on the first syllable) implies crossing a rivertothe other side, an area where the truth mayemerge from concealment and forgetting (Lethe). Ye tinPrimo Levi’s memoir the actoftranslating in the sense of re-presenting the experience of the Lager to relatives and friends back home in the unlikely case of survivalbecomes acollective nightmare. It reflects one of Levi’s worst fears for life after Auschwitz, thatofaprolonged isolation with his memories, an apt image ultimately for the impossibilityoftranslation. Lager (camp) is one of the words thatLevileaves un-translated. This maybedue to the association with fields of flowers of the Italian campo,but such un- translatabilityalso extends to manyother texts about the Holocaust. The translation of aword like Ungeziefer (bug?cockroach?vermin?insect?) by which Kafkadescribes Gregor Samsa in his story Metamorphosis is similarly charged in the context of racial melancholia and the Holocaust. The limits of representation and translation seem to be closely linked when it comes to writing about the Holocaust –whether as fiction, memoir, testimony– aphenomenon the currentstudy examines.While there is aspate of literature about the impossibilitytorepresentthe Holocaust (see, for example, Saul Friedlander’s seminal Probing the Limits of Representation:Nazism and the Final Solution, [Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1992]), there is hardly anyliteratureon the links between translation in its specific linguistic sense,translation studies, and the Holocaust, aniche this volume aimstofill. The articles in this book have evolved from aconference Iorganized at the 8 Introduction TrinityLong Room HubatTrinityCollege Dublin in June 2013. The idea for this eventarose while Iwas working on the untranslatabilityofsome of the vo- cabularyinPrimo Levi’s If this is aman,Sebald’s Austerlitz,and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis,realizing that there are German words that are so closely as- sociated with the Holocaust and National Socialism’s brand of biopolitics that they defytranslation into other languages. Our keynote address was held by visual artist Alan Turnbull (Newcastle upon Tyne) whoshared his work on the Dresden ArchiveProjectwith the participants. He focuses on the translation of images (postcards, Alan’s ownpaintings, etc.) over time, frompre-war to post-war Dresden.Althoughnot directly linked to the Holocaust, this project will open our volume on questions of translation, which largely centres around the translation of language. In her essay“Translating the Passion of Ravensbrück:Ted Hughes and Jµnos Pilinszky” Tara Bergin then explores the relationship between the poetics of Hungarian post-war poet Jµnos Pilinszkyand the literalistic approach of his English translator TedHughes. Using as her main example Hughes’s translation of Pilinszky’s poem ‘Passion of Ravensbrück,’ Bergin outlines the process of Hughes’s technique, concentrating on his belief that arough, unrhyming version would be best suited to Pilinszky’s “poor” poetics, even if this meantbeing unfaithful to the formal and metricappearance of the source text.Bergin suggests thatthe de-regularising impactthatliteral translation can have on atext became an effectactively soughtafter by Hughes;one that would not only shape howEnglish-speaking audiences perceivedPilinszky’s first-hand accountofthe Holocaust, but alsoHughes’s ownpoetry. For evidence of this, she concentrates on his controversial 1970 collection Crow,abookwith which, according to critic A. Alvarez, Hughes joined “the selectband of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructiverealityweinhabit.” In her essay“Transforming Subjectivity:Se questo unuomo in Translation and Adaptation” Alana Fletchermentions howPrimo Levi writes in his 2002 retrospective, L’asimmetria elavita (translated in 2005 as The Black Hole of Auschwitz), of the voicelessness he and his fellowinmates at Auschwitz expe- rienced, and howacorrelativeneed to communicate this dehumanizing experience to others brought about the memoirofhis year-long internment, Se questo unuomo (De Silva, 1947) (Black Hole 24). After the memoir’s reprintby Einaudi in 1957, both its popularityand dissemination increased considerably. The processes of translation and adaptation that occur after this pointcon- sistently reveal oppositions between Levi’s notion thatanincreased accessibility and universalityisachieved throughtranslation of the work into multiple languages (as evinced by his comments in the Preface to the German edition of his memoir [1961]), and his feeling thatlanguagelessness is exacerbated by an interchange of multiple languages in which none exchanges the samemeaning Introduction 9 with another.Akind of personal revelation about the waylanguage conceals rather than reveals seems to have been prompted by George Whalley’s dramatic adaptation of Se questo unuomo for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, simply entitled “IfThis is aMan” (broadcast 30 September 1951).Ofthe radio drama, Levi wrote:“[The creators] had understood full well the importance in that camp of alack of communication, exacerbated by the lack of acommon language, and they hadbravely set their work within the framework of the theme of the Tower of Babel and the confusionoflanguages” (Black Hole 26). Fletcher’s article examines fault lines between these two opposing view points on translation and dissemination, focusing on differences between Primo Levi’s guid- ance and reception of straight translations of the memoir into English and German, and his reception of its multilingual adaption for radio by Whalley,a Canadian scholar and poet, World WarIInaval officer,CBC broadcaster,and translator. In his preface to The Drowned and the Saved (1988), Primo Levi describes a nightmare that manyprisoners in Auschwitz shared:they had returned home and begun to tell their stories of suffering to aloved one, but their stories were not believed and not even listened to.Inthe worst cases, the interlocutor turned and leftwithout response. Levi’s description suggests that both the goal and the challenge of translating Holocaust trauma into narrative formisthatofrela- tionship and response. Survivors relate (tell) their stories and invite recipients to relate (connectand interact) in response. While survivors struggle to tell their stories, the crisis of communicabilityoften lies in the recipient’s inabilityto receive, relate and respond to the survivor, resulting in abreakdown of com- munityinthe actoftranslation. Bettina Stumm’s contribution “Collaborative Translation:The Relational DimensionsofTranslating Holocaust Trauma” focuses on the dialogical

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