Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature

• In Event: Works-in-Progress Group in Jewish Studies

Abstract

This chapter is part of a larger project on the convergence of Jewish American writing and the institutions of world literature (anthologies and literary awards, canonizations of international modernism, and the global literary marketplace). My book manuscript, Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature, rethinks modern Jewish writing as a translational practice unhinged from nationalist historiographies and embedded in global literary networks and economies. The chapter on Isaac Bashevis Singer examines the Yiddish encounter with world literature by tracking Bashevis’s movement between reactionary survivalism and global ambition. Facing the linguistic uncertainty of Yiddish in the postwar translational US landscape, Bashevis began to imagine an afterlife for Yiddish literature by devising a system of translation, supervised by the writer himself, which produced “second originals” in English of his Yiddish texts. The process required various forms of essentialization, approximation, or even erasure in order to ease the transformation of Bashevis’s Eastern European persona and literary universe for US and global audiences. Bashevis at times attempted to meet literary expectations dominated by modernist sensibilities but also remained wary of the perils of Americanization. Translation became a way to embed the particularities of Yiddish within a universal conception of literature, thereby declaring a sense of security in US culture but also announcing higher ambitions. To be sure, Bashevis Singer was aware that cultural transfer would expose world literature to Yiddish’s ghosts, as the act of translation would remain inadequate and even self-destructive. This chapter focuses on Bashevis’s confrontations, in the 60s and 70s, with the uncertainty of translation and global circulation, reading short stories written and published in Yiddish and in English in which an autobiographical figure comes face to face with the ghosts hovering around Yiddish and Yiddish-in-translation. Hunchback demons in Miami Beach, Holocaust survivors in Montreal, and the living dead on the Lower East Side come together to form a “ghost world literature,” a mode of writing in which worldly ambitions are clearly articulated and yet are troubled by supplemental forces—linguistic or otherwise—that haunt the world-writer.

Author

• Saul Zaritt, Harvard University