EYROPEIZIRT UN FARBESERT? Avrom Reyzen’s EYROPEISHE LITERATUR and the "Normalization" of Yiddish Literature

• In Event: Lightning session in Literature {Jewish Yiddish, Hebrew) and Jewish Politics

Abstract

An apt Yiddish rebuke to the Italian maxim of translation “traduttore, traditore” might be “FARTAYTSHT UN FARBESERT.” That Shakespeare could be IMPROVED in Yiddish was no doubt the product of a certain knowing chutzpah; we might linger over the meaning of FARBESERT to gain a more accurate understanding of translation into Yiddish. Translation of the gentile canon was not exclusively about subversion or one-upmanship, but rather about broadening the horizons of Yiddish literature en route to its entry onto the world stage. The motivating principle of improvement – of the canon itself, of the sensibilities of readers, and/or of the talents of the translator -- became increasingly self-conscious at the turn of the 20th century, with a chorus of voices who saw in the Europeanization of Yiddish literature through translation the supplement, or even remedy, to an outmoded classical tradition. It is within a broader investigation of this desired and intermittently realized “normalization” of Yiddish literature that I’d like to focus on Avrom Reyzen’s Warsaw journal EYROPEISHE LITERATUR (1910-1). Beyond framing EL as a defining link in the history of ambitious, outward-facing Yiddish periodicals (YIDISHE FOLKSBIBLYOTEK; LITERARISHE MONATSHRIFTN) and reconstructing its history on the basis of Reyzen’s memoirs and the history of the “PROGRES” publishing house, I propose to read EL from the inside out: to discover in the selection and nature of its translations (from Lermontov to Lord Byron; Strindberg to Shelley; Maupassant to Mann; Poe to Pushkin) precisely what “Europeanization” meant in the campaign among writers and cultural functionaries like Reyzen to make Yiddish literature autonomous and respectable. As this project could hardly confine itself to Warsaw, I aim to position EL as reflective and anticipatory of “normalizing” gestures in America (DI YUNGE) and in the young Soviet Union and as part of an emergent contemporary discourse on the role of translation in (original) Jewish literary production. I hope that a new look at “in-translation” as embodied in EL will round out the current scholarly treatment of the question of Jewish translation, often examined in terms of Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism and/or the recasting of Yiddish (literature) into English.

Author

• Joshua Price, Columbia University