Yitskhok Bashevis' Translations of World Literature in Interwar Warsaw

• In Event: Translation and Yiddish: New Approaches

Abstract

As a young writer, Yitskhok Bashevis (1902-1991) translated eleven novels into Yiddish, most of them published by Kletskin Farlag in Vilna and Warsaw. Among them, Pan. Fun laytenant tomas glans ksovim (Pan, 1928), Der vogler (The Vagabonds, 1928) and Viktorya (Victoria, 1929) by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun translated from German translations of the works; a four-volume translation of the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s Der tsoyberbarg in 1930, only six years after the work’s first publication; and the ‘only authoritative’ Yiddish 1930 translation Oyfn mayrev front keyn nayes published soon after Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 anti-war novel came out in German, followed by the translation of Remarque’s Oyfn veg tsurik in 1931.

I will examine how Yitskhok Bashevis’ intensive period of book translations 1928-1931 from German into Yiddish provided him with a model for creating world literature via the English translations of his own work in post-war America. These translations served as an apprenticeship in the ‘translation zone’ for the young writer which would inform his later bilingual oeuvre and translations from Yiddish into English. Bashevis’ Yiddish translations of the works of three major contemporary European novelists facilitated the creation of an idiomatic and fluent prose style in his later Yiddish and English work. Finally, I will show how the young Bashevis’ Yiddish translation of Christian and other non-Jewish semantic and stylistic elements in the German source texts provided the guidelines for how to translate Jewish (mostly loshn koydesh) elements in his Yiddish work in post-war America.

Author

• Jan Schwarz, Lund University