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Yiddish ≠ Jewish: The Untranslatable Between Yiddish and Hebrew

Mon, December 17, 1:15 to 2:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 2 Ballroom

Abstract

The never-ending quest towards the monolingual is translational in nature. Monolingualism might be unattainable, but on the road there, translation is key. Thus, failings in translation are the stumble blocks of the monolingual project. My paper will explore the untranslatable in Jewish literature through an exploration of strategies to circumvent what cannot be translated between Yiddish and Hebrew. Parentheses, glossaries, footnotes, endnotes and others are the phenomenology of this process of clarifying within the translated text that which is untranslatable. These instances become at once a solution and a new problem, undermining the translational and highlighting fissures in the façade of monolingualism. The case of these untranslatables in Hebrew and Yiddish traces a history of brakes and continuums in the world of Jewish literatures, exposing what assumed knowledge and vocabulary these literatures share and what needs translation and when.

My paper focuses on works by Hirsch Dovid Nomberg, Joseph Opatoshu and Zalman Shneour. Through a micro-reading of isolated untranslatables I chart a phenomenology of dealing with difference and similarity between Hebrew and Yiddish, within a system what remains unreconcilable. These untranslatables remain what Walter Benjamin coined as a kernel of the foreign, complicating the translational project of Hebrew Yiddish literatures.

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