“GANEYVISHE SHPRAKHE VI TATE-MAMES LOSHN”: On the Yiddish Translation of Eugѐne Sue’s LES MYSTÈRES DE PARIS

• In Event: Translation and Innovation in Yiddish

Abstract

Among the charges leveled by Sholem Aleichem in his withering critique (1888) of the wildly popular (and rival) Shomer was the latter’s failure to honor the imagined synthesis of the term YIDISHER ROMAN (Jewish novel), then representing Sholem Aleichem’s highest ideal for a national, vernacular, autonomous, and modern literary art. One of Shomer’s novels, the arraignment went, amounted to nothing more than a coarse, superficially Judaized theft of Eugène Sue’s blockbuster epic of the French underclass, LES MYSTÈRES DE PARIS (1842-3). For Sholem Aleichem, a straight Yiddish TRANSLATION of the novel would have been far less deleterious to the Jewish literary street than its clumsy, trespassing TRANSPOSITION to and IMPOSITION on the Pale of Settlement. Though Sholem Aleichem acknowledges the (likewise blockbuster) Hebrew translation of Sue (Kalman Schulman, 1857-60), missing from his account is the Yiddish translation by Y. G. Munk (1865-6). In returning to this text, only cursorily discussed in contemporary scholarship, I will first consider its negotiation of the French original: modes of Judaization; embrace of spoilers and other plot modifications; (fraught) attempts to reproduce Sue’s variegated GANEYVISHE SHPRAKHE (argot). On the basis of these findings, set against the global reception of Sue’s novel, the potentially mediating Hebrew and German (1843) editions, and the rise of contemporaneous Yiddish popular fiction, I will examine to what extent Munk’s work reflects translational and literary norms operative in modern Yiddish belles-lettres at the formative moment of its inception. Doing so will allow us not only to restore visibility to the middle- and lowbrow corpus against which now canonical Yiddish literature once struggled to position itself, but also to consider the decisive role of translation in Jewish literary history — including, to circle back, in Sholem Aleichem’s foundational DI YIDISHE FOLKSBIBLYOTEK (1888). Finally, brief consideration of the afterlife of Munk’s translation — both retranslations of Sue and the eminently iterable “Mysteries of...” formula — will broaden current scholarship on the Jewish transformation of “imported” genres like the marriage plot, the travel tale, and the picaresque.

Author

• Joshua Price, Columbia University