Just as a tiny particle of musk fills an entire house with its scent, so the smallest influence of Judaism fills a whole life. Oh! How strong this fragrance is.
The language of the father and the language of the mother — is it not from the fusion of these two languages that our language is nourished, throughout the whole length of our life, is it not they that form its character?1
Ossip Mandelstam, Le Bruit du temps (The Noise of Time).
The missing language
We speak a borrowed language, one that comes in the place of those we might have spoken and that are lacking to us. I knew neither of my two grandfathers. Both had come from elsewhere, and the language they originally spoke was not French. Yiddish, the foreign language of which there subsisted for me only the faintest traces on the horizon of a collective history, holds this role of support, of stand-in for the absence in which each person’s identity originates. In the empty place of the family archives, the foreign language, the language spoken by those whose history remains unknown to me, has unfurled the panorama of a fascinating culture.
The “otherness” of the language came first from its writing in Hebrew characters read from right to left, inverting the “common” direction, the direction of the gaze and of the hand; then from those vocables tinged with familiarity (German) and from the strange fusion among linguistic domains: the Slavic contribution, with its “exotic” intonations, Hebrew, the language of transcendence, of the “originary” text; and unifying these unknown vocables, a rhythm, a grain of the language identifiable with the scattered words heard during childhood: a sign, despite everything, of recognition.
The foreign language is paternal; it resounds like the image of desire and of the inaccessible. It detaches itself in unpronounceable vocables, with all the distance of separation, of non-acquisition, of loss. By contrast, the mother tongue belongs to the body, near and multiple, nuanced and opened by polysemy. The language of the fathers cannot come to my mouth; the prohibition that bars its appropriation obstructs the oral jouissance; but it writes itself in square letters, standing out in all their opacity on the page of the book. The gesture of invitation of these thousands of pages in Yiddish is of an inexhaustible fecundity. It opens a world, the thickness of history, the polysemy of places, the extreme subjectivation and the recurrence of forms of unification and of holding-in-common of utterances: difference and repetition.
Yiddish is for me a language of transgression, of border-crossings and of displacement. But this language also enunciates a law, that of the discourses emanating from a tradition, a form of collective thought, a voice that moors the rootless to ways of living tested by time. The Yiddish language is what links me to these spaces of historicity, what furnishes representations where direct transmission is lacking. This history is necessarily imprinted with the imaginary; fiction is consubstantial with it. But it leans upon knowledge and learning. History, literature are its most apparent gains, beyond the invention of a poetic place impregnated with subjectivity. To reconstruct this fictive link (and this place) beyond the engulfed territories of history, to traverse the literary space standing in for a dreamed language, to apportion what belongs to fantasy and what to knowledge — such were the injunctions that guided me toward the transmission and the translation of Yiddish literature.
This fault line that Mandelstam detects in the process of transmission — a veritable rupture exemplifying the conditions of modern experience, perceptible at the collective level as at the individual, the historical as in its aftermath, transmitted consciously or unconsciously — he articulates it at the level of language, of the experience of the gaping void, of the impossible transmission of a “truth” of collective, family, individual history:
Where, in the happy generations, the epic speaks in hexameters and in chronicle, in me there stands a sign of the gaping void, and between me and the century lies an abyss, a ditch filled with the time that murmurs, the place reserved for the family and the domestic archives. What did my family mean? I do not know. It was tongue-tied from birth. We learned not to speak but to babble, and it was only by lending an ear to the rising noise of the century, and once whitened by the foam of its crest, that we acquired a language.2
Textual bifurcations
To the major voice of the Russian poet is added an echo in a minor key, important for the passages it brings to light and that will give rise to the aleatory registers of encounters, according to the desire to translate, to make known the fecund potentialities of a minority literature, unjustly set aside from the usual channels of diffusion. I felt the curious bifurcations of textual circulations on the occasion of my translation of a short story by the Yiddish author Ephraïm Kaganovski, painter of vignettes set in the framework of interwar Warsaw, which is precisely the cradle of my paternal family. Thus, when I translated for the anthology of Yiddish prose3 published by Rachel Ertel the short story by Ephraïm Kaganovski entitled Cours juives (Jewish Courtyards), I did not know that this very same extract was going to come back to me, rediscovered during a chance reading, translated from Yiddish into Polish by A. Rudnicki and then from Polish into French for the Gallimard edition of Les Feuillets bleus (The Blue Pages). One might as well say that Yiddish is not only a language to be translated, but a language of translation, a language that translates as much as it is translated. It is in this incessant passage that its irreplaceable force reveals itself to me. Here is what Rudnicki says in his essay on the Yiddish writer:
[ ] The frontier stations were foreign to Kaganovski. He had never gone there, he had not sat, head in his hands, while in the valley a life beat toward which someone had in advance closed off all the exits. Nor did he belong to that family of artists who never grow old; he drew his characters with a superficial stroke, and, for forty years, this human mosaic had satisfied him. He had not even concerned himself with history; it took the shock of 1939 for him to perceive at last that history had remained silently crouched in a corner of his work, that it was the invisible director of all his modest and short tales, that it had authorized them, and that afterward, having set fire to the city, it had given them a new lighting, a new weight. It had given them a new face, for us above all who remember. In us who remember, the frail, the insipid images of Kaganovski today awaken a powerful tumult.4
This text is to be situated in the context of Rudnicki’s work, whose fiction is devoted to the annihilation of Polish Judaism during the Second World War.5 For him as for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the memory of the places and beings annihilated without leaving traces erects a scriptural imperative beyond individual actions. Only the polyphony of writings and languages will perhaps be able to supplement (beyond mourning) the definitive absence. Himself too a ferryman, through writing and translation, he is in quest of relays, of witnesses in the enterprise of restoring an annihilated world. If he chooses the example of a minor writing, it is to throw into relief its fragile and yet irreplaceable character among the concerting voices of the universal. This definition of the Yiddish writer goes in the direction of Kafka’s well-known formulations on minor literatures: “The memory of a small nation is not shorter than that of a great one, and so it works the existing material more thoroughly. There are, to be sure, fewer posts for the specialists in literary history, but literature is less the affair of literary history than the affair of the people, and that is why it is found, if not in pure hands, at least in good hands. For the demands that national consciousness places upon the individual in a small country entail this consequence: that everyone must always be ready to know the share of literature that falls to him, to support it and to fight for it, to fight for it in any case, even if he neither knows nor supports it.”6
To be sure, in Kafka as in Rudnicki, one detects a tendency to mythify the “small literatures,” those in which individual genius counts for less than collective élan and literary fervor. If this model is in part true for Yiddish literature, within which the popular veneration for all manifestations of the written word partakes both of traditional culture and of the forms of “enlightened” militancy that replaced it, it is nonetheless only the backdrop against which manifold talents stand out, singular styles, literary idioms of infinite diversity, a resolute and open cosmopolitanism. My approach to literature and to translation is the inverse of a folkloric and uniformized vision of collective creativity, such as Kafka reconstructs it from his discovery of the Yiddish theater and of a few texts that reach him through the intermediary of the Polish actor Itzkhak Löwy, as well as from his own reading.
However, there is in this text by Rudnicki a very accurate formulation both of the dead-end situation that, in many cases, was that of the Yiddish writers, wedged between Nazism and Stalinism, antisemitism and communitarianism, and of their obligatory relation to History, an objective relation, due not to their own orientations, to their personal choices, but to their minority and, finally, besieged position, at the heart of the process of the massive destruction of the European Jewish population and culture. In this perspective, the image of History silently crouched in a corner of the work, the invisible director of the tales at the same time as the incendiary of the places, could not but hold me. It pursues its work of subterranean suggestion in my own approaches. The same is true as regards the reception of the works, violently “lit up” by the black light of the post-genocidal period, not so much in the sense that the witnesses’ word would be lacking, but rather where it is the power of stupefaction of the event that would produce misrecognition, even a form of mythic nostalgia for an eradicated universe.
Castings of the voices
If Giorgio Agamben was able to write, in his preface to Enfance et Histoire (Infancy and History):7 “Every written work can be considered as the prologue (or rather, the lost-wax cast) of a work never composed and destined never to be, because the later works, themselves preludes or castings of other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks” — this remark, which designates the general process of writing, cannot but redouble itself, exemplify itself in a particularly dramatic fashion, in the case of the translation of works whose original language has suffered an irremediable injury, even when the language in question would perpetuate itself under different conditions.
Now this point of departure, this inaugural observation, do not go without saying when one begins to translate from Yiddish. The power of solicitation of the language and of the texts seems at first to be able to remain intact, apart from historicity, enclosed in the enchanted circle of these pages rustling with a life certainly past, but always present in the grain of the language. The demand to be translated, for any language encoded by a text, does not seem essentially to depend on the circumstances of its history; it is linked to the power of solicitation of the linguistic sign, to the permanence of its signifiers, insofar as they are susceptible of being understood and translated into another language, to the survival of its signifieds as a universal human patrimony, accessible to any possible reading.
To be sure, the relation to the spoken language carries from the outset a particular weight of strangeness, in the case of Yiddish whose natural speakers have massively disappeared in a violent fashion, carrying away with them treasures of language that no dictionary will ever be able to fully recover in their richness. The complication, for the translator, which consists in being a late link in the chain of transmission, sifted through the acculturation and assimilation of the previous generations, comes to reinforce a certain form of artificiality in the relation to the source language. If the bodily struggle with the language, that of the Other as well as one’s own language, is constitutive of the drive to translate, it carries a form of supplementary difficulty in the case of a language certain of whose points of opacity cannot be resolved by any document, by any investigation, by any personal intuition. It is in the “proper” sense that there exists “the untranslatable” in Yiddish, terms or formulas that have passed through the sieve of the written text, without oral counterpart, without linguistic witness who might attest to their meaning, and that one finds at times, rather rarely, but occasionally, in a bend of the literary text.
Weighing of the languages
However, the immersion in the bath of the language enriched by the talent of the writers is established, at least for me, from the pleasure of the text, which Valéry Larbaud, better than any other, was able to describe: “Each text has a sound, a color, a movement, an atmosphere proper to it. Beyond its material and literal meaning, every piece of literature has, like every piece of music, a less apparent meaning, which alone creates in us the aesthetic impression willed by the poet. Well, it is this meaning that must be rendered, and it is in this above all that the task of the translator consists.”8 It is perhaps this that I meant to suggest in beginning by evoking the initial simplicity of the gesture of translating, in an article that I entitled “De la trahison” (“On Betrayal”), for the review Translittérature.9 However, if one takes up the so suggestive image used by Larbaud to evoke the work of translation, that of the pans of a balance on which one weighs the living substance of a language that one ponders, by successive equilibriums, by cautious weighings, against the weight of the other language set opposite it — the one that one creates in this intimate relation of engendering and of equivalence starting from the first — there is no doubt that the imbalance appears progressively, but all the more ineluctably, in the case of Yiddish.
An imbalance that results from two successive and complementary moments of the weighing of the languages and of their common crossing. The first inscribes itself within an attitude privileged by Walter Benjamin, in a well-known sentence of “The Task of the Translator”: “The interlinear version of the sacred text is the model or the ideal of all translation.”10 It is here a matter of the practice of calque-translation (“source-oriented”), common to a whole tradition of biblical translation (in particular in Yiddish, as it is practiced within the framework of traditional study or during the first written attempts at translating the sacred text), and which constitutes one of the important references of contemporary translating practice. On the pan of the source language weighs literality, imposing itself as an imperative of fidelity to the “face” of the original language, to its sonorities, its rhythm, which it is a matter of suggesting in their greatest concreteness, through the language of translation. The notion of transparency is then understood as a glass laid upon the object, letting its light pass through and encounter the daylight of “pure language,” as Benjamin formulates it.
The second movement, by contrast, works in the direction of the target language (“target-oriented”), of its possibilities of reception, of acclimatization, of suppling. The other pan of the balance leans toward the side of the metamorphosis and the becoming of languages, in their movement of reciprocal fecundation and transmutation. The risk is thenceforth that of a certain “forgetting” of the source language, of its misrecognition, during the passage that transfers it over to the side of the Other, like the statue of Pygmalion that Valéry Larbaud evokes, in a powerful image: “Thus our craft as Translators is an intimate and constant commerce with Life, a life that we do not content ourselves with absorbing and assimilating, as we do in Reading, but that we possess to the point of drawing it out of itself in order to clothe it little by little, cell by cell, with a new body that is the work of our hands.”11 Reversing the traditional hierarchy between original and copy, model and portrait, lawful spouse and servant, Larbaud systematizes, with regard to translation, the unthought of the myth of Pygmalion: once the statue is animated, it disappears before the living woman. In this assimilation of translation to the animation of the ivory statue by amorous desire, one reads the possibility of forgetting, the abandonment of the first text in favor of the one that recreates it after having transfused it. A vampiric myth, found in numerous fictions devoted to artistic creation, and that brings to light the destructive moment inherent in the creative act, of which it constitutes the precondition.
Effacing the language / Recreating the language
In the case of translation from Yiddish, the act of transgression partaking of the gesture of creation annuls itself in the blankness of the originary absence, which Perec so strongly symbolized by the missing letter of La Disparition (A Void) or the watercolor of the painter returned to its original whiteness (La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual)). The subtle equilibrium in which the weighing of the two languages consists inverts itself into a crushing, constitutive imbalance: “He [the translator] has no source language” (Rachel Ertel). On the first pan weighs an untranslatable gaping void, the programmed death of a language, the very materiality of the disappearance, present in the words in which originates the process of survival that translation constitutes. From then on, all fidelity inverts itself into betrayal, the success of the passage consecrates its downfall, literality implies something monstrous, something unassimilable.
Without having totally thought it through at the time when I was writing that article, I was nonetheless trying to formulate it in my own way:
For what is translating, if it is not also effacing the primitive text, like the palimpsest that writes itself over the vanished layers of older texts? […] If it is not transposing the past by rendering it present, that is to say by erasing it and covering it over? As I translate the Yiddish words, finding in French the cadence and the timbre that I believe appropriate, I forget them, attentive henceforth to “the other language” that is born of me and before which I remain vaguely seized with dread and with happiness. For it is thus that they become these condensations of my most intimate sensations, landscapes that I know for never having seen them. Which does not mean that I dream a vanished world, a lost origin, but that it is my own past that says and writes itself between the translated sentences. There where I translate, there is past that says itself in passing, not a mythic, fantasized past, the past of the tribe, which is in any case barred to me, but my own, the most intimate, the most anecdotal, the most uninteresting to others.
This image that rises, this being of sonorous relations, of proportions among the words, of equilibrium among the intensities, this vibrato that warns me that it is indeed there, that it is beginning, that I am there (jouissance of the language, as of the body), are my past in shreds, translated into sonorous images vibrating from Yiddish to French, through the link, the passage but also the effacement and the betrayal.
For what is it that effaces itself thus? The text of which I am written, invisible, survives, through all the pores of the translation, diffusing, resounding with a beautiful sound, matte and even, destined to live a thousand lives. What does not efface itself in being translated, I discover (but it is quite late) is the language of disappearance itself. Had I then not known it? No doubt, but it is from translating that I truly learn it. I read the chronicles of the Jewish destruction and they are the same names as in “my” texts. Radzymin, Otwock, Praga, are these those names? These singing names: these places of death? I wanted to translate life and now I read its death? And I would not have known it?12
And despite everything, despite the feeling of bad faith, one must translate, not only to enrich oneself with this multiform life, but to make known texts that only an infinitesimal minority of readers can read in the original. By the detour of translation, the translating subject is born to its own historicity, to its link not only to death but to life.
The places of translating
Through my choices as a translator, I identify the imaginary domains whose surveying I subsequently pursued: the Warsaw place (E. Kaganovski, H. Grade, certain short stories of Israël Joshua Singer), between tradition and modernity, drawing its urban perspectives whose names alone evoke for me a cartography of rootedness and of destruction, a vanished world but one to which I feel linked. The Jewish small town, melted into Polish or Ukrainian nature: those forests, those rivers, those empty immensities evoked by the short stories of Israël Joshua Singer devoted to the “Jews of the countryside.” American nature and the great American city (I. J. Singer,13 L. Shapiro,14 A. Raboy), whose strangeness pairs with troubling resemblances to old Europe, as if to show the ambiguous character of change, of new beginnings, the constant humanization of the outer landscape by a literary and cultural subjectivity perpetually awake, creator of relations, of analogies, of reminiscences. Or else the messianic thematic which, in Moyshe Kulbak,15 is accompanied by a recreation of the traditional utterances by means of an unbridled poetic (and parodic) invention, typical at once of modernism and of the poet’s creativity. But also the terrifying vision of the pogroms, in L. Shapiro, anchored in history, but overflowing it, pulverizing it by the influx of visions, of oneirism, of subverted liturgical utterances. And finally the feminine fate, through the moving and strong voice of Esther Kreitman,16 the sister of the Singers, caught like her brothers in the knot of ambivalence, but for whom the lack of recognition — unlike the trajectories of the latter — was fatal, leading her to the gates of madness.
If one seeks to define a common point among these texts, it should no doubt be sought on the side of that intimate cleavage between fidelity and rupture, between modernism and attachment to forms of spatiality, of sociability whose fragility one perceives, in the midst of the intense upheavals of History. Poetry, melancholy, heartbreak constantly accompany these manifold visions of passage, of displacement, of non-coincidence with oneself engendered by the in-between and by a disturbing historicity. The translating language must accept being itself too traversed by this intimate torsion, this power of scission at the level of language and of inner reality. Clinging at first to the word-for-word of the original language, it must then tear itself away from it, from its vocables vibrating with echoes and presence, in order to displace the space of their resonance, to transfer it, perhaps to betray it, but also to preserve it from total disappearance, and thus, insofar as that is possible, to save it.
“The translator from Yiddish is in an unprecedented situation. He has only target languages at his disposal. He has no source language. Something in him aspires to say itself, to ‘arrive.’”17
Translating history
For it is indeed the definition of the very gesture of translating, as well as the law that inscribes the particularity of a “historical” relation to the source language as to the target language, that are enunciated here. Just as the literature of the disaster requires the notion of “community of testimony,” whose saying exceeds individual variations, so the task of translating from Yiddish implies the becoming-aware of the eradication, upstream, of the source language. The translator’s orientation, whether toward the source language or toward the target language, which is usually posed in terms of choices or of socio-historical movements linked to integration into the cultural polysystem, takes on here a particularly difficult turn. This extreme position ratifies the mourning of the language, this “language in less,” analogous to a phantom limb, amputated but lived as ever-present, “in excess.”18 A language which, like the dibbouk of Yiddish folklore, demands to reincarnate itself, with all the ambivalent power that this supposes, in the languages that participate in its survival, in a sense that Walter Benjamin, already, perceived clearly, but without yet envisaging all its most radical possibilities.19 To the “drive to translate” brought to light by Antoine Berman corresponds here a particularly complex entanglement of the forces of life and death that confront one another in the rustling of languages, the passage of words, the translation of the rhythm and movement of the text.
The relation to otherness, founding of all translation, is charged here with a weight of silence almost too heavy to conceive if one attempts to deepen its nature. Fortunately, these questions do not always emerge in an immediate fashion for the second (or third?) generation of translators of which I am a part. It is only at the end, here again, of a process of reflexivity and of deepening of individual practices, that a landscape emerges, at bottom concordant, despite the generational differences. This is what Antoine Berman observed, in another context: “The only way to accede to this richness of contents is History. Far from bringing the proof that translating is a changing, relative thing, without identity or borders, History, from epoch to epoch, exposes to our eyes the disconcerting richness of translation and of its Idea.”20
Notes
Ossip E. Mandelstam, Le Bruit du temps, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1972, pp. 21, 34.↩︎
Ossip Mandelstam, op. cit., p. 77.↩︎
Une maisonnette au bord de la Vistule et autres nouvelles du monde yiddish, texts selected and presented by Rachel Ertel, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989.↩︎
Adolf Rudnicki, Feuillets bleus, Paris, Gallimard, 1968, p. 250.↩︎
See for example Adolf Rudnicki, Les Fenêtres d’or et autres récits, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Folio,” 1966.↩︎
Franz Kafka, Journal, Paris, Grasset, 1954, p. 181.↩︎
Giorgio Agamben, Enfance et histoire. Destruction de l’expérience et origine de l’histoire, Paris, Payot, 1989, p. 7.↩︎
Valery Larbaud, Sous l’invocation de Saint-Jérôme, Paris, Gallimard, 1946, pp. 69-70.↩︎
Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, “De la trahison,” in Translittérature, semiannual review published by the Association des traducteurs littéraires de France, Paris, 1995, pp. 61-63.↩︎
Walter Benjamin, Œuvres I, translated from the German by M. de Gandillac, P. Rusch and R. Rochlitz, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Folio,” 2000, pp. 244-262.↩︎
Valery Larbaud, op. cit., p. 85.↩︎
Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, “De la trahison,” op. cit., pp. 62-63.↩︎
Israël Joshua Singer, Argile et autres nouvelles, translated from the Yiddish and presented by Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Paris, Liana Levi, 1995 [repr. Royaumes juifs, Rachel Ertel (ed.), Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 2009].↩︎
Lamed Shapiro, Royaumes juifs, translated from the Yiddish by Delphine Bechtel, Carole Ksiazenicer, Jacques Mandelbaum, Paris, Le Seuil, 1987 [repr. Royaumes juifs, Rachel Ertel (ed.), Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 2009].↩︎
Moyshe Kulbak, Le Messie fils d’Ephraïm, translated and presented by Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, coll. “La Salamandre,” 1995.↩︎
Esther Kreitman, La Danse des démons, translated from the Yiddish by Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron and Louisette Kahane, Paris, éditions Des Femmes, 1988.↩︎
Rachel Ertel, Brasier de mots, Paris, Liana Levi, 2003, p. 238.↩︎
Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine. Une langue en trop, la langue en moins, Saint-Denis, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1993.↩︎
“Just as the manifestations of life, without meaning anything for the living being, are in the most intimate correlation with it, so the translation proceeds from the original. Certainly less from its life than from its survival. For the translation comes after the original and, for the important works, which never find their predestined translator at the time of their birth, it characterizes the stage of their survival,” in “The Task of the Translator,” op. cit., pp. 246-247.↩︎
Antoine Berman, Pour une critique des traductions : John Donne, Paris, Gallimard, 1995, p. 61.↩︎