K. Hellerstein - Translating as a Feminist - Reconceiving Anna Margolin(1).pdf

(170 KB) Pobierz
"Translating as a Feminist: Reconceiving Anna Margolin," by Kathryn Hellerstein
❙
191
Translating as a Feminist:
Reconceiving Anna Margolin
KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN
considered a secondary work dependent on, and subservient to, the original
text. One cliche, proclaiming, ``Only one syllable di²erentiates a translator
from a traitor,'' puns on the Italian words traduttore (translator, masculine) and
traditore (traitor, masculine). The pun warns what a treacherous occupation
translating is, for a mere slip of the pen can transform the whole e²ort of
transporting a text from one language to another into a betrayal that reaches out
from a single word to infect the entire culture. It seems signi®cant that this pun
works only in the masculine formation, and even more so, that my 1978, pocket-size
Barnes and Noble English-Italian; Italian-English dictionary, which gives the
feminine of ``traitor,'' traditrice, o²ers no feminine form for ``translator.'' Is the
tourist more likely to encounter a traitress than a woman translator?
The cliche, in the context of the dictionary's omission, suggests how per-
vasively gendered are our assumptions about translation (and also about translators
and writers). This gendered notion becomes explicit in yet another truism, ``A literal
translation is plodding, like a faithful wife, and a literary translation is free, like a
loose woman.'' Likening a translation to a woman, this statement assumes, ®rst, that
an original text is like a man, and second, that the relationship between a text and its
translation is like a hierarchical, heterosexual relationship between a man and a
woman. In this textual or sexual relationship, the original text, equated to the man,
W E ARE ALL FAMILIAR WITH the conventional view in which a translation is
192
❙
Kathryn Hellerstein
What the cliches
do not acknowledge is that translation is transformation, as much the ``changing of
forms'' as the ``carrying across'' from one language to another. The act of translating
creates a text that is something ``other,'' that lives on its own terms.
In this essay, I want to dispute such hierarchial conventions of text and of
gender by speaking from my experience as a reader, a teacher, a scholar, and a
translator of Yiddish poetry, especially Yiddish poetry by women. At the center of
my argument is my belief that the act of translating is the supreme art of making
choices. The translator must constantly negotiate between risk and compromise,
originality and collaboration, individuality and community. Translation, though,
transcends the dualism of these paired opposites. Rather than choosing to be either
faithful or free, either a patriot or a traitor, the translator must create more terms,
shape other terms, rearrange old terms. By selecting, modifying, combining, and
recasting these terms, the translator will transform a poem embedded in one
language and culture into a di²erent poem in a second language. This new text
might appear to replace the original. In fact, though, each translation continually
converses with its original, which does not vanish, but shimmers beneath the second
language. A ¯uid interpretation, the translation talks. Rereading, answering,
querying, it keeps the text in motion.
Drawing on my own translations of Yiddish poetry, I would like to discuss
some of the ways that a translator whose frames of reference include feminism
makes choices. Let me make clear my assumption that every translator is, ®rst of all,
¹
determines a tyrannical dualism, which de®nes a translation (or a woman) as either
literal or literary, tedious or thrilling, domestic or dangerous, too faithful or too free.
As in the age-old paradox that binds women into the roles of virgin and whore, a
translation, like a woman, can never achieve an appropriate balance. Thus, a
translation lives an imperfect female version of the male original.
We ®nd a prototype for this notion in the second story of Creation (Gen.
2:5±23), where God translates doubly: The Creator carries across the breath of life
by transforming dust into a man, and then the man's rib into a woman. When the
man proclaims, ``She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man,'' his
derivative naming of the woman ( isha from ish; woman from man) creates the
assumptions about translation upon which the cliches are based.
Translating as a Feminist
❙
193
a reader. Just as the intellectual, ideological, emotional, and aesthetic perspectives of
the reader shape every reading, so the translator's context, whether that is explicitly
acknowledged or not, shapes every translation.
The feminist framework for my long-term and multi-stranded project of
translating Yiddish poetry by women took form in 1985, when I began to write an
article on Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish women poets)
and, at the same time, to translate Kadya Molodowsky's poems. As I combed the
card catalogs at YIVO and at the Jewish National Library at Hebrew University for
Yiddish books by women, read reviews in the Yiddish press, found poems by
women in old journals and newspapers, surveyed anthologies of Yiddish poetry in
the original and in English translation, and immersed myself in Molodowsky's
earliest book, I realized that women poets in Yiddish had been sparsely represented,
received with prejudice, and only partially heard and understood by their contempo-
raries and mine. It seemed necessary, even urgent, to bring to lightÐthat is, to read,
write about, and translateÐas much Yiddish poetry by as many women as possible,
in order to see what was there and to de®ne and examine the traditions of writing in
which women were engaged.
Faced with a vast amount of material and few guides, I did not know how
exactly to proceed, that is, how to choose which poets and which poems to translate.
In retrospect, I realize that my puzzlement forced me to begin de®ning the
problems of translating as a feminist, for at that moment, I began to bring a set of
values or principles based on an awareness and analysis of gender to bear on the
framework that I was using to make those choices. Because translators weigh their
choices of what and how to translate according to their perceptions of language in a
cultural context, a feminist translator continually tests the weight that gender adds
to the cultural balance. These choices force the translator to question accepted ideas
of canon and of literary value.
At the time I wrote my doctoral thesis on Moyshe-Leyb HalpernÐa
dissertation that included a verse translation of his book In nyu york (In New York)
and a critical reading of that workÐI felt strongly that the best way to represent a
Yiddish poet in English was through a complete translation of the works.
²
It seemed
to me that completeness provided a context that was more important than selecting
194
❙
Kathryn Hellerstein
the ``best'' or perhaps the ``most translatable'' of the poems to represent the poet.
Yiddish poetry was new to me then, and I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the
literature and by the immense silence and indi²erence that surrounded it in both the
university where I was studying and in the books I was reading.
Translating Halpern, with Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Yeats ringing in my
ears, I began to question the values of ``good'' and ``bad'' poetry with which my
professors had inculcated me. What was strong and clear to me in Halpern's poems
had a di²erent quality. The ``hard'' modernist disdain for the ``sentimental'' and the
``soft'' in poetry did not really applyÐHalpern's poems did not ®t into these
categories of taste.
Such categories of aesthetic judgment are complex enough when they cross the
boundaries of culture and language, but they become even more entangled when
they encounter the question of gender, which invokes the problems of canon and
historical context. When I began to translate women Yiddish poets, I felt an
urgency to carry over into English as many female voices as possible, yet encoun-
tered so many voicesÐseventy in Korman's anthology, more than a hundred in the
card catalog at YIVOÐthat I did not know where to start. To translate one or two
poems by unknown poets seemed pointless. Korman's 1928 anthologyÐthe only
collection of Yiddish poems by womenÐwas an early selection of poets, and hardly
complete or representative of what had been published in the subsequent decades.
Malka Heifetz Tussman was not included there. (She told me that she had refused
to send Korman poems, disliking the idea of being grouped with only women
poets.) Molodowsky's poems in this collection are a small, variant sample from her
®rst book; she still had her career before her. How could I trust Korman's selection
without ®rst knowing the body of works from which he had selected? Which of
Molodowsky's poems would Korman have chosen if he'd published the anthology
forty years later?
The poems in Yiddish by women form an uncharted, uncanonized body of
works that were marginal in their own culture, and thus the translator needs to
reinvent the terms of ``good'' and ``bad'' values in poetry. Rede®ning what constitutes
a ``good'' poet, the translator constructs a context for that poet and her work.
According to the Poundian, modernist values of poetry that informed my graduate
Translating as a Feminist
❙
195
education in the late 1970s, a good poem was made of concrete rather than abstract
language, avoided wordiness and poeticism, was exact, concise, focused, imagistic,
discursive, witty, and antisentimental. Every word was le mot juste, the exact word.
Conventions and cliches or dead metaphors were evoked intentionally, to subvert or
crack open the accepted and to revivify the language of ordinary speech. Allusions
and quotations drew the poem into a dialogue with the great Western traditionÐ
with Homer, ``The Seafarer,'' the French troubadour poets, Dante, the French
Symbolists, the English Renaissance poetsÐas well as the ancient Chinese poets.
As a translator steeped in these values, I had to ®nd a di²erent way to read, for
example, the wordy poems ®lled with poeticisms and abstractions, such as Roza
Goldshteyn's ``Di yudishe muze'' (The Jewish muse) or ``Zikhroynes shel peysakh''
(Memories of Passover) or Yehudis's ``Breyte himlen'' (Ample heavens). From a
modernist perspective, these poems are not ``good.'' Nonetheless, they have value,
for they reveal how women at the turn of the century, engaging in politics on the
page and in the street, recast the literary language of the Labor poets. These poems
merit a translation that conveys their energetic syntax, their spirit, and the
di²erences of gender.
In another example, I learned to read beyond the mid-century misconception
that labeled Miriam Ulinover's deliberately archaic diction in 1922 as naively
folkloristic. Ulinover's poems demand from the translator a diction and a tone in
English that correspond to the dialogue between a modern poet and the folk source
of her poetry. In a third example, what might be called sentimentality in Roza
Yakubovitsh's dramatic monologues of the Matriarchs, Hagar, Esther, or a name-
less, pregnant widow, actually provides the poetic means to narrate childbearing and
love from a point of view not heard elsewhere in Yiddish poetry. Finally, as her
translator, I have recast my own sense of ®gurative language to accommodate
Molodowsky's slippery, compounded, ever-evolving metaphorsÐthe ``pure blood''
of the grandmothers' lineage that binds the brain like silken thread, which itself is
likened to the straps of te®llin, a pair of buzzing, old spectacles, a tattered ¯ag
deveined like a piece of meat.
These poems, like many Yiddish poems by men, speak powerfully without
conforming to the standards of ``good,'' ``modern'' English verse. A critical consensus

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin