Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 4.093
August 23, 1994

1) Introduction (Abe Bloom)
2) Introduction (Gregg Hudis)
3) Bei Mir bistu sheyn (David Sherman)
4) Abbreviations (Reuven Frankenstein)
5) Authentification of personal style (Brenda Danet)
6) Musings on translations (Bob Poe)
7) Papirosn (Bob Poe)
8) Oyneg Shabbes (Abe Igelfeld)
9) Sholem Alechem Oil Field (Zachary Baker)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 94 12:30:43 EDT
From:Abebloom@aol.com
Subject: Introduction

Just a thumbnail sketch.  I am a retiree, 78, and was steeped in Yiddish
since early childhood.  My claim to fame is that I read almost all of
Jules Vernes novels in Yiddish before I read any in English.  My father,
until his death in 1954, was a compositor for many years for the Jewish
Daily Forward and we got an early Yiddish training in the Day Schools in
the NYC area.  One of my sisters performed on the Yiddish stage,
concertized and did radio work. Another sister is actively interested in
conferences that touch on Yiddish.

Abe Bloom

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 20:24:31 -0700
From: ghudis@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Introduction

I am a Data Processing professional that works in NYC, lines in NJ where
I attend a monthly Yiddish Club. Interest in Yiddish language, modern
Yiddish poetry, Jewish History, Klezmer music.

I am beginning to translate sections from 2 Yizkor books dealing with SW
Ukraine, willing to forward if anyone interested.

Gregg Hudis

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 94 12:41:24 EDT
From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca (David Sherman)
Subject: Bei Mir bistu sheyn

> There was a distortion - canonized briefly - of Bei mir bistu sheyn
> (the English version) which began 'My dear Mr. Shane.'

Well, if we're stooping to that... Rechnitzer Rejects have a
version that runs "Buy Beer, It's No Shame".

David Sherman

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 17:05:49 +0200 (MESZ)
From: frankens@mibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de
Subject: Abbreviations

A short answer to Leybl Botwinik [Vol. 4.072]:

Another word where last letter becomes part of the abbreviation is
doctor in hebrew: Daleth Reysh, exactly like in english and other
european languages.

Reuven Frankenstein

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 18:05:36 +0300 (WET)
From: msdanet@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
Subject: help on authentification of personal style in Yiddish texts

I am writing on behalf of a former student called Roni Biran, who is
writing a doctoral dissertation in Yiddish folklore, on a storyteller
called Berl Werblunsky. She seeks help in assessing whether texts of
stories attributed to him are in his personal style.  Any help you could
provide in directing her to material on establishing the authenticity of
texts--written or oral/transcribed--would be greatly appreciated. Please
write to me privately. Thanks!

Brenda  Danet

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 94 14:42:25 EDT
From: poe@keps.com
Subject: Musings on translations

In Vol. 4.090, Louis Fridhandler picks up an earlier discussion on
translation and asks for others to share experiences.

My great uncle was Pinkhes Rudoy, who wrote under the name of Pinye
Bal-Loshn.  (I'm not too sure of any of these spellings.) At some point
in the 1960's or early 1970's he commissioned a translation of his novel
_Oyf_Amerikaner_Erd_.  He then asked me to look over the English version
that he had received.  My Yiddish was no better then than it is now, so I
was in no position to make a comparison with the original, but he trusted
me as a native speaker of English, with a B.A. in English, to judge the
quality of the translation as good English prose in its own right.  I
didn't have to read more than a few paragraphs before realizing that it
did *not* flow like good English prose; it was, in fact, quite awkward
and contorted, and I told him so.  (My apologies, if the translator is a
Mendele subscriber--I never knew his name--, but that was my very clear
impression at the time.)

Now, it has been stressed here that it is important for a translator to
be a native speaker of the *target* language (i.e., the language into
which the work is to be translated) and that this is more important than
being a native speaker of the original language. (One can always get help
in interpreting the original, sometimes from the author.)  But that may
not go far enough.  The translator also has to be a *good writer* of the
target language.  After all, the goal is to recreate the original:  if
the original was written well, the translation should also be written
well; if the original was a work of art, then you may need an artist
(e.g., a poet) to recreate it.  Of course, there is an old saying to the
effect that poetry is what gets lost in translation, and few readers
expect that a translation of fine poetry will be as good as the original.
But it should attempt to approach this goal, and, in the case of prose,
it should get pretty close.

But even if the translator is perfectly at home in both languages, there
is an additional difficulty in producing a fluent, idiomatic,
well-written prose translation, and that is that the presence of the
original work exerts an influence on the translator that tends to
preserve the structure of the original prose sentences and phrases. I can
remember this clearly from my own efforts at translating passages of
Caesar's _Gallic_Wars_ in high school.  The natural sentence structure of
classical Latin is so different from that of English that it was very
difficult for me to free my mind from the influence of the original and
to produce English that sounded natural.  Thus, I couldn't tell whether
the translator of my great uncle's book was an immigrant who had learned
English imperfectly or was a native speaker who simply wasn't able (or
willing) to build a bridge between the forms and structures appropriate
to the two languages.  This is not simply a matter of syntax, but also of
diction, idiom, literary conventions, etc., and requires a lot of talent
and hard work.

In this connection, I am encouraged by Mr. Fridhandler's description:

"Given the significant compromises allowed by Sholem-Aleykhem, I don't
feel so bad about the compromises I have occasionally made in translating
his work into English.  I see no overarching principle.  One must invent
case by case.  I have occasionally changed paragraph order, sentence
order, even idea order, because English style seemed to demand it.
Further, Sholem-Aleykhem sometimes uses a string of adjectives which
sound wonderful in Yiddish with each adjective adding to the fine tuning
of the atmosphere.  However, in English, that usually sounds like a
quotation from a thesaurus entry, awkwardly, boringly repetitious.  My
solution?  Ruthlessly chop off some adjectives.  Maybe not the best
solution, but the only one I could devise.  Puns and spoonerisms make
special, difficult demands on the translator."

Translations that are intended to help students of the language, of
course, have to stay closer to the original.  But, if they are intended
for a general readership, the goal is to create the same experience for a
reader of the target language as the original did for a reader of the
original language (as closely as possible).  Towards that end, I think, a
lot of "compromises" should be allowed or even encouraged.  Certainly, a
translator should not insert ideas or expressions that have no basis in
the original, but he/she should feel free to invent equivalents for the
original elements.  I have heard of translations of Cicero into English
in which Cicero's Greek phrases were rendered in French!  Verse forms do
not have to be preserved, but can be reworked into forms that are
"equivalent" in the target language.  And so on.

The best translation I have read was that of Alexis de Tocqueville's
"Democracy in America"--the 19th century translation by Henry Reeves,
which was standard for a long time.  It has the elegance and clarity of
Jefferson's prose in the Declaration of Independence, and a comparison
with the original indicates that he made a lot of "compromises".  Indeed,
one could almost claim that it is written better than the original.  Now,
does that make it a bad translation?

Bob Poe

7)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 94 14:53:32 EDT
From: poe@keps.com
Subject: Papirosn

In Vol. 4.091 Nathan Kravetz identifies Herman Yablokoff as the author of
this song.  I actually heard him and his troupe perform it on stage in
Los Angeles in the 1960's.  I think the play was also called "Papirosn".
It was indeed a tear-jerker.  I didn't understand much of the dialogue,
but that much was apparent.  This may have been the swan song of the
Yiddish theater in this country, and I was embarrassed by how
unsophisticated it was--the appeal to cheap emotions, particularly.

Subsequently I have heard the melody of this song in instrumental
arrangements, and I am wondering whether Yablokoff composed the music as
well or whether it came from somewhere else--a traditional folk melody
from the Balkans or Middle East, perhaps.  Anyone know?

Bob Poe

8)----------------------------------------------------
Date:   Tue, 23 Aug 1994 15:23:04 -0400
From: igelfeld@math.toronto.edu
Subject: Oyneg Shabbes

Self-deprecation has acquired an undeservedly bad reputation. A guter
kibets is vert mer vi toyznt komplimentn.

Abe Igelfeld

9)----------------------------------------------------
Date:     Tue, 23 Aug 94 12:25:48 PDT
From: BM.YIB@RLG.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Sholem Alechem Oil Field

In the process of clearing out my desk while preparing for YIVO's move, I
came across the following letter, written by an oil driller in Oklahoma,
dated April 29, 1991:

Gentlemen:

Last week I read the enclosed article in the New York Times ["His Words
Celebrate Sholom Aleichem," by Richard F. Shepard, about the author's
yortsayt] and was curious if the [YIVO] Institute knew that a large oil
field in Oklahoma had been named for Sholom Aleichem (the spelling has
apparently been localized over the years to Sholem Alechem).  I have
enclosed a map of this oil field.  This field was discovered and named in
the 1920's, and its name was probably given because some of the discovery
wells in the field were drilled on lands owned by several Jewish families
from Ardmore, most notably the Daube, Westheimer, and Neustadt families.
Any further information you could provide on Sholom Aleichem would be of
great interest. Best regards, [Name withheld here]

A detailed map of the Sholem Alechem [sic] oil field was indeed enclosed
with the correspondent's letter.  I wonder if the heirs were able to
benefit from it somehow...

Zachary Baker

______________________________________________________
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