Articles

What are the par­al­lels between ​“Jew­ish con­ver­sa­tion” and Tal­mu­dic dis­course? Is there some­thing inher­ent­ly Tal­mu­dic about Jew­ish speech?

Jun 16, 2020

Can Mar­tin Buber and Franz Rosen­zweig’s trans­la­tion of the Hebrew Bible be con­sid­ered a form of Jew­ish speech? When and how does trans­la­tion become a Jew­ish way of talking?

Jun 16, 2020

When read togeth­er, Psalms 148 and 150 instruct the read­er to con­stant­ly shift between the uni­ver­sal and the par­tic­u­lar, between pray­ing for the wel­fare of the world and focus­ing on the peo­ple of Israel. 

Jun 16, 2020

The his­to­ry of Smocza, a Jew­ish Street in War­saw, is not the sto­ry of the world-renowned fig­ures, but rather of every per­son who ever lived or died there, includ­ing those who are lost to our col­lec­tive memory.

Jun 07, 2020

These sto­ries take place in Israeli cities, towns, and vil­lages, in the post-war Sovi­et Union, and in Poland of the inter­war peri­od. How­ev­er, it is often very dif­fi­cult to tell where the sto­ries actu­al­ly take place, because they express an expe­ri­ence of dis­lo­ca­tion and total disorientation.

May 20, 2020

In new trans­la­tions by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s War­saw Sto­ries (White Goat Press) and Zal­man Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Sui­cide (Wake­field Press) can right­ful­ly be labeled ​“clas­sic”; they reach across time and space to name an eter­nal — and unro­man­tic — facet of human experience.

Apr 29, 2020

Rachel Ertel has been one of the most pro­lif­ic trans­la­tors from Yid­dish to French. In Mémoire du yid­dish: Trans­met­tre une langue assas­s­inée [A Mem­o­ry of Yid­dish: Trans­mit­ting an Assas­si­nat­ed Lan­guage], an inter­view with the French jour­nal­ist Stéphane Bou pub­lished as a book in 2019, Rachel Ertel, who was born in July 1939, looks back chrono­log­i­cal­ly on her life’s journey.

Feb 06, 2020

The con­tri­bu­tions of this spe­cial issue show­case the per­for­ma­tive dimen­sion of trans­la­tion: Musi­cians and poets (when read­ing their texts) draw atten­tion to the inter­ac­tions between lan­guages, pho­net­ic expe­ri­ences, rhythm, rhyme, and the pro­duc­tive use of mis­un­der­stand­ings. Crit­i­cal reflec­tions on their own trans­la­tions, and the role per­formed by agents such as edi­tors (e.g. of selec­tion and design), engen­der the ques­tion of what it meant his­tor­i­cal­ly and what it means today to be a writer or read­er in mul­ti­lin­gual settings.

Dec 16, 2019

How the poet Louis Zukof­sky con­struct­ed his Eng­lish-lan­guage Amer­i­can mod­ernism by cit­ing, trans­lat­ing, and adapt­ing the Yid­dish poet­ry of Yehoash.

Dec 16, 2019

Radosav dis­cuss­es her expe­ri­ences as a trans­la­tor of Yid­dish poet­ry into Roman­ian and her eval­u­a­tion of cer­tain trans­la­tions from oth­er lan­guages into Roman­ian or from Roman­ian into Yid­dish. The essay out­lines a strat­e­gy of ​“trans­la­tion-recre­ation,” in which the trans­la­tor bal­ances a sense of fideli­ty to the source text with the attempt to cre­ative­ly repro­duce its inter­nal mechanism.

Dec 16, 2019