Articles
Essays and peer-reviewed scholarship in Yiddish Studies, an interdisciplinary field that engages all aspects of Yiddish cultural production, especially in its relationship to other cultures and languages.
Click here for a separate listing of open-access, peer-reviewed articles.
Article
“Literarishe reveransn”: Yiddish Translation as Negotiation
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
Article
Introduction: Translation - Poetics, Negotiation, Tradaptation; A Special Issue of In geveb on Translation
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
Review
The post-Holocaust Parisian “Phalanstery” of 9 rue Guy Patin and its Legacies. Review of Rachel Ertel, Mémoire du yiddish
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
Review
A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy
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
Review
Review of Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated and with an introduction by Heather Valencia
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
Article
Translating As Saying
Article
Talmud Talk and Jewish Talk