Articles

Berdichevsky’s Yid­dish writ­ing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly strug­gled with his ambiva­lence about these communities.

May 22, 2023

From the Jew­ish Provinces is a valu­able and high­ly read­able addi­tion to Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in translation.

Dec 15, 2022

Jacobs (who, in addi­tion to being a schol­ar of mod­ern Hebrew lit­er­a­ture, is also an accom­plished trans­la­tor and poet) offers a rethink­ing of the mod­ern Hebrew canon as fun­da­men­tal­ly shaped by what she calls a ​“trans­la­tion­al poetics.”

May 03, 2021

Replete with insight­ful close read­ings of key his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary texts, Jew­ish Amer­i­can Writ­ing and World Lit­er­a­ture com­pli­cates the lim­it­ing bina­ry of the national/​transnational models.

Mar 15, 2021

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

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

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

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

Oct 21, 2019

Nao­mi Bren­ner’s new book com­pli­cates the sto­ry of the Hebrew-Yid­dish ​“lan­guage wars” and argues that Jew­ish translin­gual­ism con­tin­ues well into the 20^th century. 

Sep 18, 2016