On the Pedagogic Uses of Literal Translation

I would give out the handout, do some situating, read aloud, invite comments. But then students would make acute remarks about features of the translation that were not features of the original. A student might come across Wolf’s translation of ovntlid as “evensong,” and then, plausibly treating it as a feature of Manger’s poem, might comment on the richness of the word, the association it implied between Jewish legend and Christian liturgy (“evensong” being the name for a celebrated Anglican and Episcopalian afternoon service), between Yiddish poets and Christian vocabulary. A great topic! And Manger was in fact interested during his earlier years in the figure of Jesus, as Efrat Gal-Ed and others have pointed out. But that is not what is happening in this poem; ovntlid does not refer to the Christian service, it means only “evening-song,” as my literal translation has it.

All of which I could and did explain, of course. But in offering the explanation, I felt I was in a false relation to the students. I imagined they might feel suddenly unable to proceed as readers. If feature x of the translation is not a feature of the original, a student might say to me, How can I know that any feature of the translation is a feature of the original? And if I can’t know that, how can I use the translation as a means of understanding the poem? And if I can’t use the translation as a means of understanding the poem, why on earth are you giving it to me in the first place? Few students were so confrontational, but I imagined the questions even when students didn’t ask them, I found them legitimate questions, and I had no good answers to them.

At other moments, of course, these questions are pressing, and too often are ignored. The fiction we live by as teachers of works in translation is that when we assign, say, a translation of Bergelson’s Nokh alemen, we can, after saying why we’ve chosen, say, Joseph Sherman’s translation of the work, treat the translation as the original. That fiction is simply not true, even in the case of Sherman’s remarkably literate and exact translation, and we should as teachers challenge it. We should, moreover, suggest to students, and for that matter to colleagues, that the imagined student’s radical uncertainty – “How can I know that any feature of the translation is a feature of the original?” – is a profound question for all readers of all translations. (It is also a profound question for teachers uneasy about having so much intellectual authority in the classroom, and about students having so little.)

But we cannot, in the relatively brief intervals of time in which we teach, consider these big questions and also consider the smaller but equally necessary and important questions pertinent to Manger’s poem in particular –who is speaking and when, what is going on with the words “wild” and “beautiful,” what is dreamed and what is real, why are only the stars trembling as Eve embraces the apple tree, why is God so repetitively gendered, and where on earth is the serpent?

Hence my present handout:

The new handout helped me to put off for a moment the more theoretical and political questions, to focus in a less hindered way on the poem being discussed, to be in a better-faith relationship with students. Sufficient justifications, surely. But they are not the only ones, because it is not only students whom my earlier practices put me in a bad-faith relation with, but also translators. Leonard Wolf is shoyn oyf yener velt, and cannot be hurt by anything said of him in a class of mine or of anyone else’s, but I keep imagining him watching over a session in which I am pointing out, again and again, that his translation misrepresents the original, gives a false image of it: in “evensong,” in replacing exact rhymes with slant rhymes, in blurring the distinction between dream and truth, in neutering the apple tree, in eliminating farlibt (“in love”) from his account of Eve circling that tree. These things, and others like them, I have to point out to give my students a richly precise sense of Manger’s poem.

But Wolf was a conscientious and distinguished translator, and surely had reasons for his choices. Hence my sense, in classes where I have had occasion to correct his translations - or translations done by others, e.g., Marcia Falk’s translations of Malke Heifetz Tussman or Cynthia Ozick’s of Anna Margolin - that the absent translators deserve better than “they must have done it for the rhyme” or whatever other weak, conjectural explanations I have improvised when such matters come up, knowing that I am not doing the translator anything like justice.

I should say something about sound, because a legitimate argument against literal translations is that they are faithful to words, to sentences, to the order of information, even to lines but never faithful, intendedly never faithful, to patterns of sound: meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration. Wolf’s translation of Khave is more faithful than mine in this regard; it retains Manger’s ballad-meter and to some extent its rhyme scheme, while mine does not.

The difficulty, though, that Wolf’s translation is also unfaithful in these matters. Manger’s rhymes are exact; Wolf’s are sometimes exact and sometimes not. Manger holds close to the ballad meter; Wolf varies it, lopping off a syllable here and there.

Fine with me, and I have done the same sometimes in translating Manger. But what Wolf is providing for the student is not only information but also misinformation. A student might see Manger as translated by Wolf as working with the rules of rhyme we see in some song lyrics, where “tree” and “dreams” are regarded as rhyming because they share a vowel sound. The student would be in error. Or a student might note the ways in which the rhyme patterns lead us to compare and contrast pairs of words: “sets” and “death,” “wood” and “good,” “fair” and “more.” None of these pairs is Manger’s, however, he having chosen to associate “red” and “death,” “alone” and “beautiful,” “beautiful” and “sunset.”

What I am substituting for Wolf’s translation in these respects is first the transliteration, and second the sound of my voice reading the Yiddish poem. In an ideal world, that would be enough; the student would listen to me and look at the transliteration and hear, as my poet colleagues can hear, the sound patterns of the original poem. In the world we live in, they often do not hear those patterns, not the first time round at any rate and maybe never. Wolf’s translation stays visible on the page, it can be studied; my reading is gone when it is over, even if to some extent the transliteration keeps it present. But the information provided by my reading and the transliteration is, if not easy to grasp, still correct. The student may not hear fully, but will not be led to hear falsely.

I can imagine refutations of my arguments and ingenious alternative practices. A teacher might provide non-literal translations of his or her own, thus getting rid of the bad-faith relations with absent translators. A teacher might argue that it is always better to raise questions about translation than not to, given how often such questions are ignored. Good luck to such innovators! I myself simply find that my earlier practices led to bad-faith relationships with students and translators, and a necessary but misleading evasion of some fundamental questions about translation. My current practices, whatever critiques might be made of them, solve these problems. The students are being given a translation that retains lexicon, syntax, order of information, lineation. The only translator is the room is me, and if the students want to denounce me, they at least have to do it to my face, and the conversation remains dialogic. The strict, almost obsessive literalism of the translation, the fact that its only goal is to give the Yiddishless reader some access to the Yiddish poem, keeps the large theoretical questions at bay. No translators are being dishonored, no students misled, no questions uneasily avoided.