“translation studies”

The stories in this collection are an invitation to reexamine what Israeli literature is: to expand the category of Israeli literature beyond just the Hebrew language and in so doing to disrupt expectations about that literature.

Dec 12, 2024

Through translation and creative writing - in the form of found poems - Dalia Wolfson explores the experiences of the women reciting tkhines in the Early Modern period.

Jul 12, 2024

A report on the process of creating a scholarly edition of the Old Yiddish Arthurian romance Viduvilt.

Jul 12, 2024

The aim of this compendium is to make Yiddish originals for the stories in Found Treasures easily available and to preserve some of the materiality of the editor’s task of collecting these short stories.

Jun 19, 2023

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

An interview with translator Ellen Cassedy about her two translations of Yiddish children’s poetry into English: a collection of prewar children’s poems for a book called “Yiddish Zoo” and a collection of Boris Sandler’s “Good Morning” poems for children.

Nov 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

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

What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead? 

I may not believe in an afterlife or in resurrections, but I do believe that cultures can be reawakened and revived in new generations. 

Jan 07, 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

As a composer and performer of Yiddish music, Rosen confronts the fact that most members of my audience do not understand the language of the texts he performs. Yet, while music does not communicate information in the same way as language, it can lead listeners towards specific associations and meanings. There are multiple instances in which translation, imagined or guided, takes place during a musical performance and the composer and performer mediates these processes.

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

Maranne Windsperger interviews punkfolk artist Daniel Kahn about his approaches to transadaptation and translation.

Dec 16, 2019

Adriana X. Jacobs on her commitment to literary translation.

Nov 12, 2019

Lawrence Rosenwald considers the uses and meanings of literal translation in the classroom.

Nov 05, 2019

Oct 21, 2019

The recent publication of Robert Alter’s long-awaited complete translation of the entire Hebrew Bible into English is a en enormous achievement. But Alter is not the first to tackle this monumental project; almost a century earlier, Solomon Bloomgarten—better known by his pen name, Yehoash—produced a landmark translation of the same text into Yiddish. 

Apr 05, 2019

Feb 27, 2018

In geveb's founding editor discusses different models of Yiddish in relation to world literature through the figures of Sholem Asch and Jacob Glatstein. 

Jan 23, 2017

Instructors share their thoughts on teaching Yiddish texts in translation. 

Nov 28, 2016

Naomi Brenner's new book complicates the story of the Hebrew-Yiddish "language wars" and argues that Jewish translingualism continues well into the 20th century. 

Sep 18, 2016

Professor Anita Norich concludes our series of reflections on Translating Yiddish in the twenty-first century by reconsidering our relationship to ambiguity in translation. 

May 12, 2016

In geveb's Managing Editor for Translations reflects on the need and possibilities for translating the archives of Yiddish culture, in addition to the greats of its literature. 

May 10, 2016

Zackary Sholem Berger reflects upon the roundtable discussion at AJS last December that inspired this series, and on his own motivations as a translator from Yiddish and a writer in English and Yiddish. 

May 08, 2016

In the second essay in our series of reflections on translating Yiddish in the twenty-first century, Sarah Ponichtera thinks about how we can bring a sense of materiality to our translations. 

May 04, 2016

Chief Editor Saul Noam Zaritt introduces our series of essays reflecting on the state of Yiddish translation. 

May 01, 2016

Our editorial team discusses/debates our guidelines for translating and transliterating place names from the Yiddish.

Mar 20, 2016

Naomi Seidman reflects on having translated Jonathan Boyarin's Yiddish Science and the Postmodern and asks: what power does Yiddish have in our world of nonstop chatter, of ubiquitous and generalized marginality, of planetary precarity?

Mar 13, 2016

Think you know when Bashevis was first translated into English? Think again! 

Sep 20, 2015

How can we read Yiddish poetry across time to find a new common language? How can we create a space for the imagined dialogues of Kadia Molodowsky and Adrienne Rich with their foremothers, an alternative narrative of blood and text? 

Aug 11, 2015

In this 1910 essay, Chaim Zhitlowsky examines how the translation of works of world literature into Yiddish can be a way to establish Yiddish as a kultur-shprakh, a language as modern and expressive as European languages. 

Aug 11, 2015