A Response from Lawrence Rosenwald

Dear Kathryn,

I'll put my response to your exhilarating paper in the form of a letter, since I at any rate have found that it's helpful to think about these matters in the context of addressing another human being; and I'll focus for the most part on the question I asked originally, namely, "Is there such a thing as feminist translation, and if so, what would it be?"

You start by talking about a task where there is clearly such a thing as feminist translation, i.e., the task of choosing which poems and which poets to translate, and how to develop criteria for such choices, specifically, feminist aesthetic criteria for judging Yiddish poems by women. This seems to me an important task, and I admire the argument you make in elaborating it; but I also sense a certain hesitation, a holding back, and think that the argument needs to be developed further. For example, you write that

from a modernist perspective, these poems [by Roza Goldshteyn and Yehudis] are not "good." Nonetheless, they show us how women at the end of the nineteenth century, engaging in politics on the page and in the street, recast the poeticisms of the Labor Poets. These poems merit a translation that conveys their energetic syntax and spirit.

The problem with that formulation, I think, is that it leaves modernist aesthetic criteria unchallenged, because what's being opposed to "good" in a modernist sense is not "good" in some other sense, but rather some other criterion altogether, a criterion of being representative or bearing witness; you present the Goldshteyn and Yehudis poems as worthy of being translated because they represent some aspect of women's literary history. But a modernist could agree with that and continue to think that when push comes to shove, Pound and Eliot are simply better poets.

Similarly, you write of finding "poems that embody sexuality and sensuality, poems that speak about power and powerlessness through images of pregnancy, childlessness, childbirth, child-rearing, widowhood, orphanhood." Here also, it seems to me, the implicit argument is that these poems are worth translating because of the experiences they embody. So I'd want to push you to formulate not just reasons for translating poems that don't meet modernist aesthetic criteria, but also different aesthetic criteria by which to judge them.

One way to do that, probably, will be to elaborate your statement that "ideally, the translator will acknowledge that her canon, like all canons, excludes as well as includes," and in particular to work out what your canon is excluding. As long as you're arguing simply for the inclusion of this or that neglected poem or poet, you don't really have to formulate aesthetic criteria at all; representing important experiences is warrant enough. But when you get around to excluding poems, to deciding what does not belong even in a generous and capacious anthology of Yiddish women's poetry, I think there's no choice but to formulate aesthetic criteria; and I wonder what poems you would exclude from an ideal anthology, and on what grounds.

In the second section of your paper, you focus on an area where it's less clear what feminist translation might be; in particular, you identify two moments where "the question of feminist translation comes to a head." The first is line 6 of Margolin's poem, in particular the rendering of hiterin, "protector" or "keeper." The second is line 9, ikh lig afn rand fun der velt. And the two moments offer two different images of feminist translation. In the former, feminist translation is the heightening of a woman speaker's power. In the latter, it's the possibility of "validat[ing] a visceral, private, peculiarly female experience, and [applying] it to the public, literary act of translation." The former image you reject; the latter you endorse.

I agree with both your judgments. But I don't think that either judgment requires a specifically feminist idea of translation. Your rejection of the bad kind of feminist translation, of the rendering that artificially heightens a woman speaker's power...