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A Note on the Translation
- Wayne State University Press
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A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION The translator of Kadya Molodowsky's poetry into English, and perhaps of all Yiddish poetry, faces more challenges than I can enumerate here, but I will discuss two. The first of these evolves from the cultural assumptions surrounding particularities of diction . The second is prosody. Yiddish is syntactically a Germanic language with a rich dictionary of Hebraic and Slavic words (as well as of medieval French, American English, and other sources), upon which Molodowsky often capitalized. Although English has a Germanic base, Anglo-Saxon, the modern language is strongly influenced by the Romance languages, both in syntax and in diction . Because the cultural matrix of Yiddish is Jewish and that of English is Christian, a translator will never find exact equivalents, especially for the Hebraic words that refer to religious objects, practices, or concepts. For example, in the first poem in this book, "Women-Poems I," the second line presents the Hebraic adverbial phrase in tsnies to describe the virtuous, modest, even chaste way that "the women of our family" carried a lineage of purity from one generation to the next through the strict observance of Jewish law and custom in their sexual conduct and their dress. The options offered by English for this Hebraic word are all Latinate —"in virtue," "in modesty", "in chastity"—and, in reference to women, denote an obedience to a religious or moral code of conduct that is essentially Christian. It is tempting but unwise to draw an equation between the Latinate aspects of English and the 61 A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION Hebraic aspects of Yiddish. The best one can try for are correspondences . I chose the adverb "modestly," perhaps the least religiously connotative of the words—hoping that a few lines later, both the word "kosher," which has been absorbed by the English dictionary, and the peculiarly Jewish conundrum of the abandoned wife (agune) will direct the reader toward the Jewish notions of sexual purity. In other cases, I chose not even to attempt to translate the Hebraism and left it intact in the translation. In both "My Father's Fur Coat" and "Khad Gadya," Molodowsky uses the Aramaic phrase "khad gadya"—the title of a well-known Passover song that literally means "one kid"—in a colloquial Yiddish manner to denote a tedious tale that has no end. Because, in both poems, Molodowsky has rhymed "khad gadya" with her own name, "Kadya," it seemed important to keep the phrase, the name, and the rhyme in the English version, and to let a note explain the idiom's meaning. One other example will introduce yet another kind of problem I encountered trying to convey the cultural ramifications of particular words, in the phrases "mamzer gonoruk" and "katshkedreydl ," both found in "In My Hand Two Feathers from a Pheasant ." The first phrase consists of a common Hebraic word, mamzer (bastard), and gonoruk, which is not to be found in any dictionary. Not one of the several informants I consulted (all native Yiddish speakers from various regions) understood or recognized the word gonoruk in this phrase. The linguist Dr. Mordekhe Schaechter hypothesized that it means "gonorrheal" for -uk is a pejorative suffix. He said that this phrase may have been an urban, Warsaw insult. On the other hand, the late Yiddish translator of the French Symbolist poets, M. Litwin, told me that he thought the phrase somewhat stilted for a curse. To his Lithuanian ear, gonor was medical terminology, while the crass, common term for gonorrhea, triper, came from the Russian and was more likely to have been used in a curse. He speculated that Molodowsky chose gonor because it sounds like goner (gander, male goose). This wordplay would connote the same family of associations as katshke (duck) in the next line. Although both components of the second phrase were found in Weinreich's dictionary (dreydl here means chicanery or, humorously , scheme), the literal translation of katshke-dreydl as "duckchicanery " made no sense. Two informants from Rumanian Yid62 [44.212.50.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:19 GMT) A Note on the Translation dish backgrounds, Dr. Schaechter and Dr. Itzik Gottesman, identified katshke-dreydl as a nonsense rhyme in a children's counting or game song, like "eenie meenie minie mo." Another informant, Gella Schweid-Fishman, reports that the phrase appears in a rhyme that pokes fan at someone's self-importance. In the poem these two phrases seem to signify to the poet two extremes of diction...