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A. M. Klein asPimontel: T H E R I S K S O F D I A S P O R I C T R A N S L A T I O N Sherry Simon Concordia University A M. Klein is widely recognized as the first Canadian writer to turn Jewish experience into English. He is the hinge between w the Yiddish-speaking world of his parents and the writers who would come later — Cohen, Layton, and Richler. It astonishes how quickly this pivoting happened, and how the swingingwent in one direction only. As soon as young Jewish children went to school, they became English-speaking children and later became English-language writers.In one generation, the deed was done. Klein, apparently, was never tempted to make Yiddish his literary language — though he was familiar with Yiddish-speakingwriting circles in Montreal and remained attached to "Yiddishkeit." Such was the power of the assimilating language in North America. What follows are some reflectionson Klein as "the first," as the liminalfigure on the threshold between the Yiddish past and the Englishpresent. Though he wrote in English, Klein maintained his interest in Yiddish and the strong literary and folkloric traditions it represented. As a firm believer in the richness of diasporic culture, Klein made his work an intersection of languagesand cultural histories. His commitment to the polyglot consciousness of the diaspora meant that much of Klein's writing was in fact translation from Hebrew and Yiddish sources. What becomes immediately evident, however, is that Klein was in many ways a failed translator. If successful translation is turning one language into another, replacing a coherent and systematic idiom by another, Klein never attained this goal. Klein's ambition was somewhat different. He chose English as his writing language, but wanted it to reflect the many cultural sources of his work. His strategy was to remain between languages, forcing the limits of English and subjecting it to the strain of alien vocabulary and rhythm. His distinctive style integrated a wide range of vocabularies, including the use of archaic Renaissance diction. This means that Klein was sometimes considered obscure and intentionally difficult. Klein was aware of the paradoxical task he had undertaken: that of turning English into a Jewish diasporic language. This awareness is most powerfully portrayed in an unpublished draft of a novel, written in the early 1950s, just before the publication of The Second Scroll In a few pages of this abandoned novel, Klein creates a character called Pimontel whose dramas of translation are an echo of Klein's own fascination with the erudite dilemmas of translation, as well as his sense of the futility of his efforts. These very rich few pages take on increased importance when they are compared to the character of the translator that Klein later created in his brilliant and successful novel, The Second Scroll, and in relation to Klein's self-understandingas a diasporic writer. In Latin, translation isunderstood as a form of turning (vertere). A "version" is a text, which has been "turned towards" English, "turned into" an English book. Turnings are not always innocent, however, as we are reminded through the related terms of "inversion," "perversion," or "conversion." These variants have strong connotations — inversion isturning inward,perversion isa turning away from what is considered correct behaviour, and conversion is a turning toward a new identity. The prefixes stress the directions and the consequences of turnings. Translation too can be a turning "towards," a turning "from," a turning "into," or a turning "out of." For Klein's translations, we would have to invent a new term, which would convey the mixed intentions of his turnings, which lead both forward and backward, taking place in a time zone where the present contains the past, in the manner of the famous dialectic Klein was so fond of. In few writers has translation taken on such a central creative role and become the very principle through which literature is conceived. And so Klein's failed translations were the source of an original and powerful esthetic. Klein's The Second Scroll is the fullest expression of this esthetic, a novel that travels through space as it moves through the centuries of Jewish tradition, gathering into itself along the way the languages of the many diasporas of Jewish experience. Turning Yiddish into English There is a link between Klein as a Montreal writer and his vocation as a translator. Klein wrote about Montreal, and his poetry is often lively with the...

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