Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust

Summary

Most people know something about the Holocaust, the destruction of the Jews and other communities by the National Socialists before and during the Second World War. Historians have recounted in both popular and scholarly historical works the appalling facts about the mass-murder, large-scale theft, degradation, and annihilation of whole communities which was the aim and reality of the Holocaust. But facts, especially when coupled with figures of such magnitude - the murder of many millions of Jews, countless thousands of Gypsies, gay men, the politically active, the mentally and physically ill - can leave us aghast, frightened, stunned and at worst unable to engage with the reality behind them, or to think through their consequences.

Eye-witness accounts go some way towards ensuring that the lived experience of a concentration camp, the feeling of being hunted, the empty grief of losing one's family, can be shared by those who were not there. Translations of such accounts ensure that others - for example today in England - can engage with this experience and try to understand how it could have come about. Fictional accounts, both original and translated, though controversial, certainly have an important role to play in educating people about what it might have felt like to be affected directly by the Holocaust. Like documentary accounts, they can help readers to question their own motivations, prejudices, and feelings. Poetry, however, is different. It is both different in the way it works and very different in the way it needs to be translated. Poetry leaves far more to the reader than do most documentary accounts. More than prose fiction, it employs gaps, silences, fragments, ambiguities, suggestions, leaving much open to the reader's mental engagement. Such poetry is hard work to read, and can affect readers profoundly. It can change minds. How, then, can we translate such complex poetry, the real essence of which can often seem to reside in what it does not say as much as in what it does?

Such poetry must cross over into other languages and times and still maintain its effects of provoking the reader to think, to re-think, to feel, to act, so we need to study exactly how this can be done, or an important resource for our engagement with this world-changing series of events will be lost. 'Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust' is on the one hand a book that examines the central role of translation in re-creating the poetic effects of the original poetry, mainly but not exclusively written in German, as well as providing guidelines that will help future translators of Holocaust poetry. On the other, it is a collaborative programme of academic and public events that will help to educate researchers, translators and readers. The public events (discussions, workshops, readings and an exhibition) undertaken together with Writers' Centre Norwich and several other local organisations, will ensure the research serves the purpose of increasing public engagement with the Holocaust.

The Fellowship is specifically intended to have impact upon three groups of beneficiaries outside the academic community.

The first group of beneficiaries will be translators.
Holocaust poetry is difficult, it is often very personal, its references to the Holocaust are frequently oblique, and translators are very aware that with such poetry it is especially important to do justice to the original work. Part of the work of the Fellowship is to contribute to translator training in public workshops. These will be held in several different locations and contexts. There will be one in our well-established MA Translation Workshops series, held at UEA, which is open to the general public. There will be two workshops focussing on the translation of Holocaust poetry attached to the event planned in collaboration with Writers' Centre Norwich, a literature development organisation with a special interest in World Literature. There will also be at least one further workshop in collaboration with the British Centre for Literary Translation, an Arts Council-funded organisation based at UEA, one of whose specific foci is the training of translators. And the two workshops at other universities (Edinburgh and Newcastle) will also be open to translators from outside the university.

The second group of beneficiaries will be the local community of readers.
Norwich is very proud of its tradition of encouraging reading communities, and widening readers' horizons. Events I have already held at the Forum (Norwich public library - one of the most used public libraries in England) and in Jarrolds Department Store Cafe suggest the immense interest among the local public in Holocaust poetry and their desire to understand and read it. People are very moved by Holocaust poetry and feel it offers an alternative to being "battered" by facts (as a local resident put it at a recent event). Several such events and conversations have shown that people are very receptive to learning to see the poetry of another country and time, read in translation, as something other than English poetry, and are willing to follow the work of the translator in re-creating the effects of the original. It is such re-creation in reading translation that gives real insight into the workings of the original poetry in its own language, independent of foreign language abilities or previous experience of reading poetry. The collaborative event with Writers' Centre Norwich will provide an exhibition and readings for the general public, and the attached workshops will be open to practising and future translators and those who want to know more about translation. Bookshop events (see next point) will provide further readings and discussion.

The third group of beneficiaries will be independent bookshops (in Norwich and London).
Past events in Norwich and Todmorden have shown the openness of independent bookshops to translated poetry. There is a precedent in Norwich in events my colleagues and I have held on translated writing at The Bookhive, with good audiences. An event specifically on translated Holocaust poetry will take place at the Bookhive and another at the European Bookshop in London. Proprietors are happy to stock relevant books, and find that sales at such events are good. They also find that sales of all stock (that is, in this case, stock that is unrelated to Holocaust poetry) benefit from such events, as does their own prestige as bookshops that both engage with the local community and promote foreign literature.