Testimony and Translation: Peter Davies
Testimony and Translation: Peter Davies
Testimony and Translation: Peter Davies
Peter Davies
170
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
1
Elie Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration’, in Dimensions of the Holocaust, edited
by Elliot Lefkowitz (Evanston, IL, 1977), pp. 4–19 (p. 7); Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The
Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf (London, 1979), p. 129.
2
See, for example, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992), p. 7.
3
Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford, 2004), p. 38.
4
See Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, translated by Patrick Camiller (London,
2005); Wiesel, p. 7.
171
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
otherwise – with a particular social role.5 This allows for more variation
in what can be considered a testimony than definitions based on intra-
textual characteristics, and it also gives us a means to investigate
the function of testimonies in the context of their production and
reading: we can account for potential cultural differences and historical
shifts under the influence of developing historical, philosophical, or
psychological views of the Holocaust and victim experience. We can
also investigate the ways in which translators and editors of translations
negotiate between potentially differing conceptions of testimony in
source and target context.
The value placed on testimonies has to do with the uniqueness of
these texts. Valuations connect truthfulness with the relation of an
individual experience of suffering (and witnessing of others’ suffering),
the unique extremity of the experience conferring unique value. It is
worth noting, however, that the kind of truth these texts are considered
to convey has shifted considerably in the decades since 1945. They
have over time been considered acceptable as legal evidence, as
historical proof, as underpinning for philosophical arguments or
ethical systems, or as a medium for conveying authentic experience.
This has affected the way they have been read, published, and
translated.
These value criteria are established with or against other genres,
depending on the task that testimonies are seen to fulfil in any
particular context. As Martin Sabrow has noted, the role of the
eyewitness has shifted from a position of opposition to particular
forms of culturally significant discourse about the Holocaust – for
example, the rules of evidence of historians such as Raul Hilberg in
his pioneering The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) – to a more
affirmative role, in which victim testimony is the privileged medium
for knowledge about and discussion of the Holocaust, with other forms
of speech and writing playing auxiliary roles.6 One can sometimes
exaggerate the supposed conflict between professional historians and
survivors, but one of the reasons for developing the conception of
testimony as a genre in its own right seems to have been to secure
its own truth-claim as distinct from historians’ rules of evidence.
The truth-claim is based on a number of factors, but the key issue is
the ethical concern for the voice of the individual and the prioritizing
of experience (including the experience of the reader/listener) over
5
Eva Lezzi, Zerstörte Kindheit: Literarische Autobiographien zur Shoah (Cologne, 2001), p. 147.
6
Martin Sabrow, ‘Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten’, in Die Geburt des
Zeitzeugen nach 1945, edited by Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 13–32
(p. 22).
172
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
7
See, for example, the case of Ruth Maier’s diary discussed by Ingvild Folkvord in
the present volume, and the debate about Wolfgang Koeppen’s literary reworking of the
testimony of Jakob Littner as discussed by Reinhard Zachau’s Foreword to Journey through
the Night: Jakob Littner’s Holocaust Memoir, edited by Kurt Nathan Grübler (New York, 2000),
pp. ix-xvii.
8
Stefan Szende, Den siste Juden från Polen (Stockholm, 1944).
9
See Annette Wiewiorka, The Era of the Witness, translated by Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY, and
London, 2006); Sabrow and Frei (n. 6); Konrad Jarausch, ‘Critical Memory and Civil Society:
the Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past’, in Coping with the Nazi Past: West
German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–75, edited by Philipp Gassert and
Alan Steinweis (New York, 2006), pp. 11–30.
10
Stephen Smith, ‘Introduction’, The Krakow Diary of Julius Feldman, edited by Stephen
Smith, translated by William Brand (Newark, NJ, 2002), pp. v-vii (p. vii).
173
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
11
See, for example, on the genre anxiety surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night, Gary Weissman,
Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY, 2004), p. 67.
174
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
12
Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: Ein Tatsachenbericht (1956; reprint Bonn, 2001).
13
Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story, translated by Susan Ray (London, 1996).
14
Compare also the adjustment in the labelling of the translated testimony of
the Hungarian doctor Olga Lengyel: Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of
Auschwitz, translated by Clifford Coch and Paul P. Weiss (Chicago, 1947); Olga Lengyel,
175
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
example, and one could argue here that the text’s insertion into the
genre of testimony through translation draws attention to its particular
stylistic qualities rather better than the bald label ‘Tatsachenbericht’.
An example of a translator’s commentary from an earlier text
can serve to illustrate some of the changes in the status of the
witness text. In the foreword to his co-translation of the eye-witness
account of working with Mengele in Auschwitz by the Hungarian-
Jewish doctor Miklós Nyiszli, published in English in 1960, Richard
Seaver apologetically sets out his view of Nyiszli’s style, which is
‘untutored’ and lacking in ‘elegance . . . or literary expression’; clearly,
he is working against an assumption that such texts need to be well-
written in order to be worth reading.15 ‘Non-literary’ expression is
seemingly not a virtue in the context in which Seaver is trying to place
this translation. One could certainly also view these comments as a
translation programme, indicating the aspects of the text that Seaver
and his co-translator Tibère Kremer are keen to emphasize in order to
create space in the genre for this text. The text is important despite
the fact that it is stylistically faulty; its rough edges do not make it more
authentic. However, it is not the direct encounter with the witness that
the reader is led to here: its publication is justified on the grounds
of Nyiszli’s observational skills and his ability to convey detail that is
verified by the view ‘through his eyes’, rather than for its ability to
convey a victim experience.16
These last two examples illustrate the shifting genre expectations
that translated texts are exposed to: from ‘factual reports’ to ‘victim
testimonies’. The role of the translator has shifted too, with translators
often stressing their personal intimacy with the survivor, rather
than their professional skill: the intimacy of the connection between
translator and witness is guaranteed either by a friendship/family
connection, an emotional response, or both. Statements such as
this are common: ‘They are not professional translations but are
true to Mrs May’s voice.’17 Similarly, the English translator of
Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz trilogy stresses her emotional closeness
to and intuitive understanding of the author, which is equated with
understanding the work, downplaying the rigour of Delbo’s style: if
the ‘Holocaust experience’ ‘speaks through’ Delbo, then by extension
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, translated by Clifford Coch and
Paul P. Weiss (Reading, 1972).
15
Richard Seaver, ‘Introduction’, Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz, translated by Tibère Kremer
and Richard Seaver (New York, 1960), pp. 3–7 (p. 4).
16
Seaver, p. 4.
17
‘Publisher’s Note’, Marianne Zadikow May, The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow, edited
by Deborah Dwork (Chicago, 2008), p. vii.
176
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
The implication is that if she had had time, Draenger would have
written a different kind of text, namely one more accessible to the
reader of the 1990s: thus, the translators are completing the job.
18
Rosette Lamont, ‘Translator’s Preface’, Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, translated
by Rosette Lamont (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. vii-viii (p. vii).
19
Roslyn Hirsch, ‘Preface’, Gusta Dawidson Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, edited by Eli
Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch, translated by Roslyn Hirsch (Amherst, MA, 1996),
pp. vii-viii (p. viii).
20
Hirsch and Pfefferkorn, ‘Introduction’, in Draenger, pp. 1–21 (p. 17).
177
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
178
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
21
Ernő Szép, The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary, translated by John
Bátki (Budapest, 1994), p. 53.
22
See my ‘Translation and the Uses of a Holocaust Testimony: Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit in
German Translation’, German Life and Letters, 64 (2011), 552–69.
179
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
23
Karel Berkhoff has compared the various accounts by Pronicheva, suggesting that
the narrative as it appears in Kuznetsov’s text needs to be treated with caution as a
historical source. Karel Berkhoff, ‘Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving the Babi Yar Massacre:
German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian Records’, in The Shoah in Ukraine: History,
Testimony, Memorialization, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington, IN,
2008), pp. 291–317.
24
For example, in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London, 1986),
pp. 204–5, or Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, NE, 2009), pp. 174–5.
25
As by, for example, James E. Young, ‘Holocaust Documentary Fiction: Novelist as
Eyewitness’, in Literature of the Holocaust, edited by Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA, 2003),
pp. 75–90.
26
Berkhoff, p. 301.
180
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
to the ‘factual’ in balance with the novelistic, and draws attention to the
features that are innovative in this new context.27
A German context that had previously seemed hospitable to the
idea of fictionalized autobiographical texts by victims and witnesses has
developed a feeling of unease similar to what we find in the English-
language context. The literary, which enjoyed considerable authority in
the 1960s as a mode of writing for dealing with the legacy of National
Socialism, has ceded its authority to the ‘authenticity’ and ‘immediacy’
of the eyewitness testimony, and written texts are subordinate in a
hierarchy of value to oral testimony. A canonical work like Elie Wiesel’s
La Nuit, whose German translation was labelled ‘Roman’ in the 1960s,
and which was discussed as an innovative literary text by Martin Walser,
has by the 1990s become an example of ‘Erinnerung und Zeugnis’
(‘Memory and Testimony’), implying a very different mode of reading
and set of generic expectations.28
Concern about the possibility of invention or embellishment, which
threatens to disrupt the immediacy of the encounter with the witness,
is one of the key features of discussion of testimony, and the
establishment of the autonomy of testimony as a genre is accompanied
by paratextual features that ensure a text is read correctly. When, for
example, the paratexts of a German translation of a text which has
had a very complex genesis in a process of dialogue between witness
and editor working between Hebrew and English, and between oral
interviews and written narratives, state that the purpose of reading the
testimony is to identify with the victim, then it is clear that the reader is
being asked to ignore the circumstances of the text’s composition and
to concentrate on the description of an experience.29
Since the autonomy of testimony as a written genre is ultimately
dependent on extra-textual guarantors such as the presence of the
witness, the paratexts and genre labels aim to fix the connection
between text and witness. Thus fictional or literary aspects of the text
must be played down or compensated for, as must the shifts involved
in translation and the creative activity of the translator. For a collection
of texts to be introduced as testimony, it is important that effort is
27
Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David
Floyd (London, 1970); Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, translated by Jacob
Guralsky (London, 1967); Anatolij V. Kuznecov, Babij Jar: Roman, translated by Alexander
Kaempfe (Munich, 1970); Anatolij V. Kuznecov, Babij Jar: Die Schlucht des Leids. Roman-
Dokument, translated by Irina Nowak (Munich, 2001).
28
Davies, p. 560.
29
Jeffrey N. Green, ‘Nachwort’, in Trudi Birger with Jeffrey M. Green, Im Angesicht des
Feuers: Wie ich der Hölle des Konzentrationslagers entkam, translated by Christian Spiel (Munich,
1990), pp. 209–15 (p. 214).
181
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
30
Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women who
Survived, edited by Lyn Smith (London, 2006), p. xv.
31
Johanna Krause, Zweimal verfolgt: Eine Dresdner Jüdin erzählt, edited by Carolyn Gammon
and Christiane Hemker (Berlin, 2004).
182
Translation and Literature 23 (2014)
with the witness; and the text contains its own truth that is independent
of other forms of discourse:
How can one guarantee the truth of memories of such long-ago events?
In the end, Twice Persecuted is Johanna’s truth - told in her unique voice,
and not intended to contradict (or even comment on) other truths.32
It is neither fiction nor history, but contains its own autonomous
justification; translation makes no difference to this claim, and the
translated text embodies the witness and transmits the voice in the
same way as the original.
A discourse that defines testimony as a genre is intended to clarify
the relations between certain texts, to define the kinds of knowledge
that are produced in these texts, to give this knowledge legitimacy
in a cultural context that was for a long time unwilling to grant it
legitimacy, and to support the efforts of victims to gain recognition
in the uniqueness of their experience and their right to speak from
a subject-position which they themselves define. Whereas individual
testimony once offered a critique of other ways of speaking about
the Holocaust in the name of a radical subjectivity, the dignity of the
survivor-witness, and an encounter with the unimaginable, it has now
become the central focus of knowledge about and remembrance of the
Holocaust. This development has been accompanied by the definition
of testimony as an independent genre whose characteristics are held
to derive from the uniqueness of the victims’ experiences. It is a genre
unavailable to anyone but the witnesses; thus it is not defined purely
by particular textual features, but through extra-textual factors, such
as the figure of the survivor-witness and its status within discourse
about the Holocaust. For this reason, questions about the conditions
of production of the text – its cultural, sociological, or discursive
context, as well as questions of editorial practice and joint authorship –
tend to be downplayed. The genre itself is a field of unresolved
tensions between a desire for an authentic encounter with the past
and the insistence that this encounter is impossible. Some of the
theoretical discourse on testimony is concerned with warning readers
off identification with the victim, even where the first-person narratives
seem to invite it. There are also tensions in the space between the
absolute denial of any fictional shaping of the narratives, and the claim
to a form of truth independent of legal or historical truths.
Significant tensions are exposed in the act of translating a text into
a fresh context governed by the generic expectations of testimony.
32
Johanna Krause, Twice Persecuted: Surviving in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany,
translated by Carolyn Gammon (Waterloo, Ont., 2007).
183
Peter Davies/Testimony and Translation
184