Translating Holocaust testimony: a translator’s perspective

TY - CHAP

T1 - Translating Holocaust testimony

T2 - a translator’s perspective

AU - Bellos, David

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sharon Deane- Cox and Anneleen Spiessens; individual chapters, the contributors.

PY - 2022/1/1

Y1 - 2022/1/1

N2 - Nearly all European catastrophes of the twentieth century – and even beyond – took place in a multilingual space, not a monolingual one. Testimony to these bloody gashes therefore nearly always requires or implies acts of translation, even though these are usually not thematized or put on display and are rather hidden and masked. From a translator’s perspective, this chapter demonstrates how traumatic memory can be rendered in translation and how the polyphony of Holocaust testimony is negotiated in new target languages. In particular, it presents an analysis of translation dilemmas in Georges Perec’s novel W or the Memory of Childhood and Hélène Berr’s Journal. They concern the representation of traumatic memory (gaps and slips in the original text), the impact of historical irony in unintended testimony, and the problem of L3 translation when the original already contains pieces of the target language.

AB - Nearly all European catastrophes of the twentieth century – and even beyond – took place in a multilingual space, not a monolingual one. Testimony to these bloody gashes therefore nearly always requires or implies acts of translation, even though these are usually not thematized or put on display and are rather hidden and masked. From a translator’s perspective, this chapter demonstrates how traumatic memory can be rendered in translation and how the polyphony of Holocaust testimony is negotiated in new target languages. In particular, it presents an analysis of translation dilemmas in Georges Perec’s novel W or the Memory of Childhood and Hélène Berr’s Journal. They concern the representation of traumatic memory (gaps and slips in the original text), the impact of historical irony in unintended testimony, and the problem of L3 translation when the original already contains pieces of the target language.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037308357

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037308357#tab=citedBy

U2 - 10.4324/9781003273417-3

DO - 10.4324/9781003273417-3

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781032226200

SP - 13

EP - 21

BT - The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory

PB - Taylor and Francis

ER -