The Origins of National Culture: Self Translation, Originals and Split Authors

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free Watch the video

Is there a difference between originals and translations, artistically? Intuitively the answer seems to be: yes, especially in our cultural and historical context of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literatures, that share a vested interest in originality. But when matters come to self-translation, work written and rewritten by the same author, issues of origins and originality become murky.

This lecture will look at work by self-translating writers such as Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, Hersch Dovid Nomberg, and Zalman Shneour to explore the ways authors and critics thought about self-translation, how they pondered and practiced writing the same work time and again. In thinking about this practice the validity of concepts such as “original” and “translation” will be scrutinized, as well as the idea that people have different capacities and even personalities in different languages. Looking at modes of self-presentation and literary composition will allow us to ask what, if at all, sets the self-translating author apart from other writers and translators.

About the Speaker

Yaakov Herskovitz is the inaugural Goldrich postdoctoral fellow in the Yiddish studies program at Tel Aviv University and teaches in the Yiddish studies program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to this appointment he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of a German-Israeli research group studying Jewish-German literary exchanges in the interwar period. In 2019-2020 he was a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, in a year devoted to Yiddish.

Currently he is concluding work on a book that deals with the role literary self-translation played in the formation of Jewish national cultures. Another book, forthcoming in Hebrew with Hakkibutz Hameuchad, is devoted to the translational poetics of Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun and the Yiddish origins of his Hebrew. Yaakov’s research interests include Modern Hebrew & Yiddish literature, translation studies, gender and the making of national cultures. His work has appeared in journals such as Shofar, Jewish Social Studies and most recently Prooftexts. He serves on the board of In geveb, a journal of Yiddish studies.