Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust: Translation, Style and the Reader

Description

Taking a cognitive approach, this book asks what poetry, and in particular Holocaust poetry, does to the reader - and to what extent the translation of this poetry can have the same effects. It is informed by current theoretical discussion and features many practical examples. Holocaust poetry differs from other genres of writing about the Holocaust in that it is not so much concerned to document facts as to document feelings and the sense of an experience. It shares the potential of all poetry to have profound effects on the thoughts and feelings of the reader. This book examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense. This is especially true when historical and cultural distance intervenes. The first book of its kind and by a world-renowned scholar and translator, this is required reading.

Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, UK.

This volume's greatest contribution ... is in its well-informed call to translate, and make visible, a significant corpus of Holocaust-related poetry still unavailable in English. * Translation and Literature * In this clear-sighted and innovative work, Jean Boase-Beier presents a compelling account of translated Holocaust poetry ... An important and unique strength of the book resides in its applied approach, with Boase-Beier drawing insightfully on her own experience of translating ... The book is bound to become a theoretical touchstone for all those who are interested in the confluence between translation and the transmission of Holocaust memory ... [It] will undoubtedly serve to expand the translator's toolkit and, simultaneously, promote critical thinking about the responsibility of the translator as a conduit for empathy and remembrance. * Target * Professor Boase-Beier's deeply reflective and many-layered book about the poetics of Holocaust poetry requires more than one attentive reading. It is a brilliant and meticulous analysis about the process of reading poetry - through its variously translated forms - intelligently, with due empathy and proper cognitive regard... Her work emphasises the need for empathy and memory as she highlights the symbiotic and living relationship between the original author, the various translator(s) and active readers. This book is to be valued and returned to, again and again. -- Raficq Abdulla, poet and translator A stimulating and extremely determined attempt to get to grips with the relationship between text and context and the centrality of that relationship to our construction of meaning in general and to the practice of translation in particular. Whether Boase-Beier is using these reflections as an aid for the translator, or using the translation problem to get closer to the texts and our experience of them is largely irrelevant. -- Tim Parks, Professor in Literature and Translation at IULM University, Italy