Conclusion

Summary

While working on this study, I found myself returning to Naomi Seidman's claim, which I discussed in the opening chapter, that the Holocaust “remains invisible as a product of translation.”1 The role of translators of testimony has not been simply to transfer a preexisting voice or set of meanings from one discrete language to another, in order to make a work available to a new audience, but they have played from the very beginning an active, if not defining role in the creation, mediation, and interpretation of knowledge about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as we understand it now, is literally unthinkable without translation, and what knowledge we have is structured by translation in ways that it may ultimately be impossible to unravel fully.

Investigating the detail of translation in context reveals more radical implications for our understanding of the Holocaust than a procedure that discusses translation in terms of loyalty or betrayal, accuracy or inaccuracy: these ideas are important, but working with such clear oppositions can blind us to the complexity of the texts that we have in front of us and lead us to condemn translators rather than understanding how translation informs our own knowledge.

There is no single theoretical approach that can be applied to the translation of testimony, even to the limited selection of texts I discuss here. Seeing translation as a form of textual commentary, as I do in this study, has the advantage of allowing translators to emerge as ethical agents in their own right, as cocreators and commentators on the texts they work with: this allows us to make ethical judgments about their work, informed by the concrete context and purpose of the translation, without resorting to simplistic criticism or condemnation.

This study, and the studies that have influenced and inspired my work, are really only beginning to scratch the surface of the issue of translation in relation to the Holocaust, whether in terms of the linguistic complexity of the situations in which the victims found themselves or the desires, anxieties, and dilemmas connected with finding new audiences for witness statements. There are power dynamics at work here that are complex and hard to grasp, but which affect translation and leave their traces in the texts, and can only be revealed by careful contextualization and close reading.