Introduction

Summary

IN 1962, EVEN THOUGH he had never been to Auschwitz and had seen none of these things, Curt Meyer-Clason wrote: “Nie werde ich diese Nacht vergessen, die erste Nacht im Lager, die aus meinem Leben eine siebenmal verriegelte lange Nacht gemacht hat” (Never will I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that made of my life a long night seven times sealed). We can tell that the “I” that speaks here is not a literary, fictional “I” since the generic label of this German text is “Erinnerung und Zeugnis” (memory and testimony): it is an account of memory and eyewitness testimony. Therefore, Meyer-Clason makes a claim that is factually untrue and identifies his own voice with that of the Holocaust survivor, usurping it for his own purposes. The individual whose name appears on the title page, Elie Wiesel, did not write a single word contained in this book.

The paragraph I have just written is absurd and plainly offensive, and flies in the face of common sense. But it is also true. Why is it, then, that we regard my statement as false? The answer, of course, lies in our recognition of translation, of the modern legal, financial, scholarly, and ethical frameworks surrounding the activity of translation, and of the social institutions that support them: this supplies the “common sense” that is outraged by my first paragraph. The conventions of scholarly referencing form one of these frameworks, as this necessary endnote will attest. Even though it is logical to do so, we do not go to the extreme I have outlined above: we refuse to do so, and ignore the troubling implications raised by the truth of the statements. However, we will happily go to the opposite extreme, thinking nothing of making a patently untrue statement like the following, as if the translator had had no hand in the text at all: “In If this is a Man, Primo Levi wrote …”

This is not a new issue in translation studies, of course, where such issues have been much discussed, and there are well developed fields of debate and frameworks for interpretation and analysis. However, the scholarly endeavors of studies of translation still cause friction, discomfort, and occasionally outrage when applied to Holocaust testimonies, which have their own entirely legitimate ethical, political, literary, and philosophical frameworks of interpretation and institutions to support them.