1 - Translation and the Witness Text

Summary

IN RECENT CRITICAL DISCOURSE, a view of Holocaust testimony has gradually emerged in debates about a set of ideas to do with genre, truth and falsehood, and narrative; the term testimony can be used without explanation in discussing texts, even though most of the texts covered by such a term are a long way away from witness depositions of the kind that came to international prominence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Discussion of testimonies tends to revolve around the following issues: the status of the text as an eyewitness record, thus preserving a direct link back to the legal origins of the genre; the status of the text as a factual record or historical document, and its value as a source in comparison with other kinds of documents; the text as a record of experience, with its language, form, style, and narrative structure shaped directly by the extremity of that experience, rather than by other influences, in other words, psychological causes (trauma) are a greater influence on the writing than are generic conventions or the needs of a present readership; the definition of testimony as a new genre arising from unprecedented circumstances, in contrast with the genres of autobiography, memoir, or autobiographical fiction; the style of the text conceived of as transmitting the voice of the witness, perhaps permitting the reader to become a secondary witness if he or she reads correctly; the text written for ethical purposes—for the witness's family, to make silent voices heard, to commemorate the dead, to counter the danger of forgetting, to promote tolerance—or a psychological impulse to speak for therapeutic reasons.

This is not a definition of testimony as a genre—I find that unhelpful since views of testimony shift through time and across cultures, and affect, and are affected by, the translation of texts—but instead it is a network of discourses and debates which are always invoked in discussion of Holocaust testimonies, and which are all relevant to a study of translation. Eva Lezzi has provided a useful description of what—drawing on Philippe Lejeune's “autobiographical pact”—she refers to as the “referential pact” accepted by publisher, reviewers, and readers of Holocaust testimonies, and which affects their writing, publishing, and reading:

The text refers to the historical situation of the collective persecution and murder of the European Jews under National Socialism.