In Chapter 4, I discuss two texts which relate the life and posthumous miracles of St Neot: the Latin Vita Prima Sancti Neoti and the Old English Life of St Neot. Varied dates have been proposed for these texts’ original composition. Research by Michael Lapidge on the Latin Vita and Malcolm Godden on the Old English Life proposed that they were written in the periods 975x1080 and 1004/1015x1030 respectively. Despite some challenges to their arguments having been raised, I believe that these dates should be upheld, and that the Latin life should be situated in the earlier part of the suggested period. In what follows, I lay out the historical evidence, internal and external, which supports a late tenth or early eleventh century composition for the two saint's lives; and then I consider the relationship between the two texts and a third, post-Norman Conquest version, the Vita Secunda Sancti Neoti. The relationship thus revealed between the two pre-Conquest Lives reinforces an early dating for both.

Historical evidence

Both hagiographies were long considered post-Conquest productions, until the reconsiderations by Lapidge and Godden. The extant manuscripts date from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, but the evidence given by the texts themselves indicates earlier dates of composition.

The Vita Prima Sancti Neoti is difficult to date with precision, but it seems to have been composed in the late tenth or early eleventh century. It must have been written following the foundation of the priory at Eynesbury (modern St Neots) sometime after 975. Although Neot lived in Cornwall, the Translatio which follows the Vita Neoti (probably by the same author) tells of the translation of his relics to Huntingdonshire. Bishop Æthelwold, the founder of the priory at Eynesbury, is given a role in Neot's life, however anachronistic this might be, again suggesting that the text was written at Eynesbury. Neot is said to rest at Eanulfesbyrig (Eynesbury/St Neots) in the second Resting Places list, compiled in 1013 or slightly later. This casts doubt on William of Malmesbury's suggestion that the relics were moved to Crowland during the years of viking turmoil in the early eleventh century. Viking attacks later became a common reason to claim relics of rival houses, and all the evidence for the presence of Neot's relics at Crowland dates from the early twelfth century. Orderic Vitalis reported c.

THIS CHAPTER WILL turn the spotlight onto the people who produce the translations; specifically, I will look at their visibility in the translated texts as named contributors, and will ask how they define their role in the production of the text. In each case, I will ask to whom or what the translator expresses allegiance, what the stated purpose of the translation is, and to what extent the translator's words can be read as a commentary on the translation situation.

There are as yet few detailed or comprehensive sociological or biographical accounts of even a sample of the many thousands of individuals who have made Holocaust testimonies available in translation. This work is, however, beginning, and the shifting focus in translation studies onto the biographies, professional lives, and networks of translators, as well as the development of sociological methods to make visible and analyze the circumstances under which translations are made, will allow us to begin to fill this significant gap in our knowledge. Recent work in translation studies on the person of the translator as social agent provides opportunities to shine the spotlight on the innumerable individuals who have made knowledge about the Holocaust available across linguistic, cultural, and generational boundaries, including not only the writers and translators, but also editors, publishers, booksellers, and librarians.

My focus in this chapter is on the presence of translators, and the visibility of translation as an issue to be discussed in a range of published testimonies. Thus, I am concerned with the ways in which translation and translators are presented to the reader of a testimony, and how they form part of a textual package that provides a commentary on the Holocaust and the meaning of testimony from the perspective of translation. I will also look at translators’ comments as a translation program, in other words as a statement about how they went about their work and why, reading them not simply as a description of working methods, but for what they reveal about translators’ feelings about and attitudes toward the Holocaust.

Who are the translators? This is not an easy question to answer. We can say with confidence that many thousands of people have been engaged in translation activity arising from the experiences of Holocaust victims, most of whom have remained invisible beyond their immediate circles.

DEPENDING ON how one defines it, self-translation by Holocaust survivors is either very common or quite rare. It is very common for survivors to renarrate their experiences in a new language, for a number of different reasons: survivors have ended up across the world in countries in which a different language or languages are spoken, and have had to find new audiences (which may include their family or community, therapists, authorities, police, or legal officers, or a more general audience). Some have also made the journey to Germany in order to give testimony at trials, and—if they had the linguistic ability—have spoken German in order to reach an audience beyond the courtroom, or have renarrated their story in German themselves. This may involve elements of direct translation, but it is likely to be a mixed and complex procedure of renarration in a specific context using the linguistic resources available to the witness and his or her interlocutors.

On the other hand, the process of translating one's own preexisting text for publication in the new context is much rarer, and is a rather different procedure that brings with it its own specific issues to do with text function, anticipated readership, autobiographical self-shaping, and the construction of a relationship between “original” and “translation.” Keeping the focus on this specific procedure, rather than using “selftranslation” as a metaphor for other forms of autobiographical speech or writing, will allow us to put this form of translation into the context of the other chapters of this study.

The translation of one's own text is not an entirely new narration, but is one that is caught between the structure, style, and intentions of the earlier text and the requirements of the new context and audience, and between the resources of two (or possibly more) different languages. The earlier text exerts an influence over the translation, but it is in the process transformed into an original: thus, both texts influence each other, depending on which one is defined as the original and which as the translation. The definition of original text is not always obvious, as I will show in the case of Filip Müller in chapter 6, and it is tempting to define “earlier” as “more original,” and thus “more authentic” or closer to the experience itself.

A young girl bites her lip as she maintains a stubborn silence in the face of her Nazi tormentors. A flight attendant falls from the sky, shot by a father-andson hijacking team. A Chilean folk singer lies dead, his hands shattered by right-wing thugs. A once-reviled oligarch acquires the halo of a saint as he rots in a prison camp. Though these four figures are from diff erent times, places, and even hemispheres, all of them entered a pantheon of Soviet and post-Soviet “heroes” whose status stems primarily from their victimhood. And all of them are featured in this book, which examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. I argue that early Soviet narratives constructed the stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person's “true self.” The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioning among Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained sacrificial imagery as a means of asserting ideology's continued hold on society, while the post-Soviet discourse of victimhood appeals to nationalist nostalgia. The book's final chapter proposes that the Russian intelligentsia's fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky testifies to the persistent hold of sacrificial mythology in contemporary culture, while the conclusion addresses its most recent deployments in media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and propaganda of homosexuality among minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and current usage of the phrase “sacred victim” in public discourse. In covering these cases, the book delineates the sacrificial language's trajectory from molding the individual to lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state.

My choice of examples is guided by their vividness and variety. While they span from the 1930s through the 2010s, my goal is not to cover the entire Soviet and post-Soviet time line but rather to identify a course in the development of the discourse about the sacred victim. This analysis engages with newspaper articles as well as fiction, memoirs, and film. Soviet print media was especially helpful in mapping out this trend as it reproduces ideology in a concise and repetitive manner while being highly reactive to changes in policy, official attitudes, and eschatology.