The question all second-language, second-culture writers must ask themselves is simply formulated: “How much does one translate?” Which is to say, “How accurately?” Do we translate the names of foods (cholent), or of family members (machatunim), or the texts of our blessings? Do we stet them in their original languages, but then set them in italics? Do we explain what they mean—what they mean to us—or does their foreignness alone speak to that significance (halevai)?
Here is what I’m talking about: Henry Roth was born in the shtetl of Tyshmenitz (in Yiddish), or Tyśmienica (in Polish), in Galicia, in 1906, but came to America a year later. Yiddish was his first language, his mamalashon. In his exemplary Call It Sleep, published during the Depression (1934) with low expectations from the marketplace, but with the highest of expectations from art, the protagonist David Schearl (that is, David Scissors) is referred to by his father as his father’s “Kaddish.” No explanation is given of this. There is no expository clause or note that tells the reader this is a Yiddish euphemism for the firstborn son who will say the Kaddish prayer in memory of the father when the father is deceased. Two generations later, Philip Roth (no relation) would find it necessary to convey to his readers that his own Kaddishes (not Kaddishim) were recitations of the Jewish prayer of mourning (though the prayer’s text itself actually never mentions death and merely praises God). What happened between Roth’s Kaddish and Roth’s Kaddish?
Speaking within the context of a single language—say, within the historical context of this language, the language of Anglo-America—the tension between private language and translation as explanation is often thought of as the tension between what is called “literary fiction” and the popular. Though I prefer to think of this divide as that between being, just being, and odious “identity,” which is the corpse of a culture that must be buried deep.
In my generation, let us say, Amen.