Translating into America
As these writers have observed, translation has the effect of Christianizing both Yiddish and Hebrew or of transforming a folkmensch , a character rooted in a civilization that does not compartmentalize religion within the totality of its way of life, into only a religious persona. Whereas Jewish-American immigrant writers chronicled the shift from old language to new, the children of immigrants translated and reinvented Jewish literature to accommodate it to American culture. An extraordinary moment in this transition to American English occurs in Saul Bellow's translation in 1953 of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimpel Tam" into "Gimpel the Fool," a literary occasion involving the only two Jewish-American Nobel laureates. In the Yiddish story an outcast in his village is repeatedly tricked and ridiculed by his neighbors, a fate to which he is resigned. The rational, empirical world has no hold on Gimpel, whose gullibility makes him a saintly fool and whose love for his children overrides his pride at being the town's much taunted failure. Hence the aptness of the word tam which in Yiddish (and Hebrew) may mean "innocent" or "simpleton" as well as "fool." Finally, Gimpel's wife's deathbed confession that she has deceived him all along and that his children are not his drives him to the devil, who incites him to do evil. In a godless universe that is only a "thick mire," Satan urges him to take revenge on the town by defiling the loaves of bread in the bakery so that his deceivers eat filth. But Gimpel chooses to believe, nevertheless, for "the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies" and that what may appear to be outside of human possibility "before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere."[13]
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool," trans. Saul Bellow, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), 413.
In translating this story originally written for an audience well versed in Jewish tradition but now aimed for a Partisan Review readership removed from Judaic texts and sources, Bellow retained only seven Yiddish words in his translation: golem, mezzuzah, chalah, kreplach, schnorrer, dybbuk , and Tishe B'av . With the exception of the last term, Tishe B'av, a fast day commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of a two-thousand-year exile, the other terms had already seeped into the American Jewish lexicon, in part through familiarity with literary works about dybbuks and golems and in part through popular culture, culinary and otherwise. Retaining words such as chalah underscored the quaint ethnic character of the story while also providing a few "authentic" markers of the lost culture. Actual liturgical references, however, no matter how common, were converted into American equivalents. And this is where the cross-cultural plot thickens. For in the English translation of "Gimpel" Bellow translated the well-known Hebrew prayer for the dead, "El molei rachamin," into the Christian "God'a Mercy," a shift that transformed Gimpel's eastern European setting into Southern Baptist terrain.
In the case of Bellow's translation of "Gimpel," not only did he transform Hebrew liturgy into Christian parlance, he also omitted any phrase that either parodied the Jewish religion or, more to the point, ridiculed Christianity. In defense of Gimpel's gullibility in the face of persistent mockery from the townspeople, particularly when he refuses to doubt his paternity of the child born to Elka seventeen weeks after their as yet unconsummated marriage, Gimpel appeals to the mass gullibility of Christians: "ver veyst? ot zogt men dokh as s'yoyzl hot in gantsn keyn tatn nisht gehat" (Who knows? They say that Jesus'l didn't have any father at all). This somewhat coarse and demeaning reference to Jesus (the diminutive "yoysl") could be offensive to Christians, and although, according to Bellow, it was the volume's editor Eliezer Greenberg who deleted it when he read the story aloud to him, neither Singer nor Bellow had it reinstated in reprintings of the text.[14]
Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 22. Bellow did not translate the story from the printed text but rather from listening to Greenberg's reading it aloud to him; the translation was completed in one session. I am grateful to Ruth Wisse for drawing my attention to this fact and for sharing with me her unpublished essay "The Repression of Aggression: Translation of Yiddish into English."
Even in the decade of the timid emergence of Jewish-American literature in the shadow of the Holocaust, this was a risk that neither Singer, nor Greenberg, nor Bellow wanted to take.In Bellow's novella Seize the Day , published only three years later (also in Partisan Review ), there is only one non-English rupture, and it is precisely that same prayer for the dead as recalled by Tommy Wilhelm in connection with his visit to his mother's gravesite. "At the cemetery Wilhelm had paid a man to say a prayer for her. He was among the tombs and he wanted to be tipped for the El molei rachamin [sp. sic ]. 'Thou God of
Mercy,' Wilhelm thought that meant. B'gan Aden —in Paradise. Singing, they drew it out. B'gan Ay-den ."[15]
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (New York: Penguin, 1956), 86.
In other words, what was erased in the English translation of the Yiddish story reappears in Bellow's American story set in New York, the tale of another man who is a failure in his community, who is gullible, tricked, and repeatedly deceived. This is not simply a matter of influence, of Singer's story bearing down on Bellow's; it is an intertextual referent that places Bellow's work in relation to both Hebrew and Yiddish as purveyors of a lost civilization, the Jewish world annihilated in the Holocaust. It is apt that the only non-English in Bellow's text is a prayer for the dead.[16]For an extensive analysis of the relationship between these two texts, see my essay "'Who's He When He's at Home?' Saul Bellow's Translations," in New Essays on Seize the Day, ed. Michael Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
In the translation from "Gimpel" into Seize the Day , the Yiddish all but disappears and the religious phrase El Molei Rachamim is reinstated (with a more dignified translation—"Thou God of Mercy") as Jewish civilization loses its bilingual dimension and is transformed in America into Judaism. Bellow's text "remembers" the prayer but in an entirely different context. It remembers what it needs in order to exist in its new cultural landscape, an America dedicated to melting away ethnicity and retaining only religion.