Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.035 June 30, 1995 1) Introduction and query (Norman Savitt) 2) The denigration of Yiddish (Paul Ritterband) 3) Translating Yiddish (Laurie Hollander) 4) Translating Yiddish (Morrie Feller) 5) More tuml on Tevye/Tovye/Tovya (Harvey Spiro) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 1995 09:56:46 -0500 From: normans@escape.com Subject: Introduction and query My name is Norman Savitt and for the last two months I have been forwarding printed copies of Mendele at the eager request of my parents, Isaac Savitky and Sara Berman, who although not yet official members of the computer revolution have been enjoying this list none the less. They both were born and lived in a shtetl called Slonim on the Russian-Polish border from the 1920's till the war, speaking yiddish, polish, russian and some ukranian. During the war they, unfortunately unlike most of their families, were able to escape to Russia. Afterwards they lived in Germany, France and Cuba, where I was born. They each speak many languages fluently and are familiar with many cultures but consider yiddish their main spiritual core. I also occasionally forward printed copies to my friend Tuli Kupferberg, who also grew up with yiddish as his first language but in the New York City of the 1920's and 30's. One of the original Beat poets, he is also an acomplished cartoonist and songwriter often using traditional melodies. He also is an avid collector of yiddish songs, poetry and prose. My own knowlege of yiddish is quite limited to tidbits from my parents and from what I can glean off Mickey Katz records, which I find quite amusing despite a limited understanding. My mother asks: "Does someone know the origin of the yiddish expression "Lakhn mit yashtcherkes"? I know it means "laugh with lizards" but why?" Thanking anyone who cares to respond in advance, Norman Savitt 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 16:49:58 EST From: uap@cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: The denigration of Yiddish Most frequently, Yiddish is made to be cutsie or simplly vulgarized by ignorant persons looking for a cheap laugh. In the history of Yiddish among the Jews we find a far more painful sort of phenomenon. Two examples will suffice. When the great 19th century Jewish historian produced his multivolume history of the Jews, he refused to allow it to be translated into Yiddish. Second, Harry A. Wolfson, the late master of the field of Jewish of philosophy, published an article in the Menorah Journal in which he bitterly mocked Yiddish, Yiddishists and their claims to legitimacy. For both and additional instances, see Ritterband and Wechsler, Jewish Learning in the Universities, 1994, Indiana. Paul Ritterband 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 95 17:17:34 -0400 From: laurie@silvertone.princeton.edu Subject: Translating Yiddish As a perennial beginner in Yiddish, I would be strongly in favor of a less ambitious approach to computerized Yiddish to English translation (than the ones described in earlier postings on this subject). Digitize a couple of dictionaries so that I can sit at a computer with a text I'm working on translating, type in a word I don't know (in Hebrew characters, of course), and have the computer return all the English equivalents. A windowed version would be nice. I'd like to be able to type in a tof and have the window fly to the beginning of the tof section, then type in the next letter and automatically jump ahead, etc. Anybody with some familiarity with standard Mac and PC applications can easily imagine how to implement the software I'm describing. Any takers out there? For the more ambitious programmer: provide a cross-reference, for words whose usage is idiomatic, of examples in literature. Laurie Hollander 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 21:31:27 -0700 (MST) From: feller@indirect.com Subject: Translating Yiddish I can identify with the problem that David Sherman mentioned in Mendele 5.033. I have had the experience of struggling to decipher the script of more than one letter like the ones David describes. But one has to remember that is was somewhat remarkable for someone of our grandparents or great-grandparents generation to be literate enough to correspond in Yiddish. I had a student who brought me excerpts from the autobiography her grandmother had hand written; it was even more remarkable for a woman to have done it. With respect to David Lechner's comments on machine translation (same Mendele number), the samples I have seen of translations from Spanish and from Hebrew to English were quite impressive. Has anyone had experience with these or similar programs? What prompted me to raise this question in the first place was the fact that Fishl had received an impressive response to his request for translators. This did seem to indicate that it might be desirable to have a computer-aided translation program for Yiddish. Morrie Feller Phoenix 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 29 12:35:17 1995 From: hjs@nrc.gov Subject: More tuml on Tevye/Tovye/Tovya Some more tidbits on the "proper" pronunciation of the name. Perets wrote a story entitled "Zibn gute yor," often translated as "Seven years of plenty." The protagonist shares a moniker with Sholem Aleikhem's famous milkhiker -- or does he?? My oldest version of the Perets story appears in volume 12 of Folkstimlikhe Geshikhten, published by Farlag Yidish, NY, 1920. The name is spelled "tes-vov-vays-yod-hey." (It should be noted that text in this book does not adhere fully to YIVO standard; for example, the word "Yor" (years) in the title is spelled "yod-komets alef-hey-reysh.") Moving to 1947, a volume entitled Peretz in a YIVO Bilingual Series, edited by Sol Liptzin, calls the character "Tovye" in English, with the same Yiddish spelling as the prior volume. In 1984, Congress for Yiddish Culture issued a volume of Perets' Folkstimlikhe Geshikhten, using again the same Yiddish spelling with the vov. Thus, seemingly (at least for this story), the name is uniformly spelled with a vov in the US in this century. Yet, in a 1985 reprint of a 1972 English book by Liptzin, History of Yiddish Literature, Liptzin refers to the protagonist in that story as "Tevye." Is this a misprint, or were the two names considered interchangeable? As an aside, the 1990 tapes of Sholem Aleikhem's "Tevye" by the National Yiddish Book Center, read by Shmuel Atzmon, pronounce the name "Tevye" throughout, and spell the name without the vov. Does anyone have copies of either story in either a European (or Latin American) printing, or printings from earlier than 1920? Harvey Spiro Vienna, Virginia ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.035 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Send change-of-status messages to: listserv@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele nomail b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu ****Getting back issues**** 1. 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