Exponential minor literatures: a Yiddish poem of the Shoah in Judeo-Spanish translation

Abstract

This essay applies the notion of the minor to the field of translation in order to explore the transhistorical relations between two minor literatures and languages – Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish – that have been radically affected by violent persecution and genocide. Interrogating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature as a point of departure, the essay develops a multifaceted analysis of the Judeo-Spanish translation of the Yiddish lament Dos lid funem oysgehargetn Yidishn folk (1943–4). It shows how the translation work of Arnau Pons in El kante del puevlo djidyó atemado constitutes an “exponentially minor” rewriting: a multi-layered practice with the ability of reparation that complicates the notions of the minor and the ultraminor by bringing into the conversation translation in situations of linguicide and epistemicide. The essay’s comparative and interdisciplinary outlook participates in the special issue’s ambition to pluralize the notion of the minor as it proposes to think translation as a modality of postmemory.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemicide
• exponentiality
• Judeo-Spanish
• postmemory
• Shoah
• ultraminor translation
• Yiddish

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the intensifier “hyper” to underline that these conditions instantiate the violent logic of colonialism in a particularly extreme and intense way – so extreme that it necessitates the coinage of a new term.

2 As I understand it, hypercolonialism is a unique and unrepeatable event, a pick of madness and total evil in the context of the Anthropocene, an era that exists in an already violent relationship towards biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity (Gabbay 2022a).

3 Contemporary to the Judeo-Spanish translation, the Breton version, Kan War Wallazhadeg Ar Bobl Yuzev, by Koulizh Kedez, was re-edited in 2014 and is also relevant to the study of ultraminor translations.

4 The Judeo-Spanish version appeared for the first time in a trilingual edition side by side with the transliterated Yiddish and Spanish (the 1993 Argentine translation by Eliahu Toker) translations; only in 2008 did it come out separately (Katsenelson 2008).

5 In 1930, the Sephardic communities were estimated to be about 1.3 million people in number. However, only around 350,000 preserved the Judeo-Spanish language before the Shoah, as many Sephardic communities in North Africa replaced Judeo-Spanish with Arabic or French and communities in the Americas replaced it with Spanish and English (DellaPergola and Schmelz 2006).

6 All the calculations are mine based on the numeric data given by demographic research.

7 Deleuze and Guattari write that “talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature” (1986, 17), a statement that authors such as Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin, Max Brod, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Anna Seghers, or Kafka himself easily refute.

8 The ultranano is not an exclusive phenomenon of Judeo-Spanish language, but also applies to most minor languages in colonial or postcolonial realities: think of the cases of Breton in France, of Nawar (“Nuri”) in Jerusalem, or of Guajiro in Northern Venezuela and Colombia, cases in which often only small groups or even individual agents are active in the preservation of the language.

9 Interestingly, translation between minor languages is recurrent: Ladino is mostly translated into minor literatures like Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and Yiddish.

10 On “Ringelblum’s archive” see Kassow (2007, 314–332); on the Sonderkommando’s documents in Auschwitz, see Chare and Williams (2015).

11 For outstanding examples in Latin America, see Gabbay (2022a); for cases in Latin America and Europe, see Cassani (2019); for Sephardic poetry worldwide, see Balbuena (2016).

12 Our interviews were held on 10 December 2020 (online) and on 22 and 24 March 2022 in Barcelona.

13 The Rashi abjad of rather rounded letters is differentiated from the modern Hebrew abjad (merubah), which is characterized by square letters.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Studium Loire Valley-Institute for Advanced Studies [grant number: Le Studium 2021].