5: Translation excerpts, Sholem Aleichem's "Motl, the Cantor’s Son," Hillel Halkin, 2002, and Aliza Shevrin, 2009.

5: Translation excerpts, Sholem Aleichem's "Motl, the Cantor’s Son," Hillel Halkin, 2002, and Aliza Shevrin, 2009.

Translation enters into our encounters with Motl, the Cantor’s Son in many ways. On the one hand, you and your students are probably reading the work in an English translation. In this case, you’ve needed to choose a version for your class, and the translator’s decisions and priorities have shaped your experience with the book.
 
Translation is important within the world of the novel, as well. When they emigrate, Motl and his family leave one multilingual world for another, and their acquisition of and reactions to English play important roles. In this way, we can think of translation—which literally means “to bring across”—as a metaphor for the larger Jewish immigrant experience. These resources allow you and your students to encounter all of these aspects by comparing two translations of a scene that reveals how learning English transforms Motl’s Yiddish.
 
Suggested Activity: Have students read one translation of the excerpt. Ask them to assess its tone and identify its main point or points. What does the passage reveal to us about Motl’s Americanization? Repeat with the second translation. (Alternatively, you might assign some students to one translation and other students to the second, and then have the two groups share and compare.) These are translations of the same passage from the Yiddish text. Ask students to identify specific differences in these renderings (spelling, paragraphs, names, words/sentences included or excluded). What effect do these differences have on the translations? Focus on the phonetic words in the Halkin translation. Why might Halkin spell words like this? What effect does he capture? Look carefully at the words. What kinds of things do they name or describe? Can you place them into any shared category? (E.g., “business words” or “city words.”) Conversely, what does the absence of phonetic spelling allow students to see or understand more clearly in the Shevrin translation? Remind students that Motl is a young child surrounded by a new language: what does this passage, in either translation, reveal to us about his ability to absorb or move between languages? How does he compare, in this regard, with his relatives and friends?
 
Now ask your students to imagine that they are translating Motl. What are some possible goals or concerns they might have? If forced to choose, would they prioritize clarity, style and tone, fidelity to the original Yiddish, humor, or something else? How does thinking about different audiences—children, students, adults; knowledge of Yiddish or no Yiddish; Jewish or non-Jewish—affect their decisions? If your students have already completed the first exercise of this resource kit, have them think about what the cover to their translation might look like. 

Sources: Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl & Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, The Cantor’s Son, trans. Hillel Halkin (Yale, 2002), 270.

Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son, trans. Aliza Shevrin, (Penguin, 2009), 316–317.