Translating Survival, Translation as Survival in Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Arnds

By way of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo (If this is a Man) this article discusses the challenges in translating Holocaust literature. On the one hand, the translation of witnessing ‘limit events’ such as the Holocaust into testimony is propelled by attempts to find forms of representation which push their own limits. Here myth often appears as a vehicle of representation, as is the case with Levi's use of the Tantalus myth and of Dante's Inferno. On the other hand, this article shows how the challenges of translating Holocaust literature into other languages can be facilitated by an acute awareness of debates and cultural theories surrounding genocide, such as Giorgio Agamben's theory of the homo sacer and of nuda vita. Such translation into other languages may reveal dimensions of the original that would remain dormant, buried, if the original were not translated. It is especially in the comparison of two or more translations that these deeper layers of the original are revealed.

2017 ◽  
pp. 350-398
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Krupa

The author discusses the most important phenomena in Polish historiography and the selected publications about the Holocaust released during 2003–2013. Similarly to ‘narrativists’, Krupa is interested in the shape, the language, the storytelling manner, and the metaphors used. Having indicated the most important scholarly centres and publications of sources, the author concentrates on the camp monographs, syntheses and regional studies produced during that period, and then concludes that most of them are written in a very traditional way. The year 2000, when [the Polish edition] of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours was released, proved to be a breakthrough year for [Polish] historiography. Before analysing the far-reaching consequences of this publication, Krupa briefly discusses the polemics surrounding the other books by that author. On the one hand, they led to the birth of the historiographical ‘shadow cabinet’ – a mobilisation of the milieu concentrated mostly around the IPN and directed at disparaging the significance of Gross’s publications. On the other hand, the most important consequence of Gross’s critical thinking about the Polish stances was the birth of the ‘peasant trend’ in [Polish] historiography. The books by Andrzej Żbikowski, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, as well as the collective works such as Prowincja noc and Zarys krajobrazu described, in a committed and interdisciplinary way, the shameful stances of the rural community – the denunciations, rapes, and even murders of Jews, with Tadeusz Markiel’s shocking testimony holding a special place among these publications. The works that acclaim the Polish stances and stress the Polish engagement in the rescuing of Jews (particularly those published within the framework of the IPN project „INDEX – In memory of Poles murdered or prosecuted by the Nazis because of their assistance to Jews”) are to constitute a counteroffer to the critical “peasant trend” within the framework of the “shadow cabinet.” At the end of the article Krupa discusses the books that regard the unknown pages of the Holocaust history in Warsaw written by Agnieszka Haska, Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka, or Libionka’s collaboration with Laurence Weinbaum, which are not revolutionary in the sphere of language but nonetheless broaden the knowledge on the Holocaust. The author ends his discussion with a reference to the monumental work Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, without which, just as without reflecting on the consequences of the Holocaust in general, it is impossible to understand Poles and the situation in Poland.


Author(s):  
Peter Banki

This chapter is a reading of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Forgiveness (Le Pardon (1967)) in relation to what he wrote elsewhere on the topic of forgiveness and the Holocaust. The interest of Jankélévitch’s work is that he recognizes an irreconcilable contradiction between, on the one hand, the sacred absolute of love from which comes the duty to forgive even the unforgivable and, on the other hand, crimes against humanity, which attack “the very essence, the humanness of the human and constitute the most sacrilegious of all faults.” As early as 1948, Jankélévitch spoke of the possibility of forgiveness for Nazi crimes. Twenty-three years later, however, he declared forgiveness to be impossible and immoral, when he affirmed: “Forgiveness died in the death camps.” Jankélévitch is unable to maintain a coherent position with regard to forgiveness and the Holocaust. However, this should not be considered to be simply a fault, a lack of moral and/or intellectual probity. This chapter also raises the question of the ‘privilege’ given to the Holocaust over other comparable crimes against humanity.


Author(s):  
Alan L. Berger

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 246-268
Author(s):  
George Ellis Faithful

Germany’s Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary and its resident theologian, Mother Basilea Schlink, sought to intercede in repentance on behalf of their nation for its sins in the Holocaust. This vision of intercessory repentance had its foundations in both their reading of the Hebrew Bible and in German nationalism. However, whatever resemblance between Schlink’s language and style and that of German nationalism, she utterly inverted its priorities, placing the people (Volk) of Israel above all other peoples. This inversion was part of the sisters’ self-empowerment as women, part of a paradoxical rhetoric which, on the one hand, professed their weakness and sinfulness while, on the other hand, emphasizing their worthiness and strength. Although they were sinful as Christians and as Germans, they represented a spiritual elite, among the few worthy to stand between Germany and God, holding back God's wrath. The gendered nationalism of Schlink and the sisters was defined by deference to God and to Israel, and by counter-cultural elevation of their roles as women.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-181
Author(s):  
Patrick D. Anderson

Over the last two decades, the various attempts to “radicalize” Levinas have resulted in two interesting and often separated debates: one the one hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and colonialism and racism, and on the other hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and Judaism. Whether scholars interested in issues of colonialism disregard Levinas's Judaism or use his "subaltern" identity to challenge European hegemony, they do not take seriously the Jewish content of Levinas's thought. In this essay, I challenge the prevailing postcolonial orinetation of the Levinas-colonialism conversation, approaching Levinas's phenomenology from an anticolonial perspective. I will use Frantz Fanon’s dualistic understanding of the colonial world to evaluate the adequacy of Levinas’s phenomenology in describing the ontological structure of the colony and the historical experience of the colonized within it. Levinas’s incomplete understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism contributes to his failure to recognize the dividing line of colonial ontology, the zone of nonbeing, the non-human status of the colonized, and ultimately contributes to the insufficiency of his phenomenology to describe the colony. Because my purpose is not to reject Levinas’s thought in general but to encourage a new approach to his work, in the conclusion I will gesture toward the need for an anticolonial reading of Levinas’s project for Jewish education. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Elina Vasiljeva ◽  

The aim of the present research is to consider one of the aspects of the Jewish text in Latvian literature: the connection of Jewish images with the category of the funny and the comic. A significant part of the Jewish text in Latvian literature is associated with the genre of comedy, within the framework of which a typical image of a Jew begins to form: the first landmark texts (the 17th– 19th centuries) are comedies in which it is the Jew who plays a central role in the system of characters. At the same time, the genre of comedy brings to the fore two functions of the category of the comic: laughter is associated with the situation of the character (funny, sometimes miserable) or it is caused by a comic situation in which other characters are involved. On the one hand, the Jew is the object of laughter (comical depiction of the manner of speech, appearance, behavior); on the other hand, in some texts it is the Jew who maintains the intrigue. The article examines the historical logic of the development of the Jewish text: a Jew as an object of ridicule – a Jew as a component of a comic plot – a Jew as a carrier of vice. Since the 1940s, the Jewish text actually loses its connection with the category of the comic, which is associated with the intensification of the flow of anti-Semitic literature in the interwar and war periods and the dominance of the theme of the Holocaust in the literature of the second half of the 20th century.


2017 ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
Reinhard Ibler

The name of the Czech writer Josef Bor (1906–1979) is nearly forgotten today, although he was very successful with two works in the sixties. Both works deal with the Holocaust. The novel Opuštěná panenka (1961) is inspired by the author’s own horrible experiences at Terezín, Auschwitz and other places of the Holocaust. In 1963, the novella Terezínské rekviem followed which is subject of this paper. Bor’s novella is about the Jewish musician Rafael Schächter and his staging of Verdi’s Requiem at Terezín. From the viewpoint of reception, this work is interesting on two counts: on the one hand, in the story the reception and interpretation of art play a crucial role, on the other hand, there are some special features in the reception of the novella itself, as the work has mostly been read in the light of the real events the story is referring to, whereas the text’s literary character has often been neglected.


Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.


2005 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
R. G. Meyer ◽  
W. Herr ◽  
A. Helisch ◽  
P. Bartenstein ◽  
I. Buchmann

SummaryThe prognosis of patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) has improved considerably by introduction of aggressive consolidation chemotherapy and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (SCT). Nevertheless, only 20-30% of patients with AML achieve long-term diseasefree survival after SCT. The most common cause of treatment failure is relapse. Additionally, mortality rates are significantly increased by therapy-related causes such as toxicity of chemotherapy and complications of SCT. Including radioimmunotherapies in the treatment of AML and myelodyplastic syndrome (MDS) allows for the achievement of a pronounced antileukaemic effect for the reduction of relapse rates on the one hand. On the other hand, no increase of acute toxicity and later complications should be induced. These effects are important for the primary reduction of tumour cells as well as for the myeloablative conditioning before SCT.This paper provides a systematic and critical review of the currently used radionuclides and immunoconjugates for the treatment of AML and MDS and summarizes the literature on primary tumour cell reductive radioimmunotherapies on the one hand and conditioning radioimmunotherapies before SCT on the other hand.


2003 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
P. Wynarczyk
Keyword(s):  
The Core ◽  

Two aspects of Schumpeter' legacy are analyzed in the article. On the one hand, he can be viewed as the custodian of the neoclassical harvest supplementing to its stock of inherited knowledge. On the other hand, the innovative character of his works is emphasized that allows to consider him a proponent of hetherodoxy. It is stressed that Schumpeter's revolutionary challenge can lead to radical changes in modern economics.


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