_The Mendele Review_: Yiddish Literature and Language (A Companion to _MENDELE_) ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 03.016 10 September 1999 2) Review Essay: What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for his Work -- A Review of Five Recent Books (Joseph Sherman) 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 9 September 1999 From: Joseph Sherman <071Jos@muse.arts.wits.ac.za> Subject: What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for His Work -- A Review of Five Recent Books, Part Two What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for His Work: A Review of Five Recent Books, Part Two by Joseph Sherman Part Two In his earliest American years, when he employed so gifted a professional as Mirra Ginsburg, she refused to take Singer's dictation, insisting instead on working directly from the Yiddish texts, and revising her work with him only after she had completed it alone. Ginsburg's English translations of Singer's short stories -- among them "Tseytl un Rikl" (published as "Zeitel and Rickel" in _The Seance and Other Stories, 1968) -- are among the finest we have, a fact easily verified because all the tales Ginsburg laboured over have published Yiddish texts that permit detailed comparison. Despite this -- or because of it -- Singer soon parted ways with Ginsburg, a rift ostensibly caused by Bashevis's nasty reluctance to pay properly for first- rate services, particularly from someone who knew Yiddish well. The acrimony between them is evident from a sour interview with Ginsburg conducted by Paul Kresh and published in his collection of Singer anecdotes -- many still exceptionally valuable -- _The Magician of West 86th Street_ (New York: Dial, 1979). Given her expertise, Ginsburg, a source of several scathing exposes of Singer's mean-spiritedness in Hadda's biography, inevitably called forth Singer's deepest animus against the translators on whom he was so reliant. Hadda illustrates this with a revealing incident. In 1978 Ginsburg was invited to a reception at the Swedish Consulate: "At first [Ginsburg] did not understand why she had been included. Then she saw Singer and enquired after her friend and colleague, Elizabeth Shub [the editor who first persuaded Singer to write stories for children]. Explaining that Ms. Shub had not been invited, Singer added: 'She's just a translator.' Ginsburg retorted: 'Well, who am I?' She understood that Singer may well have suspected that he was being 'interviewed' for the Nobel prize, and that he was not inclined to be generous to his long-time collaborators." (Hadda, 169). Singer's meanness reached its nadir in his despicable public treatment of Rachel MacKenzie, the gifted literary editor of the _New Yorker_, whose immaculate taste and precise editing did so much to make Singer's stories shine -- and win tremendous acclaim -- in the glittering magazine for which she worked. Over several chapters Telushkin describes with distress the deteriorating relationship between MacKenzie and Singer, quoting extensively from correspondence that passed between them. MacKenzie's letters, overflowing with admiration, are written with old-world graciousness. Yet as Telushkin tells it, "about a year after winning the Nobel Prize ... [Singer] stopped crediting his editors and translators. On _The Dick Cavett Show_, Isaac told his [television talk-show] host, 'Vhen [sic] it comes to my stories, I often dictate the translation to someone who knows English vell [sic]. My novels are translated for me. But all the editing I do myself" (Telushkin, 115). Singer pointedly chose to ignore a subtly-worded rebuke MacKenzie sent him in the letter in which she announced her retirement, for health reasons, from _The New Yorker_. In private conversation with Dvorah Menashe, however, MacKenzie let her mask of refined forbearance slip: "Oh, the ego on that man! ... He never really gave his translators or editors enough credit, you know" (Telushkin, 114-116). Penny-pinching, though always a hallmark of his dealings with those who worked for him, in this case took second place to Singer's near-pathological refusal to acknowledge the degree to which good translators were indispensable to him. For this reason he kept switching translators from year to year, getting people progressively less and less qualified to undertake the work but who, since they knew no Yiddish, could not justifiably claim to have any creative share in it. Telushkin's memoir has been criticised in earlier reviews for her sustained rendering of Singer's spoken English with a spelling that stresses its Polish-Yiddish accent. To my mind, however, this is a remarkably successful literary device that admirably serves a dual purpose. Quite apart from any "charm" it undoubtedly conveys in recreating a living, speaking Singer for the reader, this writerly stratagem highlights Singer's fundamentally _poor_ command of idiomatic English. This matters not at all in speech, where he is fluent and witty and perfectly capable of communicating everything he wants to. But such poor command of English idiom is fatal for a writer with pretensions to being fully bilingual: "'English is my "second original,"' Isaac always said. He was referring to the fact that the foreign translations of his work were done from the English versions, not the Yiddish. 'And because of this I must labour over the revisions. A story that will vone [sic] day be translated needs to be vone [sic] hundred fifty percent good since it will lose fifty percent of its power in translation'" (quoted in Telushkin, 47). As a telling comparison, one need only recall the work of Nabokov, another of Singer's countless literary _betes noirs_. A native speaker of Russian, Nabokov commanded idiomatic English to perfection; such command alone enables him to set up the brilliant literary games he plays in his remarkable novels, distinguished by, as much as dependent on, their dazzling style to achieve their purposes. Nothing could be further from Singer's own case or ability. It is of course nothing to the point here that Singer strives after a style completely antithetical to that of Nabokov, and is wholly and generically a different kind of writer. What is very much to the point, however, is that as a _Yiddish_ writer, Bashevis depends on the power of his style -- praised even by the harshest and most puritanical of his Yiddishist critics -- to achieve the effects central to his themes. In English, he cannot achieve such effects simply because he does not know the language well enough. The evidence for this, and for the deteriorating quality of the work his "translators" were steadily required to do, comes in a number of revealing insights. Lester Goran, himself a novelist with six published titles to his credit and a professor of English literature in addition, was charmed into working with Singer on some of the pieces that appeared in his final collection of stories, _The Death of Methuselah_ (1988). In the published volume containing twenty stories, Goran is credited as the co-translator, with "the author", of six; of the remaining fourteen, five are credited as being "translated by the author" alone, one each is credited to Ruth Schachner Finkel and Joseph Singer, and the remaining seven are credited to Deborah [sic] Menashe. The ubiquitous "Author's Note" to this volume awards its grudging thanks with calculated expediency: "All the stories in this collection were edited by my friend and redactor of many years Robert Giroux. Many thanks to him and to all the translators who have helped me prepare this, my tenth collection of stories in English." (_Methuselah_, ii). What lay behind all this apparent blandness is exposed in the books now before us. That Singer relied, far more than he would ever admit, on both translators and editors is obvious from the comment he made to Goran in the earliest stages of their decade-long relationship: "You are the ghost of Rachel MacKenzie ... You will win the Nobel Prize too ... God sent you. He knew I needed you when Rachel MacKenzie died and He sent you" (Goran, 3-4). On his devoted Dvorah he heaped similar extravagant blandishments: "You are a cleveh [sic] baby ... Let me tell you, you may not be able to spell, but you have an excellent taste in literature, and an excellent style" (Telushkin, 13, 47). Singer's method of "translation" in his last two decades is more or less identically described in two separate memoirs: "He would hold the Yiddish original in his lap and translate directly from the page. Isaac's power of concentration ... [enabled him] ... to sit and dictate for hours ..." (Telushkin, 33). "['Translating' with Singer] was actually a clerical refinement of transcription more than a literary exercise. He read to the 'translator' in English, putting his Yiddish into a form the auditor could understand, and then the translator put the words down into grammatical or, at best, more idiomatic usage" (Goran, 4). Both recollections also corroborate a far more devastating revelation: Singer did not understand English well enough to distinguish the fresh from the hackneyed phrase, the vigorous from the tired idiom, the life-giving from the death-dealing colloquialism. For Dvorah, wide-eyed with veneration, "he worked tirelessly over every line, every word. Jumping up for a word finder, a thesaurus, looking for synonyms and antonyms, flipping back and forth through his pages, he would repeat with infectious energy, 'Vee [sic] will polish it until it vill [sic] shine'" (Telushkin, 45). Goran, more knowledgeable about writing, notes that "Singer ... wanted colloquialisms or direct slang in the dialogue or the idiomatic in the narration. He was delighted to hear explanations of slang, breaking off our work and almost clapping his hands with pleasure at the derivations of words and phrases" (Goran, 4-5). This is the delight of a foreigner learning a new language and encountering usages that excite him only because he has not come across them before. Lack of facility denies him the capacity to know whether or not these usages have dated, what register they currently occupy in the language as it is received by educated native readers, how quickly they have become confined to a particular period or milieu light years removed from a new context into which they are incongruously thrust. Singer, as Goran describes with bitterness, never tired of objecting to their student's contemporary references to makes of automobiles (like Mercedes) or the names of film stars (like Bette Davis) on the grounds that "in a hundred years from now no one will know what these things are". Ironically, however, he himself was totally deaf to the datedness of English vernacular in a way he never was in his native Yiddish. Goran records Singer's enthusiasm for a student story that was "synthetic ... [employing] sentimental, television tough-guy talk of the fifties. ... He exulted over words like 'clobber,' which I explained to him one day. He liked the expression 'out of sight'. He liked 'buzz off' and 'get out of town.' Without resistance, he fell over himself in the students' sweep of fifty years of outdated language and my-feet-are-killing-me kind of hostess prose" (Goran 109). In such few of Singer's published Yiddish texts as we have, their deployment of different registers of speech, of idiomatic usage, slang and colloquialisms to create a character's occupation, education, or social pretension, or through description to evoke with haunting authenticity a period of Jewish life centuries before, is unsurpassed: "'Singer was a master of the Yiddish language. ... What a style! ... He has an exceptional mastery of the language, which is why no translation can possibly convey it. ... He lived in one of those little towns ... that were the source of the Yiddish language. He knew all its colors and shapes'" (quoted in Tuszynska, 110). The English versions of the same texts, by contrast, surrender their Yiddish stylistic mastery to trite American cliches because, despite all his grandiose posturing, Singer never mastered the English language. Moreover, in Englishing his later tales Telushkin steadily came to recognise that Singer consciously emasculated his Yiddish to pander to the taste of his American readers: "One important conflict ... involved my tendency to make literal translations, especially of [Yiddish] idiomatic phrases. Isaac always tried to find an English equivalent or a condensed English phrase; it was the eternal shame of the Jewish immigrant, his overwhelming need _not_ to sound like a "greenhorn". But in translation, I believed, too much of the flavour would be lost by accommodation to English expressions. ... The native expressions are vital and vivid and give the flavour to the original. But Isaac was firm." (Telushkin, 224). This "firmness" was actually deference to the marketing strategies of his publishers and their editors, who to this day ruthlessly eliminate all trace of "foreignness" in Singer's English versions, sacrificing Yiddish authenticity to American commercialism, a process to which I can personally testify from my own recent experience in translating _Shadows on the Hudson_. When the earliest English versions of his novels are compared with those of the latest, the steady coarsening of tone and diction is crudely apparent. When we add to his undiscriminating choice of English idiom Singer's determination to present in English translation Yiddish works cut and reshaped to please a predominantly non-Jewish readership largely ignorant of Jewish customs and the observances of Judaism, we confront a far more serious problem of literary misrepresentation. The case of "Der yid fun bovl" amply proves this, as Seth L. Wolitz has recently shown in his meticulous comparison of the original Yiddish text -- one of Bashevis's most powerful tales, published in 1935 before he left Warsaw -- and its progressive emasculation in successive English reworkings (see Seth L. Wolitz, "'Der Yid fun Bovl': Variants and Meanings." _Yiddish_, a double issue, Vol. 11.1-11.2 [1998], pp.30-47). But as Telushkin reveals, this literary hustling occasionally failed to work. In 1981 the _New Yorker_ judiciously rejected "The Jew from Babylon". Singer, by now convinced of his own infallibility, called the magazine's literary editor in a rage, threatening permanently to sever their connection. The editor abased himself in terror at "losing" The Master, took him to lunch, laved him in flattery, and then accepted the story. Smugly well pleased at the awe he still commanded -- "You see, vhen [sic] I finally made a real _geshray_, they got frightened" -- Singer then spitefully withheld the piece from the _New Yorker_ (Telushkin, 127-28). In what was now its wholly enfeebled form, it appeared with a flourish as the lead story in _The Death of Methuselah_. But the initial judgement of the _New Yorker_ was correct; in English, this tale is among Singer's weakest, glaringly displaying all the many defects with which his Yiddish critics had charged him for decades. The latest list of Singer's books in English numbers thirteen novels, ten volumes of short stories, five volumes of memoirs, fourteen books for children and three anthologies of selected writings. In Yiddish, on the other hand, we have access in published book form to only five novels, three collections of short stories, and two volumes of _Mayn tatns bezdn shtub_(*). This disparate ratio is staggering and disturbing. In Stockholm, at an unprecedented question-and-answer session after his Nobel Lecture, Singer told an outright lie to a questioner who wanted to know why his books were not published in Yiddish: "My books did appear in Yiddish, but they sold out, and there were no second editions. ... With the prize money, I hope to get my works published in Yiddish" (quoted in Zamir, 164). For so passionate a defender of Yiddish to so fanatical a detractor as Menachem Begin (Telushkin, 199- 200; Zamir, 184-86), Singer seemed to take extraordinary pains to ensure that very little of his work ever appeared in book form in Yiddish. Why was this? The question, impossible to answer with any certainty, is nevertheless central in evaluating what exactly it was that Singer actually wrote in his long, productive and much publicised literary life. Hence the most pressing question raised by the volumes under review. What constitutes the authentic corpus of Bashevis/Singer's writings? With what texts is the literary scholar to engage to get to the heart of his work? Quite obviously there are two corpuses, and in the larger of the two - - the English corpus -- we confront texts that are not simply "translations" but entirely different works, conceptually recast by the author, and Englished by a whole team of collaborators. In the English corpus we dare not speak of "style," since we face a conflation of styles. But we cannot easily gain access to the Yiddish corpus. Serialisations over extended periods of time in the _Forverts_ remain not only inaccessible but also ephemeral. It is absurd for chairmen of university presses to demand from potential students of Singer's work -- as has been my own experience -- that any evaluation of Singer's novels, for example, must be based on their Yiddish texts. Even with the indispensable aid of the comprehensive bibliographies compiled respectively by David Neal Miller and by Roberta Saltzmann, if their innumerable episodes could all be tracked down in the crumbling pages of sixty years of the _Forverts_ or their costly (and incomplete) microfilms, the scholar would still be confronting two wholly disparate texts. Janet Hadda's biography pointedly highlights this signal problem. She devotes an entire chapter to the origins and development of the dual personae of the Yiddish Bashevis and the English Singer. From the late 1940s, Hadda notes, when Bashevis's works first started appearing in English, "[a] major change was underway in Bashevis's life: he had entered the world of English translation ... Bashevis, that sharp-witted, conflicted, sometimes harsh literary genius, would gradually yield to Isaac Bashevis Singer ... Consciously or not, he had learned that Bashevis, the _enfant terrible_, would never capture the heart of an American audience. ... Bashevis had correctly, if intuitively perceived that for readers of English, an Eastern European Jew had to be old-fashioned, mild-mannered, even naive in order to be believable. Whether or not he knew what he was doing, Bashevis was never the innocent he claimed to be, according to Saul Bellow: 'He was sophisticated. He was an opportunist. He was a careerist.'" (Hadda, 128, 131) The president of New York's PEN Club in 1976 concurred: " [H]e had no desire ... to create something in a common effort for Jewish culture ... What was he interested in? ... Writing and being translated into English" (quoted in Tuszynska, 111). From the evidence offered, individual readers will have to test the validity of these judgements for themselves. Though Hadda's book sympathetically identifies the emotional and cultural problems confronting Bashevis in his adaptation to America and his transformation as a writer, her project is obviously not primarily concerned with what the corpus called "The Works of Bashevis Singer" exactly is. That problem, however, remains the crucial one confronting Bashevis/Singer scholars in the immediate future. With the discovery over the last five years of many unpublished and untranslated Bashevis materials, dating both from his years in Poland before 1935, and during his most productive period in the United States between 1960 and 1975, the problem will not go away. It may intensify, or it may become easier to resolve. One thing, however, is certain -- Bashevis/Singer, both in Yiddish and in English, is a writer who will be very much with us for a long while. In tone, these five books vary from the scholarly (Hadda) to the sentimental (Telushkin), from the embittered (Goran) through the bewildered (Tuszynska) to the primitive (Zamir). Nevertheless all repay attentive reading. All are indispensable for Singer scholars. What they say may not be what everyone expects to hear, but we are obliged to pay attention. ---------------------- *Ten works of Yitskhok Bashevis published in Yiddish in book form include five novels: Sotn in goray, Der kuntsnmakher fun lublin, Di familye moshkat, Der knekht, Der bal-tshuve; three story collections: Gimpel tam un andere dertseylungen, Mayses fun hintern oyvn, Der shpigl un andere dertseylungen; and two books of memoirs: Mayn tatns besdn shtub, Mayn tatns besdn shtub [hemskhekhim zamlung]. ______________________________________________________ End of _The Mendele Review_ 03.015 Leonard Prager, editor Subscribers to _Mendele_ (see below) automatically receive _The Mendele Review_. 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