Academic literature on the topic 'Nuit (Wiesel, Elie)'

By welcoming the other in his language and thus opening the door to an unknown universe, the translation must take up the challenge of otherness which rests on the capacity, beyond words, to be received in a foreign culture. What happens, in this case, when the culture of the language in question is that of a world that one sought to annihilate in an unspeakable catastrophe? It is in the light of Yiddish that I will deploy the two axes of my reflection on what, beyond translation as a passage from one language and from one culture to another, can ultimately account for the impossibility of rendering the language of the other, of another world. In the case of Yiddish, it is important to consider the mental universe it represents, the Yiddishland and the yiddishkayt. It is to paint the portrait of this now disappeared world, which is not on any world map, that I will apply myself firstly. In a second step, it will be necessary to question the very impossibility of translating Yiddish. With Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “retranslates” his own texts from Yiddish into English, and makes this English translation the matrix of translations into other languages. What happens between the first Yiddish original and the second English original of Singer’s works? Why this need to correct the English versions of his Yiddish texts? These questions raise issues about what Yiddish and the universe it stages represent for Singer: a past world, impossible to render in any other language, the “other world” which has now disappeared? And with Elie Wiesel, whose mother tongue is Yiddish, but who chooses French as the “language of writing”. Wiesel’s “first” work, La nuit, will form the matrix of his novels, built like a fresco in which the works respond to each other, in a Midrashic “infinite reading”. However, at the start of those novels is a story written feverishly and published in Yiddish, … a di velt hot geshvign. This Yiddish text is a cry of revolt and a testimony that the French version will confine to silence, La nuit becoming the very expression of silence. Faced with the impossibility of translating Yiddish, of accounting for the world carried by Yiddish, Wiesel constructs a literary work that will tell a story strewn with clues of this destroyed culture. Could it be, in the last instance, the hidden treasure of Jewish tradition which, precisely out of loyalty to Judaism, cannot be translated? This world which belongs to the Jews and of which they are the only heirs, at the risk of this heritage being lost, for lack of transmission? This questioning could illustrate a reflection on the limits of translation in the light of its cultural and spiritual issues.

Notre étude de l’œuvre d’Elie Wiesel, rescapé de la Shoah, se base sur l’apparente contradiction entre certains de ses propos sur le témoignage (refus de la fiction, de l’esthétisation) et la dimension littéraire de ses textes (témoignages, romans, récits, théâtre). Elle se divise en quatre parties. Dans un premier temps, nous nous attachons à une définition du témoignage, notion complexe, à travers la vision d’un fondateur critique (Jean-Norton Cru) des approches sociologiques (Michael Pollak, Renaud Dulong) et le travail d’une psychanalyste (Régine Waintrater) avant d’explorer la position de Wiesel quant à la fonction et la valeur du témoignage. Dans un deuxième temps, nous établissons, à travers une étude poétique de La Nuit et une étude thématique de l’œuvre, le lien étroit qu’entretiennent témoignage et littérarité dans les textes wieseliens. Une troisième partie, nous permet d’explorer le métissage au coeur de l’écriture de Wiesel. Métissage qui constitue un aspect particulier de son témoignage, tendu entre deux pôles majeurs : celui de la tradition juive (yiddish et hassidique) ashkénaze et celui de la culture occidentale (France, Etats-Unis) de l’immédiat après-guerre. Une quatrième partie explore dans l’œuvre de Wiesel des cycles qui sont les indices permettant de la considérer comme un ensemble construit, une œuvre testimoniale mais aussi littéraire, vivante, en évolution. Notre conclusion évoque l’avenir de ce témoignage dont l’existence est liée, pour l’instant, plus au corps périssable du témoin qu’à la prise de conscience de la valeur littéraire objective des textes, dimension que notre travail a voulu mettre en évidence
At the centre of our study of the work of Shoah survivor Elie Wiesel, is the apparent contradiction between certain of his statements concerning the bearing of witness (the refusal of fiction, of aesthetisation) and the literary dimension of his texts (testimonies, novels, tales, theatre works). The study is comprised of four sections. The first deals with the complex notion of testimony as approached variously by a pioneering critic (Jean-Norton Cru), sociologists (Michael Pollak, Renaud Dulong) and a psychoanalyst (Régine Waintrater) and goes on to explore Wiesel’s own stated position concerning the value and function of testimony. In the second section we establish, by means of a poetical study of Night and a thematic study of the œuvre, the close links between testimony and literarity in Wiesel’s texts. In the third section we investigate the hybridization that is at the core of Wiesel’s writing. This hybridization constitutes a particular aspect of his testimony, situated as it is between the twin poles of the Ashkenazi (Yiddish and Hassidic) tradition and the western culture (France, USA) of the immediate post-war. The fourth part explores cycles present in Wiesel’s œuvre. The presence of these cycles allows us to consider the latter as a constructed whole; as a testimony but also as a lively and evolving work of literature. Our conclusion evokes the possible future of a testimony, which is, at present, more associated with the finite corporeal presence of the witness than with an awareness of the objective literary value of the texts. It is this literary value that our study aims to demonstrate

This project sets out to frame and examine the theoretical and practical challenges involved in the process and effect of translating Holocaust testimony, which has been largely overlooked in Holocaust discourses. Research pertaining to the fields of Holocaust memorialisation, historiography, literary theory, and translation studies is drawn together, with a view to shedding light on what it means to write Holocaust testimony, what it means to read it, and how these often conflicting processes affect and are affected by translation. Using a canonical testimonial text by Elie Wiesel as a case study allows the exploration of these questions to be grounded in detailed and wide-ranging textual analysis, demonstrating the extent to which translation impacts Holocaust testimony. The Holocaust is an unparalleled event in the twentieth century and testimony to it is born of a unique desire to relate one’s experiences, coupled with a certainty that these experiences cannot be expressed. This dual set of challenges requires a distinctive approach to reading testimony, which is shaped through a range of textual and paratextual features. Furthermore, the reader’s perception of the author figure is argued here to have a discernible bearing on this reading process. Translation has the potential to unsettle this reading, by undermining the readers’ belief in the author figure and in the referential status of the text. The analysis of Wiesel’s La Nuit in translation demonstrates that translation not only has a marked effect on the content and nature of this piece of testimony, but that the way in which this effect is presented to the readership is a reflection of the text’s shifting target locale and strongly impacts the reading of testimonial texts.