For readers in the English-speaking world, almost all Holocaust writing is translated writing. Translation is indispensable for our understanding of the Holocaust because there is a need to tell others what happened in a way that makes events and experiences accessible – if not, perhaps, comprehensible – to other communities. Yet what this means is only beginning to be explored by Translation Studies scholars. This book aims to bring together the insights of Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies in order to show what a critical understanding of translation in practice and context can contribute to our knowledge of the legacy of the Holocaust. The role translation plays is not just as a facilitator of a semi-transparent transfer of information. Holocaust writing involves questions about language, truth and ethics, and a theoretically informed understanding of translation adds to these questions by drawing attention to processes of mediation and reception in cultural and historical context. It is important to examine how writing by Holocaust victims, which is closely tied to a specific language and reflects on the relationship between language, experience and thought, can (or cannot) be translated. This volume brings the disciplines of Holocaust and Translation Studies into an encounter with each other in order to explore the effects of translation on Holocaust writing. The individual pieces by Holocaust scholars explore general, theoretical questions and individual case studies, and are accompanied by commentaries by translation scholars.

A growing body of scholarship is making visible the contribution of translators to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust. The discussion has tended to be theoretical or to concentrate on exposing the "distorted" translations of texts by important witnesses such as Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel. There is therefore a need for a positive, concrete, and contextually aware approach to the translation of Holocaust testimonies that acknowledges the achievements of translators while being sensitive to the consequences of particular translation strategies. Peter Davies's study proceeds from the assumption that translators are active co-creators whose work does not simply mediate a pre-existing text, but creates a representation of that text for a new readership in a specific context. Translators of Holocaust testimonies, then, provide a form of textual commentary that works through ideas about witnessing, historical truth, and the meaning of the Holocaust. In this way they are important co-creators of knowledge about the Holocaust and its legacy. The study focuses on translations between English and German, and from other languages (principally French, Russian, and Polish) into English and German. It works through a number of case studies, showing how making translation and its effects visible contributes to a clearer understanding of how knowledge about the Holocaust has been and continues to be created and mediated. Peter Davies is Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh.

This collection brings together work from Memory Studies and Translation Studies to explore the role of interlingual and intercultural translation for unpacking transcultural memory dynamics, focusing on memories of violent pasts across different literary genres. The book explores the potential of a research agenda that links narrower definitions of translation with broader notions of transfer, transmission, and relocation across temporal and cultural borders, investigating the nuanced theoretical and conceptual dimensions at the intersection of memory and translation. The volume explores memories of violent pasts – legacies of war, genocide, dictatorship, and exile across different genres and media, including testimony, autobiography, novels, and graphic novels. The collection engages in central questions at the interface of Memory Studies and Translation Studies, including whether traumatic historical experiences that resist representation can be translated, what happens when texts that negotiate such memories are translated into other languages and cultures, and what role translation strategies, translators, and agents of translations play in memory across borders. The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in Translation Studies, Memory Studies, and Comparative Literature.

This book examines the role played by the international circulation of literature in constructing cultural memories of the Second World War. War writing has rarely been read from the point of view of translation even though war is by definition a multilingual event, and knowledge of the Second World War and the Holocaust is mediated through translated texts. Here, the author opens up this field of research through analysis of several important works of French war fiction and their English translations. The book examines the wartime publishing structures which facilitated literary exchanges across national borders, the strategies adopted by translators of war fiction, the relationships between translated war fiction and dominant national memories of the war, and questions of multilingualism in war writing. In doing so, it sheds new light on the political and ethical questions that arise when the trauma of war is represented in fiction and through translation. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of translation, cultural memory, war fiction and Holocaust writing.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory serves as a timely and unique resource for the current boom in thinking around translation and memory. The Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of a contemporary, and as yet unconsolidated, research landscape with a four-section structure which encompasses both current debate and future trajectories. Twenty-four chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars provide a cross-sectional snapshot of the diverse angles of approach and case studies that have thus far driven research into translation and memory. A valuable, far-reaching range of theoretical, empirical, reflective, comparative, and archival approaches are brought to bear on translational sites of memory and mnemonic sites of translation through the examination of topics such as traumatic, postcolonial, cultural, literary, and translator memory. This Handbook is key reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in translation studies, memory studies, and related areas.

One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccupation with processes of translation, in the form of both embedded and book-length renderings of texts relevant to Holocaust survival. In Arduous Tasks, Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony. The first book to study Levi and translation, Arduous Tasks overcomes the conventional views of the separation between his own personal memoirs and his translations by stressing the centrality of translation in Levi's entire corpus. Examining not only the testimonial nature of his work, Insana also discusses the transgressive and performative aspects of transmission in his writings. Arduous Tasks is a superb and innovative study on the importance of translation not only to Levi, but also to Holocaust studies in general.

This volume engages with memory of the Holocaust as expressed in literature, film, and other media. It focuses on the cultural memory of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors, while also taking into view those who were children during the Nazi period. Language loss, language acquisition, and the multiple needs of translation are recurrent themes for all of the authors discussed. By bringing together authors and scholars (often both) from different generations, countries, and languages, and focusing on transgenerational and translational issues, this book presents multiple perspectives on the subject of Holocaust memory, its impact, and its ongoing worldwide communication.