3 - Elie Wiesel's Night: Searching for the Original

Summary

ELIE WIESEL'S La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960) is one of the iconic Holocaust survivor testimonies, having attained a status in the United States matched only by the popular edition of Anne Frank's diary. The text functions as a focus for discussion about the nature and purpose of testimony, about the status of the Holocaust survivor in contemporary culture, about questions of witnessing and authenticity, and about the boundary between the testimonial, the autobiographical, and the literary. However, it is not just the text that has attracted commentary, but also issues connected with translation. In contrast with the majority of Holocaust testimonies, issues of translation and reception in translation have been a defining feature of discussion of this text at least since the 1990s: it is very difficult to read this text now without engaging in some way with questions of translation and mediation, as the author himself has drawn attention to these questions in his preface to the recent English retranslation. As such, it is an interesting example of what happens when translation suddenly becomes visible in connection with a well-known, canonical testimony.

In this chapter, I am going to trace the outlines of the debate about Wiesel's text in translation, expanding the boundaries of the discussion by looking at the German translation by Curt Meyer-Clason as well as the English translations by Stella Rodway and Marion Wiesel. I will consider the extent to which discussion of translation is in fact about something else entirely, and how the relationship between translation and “original” that is identified by critics reflects ideas and anxieties about testimony, witnessing, loss, betrayal, and the status of Jewish remembrance within a more general, universalizing memory culture.

Ultimately, even though critical attention was drawn to translation through an attack on Wiesel and the attendant scandal, subsequent critical discussion, which has had an effect on popular new editions of the text in both English and French, has shown the potentially positive consequences of making translation visible. One can explore what translators do to make texts available to new readers, while also acknowledging that translation talk is often a way of negotiating other issues, too. An open, informed, respectfully critical discussion about translation and testimony can add to our understanding, and can be a source of knowledge about the Holocaust, rather than of anxiety.