5 - Self-Translation and the Language of the Perpetrators: Krystyna Żywulska's Auschwitz Testimony

Summary

DEPENDING ON how one defines it, self-translation by Holocaust survivors is either very common or quite rare. It is very common for survivors to renarrate their experiences in a new language, for a number of different reasons: survivors have ended up across the world in countries in which a different language or languages are spoken, and have had to find new audiences (which may include their family or community, therapists, authorities, police, or legal officers, or a more general audience). Some have also made the journey to Germany in order to give testimony at trials, and—if they had the linguistic ability—have spoken German in order to reach an audience beyond the courtroom, or have renarrated their story in German themselves. This may involve elements of direct translation, but it is likely to be a mixed and complex procedure of renarration in a specific context using the linguistic resources available to the witness and his or her interlocutors.

On the other hand, the process of translating one's own preexisting text for publication in the new context is much rarer, and is a rather different procedure that brings with it its own specific issues to do with text function, anticipated readership, autobiographical self-shaping, and the construction of a relationship between “original” and “translation.” Keeping the focus on this specific procedure, rather than using “selftranslation” as a metaphor for other forms of autobiographical speech or writing, will allow us to put this form of translation into the context of the other chapters of this study.

The translation of one's own text is not an entirely new narration, but is one that is caught between the structure, style, and intentions of the earlier text and the requirements of the new context and audience, and between the resources of two (or possibly more) different languages. The earlier text exerts an influence over the translation, but it is in the process transformed into an original: thus, both texts influence each other, depending on which one is defined as the original and which as the translation. The definition of original text is not always obvious, as I will show in the case of Filip Müller in chapter 6, and it is tempting to define “earlier” as “more original,” and thus “more authentic” or closer to the experience itself.