Carolyn Yeager wrote:Looking for sections to translate will not do it - we have to have
the whole book. I have been making some inquiries and have learned that "someone"
is working on a translation.
This comes from a Yiddish organization, so it's very likely being done in conjunction with
Elie Wiesel and/or his backers.
This is not good. We have to have our own translation, totally objective. If anyone on
this board has any connection to Yiddish speakers or would want to undertake
this translation, let me know at
[email protected].
Carolyn, I wonder if you'll find
the smoking gun you're looking for. I did some test translations myself a few months back, after reading your articles on IH, and what I found was just that "Un di Velt"
is terribly overwritten. In other words, Wiesel slashed huge amounts
of filler out
of the Yiddish text to create "Night," but
the outline
of the story, and
the essential details, basically remain
the same. That, at least,
is the result I found.
I don't mean to be discouraging, and I don't mean that a translation might not be useful for other reasons. (As in, for example,
the light it might shine on EW's real sympathies--Seidman did title her article "
The Scandal of Jewish Rage," after all.) I'm just not sure that a complete translation will be
of much use in determining
the larger question
of whether EW really
is the author
of the text.
The discrepancies which you've found between
the existing translations
of "Night" and EW's statements elsewhere are already enough to establish that
the text
is not a "true" story in
the way it's usually passed off to be. But that's not likely to matter much to EW or his defenders. It's just too easy to say, "Oh, a few details were changed here and there--poetic licence." They'll shrug it off.
In other words, you might go to a huge amount
of trouble to produce a complete translation, and still be no further along in making
the case that EW
is a fraud.
Anyway, I didn't come along just to be a naysayer. Like I said, I did some translations a while back, before I knew that others were working on
the problem. So I'll post my results here, if only so that others don't waste their time on
the same material. Following Eric's example, I'm uploading
the pages as images--that looks like
the easiest way to display them here, without people having to download. If anyone's interested, I can pass along
the original Word files.
The text
is in three columns: Yiddish original, translation, and
the text
of "Night" in Marion Wiesel's translation, for comparison. I've highlighted in yellow
the material that EW cut in producing "Night." There are also a couple
of places, highlighted in blue, which show
additions EW made to
the text in "Night." Most
of these are pretty trivial, but there
is one that I'm sure everyone here will find significant. (It doesn't prove anything about authorship, however.)
Un di Velt, pp. 96-97
Un di Velt, pp. 167-171