The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif

The Soviet Jewish poet Moisei Teif, whose young son was murdered during the Holocaust, wrote a number of poems in Yiddish on the taboo subject of the massive loss of Jewish children during the Second World War—a trauma that almost every Soviet Jewish family experienced, but often lied or kept silent about. This chapter focuses on one poem in particular, “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh,” which was translated into Russian and incorporated into a play, and which, in the course of time, became an emblematic work for Soviet Jews who, for years, had lacked the language (or means) to commemorate their losses.

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there isa Holocaust poetics.

A semiosic translation of Paul Celan’s Schwarze Flocken and Weggebeizt

The need for a comprehensive semiotic understanding of poetic translation is at the heart of the present paper. This task is framed in terms of a multidisciplinary theoretical framework termed semiosic translation that I apply in this article to the translation of Holocaust poetry. This type of poetry is characterized as a distinct sign system that poses a number of challenges to both translators and semioticians. One of the most conspicuous problems is the ineffability of nothingness, which is particularly evident in the poetry of Paul Celan. Building on the notions of abductive inference (Charles S. Peirce) and rule-following (Ludwig Wittgenstein), I introduce a method for the translation of two key poems Schwarze Flocken (‘Black Snowflakes’), corresponding to Celan’s early period, and Weggebeizt (‘Worn down,’ a poem written in 1963). The semiotic method applied shows that the underlying Firstness of Holocaust art (an anti-semiotic sign system) is the driving force behind Celan’s poetry. It is also suggested that iconicity and indexicality are not peripheral semiotic processes but central elements to elucidating how the translation across sign systems takes place.

Polish and Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust

WHEN discussing Holocaust poetry two names usually spring to mind: Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. There is, however, a large corpus of poems on the subject from two eastern European countries, both of which had large Jewish communities before the Second World War: Poland and Hungary. In what follows I shall discuss the best poetry on the Holocaust from both countries, excluding that written in Yiddish....

Fasetowany język: bilingwalna poezja Ireny Klepfisz w poetyckim dyskursie o Zagładzie

The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz, a Polish-born Jewish-American poet, seems to constitute a unique case of Holocaust poetry. The poet, an intellectual and activist engaged in lesbian, queer, feminist and gender movements, advocates the reading of Holocaust poetry within the ramifications of gender oriented cultural theories. Her bilingual poetry undermines the hypothesis of the postvernacularity of contemporary Yiddish. The paper substantiates the thesis that the choice of the target language in the translaton of bilingual Holocaust poetry has clear axiological underpinnings.