Here at BookishlyJewish we are preparing to start featuring books in translation. So we were thrilled to sit down with Jessica Kirzane and learn about her work as a translator, including how books are selected for translation and published. Read on to discover more!
BookishlyJewish: I am so excited to learn more about book translation and how it works! How did you get involved in the field?
Jessica Kirzane: When I was a graduate student working on a PhD in Yiddish literature – as a non-native Yiddish speaker who was still learning Yiddish as I was trying to analyze it in a critical way – I found myself turning to translation as a way to express to myself my comprehension, and my interpretation, of the texts I was reading. This was initially a personal practice to support my reading and force myself to slow down and spend time with the texts in close detail. I discovered quickly that I loved translation! I appended a translation of a short story to a term paper I had written on the story, and my instructor told me that the translation itself was excellent (he was less enthusiastic about the term paper, if I remember correctly) and I should consider pursuing translation. Maybe that was a veiled insult, or even an example of a certain kind of academic sexism in which translation work is considered supporting or supplemental to the “more seriou”s work of literary analysis, like women academics have sometimes been treated as supporting figures to “more serious” male academics. But I took it as a compliment anyway, and when I finished my PhD I applied to a translation fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center.
This was a life-changing opportunity to learn about the nuts and bolts of translation and to understand myself as a translator who could interpret and represent an entire book-length translation, something I probably never would have attempted without this extra vote of confidence. Through this program, I came to understand what it meant to see literary translation as an act of literary creation, and to develop my own voice as a translator. I could see how each word in the original bears with it a constellation of connotations and associations, possibilities that a translator has to either recreate or choose from in order to craft a new text that stands on its own terms.
BookishlyJewish: How many books have you translated and what languages do you work in?
Jessica Kirzane: I translate from Yiddish to English. I have translated three books, all by popular Yiddish writer Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse UP 2020), Judith (Farlag Press 2022), and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse UP 2023). In addition I have translated many short stories and poems that have appeared in literary journals and anthologies – some of the writers I have translated include Yente Serdatsky, Pessie Hershfeld Pomerants, Joseph Opatoshu, and Dora Schulner.
BookishlyJewish: How does the selection process work? Do you approach an author, does a publisher approach you, or is there some other permutation I haven’t thought of?
Jessica Kirzane: Generally, I choose what to translate by reading as much as I can. Whenever I read in Yiddish, I always have in the back of my mind the question, “Will I translate this?” Often if I think something would be fun, interesting, or meaningful to translate, I’ll try my hand at a few paragraphs and see how it feels in my language. Sometimes that’s as far as I’ll go – even if I like it, I feel satisfied in having engaged with it just as a personal experiment.
Sometimes I decide to move forward. Often that’s because I feel that the text needs a champion, that English language readers should have access to it and I’m a good person to help them reach the text. In my case (with a few rare exceptions) the author is often no longer living. I have to look for existing relatives because they often hold the rights for the original, and ask them for permission to publish a translation. I then pitch the translation to a journal or to a press, usually when it’s already finished, or in the case of the books when I at least have quite a bit of the text already translated and in good shape. I have never been approached by a publisher – but if anyone out there is reading this and wants to approach me, I’m all ears!
BookishlyJewish: I imagine there are many moments when translation also requires interpretation of the authors meaning. How do you resolve these ambiguities in writing?
Jessica Kirzane: I can’t remember who told me this, so I can’t give credit specifically, but in one of the workshops at the Yiddish Book Center translation fellowship I remember being taught that a good translator has to make decisions and interpretations. If the original is ambiguous, you have to decide on what you think it means, and try to convey that (even if you want to convey it in a way that is also ambiguous, to match the original). You have to know why you are writing it the way you are. If you are unsure, your readers will be unsure, and even confused. Your original author wasn’t unsure – they made a choice. You have to be an author too, and make your own choices, because that’s what makes a good piece of writing.
BookishlyJewish: How much involvement does the original author have (if they are still alive obviously)? Do you consult them during the work?
Jessica Kirzane: I very rarely work with an original author (as I mentioned above). Recently, however, I have translated a few poems by contemporary Yiddish poets. In that case, I have sent my translations to the poet, who has sometimes given me feedback. Sometimes there’s a back-and-forth: the poet is the expert on the poem in its original, but I am the expert on the English version, and on what I’m trying to do with it. I am thinking about the connotations of the words in English and how I imagine they might land with my readers. Maybe I made a change to create a particular rhythm or sound that I feel works for the English version. I don’t simply take the author’s suggestions as corrections. I see them as an opportunity to have a clarifying conversation about how the poet and I both understand the words and their weight.
I did have one very fun interaction, as it were, with the author I have translated most – Miriam Karpilove. She died in the 1950s, so of course it wasn’t a conventional back-and-forth with an author, but it was sort of like that! I had already translated Karpilove’s novella Judith when I realized that in her archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research there was an unpublished manuscript of Karpilove’s self-translation of the novella into English! I did a side-by-side comparison of my translation and hers, and sometimes I took her “suggestions” because they clarified something I hadn’t fully understood or I simply preferred her turn of phrase. But her writing in English felt much more formal than mine, and I was confident in my version as one that would be more readable for today’s readers. It felt like having a conversation about translation with the author, albeit a delayed one.
BookishlyJewish: What credentials does a translator need?
Jessica Kirzane: The bottom line is that a translator needs to translate well. There are MA programs for translation, there are courses in translation, there are conferences and workshops and collectives, and I heartily recommend participating in all these things – having a community you can bounce your ideas off of is not only helpful but absolutely life-giving. There’s nothing as satisfying as being in a room full of translators who can talk together about shades of meaning around a particular phrase. But there isn’t a specific qualification or requirement.
BookishlyJewish: Yiddish is a language full of idioms that carry meaning only from the years of tradition that created them. How do you adequately convey those meanings in another language?
Jessica Kirzane: I think any language has its own idioms and its own cultural and historical context and specificity. The crux of translation is to try to remain true to that cultural specificity while also making the text understood for a new audience. You can do that in a variety of ways: sometimes with footnotes or glossaries to support your including information (such as words from the original, or cultural references) that might not be readily comprehensible to your readers, sometimes by expanding the sentences to include explanations where the original doesn’t have to. For me, a question is always whether I am correctly conveying the tone of the original – is it chatty and lighthearted in the original? Is it formal? Is a particular word that comes from Hebrew there because the author is trying to convey something about tradition or religion, or was it simply a commonplace word and the most apt word the author could think of? Knowing, or deciding, when something is so specific and its specificity is so central to the idea of the original text that it needs to be preserved in the translation is a tricky thing – but I don’t think that’s unique to Yiddish.
BookishlyJewish: I always end by asking if you have a favorite Jewish book
Jessica Kirzane: I have so many favorite books! My favorite book for today, though – just for this very minute – is Yerra Sugarman’s Aunt Bird. It’s a recent book of poetry in which the poet tries to connect to an aunt she never met, who died in the Holocaust, through imagining the texture of her aunt’s emotional life. There’s something sort of translation-like in the poet’s attempts to reach across an enormous gulf and think, or feel, herself into her aunt’s mind. It’s a beautiful book – I hope your audience will give it a read.
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