• 48 Friday, June 1, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS your advertising dollars do better THE JEWISH NEWS • • 1 Translating Yiddish Call Us Today! 424-8833 COUPON Continued from Page 72 DOUBLE DISCOUNT Quality Cleaning - Save Up To 10% 0 C 0 On Cleaned & Pressed Paid In Advance Orders Lowest Prices In Town SLACKS $ 1.58 when paid in advance 0 0 U SUTTON PLACE DRYCLEANER 23119 Leiner at 9 Mile Coupon Good to 6-16-84 COUPON BERNICE GARON,M.A. Diet Consultant Offers clients a unique approach to weight loss*.. . For information regarding an appointment Call 353-0465 * Clients must be sincerely committed to an intense individualized weight control program conducted in the most personal & confidential manner. ntwown "Fashions for Girls 4-14 & Pre-Teen" 8th ANNUAL SUPER SUMMER SALE! • Week Beginning Saturday, June 2 • Week Beginning Saturday, June 9 • Week Beginning . Saturday, June 16' Thursday, July 5 All Remaining Merchandise '75% OFF 30% OFF 40% OFF OFF . Hours: Monday thru Sattirday 10-5 Applegate Square, Southfield Corner Northwestern & Inkster 7~40.4747.44 .4 :Z=..ket rt •• • Phone 357-1123 translating will be much harder . then." Despite the urgency, crafting a fine translation can take as much, or more time than writing an original work, says Shevrin. Marienbad took her two years and four drafts — with time out to teach Yiddish classes at Hillel and to regretfully decline invi- tations to translate various grand- mothers' diaries acquaintances sent her way. One six-page section of Marienbad, with its mix of Biblical Hebrew and Yiddish, took her two weeks to translate as she used prayer books in addition to dictionaries and thesauruses for her research. Shevrin spends her days writing in her upstairs study, where her granddaughter's Rubber Duckie graces the desk along with a typewri- ter and the xeroxed pages of Yiddish text upon which she makes prelimi- nary English notations. Evenings find her in the living room with her husband, Howard, a clinical psychol- ogist who is also fluent in Yiddish, reading aloud the day's translation, "balancing it like a checkbook" from English back into Yiddish — a device she uses to rein the translator's per- petual urge to "say it better than the author." Like all performers, the trans- lator has some latitude of interpreta- tion. Exactly how much? Well, Shev- rin would have liked to "edit out" some ofln the Storm's, less successful comic characters. "Bilt you can't do it," she says. She shakes her head. "I'll get walloped for that, but it's not my fault; I didn't write the book; I translated it." In general, Shevrin says, "basic grammar" best conveys Yiddish's linguistic persona. "There's a spoken voice to Yiddish," she says, "a narra- tive that was the original tradition. At the end of all my translations, I read my work aloud. If it doesn't sound right, I change it. The lan- guage's homey, friendly tone should come through in English:" To produce that tone means avoiding the stiff and literal "Woe is me" for the classic Yiddish exclama- tion Vey iz mirl as well as eschewing sentences like "I threw mama from the train a kiss," which fall a little to the Lower East Side of their Yiddish originals. When her translation cap- tures a Yiddish cadence or allitera- tive phrase, Shevrin is thrilled. "It was a real find when I came up with "wheeling and dealing" for handlen and vandlen,, she crows. Shevrin launched her literary career 19 years ago on a whim and a healthy dose of chutzpah. The im- petus was an installment of an I.B. Singer story published in the Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish news- paper her father mailed to her during the 19 years she resided in Topeka., Kan., where her husband was on the staff of the Meninger Institute. "I just had the urge to translate it, to scrib- ble it down for fun on the spur of the moment, the way you do a crossword puzzle," she recalls. But she sent Singer her transla- tion, in care of the Forward, and, on a visit to see relatives in New York, she phoned him — his name, to her amazement, was plainly listed in the Manhattan phone directory. After a lunchtime interview with Singer at a Manhattan vegetarian restaurant, she found herself engaged as trans- lator by him. Shevrin found Bel Kaufman in the Manhattan phone directory too. But she is unlikely to have to let her fingers do any more walking for a while. She loves Sholom Aleichem; the family likes her translating work; publishers find the man she refers to as the "Mark Train of Yid- dish •Literature" quite marketable; and while there are 42 Sholom Aleichem volumes, only about a third of them exist in English. An excerpt from 'Marienbad' Letter 13, from Meyer Mariom- Shlomo Kurlander's pretty wife? And chik, otherwise known as the in what way is he attentive? He lends "Odessa Womanizer, to his wife, her money on Shlomo's account. He Chan'tzi, home in Warsaw while he says that Shlomo Kurlander person- plays abroad: ally requests that he should give her "For no reason, dushinka, you money. But whose business is it? • • accuse me of writing you only once "Or, for instance, do I care that every two weeks. To me it seems that he plays, your brother-in-law, Sixty- I am writing you every day. What six with Madam Tchopnik every day? else is there to do here in this Tell me, what would you say, Marienbad where the heat is oppres- dushinka, if you would see me play- sive and you don't see a living soul ing Sixty-six with a strange woman? other than our high-flown Warsaw . But whose business is it? Or, for in- ladies? I avoid them like the plague stance, is irmy business that Mmes. because you know my attitude Sherentzis and Pekelis, those two toward women in general and how I young women who, on , the especially dislike these Nalevkis pious Nalevkis, wouldn't dare say a word gossips. We in Odessa dislike gossips. out loud to a man, here have cast off In our Odessa you can walk on -your their wigs and stroll arm in.arm with hands and whose business is it? For this Kishinever gigolo, a flirt who is instance, tioes•it bother me that your chasing after all three Yamayichke's brother-in-law Chaim is attentive to daughters . ."