{"title":"Translating the Memory of the Holocaust: Thomas Geve’s Memoir","authors":"Laura Miñano Mañero","doi":"10.5209/estr.68877","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the most significant challenges of translating the memory of the Holocaust, focusing on the difficulties of transferring a survivor’s testimonial account to a different linguistic and cultural system. Because the concentration camp experience is inherently multicultural, and survivors have chosen to pen their ordeal in several languages, translation epitomizes a discipline that intertwines directly with the construction of universal collective memory. Consequently, translating Holocaust memoirs poses challenging questions on hermeneutics and deontology. Throughout the following pages, I will critically analyze my own Spanish rendition of Thomas Geve’s memoir, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (1987), so as to delve into the ethical commitments borne by a translator, and into the formal and stylistic complexities inherent to the translation of concentrationary literature.","PeriodicalId":40318,"journal":{"name":"Estudios de Traduccion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Estudios de Traduccion","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5209/estr.68877","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper explores the most significant challenges of translating the memory of the Holocaust, focusing on the difficulties of transferring a survivor’s testimonial account to a different linguistic and cultural system. Because the concentration camp experience is inherently multicultural, and survivors have chosen to pen their ordeal in several languages, translation epitomizes a discipline that intertwines directly with the construction of universal collective memory. Consequently, translating Holocaust memoirs poses challenging questions on hermeneutics and deontology. Throughout the following pages, I will critically analyze my own Spanish rendition of Thomas Geve’s memoir, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (1987), so as to delve into the ethical commitments borne by a translator, and into the formal and stylistic complexities inherent to the translation of concentrationary literature.