HHU, Room 23.21.02.22
This lecture will discuss one of the most provocative and successful Yiddish novels published in Poland between the World Wars, Oyzer Varshavki’s Shmuglars. Literally a novel about smuggling, one of its most remarkable features is the extent to which the languages surrounding Yiddish—particularly Polish and German—are incorporated into the narrative discourse. The strategy of linguistic subversion whereby multiple languages are coded into a monolingual novel finds resonance with contemporaneous musical stragies whereby multiple tonalities are played simultaneously within a single composition. Understanding this novel and others like it as “polytonal” provides an intermedial methodology to understand the significance of translation within works of literature conceived in multilingual environments, as well as the problem of replicating these strategies when translating them from Yiddish into another language.
Apl. Prof. Dr. Marc Caplan is a faculty member of the department of Jewish Studies at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. He earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and has held professorial appointments at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale, the University of Wroclaw (Poland), and others. Marc Caplan is the author of two monographs, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (Indiana University Press, 2021). He has also written various articles on world literatures, the titles of which can be found here.