{"id":77400,"date":"2013-08-19T11:45:38","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T16:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/?p=77400"},"modified":"2013-08-19T08:00:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T13:00:36","slug":"j-r-r-tolkiens-foremost-and-only-yiddish-language-translator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2013\/08\/19\/77400-j-r-r-tolkiens-foremost-and-only-yiddish-language-translator\/","title":{"rendered":"J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s foremost and only Yiddish-language translator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"throrsmap_lowres\"<\/a> Thanks to Ringer Tajik for the heads-up on this interesting read about a Yiddish translation of The Hobbit<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Cool quote that gives some insight into the difficulties of translating texts:<\/p>\n

But when Bilbo Baggins played with the meaning of his name in a long discussion with the dragon Smaug, Goldstein was forced to admit defeat. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to do it, there\u2019s just no way to translate it,\u201d Goldstein said. \u201cSo, I put in a footnote and said, \u2018This is a pun and I give up.\u2019 \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

For one of his first translation projects after his retirement, Barry Goldstein, a former computer programmer, found an empty table at his local Starbucks in Boston and settled in to work on the \u201cTreebeard\u201d chapter from J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Goldstein soon realized that he needed something more sizable to occupy his time: 95,022 words later, he had translated the entire text of The Hobbit, the prequel to the Ring series, into Yiddish.<\/p>\n

Only a little more than 130 copies of Goldstein\u2019s translation have sold since it was released in December. But as Goldstein tells it, he always knew Der Hobit wouldn\u2019t be a best-seller, and the sales were still double his original two-figure estimate.<\/p>\n

In the heyday of Yiddish literature, the translation of literary classics into the mamaloshen was entirely commonplace. The prewar Yiddish readership is estimated at about 10 million\u2014many of whom spoke Yiddish as their first language and had a rabid appetite for the classics of world literature. <\/p>\n

Some of the best-selling Yiddish adventure stories included gems like Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s Treasure Island, Jack London\u2019s Klondike series, and Mark Twain\u2019s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. \u201cThere was a sense that we had to catch Yiddish up with the world and modernism and that any important literary phenomenon that was taking place in the larger world had to be conveyed to the Yiddish-speaking world,\u201d said Miriam Udel, a professor of Yiddish at Emory University. \u201cThe cultural ambitions of Ashkenazic Jewry were on the grandest scale, so they didn\u2019t think of themselves as having a small or minority literature or a cultural complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Read More<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Ringer Tajik for the heads-up on this interesting read about a Yiddish translation of The Hobbit….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":44898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,153,196,148,152],"tags":[2111,2110],"class_list":["post-77400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hobbit-book","category-tolkien-life","category-tolkien-languages","category-hobbit","category-tolkien","tag-translation","tag-yiddish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t