For readers in the English-speaking world, almost all Holocaust writing is translated writing. Translation is indispensable for our understanding of the Holocaust because there is a need to tell others what happened in a way that makes events and experiences accessible – if not, perhaps, comprehensible – to other communities. Yet what this means is only beginning to be explored by Translation Studies scholars. This book aims to bring together the insights of Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies in order to show what a critical understanding of translation in practice and context can contribute to our knowledge of the legacy of the Holocaust. The role translation plays is not just as a facilitator of a semi-transparent transfer of information. Holocaust writing involves questions about language, truth and ethics, and a theoretically informed understanding of translation adds to these questions by drawing attention to processes of mediation and reception in cultural and historical context. It is important to examine how writing by Holocaust victims, which is closely tied to a specific language and reflects on the relationship between language, experience and thought, can (or cannot) be translated. This volume brings the disciplines of Holocaust and Translation Studies into an encounter with each other in order to explore the effects of translation on Holocaust writing. The individual pieces by Holocaust scholars explore general, theoretical questions and individual case studies, and are accompanied by commentaries by translation scholars.

In his testimony on his survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi said "our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man". If language, if any language, lacks the words to express the experience of the concentration camps, how does one write the unspeakable? How can it then be translated? The limits of representation and translation seem to be closely linked when it comes to writing about the Holocaust – whether as fiction, memoir, testimony – a phenomenon the current study examines. While there is a spate of literature about the impossibility to represent the Holocaust , not much has been written on the links between translation in its specific linguistic sense, translation studies, and the Holocaust, a niche this volume aims to fill.

A growing body of scholarship is making visible the contribution of translators to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust. The discussion has tended to be theoretical or to concentrate on exposing the "distorted" translations of texts by important witnesses such as Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel. There is therefore a need for a positive, concrete, and contextually aware approach to the translation of Holocaust testimonies that acknowledges the achievements of translators while being sensitive to the consequences of particular translation strategies. Peter Davies's study proceeds from the assumption that translators are active co-creators whose work does not simply mediate a pre-existing text, but creates a representation of that text for a new readership in a specific context. Translators of Holocaust testimonies, then, provide a form of textual commentary that works through ideas about witnessing, historical truth, and the meaning of the Holocaust. In this way they are important co-creators of knowledge about the Holocaust and its legacy. The study focuses on translations between English and German, and from other languages (principally French, Russian, and Polish) into English and German. It works through a number of case studies, showing how making translation and its effects visible contributes to a clearer understanding of how knowledge about the Holocaust has been and continues to be created and mediated. Peter Davies is Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh.

One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccupation with processes of translation, in the form of both embedded and book-length renderings of texts relevant to Holocaust survival. In Arduous Tasks, Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony. The first book to study Levi and translation, Arduous Tasks overcomes the conventional views of the separation between his own personal memoirs and his translations by stressing the centrality of translation in Levi's entire corpus. Examining not only the testimonial nature of his work, Insana also discusses the transgressive and performative aspects of transmission in his writings. Arduous Tasks is a superb and innovative study on the importance of translation not only to Levi, but also to Holocaust studies in general.

Taking a cognitive approach, this book asks what poetry, and in particular Holocaust poetry, does to the reader - and to what extent the translation of this poetry can have the same effects. It is informed by current theoretical discussion and features many practical examples. Holocaust poetry differs from other genres of writing about the Holocaust in that it is not so much concerned to document facts as to document feelings and the sense of an experience. It shares the potential of all poetry to have profound effects on the thoughts and feelings of the reader. This book examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense. This is especially true when historical and cultural distance intervenes. The first book of its kind and by a world-renowned scholar and translator, this is required reading.