The Shmooze: The Yiddish Book Center's podcast
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"A New Year's Eve State of Mind": Ri J. Turner’s Yiddish Translation

We caught up with Ri J. Turner, a 2014 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, to chat about her translation of A.S. Lirik’s "A New Year's Eve State of Mind.” An M.A. student in the Department of Yiddish at Hebrew University, Ri is currently studying as a graduate exchange student at Medem Library in Paris, France. She joins us on the phone from Paris to discuss her work as a Yiddish translator, how she found Lirik’s piece, translating work by Yiddish writer Der Tunkeler, and the Yiddish scene in Paris. Ri’s translation of "A New Year's Eve State of Mind" is posted on our website under Language, Literature & Culture.

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The below is a transcript of this podcast. Due to the long distance connection the sound quality is poor so we wanted to share the conversation as transcribed:

Lisa Newman:                       Sholem-aleykhem. Welcome to The Shmooze, the Yiddish Book Center's podcast. I'm Lisa Newman and today I'm visiting with Ri Turner. For our listeners, we’re doing an overseas call here, from Amherst to Paris.

Ri is an MA student in Yiddish at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is currently studying as a graduate exchange student in the Yiddish Immersion Program of Medem Library in Paris, France. Ri was a 2014 Yiddish Book Center translation fellow, and recipient of the 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship.

Welcome, Ri.

Ri Turner:                                Thank you.

Lisa Newman:                       Great to have you here. Really have been looking forward to the chance to speak with you. You know, you've been on my radar for the past many years as an alumna of our translation fellowship program and I know we've been publishing your work in translation, so it's great to have a conversation with you. And I thought of inviting you on, and we'll get to this, because we're about to post your most recent translation for us, of "A New Year's Eve State of Mind" and we'll talk a little bit about that which is great. So, before I ask you about this recent translation, tell me how you found your way to Yiddish and Yiddish translation.

Ri Turner:                                So I never really know how to answer the question about how I found my way to Yiddish. I guess, I was already doing Jewish studies stuff, and kind of starting to feel like Yiddish was the missing piece, like there was a big gap in what I knew and I wouldn't be able to fill in that gap without this key piece. That led me to study in the YIVO summer program in the summer of 2012. Actually, before that I took my first Yiddish class at the Workmen's Circle in Boston. I absolutely fell in love that very first summer, and since then it's basically been all Yiddish all the time. When I saw the announcement that the Center was organizing the translation fellowship, I really wanted to apply, so I applied for the 2014 fellowship and then it just sort of took off from there. I never really set out to become a translator, but I keep finding that I'm doing more and more of it.

Lisa Newman:                       And it's kind of funny when you think about it. I don't imagine that even five years ago, or six years ago, when we started the fellowship, that people would think that they could actually have a career path or profession as a Yiddish translator, but it's wonderful that you're all doing this for those of us who can't read it in the original. Curious to know if there's a particular genre, writer, that you kind of gravitate towards in Yiddish literature or do you just explore, trip over, and find your way to something that resonates with you?

Ri Turner:                                I really love the Yiddish press, finding pieces from the Yiddish press. And we live in an amazing time right now because more and more Yiddish newspapers are being digitized all the time and also there’s the project of the Index to Yiddish Periodicals out of Jerusalem, which I love amazing my friends with my magical party trick of getting online and saying "Hey, do you want to find a Yiddish article from the 1920's about Charlie Chaplin, or about Shakespeare or about, I don't know, baseball?" And then with a few clicks I can access dozens of articles on pretty much any subject you want.  That's all new in the past five, ten years, so I feel really lucky to be coming of age, so to speak, at a time where all of these things are becoming so much more accessible.

Looking through Yiddish periodicals is like this treasure hunt where you never know what you're going to find, so that’s how I really enjoy finding pieces to translate, especially because that writing is much less accessible, obviously, than writing that was published in book form, so I know that pretty much anything I find is going to be like something that no one’s looked at for a long time.

Lisa Newman:                       It's really great! I mean, it gives us such an informed understanding of what was going on in everyday life. It's a reflection of the times, it contextualizes things in ways that we haven't been able to, again, if you're not a Yiddish reader these translation are so needed. We're just discovering these periodicals. So am I correct that you're currently working on translating a selection of Humoresques by Joseph Tunkel, or Der Tunkeler, as some say?

Ri Turner:                                Mhm, yeah that's right.

Lisa Newman:                       And tell me a little bit about that project.

Ri Turner:                                So that's also, to some extent, a project that involves digging through the Yiddish press, because even though Der Tunkeler did publish a lot of book-length collections of his humorous writings, almost everything that he wrote appeared first in the press, and there's lots and lots of pieces that he wrote in the press and then never reissued in book form, so I'm really enjoying that fact, of searching out the various pieces he has in the press.

The project has a huge element of curation. A lot of what I'm doing is looking through stuff that he wrote and deciding what's worth translating, what pieces work, what pieces would work for today's audience, and then, obviously, the work of translating as well, and annotation too. There's kind of a habit, I guess, in the world of literary translation into English that says work should speak for itself, like there's sort of a ban against footnotes in literary translation. And that’s what I think really just does not work when it comes to Yiddish. There's so much cultural and historical context that's necessary in order to understand what [inaudible 00:06:29] means, and I think that rather than taking away from the work, that sort of annotation can add so much to it in terms of allowing the audience to understand what's going on, being able to appreciate both the content and the style of the piece by putting it into its context.

Lisa Newman:                       Interesting that you mention that because, there is a straddling of the line. Does it interfere with the reading, or, you make a really great case for why it needs to be there not just for academic purposes, but just for cultural understanding, yes?

Ri Turner:                                Mhm.

Lisa Newman:                       So what are the challenges, you know, we talk about literary translation which certainly demands, I think, or needs, a translator to really get the voice of the writer, but then also to be able to find that voice that's comfortable in translation and reads well.

Ri Turner:                                Mhm. It a cliché to say this at this point, but translation really is an extremely creative process, and I think it took me a while before I learned how to access that, and actually one of the reasons that I decided to devote so much time to Der Tunkeler is that the moment when I first really understood that was when I was working on one of his pieces – when I got past the endeavor to kind of reproduce every word in every sentence and experience the kind of creative leap where I started coming up with sentences that had the tone in English that I felt like the Yiddish sentence had.

In some cases, the exact content or syntax of the sentence might be actually quite different from the original Yiddish sentence, but if I feel like it's doing more or less the same work in English, then that's kind of the moment of success, and the first time I experienced that was when I was translating one of his humoresques.

Lisa Newman:                       Are you finding that there is sort of a community that you can connect with to talk about challenges of, a word, a phrase, or what have you? Since there's so many people who have come out of the Translation Fellowship and then there are, obviously, other people who have been working in Yiddish translation for a long time.

Ri Turner:                                Yes and no, I mean, I feel like there's multiple communities. There's the translation community of people who work from various languages into English and there's a certain type of challenge that that community can help with, and then there's sort of a Yiddishist linguistic philological community of people who may or may not work in translation but are very interested in Yiddish etymology, dialect, all that type of linguistic stuff and also cultural context from the Yiddish literary world and that's where I usually turn when I have questions about specifics of the text that I'm working with.

Lisa Newman:                       So, lets talk a little bit about the piece that we’re about to post on the Yiddish Center's website, just in time for New Year's Eve, everybody, "A New Year's Eve State of Mind." Tell me how you found your way to this and a little bit about it without need for, as for like I like to say, a spoiler alert, because I think everybody should read this and come to it fresh.

Ri Turner:                                Yeah sure. So this is once again a piece that I found in the Yiddish press, and actually, I went looking for it because last year around this time, some of the folks here, some of the students who attend the Yiddish classes here in Paris got together and said "Hey, let's do something for New Year's Eve, let's have a Yiddish gathering, let’s only speak Yiddish, play some games, sing some songs, read some texts." And they invited us all to bring something to contribute, so I thought, "Hey, I'm sure there must be some articles in the Yiddish press about New Year's Eve. Let's see what kind of editorials are out there."

I found quite a few, dozens in fact, but I think this was actually by chance the first one I read through, and I was immediately taken with it. As a friend said, "It's a little too timely for us today. Maybe more timely than we would like it to be."

I think holiday-themed pieces are a double-edged sword, like it's really hard to avoid cliches, but I think that this piece really does do that. It uses the holiday as a chance to really talk about what was going on politically and socially at that moment in the 1930's in a way that really takes you back to that moment in time.

Lisa Newman:                       Yeah, it's quite a piece. Thank you for translating it and you're right, there's a timeliness about it. It was published in 1936.

 So, before I let you go, I've alluded to the fact that you're in Paris and I'm here in Amherst which is just lovely but, a little bit different. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about the Yiddish scene, such as it is, in Paris where you’re currently residing.

Ri Turner:                                Yeah, I mean, there's actually an amazing Yiddish scene in Paris, that's what I came here for. A little-known treasure is the Medem Library/Paris Yiddish Center which is full of people who are very humble and don't like to toot their own horn, which makes a wonderful environment but also means that people in other places don't know enough about it.

As far as I'm concerned, and I've lived in quite a few places, and studied Yiddish in quite a few places, this is where it's at. I don't know that there's a site anywhere else in the world that can compare. With a very small staff and small overhead budget, this center is running sometimes up to 17 different Yiddish classes, on five different levels, a week.

These classes are well-attended by people of all ages in Paris, and aside from the language and literature classes there's also cultural events, some of them in Yiddish, some of them in French, there's concerts, movie screenings, really, anything you can imagine, and the quality of instruction, the level of expertise, is just unparalleled, so, I'm so grateful that I've gotten to spend now more than a year, working, studying, immersed here in general.

Lisa Newman:                       Great, well, thank you so much for joining me today and for your ongoing work in translation which is wonderful, and I hope we see you over here at the Yiddish Book Center sometime soon.

Ri Turner:                                Thank you so much.

Lisa Newman:                       And again, just before you go, for our listeners, you'll find Ri's latest translation on yiddishbookcenter.org. It's in the Language, Literature and Culture section, which includes work in translation.

So thanks again and, Happy New Year to you!

Ri Turner:                                Yeah, you too.

Lisa Newman:                       Take care. Bye bye.

Ri Turner:                                Bye.