CHANTAL RINGUET ORAL HISTORY

CAROLE RENARD: My name is Carole Renard, and I'm here at AJS in Boston, Massachusetts, with Chantal Ringuet.  Today is December 17th, 2018, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Chantal, do I have your permission to record this interview?

CHANTAL RINGUET: Yes, you do.

RENARD: Great.  Thank you.  So, I'm going to switch to French for a short introduction, and then we'll switch back to English for the rest of the interview.  Je m'appelle Carole Renard et je suis ici à la conférence d'AJS à Boston, dans le Massachusetts, avec Chantal Ringuet et nous allons enregistrer un interview en association avec le Wexler Oral History Project du Yiddish Book Center.  Chantal, est-ce que j'ai votre permission d'enregistrer cet interview? [French: My name is Carole Renard and I'm here at the AJS conference in Boston, Massachusetts, with Chantal Ringuet and we are recording an interview with the Wexler Oral History Project of the Yiddish Book Center. Chantal, do I have your permission to record this interview?]

RINGUET: Oui, absolument [French: Yes, absolutely].

RENARD: Merci.  Alors, nous allons commencer en français, puis faire la plupart de l'interview en anglais.  Est-ce que vous pouvez commencer par expliquer pourquoi vous avez fait le choix de donner cet interview en anglais? [French: Thank you.  So, we are going to start in French, then do most of the interview in English.  Can you begin by explaining why you made the choice to do this interview in English?]

RINGUET: Alors, parce que je crois que la [French: So, because I think that the] -- there's a wider readership -- je m'en vais en anglais [French: I'm drifting into English].  (laughter)

RENARD: C'est pas grave, on peut faire un peu des deux [French: It's okay, we can do a bit of both].  (laughter)

RINGUET: Oui, alors c'est pour, en fait, rejoindre une histoire un peu plus vaste, compte tenu que le Yiddish Book Center normalement fonctionne en anglais.  Donc je pense que, voilà, c'est la raison pour laquelle j'ai décidé de parler surtout en anglais. [French: Yes, so it's, in fact, to be integrated into a broader story, considering that the Yiddish Book Center normally functions in English.  So I think that, there you have it, that's the reason that I decided to speak primarily in English.]

RENARD: Parfait, merci [French: Perfect, thank you].  So, I'm going to switch over to English now, if that's okay.  Could you please start by briefly telling me what you know about your family background?

RINGUET: Yes.  So, I grew up in a very Catholic family.  I was born in Quebec City, raised as a Catholic, and I attended the Ursulines de Quebec, which is a private school for girls -- which was actually the first private school for 2:00girls in North America in French.  And so, I don't have any Jewish background -- almost nothing -- well, not that I know of.  And so, the question, I think, about how I became a Yiddish scholar or a Yiddish translator, or both, I think it also has to do with when I started learning Latin.  So, (laughs) how do you get raised into a Catholic environment and learn Latin for many years and then how do you arrive to Yiddish Montreal and the Yiddish culture in North American cities?

RENARD: Um-hm.  Yeah, so I do want to get to how you got from there to Yiddish, but if I can just ask a little bit more about your --

RINGUET: Yes.

RENARD:   -- your sort of childhood times first.  So, did you have any contact 3:00with Jewish culture or Judaism as a child?

RINGUET: No.  So, I grew up in Quebec City, which is a very -- you know, it's -- there aren't that many religions.  There aren't Protestants.  And there were Jews in Quebec City -- nowadays, it's about forty, fifty families -- but I didn't have any Jewish neighbor.  And as I attended Catholic schools -- so the Ursulines and later the Jesuits -- there were no Jews around me.  And so, it appeared later in my life, this contact.

RENARD: Okay.  And I know that you're a big Leonard Cohen fan.  Can you tell me a little bit about how you got introduced to Leonard Cohen, and how, if at all, you feel that that love has played a role in your later trajectory?

RINGUET: Yes.  That's a very interesting question, because I discovered Leonard 4:00Cohen when I was around fourteen or fifteen years old.  It was at the period of his comeback, 1988, with "I'm Your Man," and I was really struck by his presence on the screen, with his black-and-white videos -- "First we take Manhattan, and then we take Berlin."  And then, I thought, Oh, he's from Montreal.  So that was of interest to me, because, of course, I was going to Montreal from time to time.  And retrospectively, I could say that having been a fan of Leonard Cohen and listening to his songs many times when I was young and especially when I arrived in Montreal in my youth -- I think he really opened a path to Jewish Montreal.  But this is something that I realized only later, you know, more recently.

RENARD: Um-hm.  And how did you come to sort of make that connection, eventually?

RINGUET: So, I did my PhD in Quebec studies and Quebec literature.  At the 5:00time, we started including into the history of Quebec literature anglophone writers like Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, and prior to them, A.M. Klein, and so on.  So, Leonard Cohen was perceived as mostly an anglophone writer that had some importance and influence on some francophone writers in Quebec.  But I thought -- this was not my connection, I think, since I got involved into Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture in Montreal.  This is more something that was my link to Leonard Cohen and then to Yiddish.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RENARD: So, we don't have time to go deeply into your studies, because I want to get especially to translation and the work that you have done more recently, but could you please list what you've studied throughout your academic career, just 6:00to give an idea of your trajectory from university onwards?

RINGUET: Yes.  So, I did almost all my studies in French in Montreal -- in Quebec City, in Montreal, and then also in Paris, and then at University of Ottawa in French and English.  And my PhD was about women writers in Quebec, so francophone women writers and modernism, and the question of memory and transmission of memory from mother and son.  So, there was nothing Jewish about it.  But in parallel, I started working on Eastern European authors who immigrated to Montreal and to do a research on that topic, and I found that very interesting.  So, I was interested in -- my question was: What were the origins of these writers?  Who were the first writers with Eastern European background 7:00that came to Montreal and to New York and who eventually published in the city?  And then I found -- this is how I found out that Montreal had been a very important cultural center for Yiddish -- in the arts, in literature, and politics as well.  And this is something that I knew almost nothing about.  And I found that fascinating, because it was kind of -- suddenly, I had this kind of underground movement -- like an underground city, that's how I call it, Yiddish Montreal.  And it was really challenging in terms of the way I perceived my own historical narrative.  For example, when you study literature in French in Montreal, you learn that modernism is something that appears in the 1940s: 1945 with the urban novel, Gabrielle Roy, and then in the arts in 1948 8:00with the manifesto "Global Refusal."  But then when you think about the Yiddish writers, then you -- the first poetry book in Yiddish was published in Montreal in 1918 by Yud Yud Segal, and then there were many others.  And in those books, you found -- I mean, modernism was everywhere.  Those were European writers, and they brought the avant-garde movements, the futurism.  And it was all part of their writings, and also in the way they conceived theater, in the way they performed theater, at the Monument-National and in other theaters as well.  So, it was challenging, because then I was confronted to the fact that there was actually a lot of modernism in Montreal and in Quebec before what we think 9:00(laughs) was the modernist period.  So, it was, like, twenty years before.  So, it really helped me to reconsider the parameters of my own cultural and literary history.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RINGUET: All this to say that then I started learning Yiddish, I did a postdoctoral research on Yiddish literature in Montreal and Canada, and this is how it all started.  Then I became a Yiddish fellow later and a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.  And meanwhile, I published on this underground city a book entitled in French, "À la découverte du Montréal Yiddish [French: Discovering Yiddish Montreal]."  So, it was the first synthesis -- it's a cultural and literary synthesis -- where you find almost everything.  Not in details, of course, but you have a lot of pictures 10:00about what was this Yiddish Montreal life: the culture, the language also, and what happened later with the decline of Yiddish after the Second World War and then what can we say about it in the early twenty-first century.

RENARD: And I want to focus in a little bit more on your Yiddish studies, but since you are bringing up the book, what was the reception of that book like?

RINGUET: Well, yeah, it was a very good reception.  I had a very good reception.  And it still continued in Quebec, also, among -- I mean, everybody -- like, francophones, anglophones.  It's also a very beautiful book, because it includes 150 photographs from the archives: the Jewish Public Library's archives, the Congress --- the former Canadian Congress archives, and YIVO.  And my surprise with that was that it was also well received in Paris, because I 11:00did later interviews about the book, and then people told me, Well, you should write a book about Yiddish Paris.  It doesn't exist.  It should exist eventually.  And so, to this day, this was my most popular book.  (laughs)

RENARD: Yeah.  How long did it take you to work on that?

RINGUET: It took me -- so it was the result of my postdoctoral research, and I did not want to write an academic book at the time, 'cause I thought, We need this synthesis, and it must be accessible for both academics and the general readership.  So, three years, then one year to write, and then it was published.

RENARD: So, I do want to focus in a little bit on your Yiddish studies before we go more into your writing and translation work.  You talked a little bit about 12:00how you became aware of the history of Yiddish in Montreal.  How did you decide to actually learn Yiddish?  Why did that feel important?

RINGUET:  Oh.  Well, if I was going into that direction, for me it was clear that I needed to learn the language.  As a literary person and as a person who had always -- who had learned languages before.  Like, I was mentioning Latin, but also ancient Greek; I did some German before Yiddish, and also some Spanish.  And Yiddish was more challenging, of course, because of the alphabet, because it's the language of the diaspora, because there was no standardization until the 1930s by Max Weinreich.  And all this, I thought, was so rich that I was interested in learning the language.  And then, I got this grant from 13:00SSHRC, Social Sciences and Humanities Council from Canada, which allowed me to devote two years on a full-time basis on this study, so I had the time to learn the language also.  And so, I did some intensive courses on Yiddish in Canada and then in Vilnius and then later in Jerusalem, with also private courses in Montreal.  So, nowadays you have to travel a lot if you want to learn Yiddish.  Most of the time that's how it works, because what used to be the programs with the language courses in Yiddish, it's not the same as it was, like, in the 1980s.  For example, at McGill, you could do five years in Yiddish, learning Yiddish.  And then it's not possible anymore, because of the decline of the language and of the interest -- and also, you know, with the situation in academia with the humanities, the decline of humanities.  There's 14:00also this general context --

RENARD: Right.

RINGUET: -- that must be taken into account.  (laughs)

RENARD: Right.  Can you talk a little bit about the differences in your experiences learning Yiddish in Quebec and in Vilnius and then in Jerusalem?

RINGUET: Yes. 

RENARD: With those three different (UNCLEAR) --

RINGUET: Well, every time it was very different.  I started with an intensive course.  And I think it's the best way to do it; otherwise, you can't make it.  It's very different to learn it, I think, in North America than in Vilnius, of course, because Vilnius used to be a capital for Yiddish literature and the arts, and it's still at the heart of the Yiddish culture in Europe, of what used to be the Yiddish land.  So, when you're studying Yiddish in a North 15:00American university -- and I'm not talking about the quality.  It's just that it's -- it's really not the same.  And you don't have the memory.  You don't have the memory of the place, you don't have the traces that you find when you go to Europe.  So, that makes a huge difference.  And I think that it's much more challenging when you learn Yiddish in Europe, sometimes, for this reason, because then you go to places where -- you know, like the death camps sometimes, or some visits that are very -- they have a very strong emotional component, and you visit also the old neighborhood where there were Jews, and of course today we are confronted to the lost trauma and memory.  And it's also very important, because then you realize that you have a responsibility as someone who's a 16:00scholar in the Yiddish studies or a Yiddish translator.

RENARD: Um-hm.  And what about learning Yiddish in Jerusalem?  What was that like?

RINGUET: That was also very interesting.  It was an advanced class.  It was really mixed up, with some people who were Orthodox and apparently wanted to have good grades, and it was their mother tongue, so it was very easy for them.  (laughs) There was no issue about becoming a Yiddish scholar for these people -- there were three of them.  There were some people coming from other places, like American people, and older people who just wanted to be immersed again in a language that they were speaking when they were very young, or that was their parents' maternal language.  So, very different kind of personalities, but still it was very interesting.  And also, of course, when 17:00you're in Jerusalem, you are confronted to another important question, that is, the conflict between Yiddish and Hebrew: what it used to be, what it has led to nowadays, and especially into a Jewish studies department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  And there again, you can see that the language has -- you are confronted to the decline of the language.  And personally, I feel, too, the responsibility that you have towards the language, the memory, and the responsibility -- I'm talking of this because as a cultural translator, and this is how I would define myself -- it's very different if you translate from Yiddish than from Spanish, for example, than from other languages, as well -- 18:00you know, because of the fate of Yiddish during the twentieth century.

RENARD: Um-hm.  Yeah.  And I have many more questions for you about the idea of memory in all of this and postmemory, but you mentioned identifying more as a cultural translator, and I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what that means to you.

RINGUET: Yeah.  Well, my work as a translator, it's not only translating from one language to another; it's also translating from a whole culture.  And when you asked the question why did you learn the language -- because I really wanted to get immersed into the culture, to understand it -- like anthropologists often do.  Otherwise, you just get a sense of what it is, but you can't really understand deeply what it means and how -- for example, how Yiddish can be 19:00(UNCLEAR) (laughs) and the words and the mixing with the Hebrew and, you know, all -- so many elements that are part of the language itself.  Je suis en train d'oublier la question [French: I'm forgetting the question].  (laughs)

RENARD: Ah, juste [French: Oh, just] -- what you mean when you mean when you say that you're a cultural translator.

RINGUET: Oh, yeah.  Okay.  So, yeah.  So, it's not only translating from one language to another or one book to another.  There is this question of the responsibility that you have as a translator -- a question that even Walter Benjamin was discussing this in his essays, his pre-World War I essays, and then many other scholars have been discussing this.  It's also -- because there aren't that many translators of Yiddish today, especially in French, and my 20:00perspective, as a person who was not born and raised into a Jewish family and who is not a F-- I'm not French; I'm francophone, from North America, so I'm twice an outsider, in a way.  I think this gives me a distance.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RINGUET: My work as a cultural translator consists of not only translating from one language to another, but also a whole culture to another.  And of course, we all know about the role of the translator as a bridge-builder between cultures, but in the case of Yiddish, I think there is a responsibility that is very important, especially because of the fate of Yiddish at the twentieth century, with the Holocaust and then the decline of Yiddish and the fact that not that many people speak Yiddish anymore except in ultra-Orthodox communities.  Now, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents in Yiddish -- 21:00unpublished works, correspondences, novels -- and it's a realm -- and it's a treasure, I think, and it's a whole culture that must be saved.  And it's also the role of a translator to be able to get immersed into those texts, into those documents, and to bring it back to life for people today.  And since the last years, I was thinking more and more about the role of the translator and this responsibility, because it has a new meaning, unfortunately, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the US, everywhere.  Translating Yiddish gets -- there's a new dimension.  And I think it's also part of a work of education and 22:00dialogue that is very at the center of what I am doing when I translate Yiddish literature.

RENARD: Great.  Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit more about the experience of doing translation as someone who has, as you said, those sort of two degrees of separation in a certain way?  The challenges, but also the advantages, perhaps, of doing translation from that perspective?

RINGUET: Well, of course it was more difficult, in a way.  (laughs) But more difficult -- sometimes it depends, you know?  Because many people, older people that I've been speaking with, told me, Well, I knew the language when I was a kid, but I can't learn it in class.  It's too complicated.  The grammar and everything -- it doesn't correspond to what I know about the language, and the 23:00way I feel about it, most importantly.  So, the distance helps you to have a wider vision.  That's the way I feel it.  And it's very challenging, because, you know, it's not very easy.  You really have to get involved into this task.  And also, I'm aware that I have to -- you know, all my texts are revised, and I do have my own network (laughs) of Yiddish translators and friends that I can call almost everywhere, every time I need them.  And for example, when I prepared the anthology entitled in French, "Voix yiddish de Montréal [French: Yiddish voices of Montreal]" -- so it was the first anthology about Canadian literature in Yiddish translated into French, and at a certain 24:00point, in a text from Melech Ravitch, there was an expression that I couldn't find anywhere.  I knew that it was Hebrew, but I did some research, I couldn't find it.  And then, I asked two, three persons who were Yiddish speakers when they were kids.  Nobody could help me until I found someone whose older son is now an Orthodox, and it's part of the Talmud.  And if you don't read the Talmud, if you're not that familiar with it -- usually, you won't find the answer.  But that was a passage in Hebrew.  This is specific.  Sometimes it's a word; sometimes it's the spelling, because as we know, the standardization of Yiddish was established in the 1930s, so there are many different ways of writing the same word.  If you came from, you know, Warsaw, it's different from 25:00Kraków or from -- even more from Romania, for example.  So, in a country of immigration like Canada, what we find in the Jewish archives can be very different, the same word from one author to the other -- the way they write it can be not the same.  So, that's another challenge.

RENARD: Yeah.

RINGUET: I'm going into details here, but --

RENARD: Oh, this is great.  (laughter) No, I like -- and it's -- you know, it's lovely to have little examples.

RINGUET: It's perfect.  You know, Roland Barthes wrote a text about literary translation in 1958, and it was mentioning the two important poles of literary translation.  In French, it was "la clarté du détail et à la musicalité de l'ensemble" -- so, the clarity of the detail and the musicality of the whole.  So, you have to constantly travel between those two poles: the manuscripts, the handwriting, the spelling, and also the musicality of the whole, which is the 26:00whole corpus, the whole body of work from Yiddish writers from the diaspora.

RENARD: Absolutely.  And how do you find yourself navigating those two poles?

RINGUET: I love that.  (laughs) I think I'm very good with synthesis and with details also.  But sometimes it's -- there are days when you are more a person working on details and other days when you feel more comfortable looking to -- a whole book project, for example, not going into the details.  So, I think you have to find the right balance between the two.

RENARD: Right.  Have there been any projects that you've worked on that have been particularly challenging in terms of holding on to both of those?

RINGUET: Yes, it was Marc Chagall's autobiography, (UNCLEAR) -- his original 27:00autobiography, written in Yiddish in 1922-'23, and first published in the literary journal "Di Tsukunft" in New York.  So, there's a whole story about that manuscript, because in French, in the French translation published since 1931 -- a French translation by Marc Chagall's former wife, Bella Chagall -- it is written in the book, "translated from Russian."  And so, we know that at a certain point, he probably wrote it in Russian.  The manuscript was lost.  But the original version was written in Yiddish.  So, this is not something that was revealed to the public, to the readership.  And so, what happened -- it's a very beautiful story behind this project, the Marc Chagall autobiography translated into French.  I was a fellow at YIVO, and at the very end of my 28:00stay, like, two days before I left, there was this festival of Yiddish culture and literature in New York, and there was a special day at YIVO.  It was called, I think, "Highlights and Treasures from the YIVO Archives."  And then, we could see some manuscripts, audiovisual, visual materials in Yiddish, and then there was this manuscript from Marc Chagall.  And then, I thought, Wow!  What was that?  What is this?  It was written in Yiddish.  I always thought that he had written his autobiography in Russian, so I was very curious about that.  And then, I asked a friend in Montreal to send me the first and the last pages of the book in French -- the French translation -- by email the same day.  I received it and then I compared it to first and the last pages of the 29:00autobiography in Yiddish, and there you could tell that there were important differences, including -- the dedicace?  La dédicace -- ça va, ou [French: The dedication -- does that work, or] --

RENARD: La dédicace -- the dedication --

RINGUET: The dedication.

RENARD: Yeah.  (laughs)

RINGUET: Right.  La dédicace, en français [French: The dedication, in French].  And also, the punctuation -- the original text was much more passionate than what we had in French.  And then, I thought, Okay, I think this text should be translated again.  Perhaps it's time for a new translation of Chagall's autobiography.  And then, what happened was very surprising, because I learned a month later that they were organizing in Montreal -- the Museum of Fine Arts was organizing a big Chagall exhibition -- which was very beautiful, by the way.  So then, I found a publisher -- who was fine -- who accepted to 30:00publish the manuscript right on time for the beginning of the exhibition.  And then, it involved working on this with Pierre, Pierre Anctil, during three months on a very full-time basis.  And we had fun, but it was difficult.  So, it was the most challenging because of the deadlines, because of the references from the Russian language, the Polish.  There are many interesting elements in this autobiography.  Also, because we had to compare constantly between the original version and the one that was published in 1931.  And then, we realized that one-third of the text in French was new.  It was not part from the original, and very often, it was produced in order to improve Chagall's image 31:00towards the reader, the readership.  For example, to make him look good with children (laughs) -- his grandfather, would give candies to the children -- it was not in the original.  And also, there were suppressions.  A lot of references to the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community], to Jewish culture -- Jewish religious culture, so Judaism -- were not in the final translation.  And same thing for eroticism.  There were a few passages in the end where he was mentioning "la chair française [French: French flesh]" -- "J'avais envie de goûter la chair française [French: I wanted to taste French flesh]."  So, when we were reading the text in Yiddish, I thought, What's that word?  (laughs) "la chair" -- what is he talking about?  That was not in the French version, but yes, there it is.  And of course, it was 32:00suppressed in the 1930s.  He was a Jew; he was an émigré.  With anti-Semitism, you could not find this in a text published in French.  So, that's called censorship.  And I am very sensitive to André Markowicz's work as a literary translator.  He's a wonderful literary translator whose enterprise has been, since the 1990s, to retranslate the entire works of Dostoevsky and many Russian authors.  And in order to respect the authenticity of the texts, which was not done by the former translators -- even when they were excellent translators -- because you have in France this tradition in literary translation where foreign authors are transformed into French 33:00authors.  So, everything that looks like a sign of ethnicity or a religious aspect, something that's culturally too different, has to be suppressed -- or almost.  And so, I always had in mind André Markowicz's works and what he's doing that's so wonderful when I was doing the Chagall.  And we were actually in dialogue together (laughs) when I did that work.

RENARD: Wonderful.  Thank you for sharing all of that.  So again, I have many more questions about translation itself, but you mentioned collaborating with Pierre Anctil, and I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you two met and also what that experience was like of collaborating on this project.

RINGUET: Right.  Okay.  We have met through Yiddish, actually.  When I first 34:00wanted to get involved into Yiddish studies, he was the only francophone working in that field, so I was referred to him, of course.  And later, we fell in love and we got married -- I have to mention that, because it's also part of the process.  And for me, translating Yiddish and working on Yiddish is also a work of love.  So, that's another part of my life which is more personal, but that's -- that comes together at some point.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RINGUET: So, it was the first time for both of us that we translated with another translations -- donc, traduction à quatre mains, comme on dit en français [French: so, a four-handed translation, as we say in French].  It was -- well, I won't go into the details of all the steps -- a first draft, then a second draft, revision.  Personally, I felt that I had to recite the text.  I needed to hear Marc Chagall's Yiddish in order to translate it.  I don't know, 35:00there was something about musicality, the rhythm of the sentences, that I get it better if I hear it.  So, at some point, I was reading the draft and I was asking Pierre, "Can you read it aloud?"  And then, I thought, Oh, no!  You should reverse these words.  You know, in French, it would sound -- I think it's that translation -- it's that word, not exactly the other one.  And so on.  So, that's how it went.  So, I pushed it until (laughs) the limit, which means to go as far as we could -- and also, we had some people who helped us with the Russian, for example -- there were a few words in Russian -- in order to double-check every draft and, of course, the final product.  Now, what was interesting and challenging historically is that we had the previous, the former 36:00translation from 1931 that was republished many times since then -- aux Éditions du Stock [French: at Stock publishing house] in Paris.  And also we had Benjamin and Barbara Harshav's translation, dating from the early 2000s.  Benjamin Harshav was the first scholar who did the whole research about Marc Chagall's manuscript in the YIVO archives in order to confirm was it the original one or was it a translation from the Russian.  So, he explains that in his huge book on Marc Chagall, in which he included the translation into English.  So, we navigated between the French translation and the English translation in order to establish our own translation.  But that -- I have to 37:00say, this was a further step.  The first step, we were really translating from French, working on the text again, until we attained an interesting result -- what we considered as being an interesting result -- then comparing with the French and then with the English, and also with -- we did some research with the Hebrew, because there were some Hebrew words and expressions in the text, as well.  So, there was a work of compared translation, if we can call it like this, that was included, that was part of this translation work.

RENARD:   Yeah

RINGUET:  Traduction comparée [French: Comparative translation].

RENARD: (laughs) À quatre mains [French: Four-handed].

RINGUET: Voilà [French: There you go].  (laughs)

RENARD: Great.  So, that brings me to another question that I had that you've sort of answered in little bits throughout this already, but I was curious about 38:00generally what your process looks like for translation.  You've mentioned reading out loud to hear the musicality and sometimes referencing with other translations, but generally, what is your process like?

RINGUET:  I translate mostly poetry.  Rachel Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, Melech Ravitch a bit -- not only poetry, but this is just is something that I really like to do.  And I wrote myself some poetry before translating poetry.  So, what I do usually is I go from the original to the French with my dictionaries.  And that's how it goes.  I sometimes recite it, as well -- not always.

RENARD: Okay.

RINGUET: I don't know if I answered your question --

RENARD: Yes, absolutely.

RINGUET: Yes?

RENARD: Yeah, yeah.  And again, you've sort of answered it in different ways throughout already, so it's -- what has felt important specifically about 39:00translating Yiddish works into French, and specifically in the context of Quebec and Montreal?

RINGUET: Oof!  That's a big question.  (laughs) Opening a new path for intercultural dialogue -- that's very important.  Also, I -- in getting -- being aware of what has been produced in different languages in Quebec, not only in French, or in French and English with this, you know, conflict between the two languages and cultures.  It's interesting to see that there was a Yiddish -- a literature in Yiddish.  It was really from Montreal, between the 1910s until the late nineteen, say, '60s.  And with a vibrant community -- vibrant 40:00life in this language, a lot of creativity.  And that it's really part of our culture.  And it should be part of the historical narrative.  So, that's very important.  I am not for an exclusive vision of what should be defined as Quebec literature.  And since the early 2000s, in the new -- there was a new book, history of Quebec literature published in French -- they're called "les écrivains anglo-montréalais [French: anglo-montreal writers]" -- like A.M. Klein, Leonard Cohen, a few others -- Irving Layton -- how they influence writers in French in Quebec, or how does their work echo with those of francophone writers.  So, that's one step, but I think that we have to go further and to not forget that Yiddish was a very important language in this 41:00city.  It was the third-most important language, after English and French, in the 1930s.  So, we used to repeat it over the years -- Pierre did and then I did.  Now everybody -- many other people say it.  So, it's nice that it's becoming integrated, so people -- if they don't have this memory now, they have the chance to hear about it, so that's great.  And it is so rich.  And for me, you know, I really like everything that's cosmopolitan, European, and to see that Montreal had welcomed those people -- that this literature was a vibrant cultural center for Yiddish, is something that I'm really attached to.

RENARD: Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit about the concept of postmemory and how that sort of fits into or informs your work?

RINGUET: Yes.  It's a very interesting concept, from Marianne Hirsch.  I know 42:00her work, and I quoted it in many articles.  Now, recently, there was a professor of literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Simone Grossman.  She's a francophone.  And she wrote an article about my first poetry book and a book from a French writer, Marianne Rubinstein.  And it all focuses on postmemory.  So in Marianne Rubinstein, it's a novel, and she mentions that it's family, familial postmemory, and in my case, it's postmemory by affiliation practice, because I'm not -- I don't have any Jewish background, but it became a very important concern in my own research and in my own work.  So, it's all about the question of the transmission -- transmission of the memory, and the 43:00memory includes the trauma of the Holocaust, even though we are North Americans or we published in North America -- not always, in my case, but -- and we should feel a concern about it.  It's very important.  And especially today, with everything that happens now in the US and in Europe with the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RENARD: I was curious about what you perceive as the role of the translator in the transmission of memory, and within that, culture and literature.  Et si vous voulez répondre en français, c'est très bien [French: And if you want to answer in French, that's totally fine].

RINGUET: It's -- oui, là je suis un peu déstabilisée à cause de l'anglais [French: yes, I'm a little thrown off here because of the English] --

RENARD: Oui, donc le role de -- je vous posais la question [French: Yes, so the role of -- I was asking you about] --    

RINGUET: D'accord, on va [French: Okay, we'll] --

RENARD: -- sur le role du traducteur ou de la traductrice dans la transmission 44:00de la mémoire et la culture et la litérature [French: the role of the translator in the transmission of memory and culture and literature].

RINGUET: Oui.  C'est un role qui est de première importance parce que on parle ici, donc, de l'ancien Yiddishland, ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui le "Yiddishland," un monde englouti, une langue qui a été en déclin mais qui a été aussi assassinée.  Et donc, une langue qui survit dans les communautés ultra-Orthodox aujourd'hui, mais qui, dans son versant séculier, avec toute la créativité à laquelle elle a mené, est menacée plus que jamais, et qui se retrouve très souvent dans les fonds d'archives.  Donc, les fonds d'archives, c'est un royaume extraordinaire pour la langue yiddish de nos jours, et malheureusement, il n'y a pas beaucoup de traducteurs pour faire des recherches.  C'est-à-dire que, même si on avait énormément -- toute une grande équipe de traducteur, ou de chercheurs universitaires, pour travailler sur ces documents, il va toujours y en avoir énormément.  Donc, c'est un monde en soit.  La responsabilité est énorme, elle est extrêmement 45:00importante, parce que il s'agit donc -- donc, ce volet du fardeau, Rachel Ertel parle du fardeau du yiddish -- Rachel Ertel, qui est une traductrice française -- c'est un fardeau que, personnellement, je ne perçois pas de la même façon, pour revenir à votre question de tout-à-l'heure, puisque je n'ai pas, donc, cet héritage du fardeau.  Et là, ça me donne un peu plus de distance -- personnellement, c'est comme ça que je le sens -- et il est question pour moi de traduire les voix des morts, ou les voix de ceux dont la langue a été assassinée.  Donc c'est très important, il ne faut pas l'oublier, cette langue, il ne faut pas oublier toute la créativité à laquelle elle a mené, et en ce sens-là, il y a aussi cette question de recevoir la langue, entendre les voix, se laisser habiter par les voix.  Il y a cette dimension pour moi qui est un peu comme le travail d'un écrivain -- je suis aussi écrivain -- entendre les voix yiddish et les extraire de l'espèce de temporalité gelée, 46:00dans laquelle elles sont inscrites, quand elles ne trouvent pas le moyen de sortir des fonds d'archives.  C'est comme ça que je le dirais.  Donc, c'est un travail qui convoque -- bon, c'est un travail, bien sûr, de résistance, c'est un travail de combat, dans un certain sens, un travail de transmission, mais aussi un travail d'hospitalité et de générosité.  Et, en ce sens, la responsabilité du traducteur est vraiment importante, parce que je pense qu'on ne peut pas oublier ce segment de l'histoire qui a été tellement important, cette grande créativité en langue yiddish depuis le moyen Âge, en fait, jusqu'au vingtième siècle, et ça fait partie d'une richesse culturelle qui dépasse toutes les frontières -- les frontières nationales et géographiques, en particulier.  Voilà. [French: Yes.  It's a role that is of the upmost 47:00importance because we are talking here about the old Yiddishland, what we now call "Yiddishland," a world engulfed, a language that has been fading but that was also assassinated.  And so, a language that survives in ultra-Orthodox communities today, but one that, in its secular form, with all of the creativity that came out of it, is more threatened than ever before, and that is very often found in archives.  So, archives are an extraordinary space for Yiddish today, and unfortunately, there aren't many translators to do research.  That is to say that, even if we had enormous -- a whole entire team of translators, or university researchers, to work on these documents, there will always be enormous quantities.  So, it's a whole world in itself.  The responsibility is huge, it's extremely important, because we're talking about -- so, this part of the burden, Rachel Ertel talks about "the Yiddish burden" -- Rachel Ertel, who is a French translator -- it's a burden which, personally, I don't experience in the same way, to come back to your earlier question, because I don't have this inheritance of responsibility.  And in that way, it gives me a little bit more distance -- personally, that's how I experience it -- and for me it's a matter of translating the voices of the dead, or the voices of those whose language was assassinated.  So it's very important, we must not forget it, this language, we must not forget all of the creativity that came out of it, and in that sense, it's also a matter of receiving the language, hearing the voices, allowing oneself to be inhabited by the voices.  There is this dimension for me that's a little bit like the work of a writer -- I'm also a writer -- hearing the Yiddish voices and pulling them out of this kind of frozen existence in time, in which they are inscribed, when they can't find a way to get out of the archives.  That's how I would describe it.  So, it's work that stimulates -- well, it's a work, of course, of resistance, it's a work of fighting back, in a certain sense, a work of transmission, but also a work of hospitality and generosity.  And, in that sense, the translator's responsibility is very significant, because I think that we can't afford to lose this segment of history that was so important, these great creative works in the language of Yiddish dating from the Middle Ages, actually, until the twentieth century, and it's part of a cultural richness that transcends all borders -- and especially national and geographic borders.  There.]

RENARD: Oui.  Merci, c'est une très belle description de la traduction, c'est très beau. [French: Yes.  Thank you, that's a beautiful description of translation, lovely].  Um --

RINGUET: Et donc, en ce sens, c'est un travail d'hommage, comme je l'ecrivais dans un texte, il est de render homage aux voix aussi [French: And so, in that sense, it's a work of paying homage, as I wrote in a text, it's of paying homage to those voices as well].

RENARD: Um-hm.  Absolument.  Est-ce que vous pouvez parler un petit peu de la connexion que vous voyez entre la traduction et la couture, comme vous avez écrit un peu dessus? [French: Absolutely.  Can you speak a bit about the connection that you see between translation and sewing, as you have written a bit about?]

RINGUET: Oui.  Donc, j'avais une grand-mère qui était couturière.  [French: Yes.  So, I had a grandmother who was a seamstress].  (laughs) Et qui -- avec qui je passais beaucoup de temps quand j'étais enfant -- j'étais enfant unique -- et qui me disait, "Tu vois, c'est toujours important de faire un bel ouvrage, première chose, et pour verifier si c'est un bel ouvrage, il faut regarder l'envers du vêtement.  Quand les finitions sont bien faites, quand tu as tous les details, que tu peux dire que, 'Ah oui, c'est presque aussi beau à l'envers qu'à l'endroit,' ça veut dire que c'est un ouvrage qui a vraiment été fait avec soin, avec attention, avec minutie."  Et il y a quelques années, quand je 48:00traduisais, donc, du yiddish, ce parallèle m'est venu en tête.  C'est-à-dire, c'est un peu comme le travail de couture, ce que je suis en train de faire -- c'est-à-dire déplier le texte yiddish dans ma langue.  Et pour moi, donc, il y a cette notion de l'endroit et l'envers parce que, en apprenant à lire le yiddish et à le traduire -- donc, en apprenant à lire l'alphabet hébreu -- j'ai appris à lire de droite à gauche, contrairement à ce à quoi j'avais toujours été habituée depuis l'enfance, donc à déplier le texte à l'envers deux fois.  Et à m'assurer d'accorder une grande attention aux détails de finition, voilà, à la langue, à toutes les expressions et toutes les subtilités de la langue, et les nuances que l'on doit rendre dans sa langue maternelle, le français.  Alors, il y a ce lien avec la couture, qui se double d'un arrière-fond historique, qui est celui, donc, évidemment, de la 49:00comparaison que l'on peut faire, et que certains ont déjà faite, entre le travail du traducteur et celui du tailleur -- le tailleur étant, donc, un métier associé aux métiers juifs traditionels d'Europe de l'Est et qui a été, évidemment, transplanté ici en Amérique du Nord dans des villes industrielles comme Montréal et New York.  Alors tout cet arrière-fond, donc, de culture juive est-européenne -- pour moi, il y a un lien qui s'est fait avec le temps, donc, à travers ce travail de traduction. [French: And who -- with whom I spent a lot of time when I was a child -- I was an only child -- and who used to say to me, "You see, it's always important to do nice work, first of all, and to check whether it's nice work, you have to look at the reverse side of the clothing.  When the finishes are well made, when you've finished all the details, that you can say, 'Ah yes, this is almost as beautiful on the outside as it is on the outside,' it means that it's handiwork that was really done with care, with attention, with precision."  And some years ago, when I was translating, so, from Yiddish, this parallel came to mind.  That is to say, it's a bit like sewing, what I am doing -- that is, unfolding the Yiddish text in my language.  And so, for me, there is this notion of the outside and the inside because, in learning to read Yiddish and to translate it -- so, in learning to read the Hebrew alphabet -- I learned to read from right to left, contrarily to what I had always been used to since childhood, so to unfold the text backwards twice.  And to make sure to give a lot of attention to finishing details, to the language, to all of the expressions and all of the subtleties of the language, and the nuances that one needs to render in one's mother tongue, French.  So, there's this connection with sewing, combined with a historical background, which is that, obviously, of the comparison that one can make, and that some have already made, between the work of the translator and that of the tailor -- the tailor being a profession associated with traditional Jewish professions in Eastern Europe and that was, obviously, transplanted here in North America in industrial cities like Montreal and New York.  So all of this background of Eastern European Jewish culture -- for me, a connection formed over time, through this work of translation.] 

RENARD: Oui, c'est une très, très belle comparaison.  Et j'adore l'image du dépliage du texte.  Même visuellement, c'est -- [French: Yes, that's a very, very beautiful comparison.  And I love the image of the unfolding of the text.  Even visually, it's --]

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RENARD: So, you talked about Marc Chagall, and I was wondering if there are other translation projects that have felt particularly meaningful to you to work on.

RINGUET:  Yes.  Translating Rokhl Korn and Kadia Molodowsky's poetry and their texts.  I'm still working on this.  We published recently a special issue of literary in translation in a literary journal in Quebec called "Les Écrits 50:00[French: The Writings]" -- a beautiful journal.  C'est le journal de l'Académie des lettres du Québec -- donc on a aussi une Académie des lettres [French: It's the journal of Quebec's Academy of Letters -- so, we also have an Academy of Letters].  There's one in France and there's also on in Quebec, since many, many years.  And in this special issue, called "Suite yiddish," I published with Pierre Anctil some translations of Kadia Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, Melech Ravitch, and Yud Yud Segal -- Jacob Isaac Segal.  Now, for me, it's part of a larger project that I started to work on when I was a fellow at YIVO and then scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.  And I really want to translate more of their poetry -- first of all, because they haven't been translated much into French, and I think I'm their French voice.  (laughs) 51:00So, that's an important responsibility, because they write so beautifully, and they were major female -- women writers at their time.  Also because they are at the core of many worlds: so, Eastern European world, with the universe of the shtetlekh, and then North America, and then pre-World War II, post-World War II -- so what happens after the Holocaust, emigration.  There again you have the questions of loss and trauma, the memory of the trauma, and how is it inscribed in the body -- because women speak about their bodies, and it's part of their poetry.  Especially Rokhl Korn -- you have those images of people lost in time and the woman reaching the man with her own body and the way, you know, that 52:00happens.  It's very beautiful, but the body is central.  Also, Kadia Molodowsky's text, "In land fun mayn gebeyn -- In the Country of My Bones" -- so in this world, in this post-Holocaust world where Jews are foreigners everywhere, they are not welcome anywhere, this idea of hers is that perhaps it's in the language itself that we can find a home -- that's very important -- but perhaps in a country of bones, of remnants, of -- you know.  So, this question of body is very important.  And this is something that is not -- that is different from modernism -- something that you find in Celia Dropkin's texts, for example.  So, this is not exactly -- this is not modernism, although this is very modern.  And this is another vision of women's poetry, European poetry, 53:00and also, twentieth-century women's voices -- in Yiddish.

RENARD: Yeah.  I haven't asked you about this yet, but you just mentioned it briefly, but can you talk a little bit more about the work that you did with the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute?

RINGUET: Yes.  So, there was a seminar conducted by Sarah [sic] Barack Fishman, who was the former co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.  We were three scholars-in-residence -- there was me, Lori Harrison-Kahan, who's a professor of the practice at Boston College and who teaches at the English department there, and also Kathryn Hellerstein, who is Kadia Molodowsky's 54:00English translator, and so she's been working a lot on Yiddish women poets.  So, it was very interesting to exchange with these two colleagues about our respective work -- and with Kathryn, as literary translators, also, of Yiddish -- that was very interesting.  And actually, we have a session tomorrow with -- oh, I shouldn't mention that.  (laughs)

RENARD: Oh.  (laughs)

RINGUET: Sorry.

RENARD: You can mention that.  That's fine.  (laughter)

RINGUET:  I was in this conversation with you.  (laughs) So, we have kept in touch since then.  And it was a very interesting experience for me.  And it was my first experience at Brandeis, working on women Yiddish poets.  Yeah.  I don't know what else to say.  (laughs)

RENARD: Can you talk a little bit about the experience, as a woman writer yourself, of translating women writers?  If that --

RINGUET: Yes, yes.

RENARD: -- makes sense.  (laughs)

RINGUET: (laughs) It does, it does.  Well, it's a very sensitive thing to translate other women's voices, and not being an intruder --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RINGUET: So, the translator should not be an intruder, and sometimes it might be very tempting.  I've had many conversations with other translators -- especially when you translate from a language that is not that well known.  I think it should never happen, especially in order to respect the memory -- and the words of these persons.  It's like, unfolding the text differently.  And of course, as a writer, it's very important -- this practice, that kind of work, is very important.  And it influences my own work as a writer in a very 56:00creative way, because of "le mot juste [French: finding exactly the right word]," for example, or their vocabulary, or the metaphors that you find into their texts.  You know, it's like reading another writer with whom you feel familiar with, and then it's very rich, you know, for your own writing.  (laughs) And also the separation with the time and the fact that it's written in Yiddish -- these are all important components of that work.  And it's all very challenging.

RENARD: Yes.  So, you've talked about this in various ways, but can you talk a little bit about how, if at all, you feel your literary and academic interests overlap or intersect with your personal interests or your personal life?  And, 57:00if at all, how they sort of inform each other?

RINGUET: Yes, yes.  Well, for me, the two most important things, I would say, are -- of course, there's the research, but at the very end, it's writing and translating Yiddish.  And these are two practices that are very complementary, because they -- I'm looking -- I'm searching for my words -- ils convoquent les deux côtés différents de mon cerveau.  (laughs)

RENARD: They stimulate the two --

RINGUET: Yes, yes.

RENARD: -- like, different parts of your brain?

RINGUET: They stimulate different parts of my brain.  And I find it very complementary.  There is one that is really anchored into the present, the writing process, and also looking back at the past -- sometimes my own past or 58:00the cultural history.  And there is the writer's experiences, which are so different from mine, and their own past.  And always this question of memory.

RENARD: Yes.  (pauses) Well, I think we're starting to near the end of the interview.  I have a few closing questions, but before I ask, are there any topics that you wanted to talk about in this interview that we haven't touched on?

RINGUET: I think we've talked about almost everything.  (laughter)

RENARD: We've covered quite a bit of (UNCLEAR).

RINGUET: Covering details that -- (laughs)

RENARD: Yeah.  Okay, well, if at any point before the end of the interview you think of things that you --

RINGUET: Okay.

RENARD: -- want to make sure to talk about, feel free.  I was wondering what you see as the future of Yiddish.

RINGUET: (laughs) I would say that there is a nice future of Yiddish, because 59:00there's a new generation of scholars and translators.  So, we're past this point of, you know, this period of the 1990s, where Yiddish was all about nostalgia, loss, and second generation who doesn't speak and then the third generation who wants to know more about what happened -- you know.  So, we're past this point.  We're really in the twenty-first century.  And the future of Yiddish -- we can see it in Brooklyn and Montreal, for example, through the ultra-Orthodox communities.  This is a fact.  This is very concrete.  There is a future of Yiddish there.  Perhaps it's not the future you're talking about if we go back to our main topics of literature, translation, and so on -- and the arts -- folklore, music, and everything else.  But so, there is a real 60:00future, and it resides in all the works that those people from the new generations are doing, in terms of translation, scholarly works, music, performing arts, and so on.  And I think it's very promising.  And also around the literary journal "In geveb."  Since the last year at the AJS conference, I think there are more and more sessions -- panels and also personal presentations on Yiddish than there used to be, even five, ten years ago.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RENARD: My last question is what advice you have for people who are interested in translation, and specifically, translation of Yiddish.

RINGUET: My suggestions?

RENARD: Yeah, any advice that you might have for people who are interested in 61:00this field.

RINGUET:  Work hard.  (laughs) Always important to work hard, to be attentive to details, to welcome the emotional challenges that will happen through this process of learning the language, translating it, and getting more and more involved into this work, this kind of work.  And also to have a good network -- it's always important to have someone to whom you can ask a precise question about something you don't understand.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

RENARD: Well, on behalf of --

RINGUET:  (UNCLEAR).

RENARD: -- the Yiddish Book Center and myself, obviously, thank you so much --

RINGUET: Well, thank you.

RENARD: -- for this interview.  It was wonderful to hear your insight on translation, so thank you very much.

RINGUET: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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