HOLOCAUST TRANSLATION, COMMUNICATION AND WITNESS IN THE WORK OF H. G. ADLER

This article demonstrates the unique contribution that the works of the Holocaust survivor and writer H. G. Adler (1910–88) make to the questions surrounding the relation of translation, broadly understood, to the experience of suffering in the Holocaust. Although a new challenge to the power of language to communicate experience was posed by the events of the Holocaust, in Adler’s literary and philosophical work the challenge is rather to ensure that all language remains rooted in an ethical framework. Adler resists the distortion of language into an instrumental tool for genocide. This article argues that Adler’s survivor-protagonists do not struggle to translate the ineffable experience of suffering into literary German, but rather, to find a community of listeners for their literary language.It further describes Adler’s humanist theory of translation, showing how this sheds light on the relationship between communication and translation in Adler’s novels, and demonstrates the extent to which the reciprocal act of bearing witness in Eine Reise (1962) fails. The article both analyses the interlingual act of translating between languages in the novel, and tests the more metaphorical sense of translation frequently used in discussing the literature of the Holocaust.