{"id":429,"date":"2017-08-31T13:22:16","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T12:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/?p=429"},"modified":"2024-02-24T21:09:41","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T20:09:41","slug":"coming-out-of-the-shadow-review-of-madeline-g-levines-susana-greiss-lecture-from-slavfile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/coming-out-of-the-shadow-review-of-madeline-g-levines-susana-greiss-lecture-from-slavfile\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming Out of the Shadow: Review of Madeline G. Levine\u2019s Susana Greiss Lecture [from SlavFile]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Christine Pawlowski<\/em><\/p>\n

Reprinted from SlavFile<\/em><\/p>\n

Each year at the American Translators Association Annual Conference, the Susana Greiss lecture brings an eminent guest lecturer to speak upon some aspect of translation\/interpretation related to the Slavic languages. ATA\u2019s Polonists owe a debt of gratitude to Nora Favorov, who initially reached out to Madeline Levine, the 2016 speaker. Dr. Levine\u2019s address, \u201cIn the Shadow of Russian: Forty Years of Translating Polish Literature,\u201d proved a seminal event: Dr. Levine became the first speaker in the nineteen-year history of the Greiss lecture to address a Polish subject.<\/p>\n

Graduates of Slavic Studies programs in the United States have often encountered the tendency to categorize the various Slavic literatures as \u201cmajor\u201d or \u201cminor,\u201d with Russian at the top. In 1963, Dr. Levine, a Russian specialist at Harvard, chose to study Polish as her secondary literature requirement. It turned out to be a serendipitous decision; the need for scholarly attention to and good literary translation of Polish was extreme. In fact, an American colleague of Dr. Levine\u2019s once greeted her with the question, \u201cIs there really such a thing as Polish literature?\u201d Learning \u201cat breakneck speed\u201d to read Polish, Dr. Levine began a lifelong career translating this \u201cminor\u201d literature.<\/p>\n

Dr. Levine\u2019s early work was made more difficult by the lack of critical resources available. (She singled out Kridl\u2019s \u201cstupefyingly dull,\u201d blue-covered, pictureless survey.) This situation was radically transformed by the publication of Mi\u0142osz\u2019s 1969 work, The History of Polish Literature<\/em>, which helped to provide a cultural and historical context for Polish literature in a \u201creadable, even exciting\u201d way. As I pulled out my 40-year-old copy of this book, heavily annotated in the early \u201870s, I found myself in wholehearted agreement. Mi\u0142osz\u2019s work, with its determination to \u201cavoid\u2026 scholarly dryness\u201d and \u201cpreserve\u2026 a trace of a smile\u201d must have created something of a Lazarus experience when it first appeared\u2014Polish literature was alive after all.<\/p>\n

Among other groundbreaking efforts for Polish literature in English, Dr. Levine explored the \u201clabors of love\u201d undertaken by Celina Wieniewska and Barbara Vedder. These pioneering women translated the works of Bruno Schulz and Tadeusz Borowski, two unknown writers whose influence now reaches worldwide. Dr. Levine has produced new translations of these works, and her translation of Bruno Schulz\u2019s prose fiction is soon to be published by Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n

A primary focus of Dr. Levine\u2019s work has been Jewish-themed literature in the Polish language. In translating works about the Holocaust and in her work as a university professor, she has delved into the question: \u201cHow is it possible that such horror can be captured and transformed into works of artistic beauty?\u201d She has also taken on another wartime subject: her re-translation of Bia\u0142oszewski\u2019s Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising <\/em>was released by the New York Review of Books in their Classics series.<\/p>\n

Dr. Levine has had her share of good fortune: at a very young age, she obtained her first position as Assistant Professor at the City University of New York \u201csight unseen\u201d after a phone interview. She enjoyed the stability of her position in the University of North Carolina\u2019s Slavic Languages and Literatures Department (now Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures). However, she has also experienced the vicissitudes of the publishing industry and, as a result, seems to have developed the patience of a saint! After 40 years of sharing an unknown literary culture with readers and students, Dr. Levine leaves her audience with the firm conviction that she has only just begun. When I asked her at our communal lunch: \u201cSo what still needs to be translated?\u201d She responded: \u201cEverything!\u201d<\/p>\n

I encourage you to read excerpts from Dr. Levine\u2019s talk on the next page to learn more about the fascinating and, at times, frustrating professional journey of a \u201cstudent-teacher-scholar-translator.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christine Pawlowski is a freelance Polish and Russian translator with an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Indiana University, \u201cTsvetograd.\u201d She is retired from teaching elementary music and enjoys being called \u201cBusia\u201d by her 10 grandchildren. She is ATA certified (Polish-English). She may be reached at<\/em> pawlow@verizon.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"end<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of SlavFile<\/em><\/a>. We invite you to check out the full publication<\/a> for the excerpts from Dr. Levine\u2019s talk referenced in the review, as well as a follow-up by Nora Favorov, \u201cThe List,\u201d about the list of pre-1945 works in various Slavic languages that still need to be translated.<\/p>\n

Going to this year\u2019s ATA conference<\/a> in Washington, DC? Then we encourage you to attend this year\u2019s Susana Greiss lecture! \u201cThe Long and Winding Road to Becoming a Presidential Interpreter,\u201d presented by Nikolai Sorokin, will take place on Thursday, October 26, at 3:30 PM. Nikolai Sorokin will also present a session on interpreting on Friday, October 27, at 10:00 AM, titled \u201cWow! How Am I Going to Interpret That?\u201d. We hope to see you there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Christine Pawlowski Reprinted from SlavFile Each year at the American Translators Association Annual Conference, the Susana Greiss lecture brings an eminent guest lecturer to speak upon some aspect of translation\/interpretation related to the Slavic languages. ATA\u2019s Polonists owe a debt of gratitude to Nora Favorov, who initially reached out to Madeline Levine, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6,99,3,11],"tags":[23,17,22,24],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8HJOu-6V","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}